[Forevermore]

Originally posted by fashadonia

4 Stars

[fashadonia]

"Oh my God, I am heartily sorry for offending thee," Madonna confesses on the opening of her new album. Her sense of humour has always been drier than a good Martini, but it's been particularly arid in the build-up to her 12th studio opus. Anyone in doubt need only watch the music video for the LP's lead single 'Give Me All Your Luvin', in which the 53-year-old breastfeeds a doll before tossing it to one side.

It's merely the tip of the iceberg on MDNA (the title itself is proving contentious amongst proud-parent types), which sees her acting her shoe size in latest cut 'Girl Gone Wild' and going on a gun-wielding rampage on 'Gang Bang'. Both are aggressive, four-to-the-floor club thumpers that not only prove she can pull off the latest trends, but she does so one better than most.

In between the silliness, Madonna also sheds an almost disconcerting amount of light on her private life. "Lawyers suck it up, I didn't get a prenup," she sing-speaks on the bratty 'I Don't Give A' about her failed marriage, before finding inner peace on stirring closer 'Falling Free' - the result of a long-awaited reunion with producer William Orbit that more than lives up to the hype.

http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/music/al...mpaign=twitter

[Legendtina]

Chicago Tribune

http://www.chicagotribune.com/entert...4882040.column

3 stars (out of 4)

On her 2008 album, “Hard Candy,” Madonna let her A-list producers steer. Timbaland and the Neptunes were hired to give her some club-banging hits, but all they really did was bury her personality. It continued a decade-long string of relatively uneventful Madonna releases, as Rihanna, Katy Perry, Beyonce and Lady Gaga surpassed her on the charts.

“MDNA” (Interscope), her first studio album since then, is a different story. It finds Madonna once again in charge and apparently motivated, co-writing and coproducing every track – and this time, the cocredits aren’t just cosmetic. It’s her best album since “Ray of Light” in 1998, an album that balanced introspection and pop dazzle in collaboration with U.K. electronic artist William Orbit. Not coincidentally, Orbit returns for the first time in a decade to play a key role on the new album.

Orbit splits most of the production with Italian DJ Marco "Benny" Benassi and French techno maven Martin Solveig. Benassi and Solveig focus on the dancefloor, and they service the machine while recycling Madonna-isms from decades past.

Benassi’s “Girl Gone Wild” starts with a confession: “I detest all my sins… I want so badly to be good.” The singer was flirting with the naughty Catholic girl imagery in the ‘80s, and she doesn’t take it anywhere new here, unless the vocoder-soaked vocals count as progress. The disappointing Solveig-produced single “Give Me All Your Luvin’ ” turns on a silly cheerleader-style chorus (Toni Basil got there first, 30 years ago), and brief cameos from Nicki Minaj and M.I.A. “Every record sounds the same, you got to step into my world,” Madonna sings, without giving us a single compelling reason why.

The Madonna-by-numbers up-tempo romps (“Addicted,” “Turn up the Radio”) dominate the first half of the album, but she excels on the Orbit tracks. “Gang Bang” is a slice of Tarantino-like Grind House spectacle, with Madonna as an abused lover-turned-avenger. The ominous, minimalist soundscape, flavored by whipcracks and screeching tires, makes for top-tier club drama. On “I’m a Sinner,” which blurs Saturday night grime and Sunday morning grace, her voice projects both vulnerability and defiance.

Like few Madonna albums in the last decade, the album has an emotional center, informed by the latest upheaval in her personal life. In 1998 for “Ray of Light,” it was the birth of her first child that colored that album’s more open tone. On “MDNA,” it’s the dissolution of her marriage to movie director Guy Ritchie.

“Love Spent” – the rare disco track to prominently feature a banjo -- addresses the divorce: “Love me like your money … I want you to take me like you took your money.” The Spanish-flavored ballad “Masterpiece” meditates on what might have been. Madonna takes some shots at her ex, but the overall tone set by the last quarter of the album is one of sadness – and when was the last time we could say that about Madonna’s music?

“Falling Free” ends the album on a bereft note. “We’re both free to go,” Madonna sings. Unlike anything in her catalog, it’s a woozy, almost psychedelic slice of chamber pop. At points, Madonna sounds like she’s channeling the ‘60s Brit-folk ballads of Sandy Denny or Anne Briggs. It’s a contemplative wind-up to an album that starts in the disco and finishes at home, in solitude.

[Legendtina]

Boston Globe-positive

http://articles.boston.com/2012-03-2...dy-guy-ritchie

What’s your favorite flavor of Madonna?

