Madonna - Hard Candy

When the mullet-sporting, ex-metal head dude at your local record store tells you that he’s “really excited” about the new Madonna album, you start to get intrigued. Up until that point, my expectations for Hard Candy (released April 29) were pretty low. The album cover was so obnoxiously confrontational it suggested the music inside might be less than stellar. The pre-release hooplah seemed to focus more on Madonna’s new haircut than her new music. And “4 Minutes,” the album’s first single, had not lived up to expectations. It’s not that the song’s awful by any means, it’s just a bit bland, with its silly lyrics, awkwardly over-complicated Timbaland beat, and Justin Timberlake whining out the chorus like a seven year old kid who wants a new Batman toy. Even worse, it sounded like Madonna was guesting on her own song, dropping a few lines here and there in between bog-standard Timbaland/lake exchanges.

Most of all, I was worried that Hard Candy would be Madonna playing it safe, for the first time in her career. After all, it’s the first time Madge has ever pandered to mainstream tastes, and worked with well-known, superstar producers – and these aren’t just any superstar producers, they’re TIMBALAND and THE NEPTUNES for Chrissakes. There aren’t starrier producers anywhere on this planet. Now, for someone like Nelly Furtado or Gwen Stefani, working with superstar producers is fine: their solo careers need a boost, so they go get a bit of a stylistic makeover, adapt to the trends of the day, hit number one, end of story. Now, if Madonna released an acoustic album of experimental gypsy music, she’d still hit number one – but that’s not quite my point. My point is, Madonna’s made a career out of dodging expectations, and built her reputation on her refusal to follow the crowd; all the way from her debut, which busted out disco-influenced dance-pop when that genre was at its commercial trough, to her latest Confessions on a Dance Floor, a glittering, non-stop dance album which sounded like nothing else in 2005. But with Hard Candy it looked like Madonna was adapting to mainstream tastes, and just following the flavour of the moment…no pun intended…

Well, actually, that pretty much sums up Hard Candy. It does pander to current tastes, almost shamelessly. We’ve got the Timbaland clucks, the Timberlake guest spots, the spare Neptunes beats, we’ve even got a Kanye West rap. Except Hard Candy is actually a fantastic pop album, bursting with sass, imagination and energy, and enough million-dollar hooks to last any normal pop singer at least three albums. Sure, none of it is ‘revolutionary,’ none of it is ‘edgy,’ none of it’s going to make you sit up the way “Like a Virgin” made people sit up back in 1984…but it’s Madonna taking a rest, basking in her glory as the Queen of Pop. For the first time in her career, she sounds relaxed, she sounds like she’s having fun. She’s even…funny!!?

As mentioned, half the album is produced by Timbaland, and half of it’s produced by the Neptunes (just Pharrell Williams at this point). On the whole, Williams’ tracks are considerably more impressive. Anyone doubting whether he is still a potent commercial force should just give this album a spin: almost every one of his production pieces is a tour de force of contemporary pop music, and if we’re taking this album as a barometer of ‘hottest pop producer,’ I’ve got to say Williams tops Timbaland without even breaking a sweat. Setting Hard Candy off to a thrilling start is his salacious, entendre-laden “Candy Shop,” in which Madge invites listeners to “come on into my store” over an atonal, slinking, Prince-like groove. For about two minutes, the song is more satisfying than stellar – Williams has pulled similar minimalist production tricks before, especially on Clipse’s skeletal, off-kilter “Mr. Me Too.” But two minutes in the track transforms, as the melody drops out and all we’re left with is clattering percussion, fizzling synth line, and Madge moaning out “My sugar is raw / Sticky and sweet,” again, and again, and again. Sound absolutely ridiculous? Well it is: it’s also head-spinning pop perfection, and Williams pulls the same trick over and over, in everything from the stabbing synth work of “Give It 2 Me” – which sounds like a deranged mixture of French house and Bavarian polka – to the shimmering, summery bubblegum pop of “Incredible,” which goes on for over six minutes without ever getting boring.

