On Disc
MADONNA
Hard Candy
BY Dave Morris May 01, 2008 11:05
Was Madonna’s choice of The Neptunes and the Timbaland/Justin Timberlake/Danja crew to helm her 12th studio album a risky move towards R&B —?given that her post–Ray of Light output has been house-oriented — or was it the default option, rounding up super-producers as a lazy way to end her Warner contract? Judging from the results, it ended up being both. By their standards, Timbaland’s “4 Minutes” and The Neptunes’ “Candy Shop” are paint-by-numbers hack jobs (rave synth + ethnic percussion = $$$$) that could have been farmed out to anyone. Either she didn’t care, or worse, the 50-year-old megastar feared the changing youth market enough to let her young acolytes treat her no better than a rent-a-diva. But buried in the mismatches and retreads (the girlish “Heartbeat” should have gone to Nelly Furtado; “Devil Wouldn’t Recognize You” is a poor man’s “Cry Me a River” right down to the synthesized rain), there are flashes of what might have been had she stood up to them. Madonna occasionally finds the disco DNA in her producers’ robo-funk and, instead of letting them bulldoze her, invests it with her personality, tricking out the lushly retro “Beat Goes On” with a sassy croon and investing “Miles Away” with the right blend of hope and resignation. On the gorgeous “Dance 2night,” her famously deadpan alto simmers while the track twinkles as though it was written for her. Who knows, maybe it even was.
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