As is usually the case, there are several to choose from on “MDNA,’’ the pop icon’s new release, out Monday.

The one that Madonna seems to have been pushing in the run-up to her album’s release is the most familiar: queen of the dance floor, here to help us boogie our, and more crucially her own, troubles away.

From “Everybody’’ to “Into the Groove’’ to “Music,’’ Madonna has successfully helped us surrender to the transporting catharsis of moving to the beat for nearly 30 years.

So the two test balloon singles sent out as precursors probably felt like sure things, and yet neither was promising. First there was the irritating branding jingle “Give Me All Your Luvin’,’’ with its cheerleading reminder that we “L-U-V’’ Madonna. The more recent “Girl Gone Wild’’ imagines setting a fire but barely generates smoke - it’s an anonymous Ibiza-targeted jam that could have come from anyone from Rihanna to Jennifer Lopez.

It is the same 808 drumbeat she’s been churning out for her last few spins around the club, 2008’s “Hard Candy’’ and 2005’s “Confessions on a Dance Floor.’’ For the diehard members of Madonna’s core fan base, who remain hung up on every little thing that she says or does, that will be just fine.

But, like the drug to which it alludes, a chunk of “MDNA’’ feels more like a pre-fabricated high, one cooked up in a chem lab with collaborators old (William Orbit) and new (Benny Benassi, M.I.A., and Martin Solveig). The often chilly bloodlessness of the buzzing, shimmering, glistening, burping, tremulous synths and her distant, disaffected, reverb-heavy vocals raise a wall between the sentiment of ecstatic celebration and the actual practice of it - it takes some work from the listener to warm them up. Sometimes the album strains to be vibrant, but is merely uptempo.

And a few, like the silly, sing-song trifle “B-Day Song’’ and the bubbly cliche-ridden “I’m Addicted’’ and “Turn Up the Radio’’ feel a lot like filler to justify a “deluxe’’ configuration of the record.

“MDNA’’ isn’t a perfect Madonna album, but it greatly surpasses its immediate predecessors when Madonna cracks that hard candy shell and allows us to get at the gooey emotional center: This is a Madonna who is angry, mournful, occasionally funny, and most of all, specific - at one point, she raps about not having a prenup.

This is a Madonna who is not just sticking to her guns, but unloading them. Sometimes at herself, sometimes at her critics, and, presumably on several pointed songs, at her ex-husband, film director Guy Ritchie.

“I ****ed Up’’ dials back the volume and tempo but ratchets up the drama over martial drums and acoustic guitars, as she laments the woulda-coulda-shouldas and owns both her missteps and her “big mouth.’’ (But in admirably Madonna-esque fashion, she claims nobody makes mistakes better than she does.)

But if she is contrite there - and actually recites “Act of Contrition’’ elsewhere in one of “MDNA’’s several religious nods - on “I Don’t Give A,’’ (which features Nicki Minaj) she’s not so sorry: “I tried to be a good girl/ I tried to be your wife/ Diminished myself/ And I swallowed my light/ I tried to become all/ That you expect of me/ And if it was a failure/ I don’t give a . . .’’

(Interestingly, “Act of Contrition’’ isn’t the only callback to Madonna’s past. There are several echoes and allusions to previous songs, including “Lucky Star,’’ “Like a Virgin,’’ “Material Girl,’’ and even “Hanky Panky.’’)

She saves most of her ammunition to unleash on the scathing, superbly titled “Love Spent.’’ Opening with a burbling banjo and segueing into an irresistible marriage of string orchestration and menacing grooves, she worries in retrospect about someone’s romantic motives: “You had all of me, you wanted more/ Would you have married me if I were poor?/ Guess if I was your treasury/ You’d have found the time to treasure me.’’

While some of the album feels alienatingly icy, “Falling Free’’ earns its cool breeze. Co-written by, among others, Madonna’s supremely talented brother-in-law, singer-songwriter Joe Henry, it is a more impressionistic, haunting look at connection featuring one of the best vocals here.

And before it devolves into an awkward repetition of the word “bitch,’’ the rage of “Gang Bang,’’ with its fidgety, fuzzy, Morse code groove, bleeds bright red as Madonna envisions a violent end to the one who did her dirty: “And then I discovered, it couldn’t get worse/ You were building my coffin/ You were driving my hearse.’’

(The album comes in several different configurations, ranging from 11 to 18 tracks. They include a deluxe model, an iTunes exclusive, and a “clean’’ version for Wal-Mart that deletes the tracks “Gang Bang’’ and “I [Expletive] Up.’’)

