Record of the Month - Classic

Another installment of a disk I have enjoyed over the years. I'm trying to keep the Record of the Month posts to be fairly new releases. Classics are going to be ones that are at least 5 years old.

I mean - at some point in time, you know I had to do a Madonna disk - right? I mean, I'm gay!

I will cop to being gay enough to have a number of Madonna records. And that being said, I don't really play a single one of them anymore, save some tracks from Confessions on a Dance Floor. (somewhere in all of this, Morty is groaning and rolling his eyes. Dity too!)

Now and again, something from her debut disk, Madonna, shuffles through my iPod, but since I have only loaded like two of the album's eight tracks, and I have 1,800 songs on my iPod, they don't come up too often - as you might imagine.

But as I was looking to update that iPod liberry before vacation, I took a look at adding some more songs from any number of her disks. It turns out I added zero. I know - I know, take away my fag card. I'll gladly give it up.

Though during spin class not too long ago, the instructor ran through "Burning Up" and I forgot how much I liked it....and it is a good song to spin to. But it did get me thinking.

Out of her 117 disks, soundtracks, greatest hit packages and remixes, oddly enough her debut disk is the only one that stands up to time. It is light, frothy and basically harmless. It aspires to nothing, which is actually its success. And while she has decent songs here and there on other disks, as a whole, they fail in an 'album' category - as opposed to them being 2-3 singles and lots of filler.

Me, being me, finds her biggest hit from this disk, the weakest ("you said I was borderline - I even wrote a song about it!"). In reality, she wrote nothing on this album and I think that helps. She sings 'moon-june-spoon' just fine and it doesn't get bogged down into what would later become posing and self-importance.

I still like "Lucky Star", "Burning Up" and "Physical Attraction" (though the latter goes on a bit too long).

It's a decent disk if you're not looking for deeper meaning (or any meaning) or complex melodies and instrumentation.