Even more impressive is the album’s second single “Beat Goes On,” a slick, glistening slice of twenty-first century disco which, with its irresistible joy in music, almost sounds like it could have been lifted from one of Madonna’s early albums. Gone are the calculated double-entendres of “Candy Shop,” gone are any attempts to come off as a twenty year old when you’re fifty: this is just a woman proclaiming her absolute love of music, rejoicing in the liberating, unifying power of dance-pop. It’s the latest in Madonna’s series of commanding pop manifestos (“Into the Groove,” “Vogue,” “Express Yourself,” I could go on), Madonna half-singing, half-chanting against Williams’ silky, deceptively complex sonic backdrop. Even Kanye West – hardly the most charismatic emcee to have picked up a mike – is able to drop a verse without making the song any less irresistible.

Best of all is the album’s centrepiece track, the glammy, string-laden put-down “She’s Not Me,” in which an unusually witty Madonna shows all the wannabe-divas out there that even though they may be “dressing like me and talking like me…[they’ll] never have what I have.” For the first few listens, the song seems underwhelming, a slightly plasticky neo-disco work-out that pales in comparison to her recent hardcore dance style, shown in songs like “Hung Up” or “Sorry.” But then you realise Madonna and Williams aren’t trying for hardcore, here – this isn’t meant to blast your ears off with its new sounds and fancy studio trickery. It’s just pure, sugary pop bliss: irresistibly groovy, loaded with sampled string breaks and Chic-like rhythm guitar riffs, and, best of all, horrendously catchy…

Now, though Timbaland’s tracks may not quite measure up to Williams’, they’re far from disastrous – they’re mostly pretty typical Timbaland work-outs, proof that he’s not getting any better, but also proof that he’s not ready to relinquish his commercial Midas touch quite yet. “Miles Away” shows this off exactly: listen to the bare melody and it would just sound like your bog-standard love ballad, but with the Timbaland make-over (vocal stutters, clattering beat, bleeping synths) it immediately sounds like a chart-topper. Not that that’s necessarily a good thing – any longer with Timbaland on top and everything in mainstream pop will sound exactly the same – but it hardly makes for unpleasant listening either. The same goes for the sleek, ominous mid-tempo ballad “Devil Wouldn’t Recognise You.” Once again, the melody’s decent, but what’s really got your attention is Timbaland’s virtuoso technique: the growling bass, the squelching synth and guitar samples, the increasingly complex layering of vocal lines, the melodramatic sound effects, bla, bla, bla. Again, it’s pretty irresistible ear candy, but it’s exactly the kind of music you’ll hear in ten years and go, “Wow, that sounds SO 2007.” Which is the problem when one producer’s sound becomes so unavoidably, inexcusably ubiquitous: it grows dated that much more rapidly.

In an interview promoting Hard Candy, Madonna was asked whether she thinks the best music is getting heard in commercial circles. In her response, she unwittingly identifies exactly the problem with the Timbaland-produced half of her album: “Not necessarily,” she replies, “we live in a world full of distractions… everything is about instant gratification and shorter shelf life.” Her tone of voice sounds critical, yet by choosing to work with Timbaland, the ultimate in now producers, Madonna has unintentionally hemmed herself into exactly that hole; and nothing in her back-catalogue will age more rapidly than tracks like “4 Minutes,” whose title could easily be a commentary on how long the song will last before being forgotten.

Luckily, on seven of Hard Candy’s twelve songs, Madonna got the Neptunes treatment, and tracks like “She’s Not Me,” “Incredible” and “Beat Goes On” are likely to last much longer than the instant gratification of Timbaland’s production style. The tricky thing is that pop music has and always will be about following trends and pandering to current tastes; what makes Madonna special is that she’s one of the few pop stars who’s managed to start trends rather than follow them, not just in matters of image and personal life, but musically too. 1998’s Ray of Light brought hardcore techno beats to the top of the charts while it was still mostly an underground phenomenon; 2001’s Music brought dirty French house and electro-pop to the mainstream at least five years before it became the norm; the list goes on. As a result, Hard Candy will probably go down in history as Madonna’s sell-out album. And if so, that’s fine, but then it’s the cleverest, catchiest and most all-out irresistible sell-out album I’ve ever laid hands on.


"Hard Candy" released April 25 by Warner Bros. Records.
Images courtesy of Warner Bros Records and Empire Online.