Madonna - Music (2000)

Autotune, much? I'm sure everyone who lived through the early aughts remembers that "Hey Mister DJ, put a record on," song, which is actually titled "Music". Generic doesn't begin to describe this one-note synthesized mess. I don't know at what state of popularity Madonna was in 2000 but it certainly wasn't, "I'm so huge I can put out a plain POS song and everyone will still love me!" Unless it was, I honestly don't remember. I was in high school at the time and I don't remember many people swooning over Madonna. We were mostly making fun of her *ahem "movie career". It's also possible I'm judging too harshly after hearing only one song.

Yeesh... 30 seconds into the next song and it's already one hundred times worse than it had been. The cover of the album shows Madonna dressed in a plain blue shirt and a cowboy hat in front of maybe a gas station. The logo on the album looks like stereotypical big Texas belt-buckle. These images and the title Music would suggest after years of pushing conventional boundaries that Madonna would use a simpler, perhaps more traditional approach to this latest album. So far, it certainly is simpler. The lyrics are completely tame and banal, and the "music" is generic white-trash techno. The most notable thing is how much autotune is being used to make Madonna sound like a robot. But again, I may be judging too harshly only two songs in.

Whoa, my mind is blown on the fourth song by the sound of a real guitar. Too bad it's paired with a drum machine loop. I could almost say I like this song "I Deserve It". It's a cliched acoustic guitar R&B song with a simple progression, melody, and beat. There are also a bunch of electronic effects pasted on top that add an eerie feeling but are a bit heavy in places. What I like is how Madonna does not oversell this song. It's soft and dark and she sings it gently. I think back to my recent Destiny's Child review where they did an acoustic R&B number but went overboard by singing it really loudly and adding powerful overdubs, as if singing loudly would give the song more feeling.

"Nobody's Perfect" would be better without all the shitty production work on top. Whoever produced this album should have put down the autotune and focused more on arranging real instruments around songs like this. Madonna has a pretty voice, and this might have been a good song if she were singing it over a guitar, a drum kit, and maybe a light string arrangement.

"Don't Tell Me" makes me angry. There's an acoustic guitar loop in the background that's been chopped up haphazardly, creating random half-note pauses that add nothing to the song. It actually made me think my iPod was skipping like a scratched CD. Before chopping up a guitar part and looping it so sloppily, I wish someone had realized that they could have achieved a comparable result by having a guitar player pick up a guitar and improvise around the melody.

Music is something of a bi-polar album. There are soft, sweet acoustic progressions with light melodies buried under a sludge of synthetic noise. It strikes me as something of a missed opportunity for Madonna. The one thing this album is not is provocative, unlike so much of her earlier work. It's like she wanted to do something dark without being so harsh and confrontational, but instead released an album full of generic video game music with trace amounts of something simple and lovely. What a shame, I sorta want to like this album, but I don't. 2 stars.