The FUNKIEST Madonna album! (Madonna: The First Album - Madonna)

Member Name: josh_debbarman

Product:	Madonna: The First Album - Madonna
Date:	09/05/02 (232 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: the birth of dancepop, the first official Madonna album!, Madonna at her funkiest

Disadvantages: , Sounds a bit dated

When the eponymous 'Madonna' burst onto the music scene in 1982, the music industry was never going to be the same again...enter Madonna, soon to be the Queen and later the Goddess of Pop! Dance/pop music was born and since Madonna's face was not on her first couple of singles, people were astounded to find out that this new phenomenon was not in fact black! This was released in Europe as 'The First Album' with different artwork. 'Madonna' was then re-mastered in 2001 with improved sound and extended remixes of 'Lucky Star' and 'Burning Up', released all around the world with the original 'Madonna' artwork (as opposed to 'The First Album' artwork).

Lucky Star starts with a sparkle of synth notes. A medium-paced dance track, the music features heavy electronic drums with strong emphasis on the backbeat reinforced with electronic handclaps, flickering soul guitar licks and bubbling bass synth (which was to become her trademark). Add to this a cutesy voice that drew comparisons with the then first lady of pop, Cyndi Lauper. This is the first song that Madonna wrote herself as a signed artist, and while the lyrics aren't too deep, she does come up with a good hook and she explores the ambiguity of the star/heavenly body - again this lyrical ambiguity would feature heavily in her later work. A good and catchy start to this album, this song was Madonna's first top five hit in the US.

Borderline has a more Seventies theme - indeed you could almost imagine ABBA singing it, and the chord invertions look back in general to Seventies disco, to the sound of Philadelphia and to mid-Seventies Elton John. Like 'Lucky Star' this song has a pretty intro, provided by keyboards and apparently renowned session bass player Anthony Jackson played on this track. Another classic, and many people's favourite, the theme is of a jealous boyfriend pushing Madonna's love to the borderline. Ag
ain, Madonna sings in her higher register but in a soul style and this lends the track an intangible endearing quality - you really care what happens to the girl in the plot of the song. The video for this song was the first one to give her exposure to the public.

Re-worked from her days as a struggling solo artist, Madonna's Burning Up is a great song. With a strong beat and great metal/rock feel, Madonna oozes attitude, and there is a real sense of drama. A strangely cold mechanical feel to the music - featuring bass, single guitar and drum machine, with loud tom-tom fills (a la Phil Collins) - takes nothing away from the groovy nature of the beat. The song sounds like the disco end of new romanticisim (and could almost be by Gary Numan). Lyrically, Madonna sings how she is prepared to do anything for her lover as she has no shame. A great abandon of passion is used in the lyrics and this sits well with the dramatic music. A masterpiece and one of the most recognisable of Madonna's early hits.

I Know It is a pretty song, where Madonna puts on a much less assertive voice - showing the vulnerable site of her nature, and tells how her lover left her. "I know it" is sung with wonderful plaintiveness, but there is a hint of defiance "I'm not gonna cry for you, 'cos that's what you want me to do" and the more powerfully sung "take your love and run from me, is this the way love's supposed to be, you don't think that I can see, huh you don't fool me". Stabbing piano chords, a few swirling synth phrases, a saxophone flourish carry the two-chord verse which then modulates to the a different minor-based sequence on the chorus. An interesting pointer to future techniques is shown by Madonna harmonising with herself (in the chorus) as if she were her own girl backing group.

What can you say about Holiday? It is one of the most famous songs ever. It has charted three times, doing well e
very time. It may come as a surprise to people who weren't around at the time, but Holiday wasn't Madonna's first song, though it was her first big hit. Fresh, with a supremely catchy and uplifting tune, you couldn't get away from this song for a few months in 1984. A huge huge hook ensures that this song is as infectious as the plague and this is emphasised by the fact that this track has no structure - it is in effect a prolonged chorus. The song starts with a chord sequence which is reminiscent of Cyndi Lauper's 'Time After Time' and most of it is based on a four-bar sequence which just keeps moving around. A Chic-guitar flickers away in the background, accompanied by electronic handclaps and synthesised strings, which adds just the right touch of glamour to the melody. The only thing that changes in the music is the arrangement, like the piano break that comes towards the end. A massive hit, Mary Wilson (formerly of The Supremes) must be kicking herself for turning this song down prior to Madonna and then boyfriend John 'Jellybean' Benitez taking it and reworking it. A six-minute monster of a chorus, this song is sheer genius.

