The Observer’s review of Madonna’ Hard Candy
• Madonna, Hard Candy
4/5 stars
Thanks to her henchmen, writes Ben Thompson, the shameless idol still has much to give
Sunday April 20, 2008
The Observer
Hidden away at the end of Madonna’s oft-derided 1992 album Erotica is a song called ‘Secret Garden’. Recorded before she’d popped out Lourdes, at a time when the wolves of artistic exhaustion and media overkill seemed to be snapping at her heels, it’s a strikingly introspective and personal piece of work, which now has a prophetic lustre. While its lyrics map out previously uncharted emotional terrain, the musical backdrop prefigures the extent to which the best records Madonna was going to make in the coming decade and a half – ‘Ray of Light’, ‘Music’ and ‘Hung Up’, to name but three – would exceed the expectations anyone (even pop’s iron lady herself) had a right to have of them.
At around the same time that she was penning this blueprint for the next phase of her career, Timbaland and Pharrell Williams were bandmates in their impeccably named high-school ensemble Surrounded by Idiots.
Given how ludicrously high a proportion of the past 10 years’ finest hip hop and R&B artefacts have had one of these two men’s names on them, there is a riveting historic inevitability about the idea of their irresistible forces colliding with Madonna’s immovable object, just in time for her 50th birthday. The big question is, can the music these three have made together match or even surpass Madonna’s collaborations with Jellybean Benitez, William Orbit or Stuart Price? The answer turns out to be a resounding ‘yes’ and ‘no’.
As its title suggests, Hard Candy is a tough, nuggety confection offering plenty for listeners to get their teeth into. But from ‘Candy Shop”s routinely lascivious opening (memo from 50 Cent: ‘Can I have my song back?’) to the cod-symphonic quasi-closure of ‘Devil Wouldn’t Recognize You’, the lion’s share of this album constitutes a foil-fresh selection-box of variations on familiar themes. Even as Timbaland’s trademark dense, booming clatter kick-starts the first single ‘4 Minutes’, it’s hard to escape the sense that all concerned are going through the motions – effortlessly, sometimes brilliantly – but going through the motions, none the less.
Whenever Hard Candy threatens to get boring, something always happens to recapture your interest, but the three songs in which Madonna actually seems to forge a genuine connection with her musical helpmeet leave the rest of the album in the shade. Each panel of this triptych involves Pharrell Williams. This partnership got off to a bad start with last year’s grisly Live Earth dirge ‘Hey You’, but in the course of ‘She’s Not Me”s blissfully heartfelt six minutes, it really hits its stride. ‘She’s not me/ She doesn’t have my name,’ Madonna reminds a partner who dares to look elsewhere, over a thrillingly off-kilter hurly-burly of whistles, handclaps and partially muted fade-outs. ‘Incredible’ picks up the disco-fundamentalist baton and flies with it into an enchanted cloudscape of Eighties pop candyfloss, where the sun simultaneously orbits around Debbie Gibson and OMD. Then ‘Spanish Lessons’ adopts a delightfully schoolmistressy tone which ultimately ends up being considerably less patronising than ‘La Isla Bonita’.
Listening to these three fantastic songs and then looking at the gynaecological cover shot, which – for all the self-consciously modern trappings of Hard Candy’s coming into the world (pre-portioned up into Silvikrin adverts, mobile phone perks and Japanese TV theme tunes) – leaves people no choice but to describe this album as Madonna’s ‘latest waxing’, the fulcrum of the delicate balance between her public and private selves is suddenly discernible. That photo’s not a gross miscalculation; it’s the picture of Dorian Gray in reverse.
From an article by Ben Thompson, The Observer.