Bring back Nicki…?
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[3.00]
Edward Okulicz: I love Madonna. I love her best when she’s provocative, life-affirming, complex, wicked, thoughtful, playful, hedonistic or cheeky; the list goes on. Sometimes, though, I’ll settle for a good beat. This doesn’t even have that. People are going to say “Madonna’s too _____ for this,” and a lot of them will fill in the blank with “old.” That’s not fair, because if you can pull off “Hung Up” at 46, there’s no reason you can’t be having stompers well into retirement age (and she looks fantastic anyway). Madonna isn’t too old for this because age has nothing to do with how moronic this is; a hypothetical, self-respecting teen star who happened to have Madonna’s stature wouldn’t accept this if it was given to her, or believe it was good enough if she wrote it. Madonna’s too good to settle for this, too vital to be recording this when she could be recording something else and I’m too bored to listen to it more than the ten benefit-of-the-doubt listens any Madonna single gets because it happens to be Madonna. And those ten listens made me pine for “Revolver.” This isn’t even good fluff!
[0]
Andrew Ryce: My first thought is “Celebration” redux. But wait, that one at least had a shred of personality underneath all the robotic Euro-isms. Here Madonna unwisely chooses to make that nasal, reedy Hard Candy vocal style even thinner and more childish, and she sounds utterly detached in the process. Over pumping trance synths that sound like a Kids Bop version of any random Pitbull track, the only thing less convincing than her claim of being a “good girl” gone wild is that there’s anything wild about this at all.
[3]
Katherine St Asaph: A boshing Madonna-whore complex, sponsored by Joe Francis, Benny Benassi, the beginning notes of “DJ Got Us Falling In Love,” the now-proven lyric “every record sounds the same,” recycled Cyndi and zero dignity. The old Madonna had gotten this shit out of her system before Catholic school.
[1]
Brad Shoup: Sloppy writing, the waste of a decent prayer, a silly Lauper reference: these are venial transgressions made mortal in the full apprehension of her power.
[3]
Anthony Easton: The organ is never a bad instrument in pop music, and the ecclesiastical organ still seems fairly rare. Maybe it is a narcissism of personal narrative, but I like Catholic Madonna better than I like Kabbalah Madonna (by order of religious preference it is Catholic, American Civil, Yoga, Kabbalah) and I like explicitly prayerful Madonna even better than slightly blasphemous Madonna. I even like when she talk-sings and I still will defend her version of “American Pie” on purely aesthetic grounds. So that is me mounting a small defense. For the opposition: it sounds stale, and she has never really sounded this stale before. She is out of ideas, in terms of music and lyrics. She seeks to return to the good: not her best self, but the pure place that she never really had. (Is it a return to the good, or an attempt to de-historicise herself?) I want to love this, but I cannot.
[6]
John Seroff: What can you say about a new Madonna single these days? Nothing is new but the most immediate context, so give me a moment to consider just that: at this stage in her career, in comparison to her last single, following a Superbowl bid for a 2015 Vegas contract that should eclipse Celine’s, given the current pop landscape, held against the standards of other recent Jukebox fare, for a derivative Club Hit™, measured against the snap expectations of a track titled “Girls Gone Wild”, having personally critically half-digested some several hundred songs thus far into the year, since it’s Friday, as I was once a fan, for the sake of argument, I would say this could be worse. Remove Madonna from the equation and it could certainly be better. But not much.
[4]
Michaela Drapes: The key word here is “like.” Madonna, she’s on the dance floor like a girl gone wild, not an actual … girl gone wild. I would assume by now that everyone would be ready for the requisite floor-filler remix fodder track that follows the lead single off new Madonna albums. Sure, this is no “Give it 2 Me” or “Sorry” — something tells me that this nouveau Act of Contrition business is going to age pretty well, though. We all wanna be that kind of good, don’t we?
[7]
Alfred Soto: Two consecutive dud singles in a row is so not you, Maddie. For time immemorial her second singles have been at least as good as their predecessors. The sugar-free gum of Hard Candy broke the streak. She remains in the slough, and worse — not only does she appropriate a tired referent but she does nothing with it except remind us that her TV taste is probably worse than Guy Ritchie’s. This is a woman who started a career bending these tropes to her will; now that she’s a respectable citizen with two children and frightening biceps she wants us to feel her heart beat for the very first time? Nuh-uh. Shoehorning the Act of Contrition strikes me as an apology to her fans. It’s one of the few illusions I’ve got left about Madonna.
[1]
Jer Fairall: Maybe time to give acting another shot, hmm?
[2]