These songs represent the Madonna of “Oh Father’’ and “Something to Remember’’ and “Don’t Tell Me’’ (also co-written by Henry).

The songs that find her venturing beyond lazy sloganeering and mechanized approximations of joy and into more personal and abstract territory gain power through storytelling, pathos, and smaller strokes of the brush, often without sacrificing the backbeat.

While there is plenty of fun to be had in the primal thumps of the better dance tracks here, it is this more vulnerable Madonna that inspires L-U-V, the one who gets down to the DNA of “MDNA.’’

[ImpressiveInstant]

Both Chicago Tribune and Boston Globe count for Metacritic. Good.

[Immaculate_Lamb]

theres 14 pages to go through, so idk if its AP. but Entertainment Weekly gave it a B-

[Tainted Blood]

Metacritic better start adding the good reviews, almost only the negative or mixed ones have been added...

[Legendtina]

New York Daily News

5 out of 5 stars

http://www.nydailynews.com/entertain...sEnabled=false

On her latest CD, Madonna chirps through a rash of odes to puppy love, blows out the biggest bubblegum song of her career (“Give Me All Your Luvin’”), and corrals the whole disc under a title that cheekily refers to a hallucinogenic drug.

Do these sound like the moves of a 53-year-old mother of four to you?

In fact, much of “MDNA” — out Tuesday — has more the flip zip of a disc by Katy Perry or Ke$ha than something by a woman who may be older than both their mothers. Then again, we are talking about Madonna, a woman who, at this point, seems just as hellbent on giving the finger to expectations about age that she once gave to assumptions about sex.

That stance alone might be enough to give Madonna’s youthful channelings a sense of defiance rather than desperation. But the music itself is what makes her flagrant act of regression not embarrassing but both pointed and exciting.

“MDNA” expands on the best elements of Madonna’s last CD, 2008’s “Hard Candy,” her most easily embraced disc since her very first. For “Candy,” the singer abandoned her least attractive feature — her self-importance. Finally, Madonna stopped marring her albums with songs meant to educate us about starving children, world politics or (gag) spiritual growth. Instead, she gave fans what they wanted all along: pitched dance anthems that doubled as smart pop songs.

Once again, upbeat tracks dominate “MDNA.” The sole ballad, the droopy “Masterpiece,” comes from another source: the soundtrack to the Madonna-directed bomb of a film “W.E.” Better, Maddy has ditched that post-“Evita”/post-elocution-lessons voice to sing again like either a snotty or an ironically innocent imp. In “Turn Up the Radio,” she sounds blissfully infantile. In “Girl Gone Wild,” she plays teen bad girl with nutty verisimilitude.

It helps that the songs themselves have so much snap coursing through them. “I’m Addicted” and “Some Girls” have the dark disco élan of druggier dance club anthems — just the thing for your next trip into a K-hole. “I’m a Sinner” and “Superstar” show a Cee Lo-style love for ’60s Day-Glo pop. They rate among her zippiest songs ever.

So many good tracks crowd the disc, in fact, that even the four extras on the deluxe version rate as must-owns.

The dance songs that dominate aren’t pushing mainstream club music ahead, as Madonna did on albums like “Erotica” or “Ray of Light.” But they’re in step with the most pleasurable tics and beats of now.

Some listeners will see the aftermath of Madonna’s divorce from Guy Ritchie reflected in the lyrics. But the four cuts that promise to be the most autobiographical contradict each other. Two strike an apologetic or regretful tone (“Best Friend” and “I F--ed Up,” both in the deluxe version). The other pair turn vindictive (“I Don’t Give A,” and “Love Spent”).

The only song that inescapably mines Madonna’s life for material — “I Don’t Give A” — reads as too literal and, so, self-indulgent. Worse, it suffers from a draggy melody. The song gossip-lovers may most wish were about her ex — “Gang Bang,” in which she imagines not just gunning a boyfriend down but chasing him into hell to do it again — is a hoot. It’s also historic. It may be the world’s first murder-ballad-as-disco song.

Better, the piece references Cher’s zippy ’60s hit “Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down).” Couple that with a reference to “The Beat Goes On” in “B-Day Song,” plus Madonna’s queenly getup at this year’s Super Bowl, and it seems as if the star has, at last, fulfilled a goal many of us have long held for her: She’s becoming Cher.

Still, the album’s greater feat has a far more subversive, if not superhuman, dimension. It finds Madonna aging in the most nose-thumbing way possible — in reverse.

