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Post by rocknroller on Apr 29, 2008 11:53:05 GMT -5
What, you don't shop at Waterloo?!? WTF, man?! I have shopped there when I've gone by. Isn't that on south lamar near 6th street? |
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Post by skovrecky on Apr 29, 2008 12:15:46 GMT -5
Yep! That is the one. We have a ton of local record shops all over this town....why in the hell would you shop at the Mall or Wal-Mart? I'm not judging or anything, just as someone who loves all of the record stores here, it just seems weird. Waterloo usally has really good sales on stuff on the first week of release. Like today, I will be procuring the new Portishead.
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Post by rocknroller on Apr 29, 2008 15:01:36 GMT -5
Well what-do-ya-know the local wally world has the Whore of Babylon's new album after all. Just kidding. LOL.
I mean walmart does have "Hard Candy" stocked and I bought a copy and have listened to over 1/2 of it on the drive home. I LOVE "Candy Shop" and "Give It To Me." Theres some great pop songs on this album and if you loved 80's Madonna you'll love 2008's "Candy Shop, Beat Goes On, She's Not Me, and Give It To Me." These are songs that stand out on this track thus far and I look forward to hearing the rest tonight on the drive into town for the local 12 step meeting.
"Candy Shop & Give It To Me" made me smile. I felt like I did hearing these two songs like I did when I heard several Madonna classics for the very first time.
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Post by Matheus on Apr 29, 2008 20:14:48 GMT -5
Washington Post:
It is not yet time to stick a fork in Madonna. The grande dame of pop isn’t done just yet.
Pop music is supposed to be a young person’s game, but Madonna, as she’s done so often throughout her quarter-century career, ignores the rules by sounding vital and relevant, even as she approaches her 50th birthday.
"They say that a good thing never lasts, and then it has to fall," she sings on her new album, "Hard Candy." "Those are the people that didn’t amount to much at all."
The 11th studio set of her career -- and her last for Warner Bros. Records, the longtime label that she’s leaving for a wide-ranging deal with concert promoter Live Nation -- "Hard Candy" is a heady, frisky sugar rush of urban dance-pop come-ons in which Madge finally gets into the hip-hop groove.
"See which flavor you like/And I’ll have it for you," she coos in album opener, "Candy Shop," a hooky song driven by a twitchy, syncopated drum pattern. "Come on into my store/I’ve got candy galore." Advertising herself as "your one-stop candy store," she purrs: "Sticky and sweet/My sugar is raw."
The recent Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee has succeeded for so long, with more than 200 million records sold worldwide since 1982, in large measure because she’s always had a knack for identifying interesting trends and adopting them as her own. (Well, that, along with self-promotional genius and sheer personality.)
Though lust is hardly a new addition to the "Sex" author’s repertoire, the sound on "Hard Candy" represents a welcome new twist for Madonna: It’s dance-pop pressed through a hip-hop filter with the help of several urban-music studio heavies -- namely Pharrell Williams, Timbaland and Nate "Danja" Hills. (It’s another signature Madonna move, as she’s been collaborating with hot producers since the early days of her career, when she teamed with the likes of Jellybean Benitez and Niles Rodgers.)
Given hip-hop’s long-standing ubiquity, Madonna is arriving late to this particular party, suggesting that she might be slowing down in her advanced age. But even if she’s not starting any new trends in following the lead of Nelly Furtado, Gwen Stefani and such, Madge still manages to sound perfectly at home in the hip-hop world, where her sharp pop sensibilities -- particularly her ability to craft killer hooks -- are given a mostly fresh rhythmic framework.
If it’s not the boldest move of her career, it’s still a successful gambit from one of the great all-time shape-shifters.
It works best when Madonna isn’t trying to act like she’s down with the hip-hop kids, which just sounds weird. In "Heartbeat," for instance, over a stuttering beat accented by a cowbell, we find Madonna quasi-rapping the line "see my booty get down" over and over as Pharrell eggs her on: "A little lower, baby." Awk-ward!
More cowbell, less of Madonna’s booty raps, please. (She should leave that to the pros, as with Kanye West, who cameos on "Beat Goes On.")
Much better is the album’s lead single, "4 Minutes," which Madonna co-wrote with Timbaland, Hills and Justin Timberlake, who also makes a vocal cameo. It’s a busy, brassy song propelled by a detonative marching-band beat, and it’s one of the most thrilling things Madonna has done in this decade.
"Give It 2 Me" is also a highlight, a thumping, super-sexualized banger in which Madonna demands "it" over lurching synth stabs and a rump-shaking rhythm. "Don’t stop me now, don’t need to catch my breath/I can go on and on and on," she sings convincingly. Maybe 50 is the new 25.
And, in fact, it’s easy to forget that Madonna is just months removed from the half-century mark and that Timberlake wasn’t yet 2 years old when her first single, "Everybody," was released in 1982.
This is not the soundtrack to "The Cougar Den," though, as Madonna wears her youthful sexuality well, managing to avoid sounding creepy during her multiple come-ons.