Think Of Me is introduced by a single high piano note before the drums kick in, and it is another song on the track that looks back to late Seventies disco. A short verse, punctuated by a low synth bass figure very quickly leads into a chorus that gets in a triple repetition of the song title. Madonna warns her lover that he'd better pay her some attention, or she'd be out of the door - something that her female audience in particular would have identified with. Towards the end, the mix is messed around with and the snare-drum being pulled out of the mix, leaving the bass line and handclaps while a saxophone goes solo, before the chorus returns. This song is not really on the same level as 'Burning Up' and 'Holiday', as the chorus is quite repetitive and the verses are m
ore like recitation than song, but there is no doubting the passion with which Madonna sings the vocals.

Physical Attraction is a lovely little song where Madonna gets all girly and she is head-over-heels in love. Yay! A medium-paced track with synth bass right to the fore, a Chic-style guitar line and a few synth brass flourishes. Interest is added with a few Collins-style drum fills panned across the stereo field. Madonna sings in her shrillest voice about a suitor and his magnetism...ok it wasn't magnetism, "it's a physical attraction, it's a chemical reaction" - aww, sweeeeet! While the verses are quite repetitive, they are sung with an earnestness which is endearing and there is another interesting pointer to the future, where Madonna adds a talking section, a technique Madonna would use heavily in her career (especially in her 1992 album 'Erotica'). The song is rounded off with some scat-singing.

Everybody was actually Madonna's first single, where she urges everyone to "come on, dance and sing, everybody get up and do your thing". People seemed to have taken it to heart as they are still dancing to Madonna today, and it was certainly a great club hit when (according to the Madonna legend) DJ Mark Kamins played an early version of it at the Danceteria Club in New York. It's a great feel-good song and especially good when sung on stage. A heavily synthesised intro and a spoken introduction with a loud intake of breath, constantly repeated invites you to dance, and Madonna's voice is wonderfully controlled and double-tracked for extra effect. There are a few spoken lines here too, but overlapped in a style she would use in her 1992 song 'Rain'. What a lot of people don't know is that it is a re-worked remnant from Madonna's career before she was signed up to her record company. This is a superb way to round off a brilliant debut album.

In 1983/84 there was no such t
hing as 'Dance' music. 'Bubblegum' pop didn't even exist. Punk was dead. The charts were ruled by the New Romantic groups such as Spandau, Culture Club and Duran Duran. Disco was on its last legs with the unlikely figure of Lionel Richie holding up its final frontier. Synthesized music was becoming popular with such bands as Depeche Mode and Yazoo.

Amidst this climate an unusual record burst into the chart called 'Holiday'. There was no obvious song structure in terms of chorus and verse and the instrumentation was synthesizer-led, extremely funky, and fast paced. The chirpy voice singing this 'song' was shrill, buoyant and incredibly infectious. While a certain Cyndi Lauper had just started to domninate the charts on both sides of the pond with a similarly high-pitched squeal, she was firmly ensconsed in the category of 'american pop'. But the singer who wanted the 'Holiday' so much was seriously funked-up, synthesizer-crazy, and wanted us all back in the disco listening to something new.

That voice, amazingly for this style of music, belonged to a white girl who was finally revealed as a street-urchin type character who hadn't been taught how to dress and apply make-up. While 'Holiday' became an unlikely smash all over the world, we all witnessed the birth of 'Dance' music. With all eyes on this curious, unconventionally-dressed, new white disco queen, she released this completely innovative set of tracks which can be categorised as funk-dance-disco music with a heavy SOUL! While 'Holiday', 'Everybody' and 'Lucky Star' became crossover hits around the worlds clubs, the album remains black-soul heavy with tracks such as 'Borderline' and I Know It'. Another thing that set Madonna apart from every other woman in rock was the blatantly sexual nature of her music and image. Songs such as the 'Burning Up'and 'Physical Attraction'
; showed Madonna was very hell bent on letting everyone know that she liked sex. While this album made the whole of the world sit up and listen, there was no way Madonna was going to get away with such sexual behaviour in future. Maybe...

A must-have for Madonna fans.

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