CEREMONY | The Madonna L-Rate

[Chlorine 47,976]

4 minutes ago, NeonSkeleton said:

@Ronk and @memomemome didn’t provide commentary, so we’ll never know exactly what combination of drugs led to them awarding this song a perfect 10.

[Cruelty 6,172]

16 LOVE SONG — average 5.68

The highs: 9 [@Reject False Icons @monstertoronto @sillynate @Anderson123]
The lows: 1 x 6 [@Lucas @Charmz @danbekim @GaGaLB @Blown Away @Madame Goo Goo]

 

Love Song was always going to have a difficult time here. On the Like a Prayer album it follows two of Madonna’s best ever singles, and even separated from that context it has to live up to the tagline of ‘Madonna featuring Prince’. And does it? @No Way Home  says ‘I’ve always felt that Madonna and Prince on the same song should’ve been more than this’ and it’s difficult to disagree—maybe they just collapsed under the pressure of the collaboration and styled it out slightly? Hearing Madonna vocals on a Prince song is undoubtedly fun, but the idea feels very half-baked, but in a kind of… cool way?

I’m tempted to think the whole thing is just a very artfully done p*ss-take, from ‘Je suis prêt, vous êtes prêt aussi?’ on outwards. Love Song is really nothing more than a jam session; there’s the most cursory attempt at a structure, and I’m surprised this even has a producer credit, since it’s basically just some noises put onto tape. Madonna and Prince just about get away with it, though, because they’re Madonna and Prince. So although I never willingly return to Love Song, when it comes on shuffle I can respect the sheer attitude of it. AND as for the first time I ever heard this and the line ‘time goes by so slowly for those who wait’ came up — the SHIVERS down my little gay spine!!

Interestingly, this is the first ever collaboration on a Madonna studio album. Later down the line, we get some rappers sprinkled across Erotica and Bedtime Stories, the spellbinding Yitzhak Sinwani featuring on 2005’s ‘Isaac’, and then the floodgates are well and truly opened at 2008’s colossal mistake of an album Hard Candy; since then, three of Madonna’s four lead singles have been bolstered by collaborators, and a third of Madame X’s tracklist incorporates guest vocalists. And that lineage of collaboration—with some fantastic results and some disasters—began with Love Song. This was the most divisive track in the rate, with scores at both ends of the scale, and it even sparked a small comments fight, which absolutely thrilled me. Ultimately, though, it never rose above second-to-last place; we are not in love with love song. NEXT!

Comments

Spoiler

@danbekim  the f**k was this

@Madame Goo Goo This is one of her worst songs I am not even sorry wtf is this mess

@Blown Away  This has to be one of the worst duets of all time. It’s just a bunch of repetitive, unhinged noise with Prince and Madonna delivering Selena Gomez-styled vocals over it.

@No Way Home  A good song but I’ve always felt that Madonna and Prince on the same song should’ve been more than this.

@CyberRaga  I just love how this was the first “experimental” track she did. The raspiness of her voice, the perfect French intro, Prince bringing this song to the next level.

@monstertoronto  I love this song. I like their sort of strange harmonies. I love the loping beat. Prince wrote it and it’s very Prince-like.

@Frank Potion When I first discovered Madonna and Prince collabed… I was so surprised. The song has always stuck out to me since then. What’s not to like?

@Duella DeVil  Prince and Madonna together was unexpectedly genius and so sexy

@Lucas  Probably bottom 3 of Madonna’s entire discography, straight up boring flat song

@Reject False Icons  I love the funk sound.

@nickkoko  I’ve never been into this song unfortunately. Just never did it for me.

@Crescent Bloom  This is a hard skip for me. Some parts are a tiny bit decent, but I somehow just can’t sit through all of this.

@ssslyboy  I like this more than most people, I think

@sillynate  Was that Prince I heard??? Then why no “feat. Prince” ???

@whoresup  A nice track, I think this is the one produced by Prince right?

 

[Chlorine 47,976]

2 minutes ago, NeonSkeleton said:

16 LOVE SONG — average 5.68

The highs: 9 [ @Reject False Icons @monstertoronto @sillynate @Anderson123 ]

The lows: 1 x 6 [ @Lucas @Charmz @danbekim @GaGaLB @Blown Away @Madame Goo Goo ]

 

Love Song was always going to have a difficult time here. On the Like a Prayer album it follows two of Madonna’s best ever singles, and even separated from that context it has to live up to the tagline of ‘Madonna featuring Prince’. And does it? @No Way Home  says ‘I’ve always felt that Madonna and Prince on the same song should’ve been more than this’ and it’s difficult to disagree—maybe they just collapsed under the pressure of the collaboration and styled it out slightly? Hearing Madonna vocals on a Prince song is undoubtedly fun, but the idea feels very half-baked, but in a kind of… cool way?

I’m tempted to think the whole thing is just a very artfully done p*ss-take, from ‘Je suis prêt, vous êtes prêt aussi?’ on outwards. Love Song is really nothing more than a jam session; there’s the most cursory attempt at a structure, and I’m surprised this even has a producer credit, since it’s basically just some noises put onto tape. Madonna and Prince just about get away with it, though, because they’re Madonna and Prince. So although I never willingly return to Love Song, when it comes on shuffle I can respect the sheer attitude of it. AND as for the first time I ever heard this and the line ‘time goes by so slowly for those who wait’ came up — the SHIVERS down my little gay spine!!