Pop music’s Everlasting Gobstopper, she keeps on ticking -- and, um, licking -- as time and trends march on.
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Post by Matheus on Apr 29, 2008 20:24:50 GMT -5
Slant Magazine:
Madonna
Hard Candy
by Sal Cinquemani
Posted: April 23, 2008
3 and a half stars
When an early version of "Candy Shop" leaked last summer, Madonna deserved the benefit of the doubt, as every artist does when it comes to unreleased demos, particularly in the Internet age, when fans can gain access to failed experiments that should have never left the confines of a recording studio. But the inclusion of this virtually unchanged track, which is as catchy as a stomach virus and just as vile, on the singer's new album, Hard Candy, and the fact that Madonna reportedly wanted the song to be its first single, seemed to point to her seriously faltering instincts as not only an arbiter of what's hip but of good taste in general. Comparing oral sex to fine dining on 1992's "Where Life Begins" seemed daring, chic, and witty, but here she likens her clitoris to the front door of a confectionary and she wants us to know her sugar is "sticky and sweet"—all set to Pharrell's tired paint-can beats. The song is neither sexy nor campy, and somewhere, Dita is throwing her head back, laughing hysterically, and cracking her whip in disapproval.
For all the criticism she received at the time, there was an authenticity to Madonna's appropriation of black music and culture in the early '90s. House music and hip-hop were frequent bedfellows, and Erotica—with production work from Andre Betts and featuring, yes, Dita rapping without so much as a peep from the white rock press—is a testament to that. The notion that Madonna was somehow "selling out" with her next album, Bedtime Stories, was a dubious complaint considering she's an artist whose first goal was to rule the world and whose second was to maintain that reign (it's telling that the very first lyric of Hard Candy is "Say which flavor you like and I'll have it for you"—such an accommodating hostess!). And in hindsight, Bedtime Stories wasn't too far behind the curve; urban music, after all, was only just starting its own worldwide dominance in 1994.
If hip-hop seems like a put-on now, it's because her Madgesty has fashioned herself into a lady of the manor in the British countryside, and instead of bedding Dennis Rodman, she's making the bed for Guy Ritchie and three kids. Okay, so that might be a stretch, but she does fancy herself a domestic goddess. As with Bedtime Stories, though, the real issue isn't that Madonna is once again making "black music," but who she's making it with. There are myriad hip-hop producers out there who could have helped Madonna achieve a more urban sound (U.K. bassline artist T2 was at one point a rumored collaborator) while at the same time giving the project an underground edge (something for which even Madonna's biggest detractors would admit she has a knack), but she instead chose to hire two of the most ubiquitous hip-hop knob-twirlers—and I use that term figuratively, particularly for Timbaland—of the last decade.
The Neptunes-helmed "Candy Shop" is so disappointing, and Timbaland and Justin Timberlake's "4 Minutes" such a blatant advertisement for the rest of the album, that it is with genuine surprise that I say that not only is the album palatable, but—and I apologize in advance for this and all subsequent but unavoidable candy metaphors—Pharrell delivers its tastiest morsels. "Beat Goes On," the other track that leaked last year, has inexplicably lost its definite article but gained a Kanye guest spot and a flattering sonic facelift that transports it from 2001 to 1979. Disco (of both the purist late-'70s and more covert early-'80s electro varieties), it seems, provides Hard Candy with its juicy center while hip-hop merely serves as a crunchy shell. We caught a glimpse of the all-American, Detroit-reared, rebel spirit that made Ciccone a star at last month's Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony, and though her rise to fame in the Big Apple didn't quite coincide with Studio 54's heyday, she sounds at home among all the disco strings, toots, beeps, whistles, handclaps, and Chic guitar licks of tracks like "Beat" and "She's Not Me."
Pharrell makes his presence known a little too much, and the same kitchen-sink production approach that marred Gwen Stefani's "Wind It Up" rears its overzealous head on "Incredible," but he also manages to get Madonna to stretch vocally in ways she hasn't since Evita. That is, when she's not doing cheeky drag queen impersonations, with trannie-fierce moments sprinkled liberally throughout "Candy Shop" ("My sugar is raw"), "Heartbeat" ("See my booty get down"), and "Spanish Lesson" ("Work!"). One of those moments ("Get stupid, don't stop it," from second single "Give It 2 Me") is, well, just plain stupid, but stupidity is one of the album's main themes—and virtues. "Heartbeat" could have been sung by any number of anonymous female pop singers from the '80s…and that's exactly the point. After 25 years in the business, Madonna knows she's beyond informing the zeitgeist and she's more than content to mine her influences—not to mention her own catalog, giving nods to "Into the Groove," "Hung Up," and her work with William Orbit—while at the same time borrowing a page from one of today's biggest pop stars.