[Legendtina]

San Francisco Chronicle- negative

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl...PKMV1NJUE0.DTL

Madonna's Super Bowl halftime spectacle - complete with tightrope juggler, M.I.A.'s raised middle finger and excessive huffing and puffing - didn't exactly ramp up anticipation for her 12th studio album, "MDNA." That's a good thing. The pop titan's latest offering just might be her least accessible - yes, that includes "American Life." Songs such as "I'm Addicted" and "Love Spent" are built around the kind of cheezoid techno beats that result from downing too many energy drinks in the studio. "Girl Gone Wild" is insistent and sleek, but surely the 53-year-old industry veteran and working mother could have come up with a more substantial title, without quoting Cyndi Lauper in the lyrics and avoiding the refrain "I've got a burning hot desire/ Nobody can put out my fire." It took eight songwriters to cobble together "Gang Bang" - yes, "Gang Bang" - and not one of them comes close to the sublime genius of a vintage cut such as "Into the Groove." The whole thing feels so synthetic, so clinical, so robotic it's hard to know how to value moments when it seems as if Madonna might actually be turning reflective, such as on the head-hammering "Turn Up the Radio," when she sings, "It was time I opened my eyes/ I'm leaving the past behind." Is it about her doomed relationship with Guy Ritchie? Who knows? Who cares? The M.I.A.- and Nicki Minaj-zabetted single "Give Me All Your Luvin,' " meanwhile, flopped because Gwen Stefani already did the same thing much better. Throughout, it feels as if Madonna is merely playing catch-up. The dubstep breaks. The throwaway lyrics. The lack of vowels. In the age of Gaga, this simply won't do.

[fashadonia]

Originally posted by Legendtina

New York Daily News

5 out of 5 stars

http://www.nydailynews.com/entertain...sEnabled=false

PERFECTION !!!!!

[GaGaFan]

I listened to the album yesterday,even though they were really low quality versions. It was good.

[fashadonia]

Originally posted by GaGaFan

I listened to the album yesterday,even though they were really low quality versions. It was good.

good to know...despite your name, you enjoy music regardless you stan for one artist.

[Tainted Blood]

Originally posted by GaGaFan

I listened to the album yesterday,even though they were really low quality versions. It was good.

Glad that you liked it, even if i'm a bit surprised.

[zach]

Originally posted by Tainted Blood

Metacritic better start adding the good reviews, almost only the negative or mixed ones have been added...

They added 5 positive and 2 mixed though.

[Sahn]

[Legendtina]

Pitchfork

http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16426-mdna/

4.5 out 10 stars

Madonna's 12th studio album is the product of both a merger and a divorce, but as much as the singer attempts to milk the latter event for pathos over the course of its 16 tracks, the tone is mostly set by corporate dealmaking. MDNA is the star's first record as part of a $120 million deal with concert promotion juggernaut Live Nation and a separate three-album pact with Interscope, and like a lot of new records by artists of her stature, it's essentially a mechanism to promote a world tour that will inevitably drastically out-earn the profits from her new music. These sort of records don't need to be cynical or uninspired on an artistic level, but this one feels particularly hollow, the dead-eyed result of obligations, deadlines, and hedged bets.

Madonna has made her share of bad music in the past, but for the most part, her failures have come from taking artistic chances that didn't pay off, as on her experiments with hip-hop on American Life and Hard Candy. Large chunks of MDNA are shockingly banal, coming across not so much as bad pop songs per se, but as drably competent tunes better suited to D-list Madonna wannabes. The worst of these numbers were produced by French DJ Martin Solveig, whose anonymous, unimaginative arrangements for "Turn Up the Radio", "Give Me All Your Luvin'", "I Don't Give A", and "B-Day Song" are paired with excessively bland lyrics. The latter track, a collaboration with M.I.A., is horrifically regressive, the sound of two of pop's great feminist provocateurs joining forces for what amounts to a tacky children's song about birthday parties spiced up with a couple of tired double entendres. (Sorry ladies, Rihanna beat you to that frosting-licking line.)

Madonna's tracks with house duo the Benassi Bros. and William Orbit, the principle architect of her 1998 album Ray of Light, are much better, if not up to par with previous career highlights. "I'm Addicted", a dynamic electro throbber by the Benassis, is the big keeper here, and their work on "Girl Gone Wild" yields a reasonably strong single that rises to the challenge of competing with Ke$ha, Britney Spears, and Katy Perry on pop radio. The Orbit collaborations mainly call back to their work together on Ray, the record that essentially established the aesthetics of the singer's past decade of music. "I'm a Sinner" is a serviceable rewrite of their Ray-era soundtrack hit "Beautiful Stranger", and "Falling Free" plays to her strengths as a singer of ballads, though it lacks the generous hooks of, say, "Take a Bow" or "Live to Tell".

