Madonna album-by-album thread

Discussion in 'Music Corner' started by aseriesofsneaks, Jan 12, 2017.

  1. Thom

    Thom Forum Resident

    Perhaps that explains why Jellybean was jettisoned following this album, and Shep Pettibone became her preferred remixer for LAP and TIC.
     
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  2. Bobby Morrow

    Bobby Morrow Senior Member

    I loved "One Good Woman" from OMS. That's a great single.

    It's hard to imagine Madonna and Cetera being "buds", so I expect she agreed to help out on his album in a generous moment.

    Unless Peter's on "Act Of Contrition" or something..:D
     
  3. Thom

    Thom Forum Resident

    I love Pettibone's "Express Yourself" remixes... they have my vote as the best in Madonna's catalogue (making the 12" or the CD maxi single a must-have).
     
  4. Thom

    Thom Forum Resident

    Remember in Truth Or Dare Madonna makes fun of Kevin Costner after he tells her her show was 'neat'? It seems to me Peter Cetera is also the sort of guy who would use the word 'neat'... so no, I can't see him and Madonna being, like, friendly. I'm sure it was just very cordial and professional. :)
     
  5. The7thStranger

    The7thStranger Part of the Rhythm Nation

    Location:
    An der Lahn...
    Agreed. Remixed Prayers has some good moments on it. Some of the "Give It 2 Me" remixes were good, too. But Madonna was one of the worst offenders of "here's 7 minutes of a generic house beat with the chorus once or two superimposed over it."
     
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  6. The7thStranger

    The7thStranger Part of the Rhythm Nation

    Location:
    An der Lahn...
    I'm guessing they boned. Cetera's a looker. :)
     
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  7. DesertHermit

    DesertHermit Now an UrbanHermit

    Who's That Girl was a strange one for me. I loved the title track, 'Causing A Commotion' is fabulous and in my top ten of favourite Madonna singles and 'The Look Of Love' was okay. I bought it of course, upon release, and then gave it away a few years later as I never listened to it. I have the 7" singles of WTG and CAC and was quite happy with those; assuming they'd eventually be released on a compilation. Who knew I'd be waiting until 2009 to get one of them on CD?! Ridiculous!!

    As for the movie, I was one of those sad fans who went and saw it in the cinema and thought it was so great and then watched it 20 years later on DVD and wondered what the hell I'd been thinking! The best thing about that 'film' was the title song!

    I am wondering if we'll EVER get CAC on CD!
     
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  8. sunspot42

    sunspot42 Forum Resident

    Location:
    San Francisco
    Yeah, that cover popped up the other day on the iPhone when I was listening ahead for this thread and I just thought, "Damn. Girl had it goin' on!" And she kept the Latin theme going with that outfit.
     
  9. The7thStranger

    The7thStranger Part of the Rhythm Nation

    Location:
    An der Lahn...
    It is on CD. :)
     
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  10. Thom

    Thom Forum Resident

    If you ever spot this @DesertHermit, it even has the 7" remix (the Silver Screen Single Mix, as it's called) on it:

    [​IMG]
     
  11. sunspot42

    sunspot42 Forum Resident

    Location:
    San Francisco
    Maybe overseas, but here in the US it was very "point" - it was the only CD source for "Into The Groove"!

    You Can Dance was the first Madonna CD I bought new. I think by this point I owned everything up thru True Blue, which at the time was probably my favorite (tho I always liked the debut and was always surprised at how strong it was - certainly better than I expected). I thought for a remix album it was pretty good - "Spotlight" is a great track if not quite as solid as some of her other singles. It does sound a bit like a flashback to her older style and a bit more dated than most of True Blue, but I loved her old style so didn't have a problem with that.

    I thought the flow of the record was fantastic - great party record. And a good selection of tracks to remix, including a few that weren't hits but should have been - "Where's the Party", "Everybody" and "Physical Attraction". I've often wondered if the plan was to release one or more of these as singles in addition to the new track "Spotlight".

    I'm not a huge fan of the "Everybody" remix - the boop boop sound is annoying in this version, and the clanking drums kind of spoil the groove. But the mixes of "Holiday" and "Physical Attraction" are great. "Over And Over" gets even more annoying with this orchestra hit-laden mix. Fortunately, they don't spoil "Into The Groove", which appears here in two mixes, both of them good.

    There's something of a break in the flow after "Where's The Party" and we get three different mixes of songs already represented on the album, which I think was a bad choice. Worse, they're a set of dub mixes, stripping off Madonna's vocals, which might have been a good idea on some of the helium-voiced material off Like A Virgin but isn't such a great idea for these three cuts. The dub mix of "Holiday" is kind of sad affair, because her vocal in the original is one of her best. It does highlight what a great backing track "Holiday" had, but if I were gonna do dub mixes of Madonna's work up to this point, I'd definitely focus on Like A Virgin and the wonderful work Chic did. "Into The Groove" gets a dub mix as well, although they leave more vocals in this one, and go a bit crazier with the editing. It's not awful, but feels unnecessary and not particularly inventive. Oddly, they close the album with a dub mix of "Where's The Party", although it's not particularly "dub" since it still has lots of Madonna vocals. It feels a bit sparse for a finale.

