The first Madonna album I heard was Like a Virgin (more on that story later). Then, I received a copy of True Blue on cassette for my sixth birthday. After that, Kylie happened, and my interest in Madonna waned for a few years. It wasn’t until 1991 that the girls at school and I started to properly obsess about her, and during that year, I filled in the rest of her discography in my collection.
I can date when I first heard Madonna fairly accurately, as I remember I was in HMV and about to buy the ‘Holiday’ cassingle (so this would be June-ish, and I would be ten years old), but my Grandmother intervened – disgusted at the amount of money they charged for only two tracks, and thanks to her I ended up going away with The First Album instead
I don’t really remember my first reactions to it – it was Madonna and therefore it was brilliant, and I’m not sure it went any further than that. Which I suppose in a way isn’t a hundred miles away to what I think about it now. After listening to it a fair bit this past week, it’s certainly a very strong debut album (it is, according to my RYM list, my 164th favourite album of all time, pointless stat fans).
Unlike some of the other reviews/reappraisals on here, I must say that while it is certainly “of its time”, it doesn’t feel particularly dated to me (though it’s possible that I’m using that word to mean something slightly different than those people). With all the talk of Madonna’s future-facing, I always forget how indebted to the past some of it is – the arrangements of songs like ‘Holiday’ are as indebted to seventies soul as much as they are disco, and the new wave-y bits like ‘Burning Up’ aren’t exactly breaking new ground either. But as a statement of intent, I think this record works perfectly. It sets out Madonna as an artist as completely as one could want – while it doesn’t really hint toward her genre-bending future, I’m never sure that aspect of her career is as essential to Madonna-the-artist as some fans might like to believe. ‘Burning Up’-‘Holiday’-‘Physical Attraction’-‘Everybody’ form a perfect insight into what makes Madonna tick (at least in terms of her musical output). The desire/sex/dancing combo is already there, perfectly formed. And alongside them, slightly cornball, but hugely endearing, and seemingly sincere love songs (‘Lucky Star’, ‘Borderline’). This is pretty much the blueprint for (most) of what was to come next.
The singles – all bloody eight-hundred of them – are all fucking fantastic. ‘Lucky Star’ – which doesn’t get enough love on here, for my liking – is probably my favourite of them, it’s gloriously insistent and that guitar is bloody marvellous. But even a song like ‘Holiday’ – never one of my favourites, far from it – is, on serious reflection, pretty close to perfection. The production on a song like that is top notch. It’s layered, and interesting, and I don’t have anything negative to say about it, really. Compare that to ‘I Know It’ (in my opinion the only misstep on the album), with its more minimal arrangement and those awful plonky keyboards. It just feels to me so wooden and empty compared to the rest of the record. The other song that I remembered less than fondly is, I’m happy to say, much better than I recalled. ‘Think of Me’ is actually much closer to the rest of the stuff on here than it is to ‘I Know It’, which I’d always paired it with. My only bugbear is her vocal, which is the only time here that it becomes too shrill not to begin to have a detrimental effect on my enjoyment of the song. ‘Physical Attraction’, the other album track, is brilliant, and I have to say a great vocal performance. Some people have commented on the lengths of the tracks here, but I see that as part of Madonna’s strength – sure it’s a legacy of disco and the idea that this was the norm for music made to dance to, but it’ll actually become something that’s pretty constant in Madonna’s oeuvre. And for me it works – it gives each track a chance to develop and progress, and frankly Madonna’s coda’s are almost always so amazing that I would never want to argue with it. Compare the outro on the album version of ‘Borderline’ to the horrible cut-down on The Immaculate Collection and maybe you’ll see what I mean.
This wasn’t the review I was intending to write. I meant to write a far more straight-forward track-by-track analysis. But thanks to work, it’s taken me long enough to get to the stage where I’ve time to sit down and write anything, so a looser piece it is. Viva Madonna!