Madonna advises said pop star on the key to creative/sexual/calisthenic endurance on "Dance 2Night," the second of two duets with Timberlake: "Are you a one-trick pony or do you want to keep runnin' this race?" The entire album is a self-declaration of Madonna's stamina, but it also reflects a woman who clearly feels like she's in a furious battle against time. Her legacy is already assured, so scoring another U.S. hit is just icing on the cake but she acts like she doesn't know it. With Pharrell providing the vintage party favors, Timbaland and Timberlake are the album's insurance policy; "Miles Away," "Devil Wouldn't Recognize You," and, of course, "4 Minutes," bear the pair's distinct, modern stamp, making Hard Candy more than just a throwback to Donna Summer, Anita Ward, and quaaludes.
In many ways, Hard Candy is the album Confessions on a Dance Floor was supposed to be, both in terms of musical style (despite the feathered hair and leotards, Confessions was more Eurotrash—and I use that term affectionately—than Eurodisco) and overall progression (French producer Mirwais' use of Autotune—years before T-Pain, thankyouverymuch—and glitchy synths was European, to be sure, but his heavy beats and use of acoustic guitars was patently American, to say nothing of Madonna's collaborations with Timbo cohort Missy Elliott, whose absence here hasn't gone unnoticed). Madonna hasn't delivered this many vapid floor fillers on one disc since her debut, and maybe not even then. Aside from a little careerism on the dance floor ("Give me a record and I'll break it," she dares on "Give It 2 Me"—okay, Mimi), there are few confessions here—nothing political, nothing too spiritual, no talk of fame, war, or the media. It's just what America ordered.
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Post by rocknroller on Apr 29, 2008 21:38:08 GMT -5
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Post by rocknroller on May 2, 2008 16:02:44 GMT -5
Favorite Songs from "Hard Candy."
Voices
Give It To Me
Candy Shop
She's Not Me
Beat Goes On
Incredible
Devil Wouldn't Recognize You
Miles Away
4 Minutes
Heartbeat
Dance 2Night
Spanish Lesson
A great album. I love it. Like I said if you liked 80's Madonna then you'll undoubtedly like this album.
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Post by Matheus on May 5, 2008 17:33:37 GMT -5
Furthermore:
Candy Shop: A
I love this as an opener for the rest of the album. I do find it funny that people interpret the song sexually. It could simply be talking about the music.
4 Minutes: B+
Could have been better, but it's nice to see a song that says "save the world" played on the radio.
Give It 2 Me: A-
Madonna perfection, except for the "get stupid" part. Could have been an A.
Heartbeat: A
I love this.
Miles Away: A
Perfection.
She's Not Me: C
If they would have cut like 2 minutes off of this song it would have been a great track.
Incredible: B
Once again, they should have cut some time off. Repetitive. It could have been an amazing track.
Beat Goes On: A+
One of my favorites. Kanye and his ego appear.
Dance 2Night: A-
Love it, but it wasn't quite perfect.
Spanish Lesson: D
This track is stupid. They were experimenting, and they should have abandoned the experiment.
Devil Wouldn't Recognize You: A
So tasty. This devil wants more.
Voices: A+
It's hard to choose between this and Beat Goes On as my favorite track.
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Post by strat-0 on May 6, 2008 20:26:55 GMT -5
She's getting a lot of props for that record.
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Post by rocknroller on May 10, 2008 19:31:19 GMT -5
Good news ! Madonna's "sticky & sweet" tour is coming to Houston in November. The even better good news is that as an Icon fanclub member I am eligible for the presale tickets that will be available on the 21st!  |
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Post by Ampage on May 10, 2008 20:14:21 GMT -5
She sucks big time. Have fun.
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Post by rocknroller on May 15, 2008 9:25:05 GMT -5
Well I made my reservation today for a hotel room for Sunday 11-16-2008. The hotel is 1/2 mile from Minute Maid Park where Madonna will perform her "Sticky & Sweet" tour in Houston. I've decided to fly as the cost will be less than 100 bucks roundtrip as I will make reservations as soon as I can. Currently Southwest is only accepting reservations to October 30th. Sigh.
On May 27th I can order my tickets via special passcode available to us Icon fanclub members at ticketmasters.
Im soooo excited. I saw Madonna's "Who's That Girl" world tour and had lousy seats. I have a good feeling I'll get killer seats for this tour.
;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D
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Post by Ampage on May 15, 2008 19:53:49 GMT -5
Have fun at the Icky and Twee Tour, but I hope she does lots of old stuff.
The new stuff sucks root, IMO.
I used to love her so and anymore she is just so, so, so..................
I don't know - not fun.
Trying too hard perhaps?
Poor Madge.
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Post by rocknroller on May 27, 2008 9:23:16 GMT -5
Heres the seating chart for the Houston show at Minute Maid Park. I'm hoping for seats in b,c,d, or e. First row! The presale at ICON starts in 34 minutes.  |
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Post by rocknroller on May 27, 2008 10:09:18 GMT -5
Well I got section C row 20 seat 14. I'm grateful! So excited!
FLOOR BABY! YAYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!
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