The most interesting of the Orbit productions is "Gang Bang", a campy revenge fantasy that essentially uses her filmmaker ex-husband Guy Ritchie's sub-Tarantino aesthetic as a weapon against him. The title suggests ****, but it's really a nod to mobsters, particularly as her over-the-top, Ana Matronic-esque monologue turns especially violent and bloody. It's the album's boldest, most experimental track, and it's marred only by a just-off vocal performance that renders her very familiar voice a bit anonymous, and a half-hearted attempt at a dubstep bass drop. (Next time just hire Skrillex, okay?)

Madonna reckons with her divorce from Ritchie elsewhere on the record, but her attempts to address lingering bitterness and affection for her ex are so remote that the songs have all the soul of a carefully edited press release. "Love Spent", an Orbit production with brittle electro-acoustic accompaniment, at least approaches the topic from an interesting angle, focusing on the tension and power dynamic of a relationship in which one half of the couple drastically out-earns the other. The song picks up steam as it goes along, but it ultimately comes out like a tepid, ponderous rework of her 2005 smash "Hung Up". "I Don't Give A" starts off strong with her spitting out the lines, "Wake up, ex-wife/ This is your life," in a robotic rap, but she is upstaged by guest Nicki Minaj, who turns in an entertaining performance that is nevertheless below the standards of her usual features.

It's almost impossible to approach MDNA without some degree of cynicism, but it's equally difficult to imagine anyone being more cynical about this music than Madonna herself. Unlike previous late-period records in which she had the luxury to indulge in creative tangents and not get too hung up on scoring several hits, MDNA is a record that comes with major commercial expectations. The "this has to work" factor is high, and it's hard to shake the impression that she has some measure of contempt for the contemporary pop audience. We all know that Madonna is an extremely intelligent woman-- even if she's never been known for penning great lyrics, it's easier to take the mesmerizingly dumb lyrics of tracks like "Superstar" and "B-Day Song" as spiteful trolling rather than vapid pandering. It doesn't really matter whether or not this drivel is insulting to Madonna's audience-- the most loyal fans seem to embrace being submissive to her domineering persona-- but it is disheartening when one of the most influential pop artists of the 20th century is tossing out the world's umpteen-millionth "Mickey" retread as a lead single. She's the one who deserves better.

[Nicole]

Pitchfork ratings are out of 10. Will count as 45/100 on Metacritic.

[Chrome]

Originally posted by Nicole

Pitchfork ratings are out of 10. Will count as 45/100 on Metacritic.

It was expected though.

[Legendtina]

Slant

3.5 stars out of 5

http://www.slantmagazine.com/music/r...onna-mdna/2747

In 1993, when asked by a Mexican journalist what she feared most, Madonna admitted plainly, "Dying." Looking at her body of work, it's embarrassingly obvious now, and it's funny to think she's best known as the queen of sex and not, in fact, the queen of death. Beating the clock, moving fast, accomplishing things because time is scare and life is short are themes that have permeated almost every aspect of Madonna's life and career. Her mother, also named Madonna, died at the age of 30, and her namesake spent the next 25 years believing she would meet the same fate. When Madonna became famous at the height of the AIDS crisis, her friends began succumbing to the disease one after the other, which turned the singer into an activist, but also ostensibly became an impetus behind her near-pathological drive to leave her mark on the world.

In the past three years, two of the three biggest pop superstars of the '80s have died tragically. But unlike Michael Jackson and Whitney Houston, Madonna wasn't thrust into the spotlight by way of an enterprising family or the kind of prodigious talent that, with or without its owner's consent, begs to be hoisted up and exalted by the masses. That Madonna was forced to compensate for her perceived lack of natural "talent" with, in addition to unbridled creativity, supreme self-control and focus is probably what's helped keep her from succumbing to the demons that have plagued many of her contemporaries. It's also, perhaps, the thing that makes her a somewhat unsympathetic character, an attractive target for ridicule among even those who claim to love her.