    Given her catalog up 'till this point, I feel like You Can Dance was a serious missed opportunity. I probably would have avoided any repeats and limited any dub mixes to Like A Virgin, which had the best dance-oriented backing tracks. I'd have included at least a couple of mixes that were more dramatic reworkings of prior hits than we get here. I probably would have tried to salvage another album cut from obscurity ("Think Of Me"? "Shoo-Bee-Doo"?), and finally I'd have put a little more polish on the "Everybody" and "Physical Attraction" mixes and then spun edits off as singles themselves (especially after "Spotlight" sorta flopped).

    Anyhow, not the worst remix album as remix albums go, and worth it in America just to bag "Into The Groove" on CD (not to mention "Spotlight"), but largely a missed opportunity.

    Surprisingly, she still managed to move a couple million of these things worldwide, including a million in the US back when that was still a really huge number.
     
  12. sunspot42

    sunspot42 Forum Resident

    Location:
    San Francisco
    Ha! I could see it.
     
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  13. sunspot42

    sunspot42 Forum Resident

    Location:
    San Francisco
    I'd also mentioned the other night that Who's That Girl was the farewell to her classic '80s sound, but that wasn't entirely true. A leftover from the True Blue sessions - and kind of a retro one at that - "Spotlight" would have been the final entry in that canon.

    At the time we had no idea what was going to come next, but I don't think anybody quite expected what we got in the spring of '89. We weren't in Kansas anymore, folks.
     
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  14. Mylene

    Mylene Senior Member

    The remix of Into The Groove became the basis of Madonna's preferred mix which turned up on The Immaculate Collection. Spotlight was a single in Japan. It was a really big thing to have it back in the day.
     
  15. Holy Joe

    Holy Joe Forum Resident

    Location:
    London
    Go Madonna! :pineapple:
     
  16. Holy Joe

    Holy Joe Forum Resident

    Location:
    London
    I dislike "You Can Dance" because of all the tracks being linked together (I prefer to play individual tracks) and I'm not that keen on most of the mixes. But I have the Japanese "Spotlight" CD3 and the mix of "Where's The Party" on it is one of my absolute top Madonna tracks.
     
  17. Bobby Morrow

    Bobby Morrow Senior Member

    I'm surprised they didn't make more of "Spotlight". It would have sold as a single and promoted "You Can Dance" at the same time.. Plus, it would have helped distract people from the "Who's That Girl" fiasco.
     
  18. sunspot42

    sunspot42 Forum Resident

    Location:
    San Francisco
    Well, Who's That Girl wasn't a fiasco on the pop charts - two of the four tracks she recorded for the film were hits in the US, and three of them were hits in various places overseas.

    It occurs to me Madonna probably didn't want to film a bunch of videos for these old tracks, since she was busy working on other stuff. "Spotlight" didn't get a video, did it? That was a big limitation at the time - not a lot of stuff became a hit during this period without exposure on MTV...
     
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  19. Bobby Morrow

    Bobby Morrow Senior Member

    Yeah, I meant the movie.

    Maybe she didn't have much to do with the YCD project... Perhaps "Spotlight" would have conflicted with the singles from the WTG soundtrack.
     
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  20. sunspot42

    sunspot42 Forum Resident

    Location:
    San Francisco
    I knew that! Sorry if it wasn't clear. I was just saying that the soundtrack was far from a fiasco, so on the pop charts at least she wasn't in need of saving.

    Her movie career though . . . well, nothing ever really saved that, did it?
     
  21. sunspot42

    sunspot42 Forum Resident

    Location:
    San Francisco
    Oh, and that thought has occurred to me. Does anybody know? I glanced thru the Wiki article but didn't see much (but I coulda missed it).
     
  22. Bobby Morrow

    Bobby Morrow Senior Member

    She was unlikely to give Meryl Streep sleepless nights.

    Maybe she just never found the right roles? Thing is, as famous as Madonna was there were always better actresses of a similar age to snag the big roles. Michelle Pfeiffer would be one of them in her day.
     
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  23. Bobby Morrow

    Bobby Morrow Senior Member

    I don't know for sure, but one can't imagine Madonna pouring her heart and soul into a project like "You Can Dance".
    Was she on tour at the end of 1987? She'd be some way of recording "Like A Prayer", I'd assume.
     
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  24. DesertHermit

    DesertHermit Now an UrbanHermit

    Didn't Causing A Commotion go to number 2 and Angel was also a top five single, wasn't it? Hardly not big enough to be considered hits.
     
  25. The7thStranger

    The7thStranger Part of the Rhythm Nation

    Location:
    An der Lahn...
    Unfortunately.

    I don't really think they did enough to differentiate these from the original mixes. They're so similar that I don't get the point of listening to YCD over the originals. Again, I have to point back to Duran Duran, who were doing much more interesting remixes five years prior.

    Also, the original mix is on the WTG? CD. And there was a CD single release of the remixes in Germany back in the 90s. :)
     

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