Everyone is afraid of death. But how that fear manifests itself when you're one of the most famous women on the planet and how it's compounded when you reach middle age in an industry that increasingly values youth and beauty were revealed, respectively, in Madonna's largely graceful quest for answers to life's most universal questions on Ray of Light and her often awkward, misguided attempts to reconcile those lessons with a habitual desire to preserve her status in the years that have followed. Social, cultural, and political impact aside, Madonna's career has been a demonstration of endurance.

To that end, while Madonna was accused of running out of ideas long before she actually did, her recent propensity to rehash her own canon seems deliberate—not to mention cynical. Last month, she told The Advocate that while she "never left" her gay audience, she's "back." (Back from where is unclear, though her estranged brother's claim that ex-hubby Guy Ritchie is a homophobe offers a clue.) The video for "Girl Gone Wild," the second single from her first album in four years, MDNA, is like "Human Nature" redux, seemingly tailor-made to snatch the title of Most Played Video Artist at Gay Bars from Lady Gaga.

But while "Human Nature" was an intentional sendup of Madonna's Erotica period, the seemingly straight-faced Catholic Girl Gone Bad shtick of "Girl Gone Wild" is just—you guessed it—reductive. Even though Madonna's dressed up like her, the feisty pop singer who went on Nightline in 1990 and clumsily but zealously called out the media for its hypocrisy and sexism is missing here. Madonna pilfers the title of one of her earliest rivals' songs during the hook of "Girl Gone Wild," only to defang it of its feminist bent: Just like Madonna's own "Material Girl" was meant to be ironic, the point of Cyndi Lauper's signature anthem is that girls want to have fun, but that's not all they want to do.

The song's intro, during which Madonna recites an act of contrition over canned disco strings, is just a ruse; the rest of MDNA is reminiscent of neither Like a Prayer nor Confessions on a Dance Floor. It's unclear what Madonna's motivations were for reuniting with William Orbit after more than a decade; a smarter move would have been to call on longtime collaborator Patrick Leonard to help her excavate and examine the remains of her second marriage. But while the album is no Ray of Light either, MDNA is surprisingly cohesive despite its seven-plus producers (most notably, Martin Solveig, the man behind the regrettable lead single "Give Me All Your Luvin'"), and it's obvious Madge and Billy Bubbles can still create magic together. "I'm a Sinner" harks back to the pair's most ecstatically joyous work—not just sonically, but vocally. Something about recording with Orbit again has inspired Madonna to abandon her recent insistence on singing like she's wearing a clothespin on her nose.

Likewise, her performance on "Love Spent" is confident enough to transcend Orbit's superfluous vocal effects. It's not just the most melodically sophisticated song on the album, it's also the most revealing, rather poignantly alluding to the tens of millions Ritchie received in the couple's divorce settlement: "I want you to take me like you took your money," she longs. What makes the lyrical faux pas of songs like "Girl Gone Wild" and "Superstar" so frustrating is the pop mastery of tracks like this and the Italo-disco "I'm Addicted," a meditation on the power of language that's both profound ("All of the letters push to the front of my mouth/And saying your name is somewhere between a prayer and a shout") and tongue-in-cheek ("I'm a dick-, I'm a dick-, I'm addicted to your love"). When she's not rapping about child custody and prenups on "I Don't Give A," she admits: "I tried to be a good girl/I tried to be your wife/Diminished myself/And I swallowed my light."

But in case the title of that song didn't tip you off, the Madonna of MDNA is more defiant than heartbroken. Ritchie's impact on the singer's personal life is obvious, but his influence on her work is just as apparent: He bought her a guitar when they met, changing her approach to songwriting, and he was responsible for the introduction of violence, often seemingly gratuitous, into her videos and stage performances, starting with his clip for her 2001 single "What It Feels Like for a Girl." So, in that sense, it's disappointing to see guns and violence continue to play such a prominent role here. But the twisted "Gang Bang," a standout cut in which Madonna quite convincingly portrays a jilted bride turned femme fatale in the vein of Beatrix Kiddo, plays more like a piss take of Ritchie's gangster fetish than a glorification of it.

Madonna's Super Bowl performance last month—spectacular but lacking spontaneity—was indicative of her overall approach to her career these days: meticulously orchestrated down to every dance move, every mimed syllable. The non-controversy of M.I.A. flipping the bird was notable only because it served as a reminder of just how "safe" the rest of the performance was. But songs like "Gang Bang" serve as reminders that what separates Madonna from most other mainstream pop stars is her willingness to try new things. Fear—of failure, of looking uncool, of death—can either paralyze or propel you. MDNA finds Madonna continuing to defy the laws of nature by doing both.

[Befour]

only GB and GGW are decent tbh