Interestingly, this is the first ever collaboration on a Madonna studio album. Later down the line, we get some rappers sprinkled across Erotica and Bedtime Stories, the spellbinding Yitzhak Sinwani featuring on 2005’s ‘Isaac’, and then the floodgates are well and truly opened at 2008’s colossal mistake of an album Hard Candy; since then, three of Madonna’s four lead singles have been bolstered by collaborators, and a third of Madame X’s tracklist incorporates guest vocalists. And that lineage of collaboration—with some fantastic results and some disasters—began with Love Song. This was the most divisive track in the rate, with scores at both ends of the scale, and it even sparked a small comments fight, which absolutely thrilled me. Ultimately, though, it never rose above second-to-last place; we are not in love with love song. NEXT!

Comments

  Hide contents

@danbekim  the f**k was this

@Madame Goo Goo This is one of her worst songs I am not even sorry wtf is this mess

@Blown Away  This has to be one of the worst duets of all time. It’s just a bunch of repetitive, unhinged noise with Prince and Madonna delivering Selena Gomez-styled vocals over it.

@No Way Home  A good song but I’ve always felt that Madonna and Prince on the same song should’ve been more than this.

@CyberRaga  I just love how this was the first “experimental” track she did. The raspiness of her voice, the perfect French intro, Prince bringing this song to the next level.

@monstertoronto  I love this song. I like their sort of strange harmonies. I love the loping beat. Prince wrote it and it’s very Prince-like.

@Frank Potion When I first discovered Madonna and Prince collabed… I was so surprised. The song has always stuck out to me since then. What’s not to like?

@Duella DeVil  Prince and Madonna together was unexpectedly genius and so sexy

@Lucas  Probably bottom 3 of Madonna’s entire discography, straight up boring flat song

@Reject False Icons  I love the funk sound.

@nickkoko  I’ve never been into this song unfortunately. Just never did it for me.

@Crescent Bloom  This is a hard skip for me. Some parts are a tiny bit decent, but I somehow just can’t sit through all of this.

@ssslyboy  I like this more than most people, I think

@sillynate  Was that Prince I heard??? Then why no “feat. Prince” ???

@whoresup  A nice track, I think this is the one produced by Prince right?

 

Well 

[CyberRaga 342]

Sorry for being late! But I'm here now. Watching SATC 2 at the same time 

[Cruelty 6,172]

15 THE LOOK OF LOVE — average 5.82

The highs: 10 [@DrewPa]
The lows: 1 x 2 [@Charmz @danbekim]

 

For many of you, this was the first time you’d heard The Look of Love. That’s okay; it’s a long-forgotten soundtrack song, even Madonna has probably forgotten that it exists. The song came about when Madonna asked frequent collaborator Patrick Leonard to write some songs that captured the spirit of her character in her film Who’s That Girl. An uptempo (Who’s That Girl) and a downtempo (The Look of Love) were written in the space of two days, with this ballad specifically inspired by the look James Stewart gives Grace Kelly in the 1954 Hitchcock film Rear Window. So this is the look of love:

Describing what ‘the look of love’ means, Madonna said “that is the way I want someone to look at me when he loves me. It’s the most pure look of love and adoration. Like surrender. It’s devastating”. Surrender. That’s the key to The Look of Love. When I first heard it, I thought the lyrics gave a sinister, Orwellian presentation of love—an omnipresent force, from which there is ‘nowhere to run, nowhere to hide’. But actually, they’re just resigned. The Look of Love is about accepting the sheer irresistibility of love, for better or worse. I’m sure many of us have had that moment when we realise that we’re falling in love, and that there’s nothing we can do to stop it. And it’s a hazy jungle of complex emotions, and impulses, and pheromones, and it might not make complete sense but we’re falling deep into it, and fast. It might be that ‘I’ve had a map laid out from the day I was born’, but love will intercede, refocusing our lives so that love is the only thing that matters. (Love Profusion, which we’ll meet later in this rate, presents the same message in a less creepy way).

The uncertain combination of the openness to, and fear of, love is reflected in the smoky, tropical-jungle production. I’ve never in my life heard a song that sounds so humid. But I kinda love it. Although, yes, as many of you pointed out, the song is rather forgettable. Its most enduring contribution to the world is that, for about 1.3 seconds in the middle, there’s a synth riff that was later repurposed for the mighty organ-tastic Live To Tell remix on the Confessions Tour (more on that later…) Clearly, sis was tired out after writing a song as exhilarating as Who’s That Girl, so we’ll forgive her for the fact that this one feels just a little bit… flaccid? Anyway, Sire Records deemed it good enough to release as a single, albeit only in the countries that had got bored of ‘Causing a Commotion’ (it’s basically the Madonna equivalent of Eh Eh). The B-side was ‘I Know It’, an absolute abomination from her debut album that got tacked onto just about everything she released in the 1980s for some insane reason. Despite this, it snuck into the UK Top 10 (as did everything she put out from ‘Holiday’ right through to ‘Cherish’, that’s 20 consecutive top 10s, literally WHEN will your fave). You lot are criminals for letting The Look of Love fall to 15th place. But onwards we go…

Comments

Spoiler

@Duella DeVil  Just kinda exists, not a very good song

@Reject False Icons  Mmm forgettable

@danbekim aged like milk

@CyberRaga Never actually heard this song, but I love the vocal output. Definitely a grower.

@Crescent Bloom The one song I didn’t know before this ranking. I really liked the track’s hazy-sexy-80s production, but I don’t know how often I will return to it.

@Frank Potion I had never heard this. And I wasn’t missing anything …

@sillynate Never heard anything from WTG before. And for years I wondered why it was called Who’s That Girl Tour instead of True Blue Tour. This song answered that question for me

@nickkoko Not bad by any means but does get a little boring.

@Blown Away This song is very nice, but could’ve been even better. It really suffers from Madge’s weak vocals. A very underrated song though, it deserves more recognition and love.

@monstertoronto A classic 80s ballad.

@whoresup Never really come back to this one.

 

[Chlorine 47,976]

4 minutes ago, NeonSkeleton said:

You lot are criminals for letting The Look of Love fall to 15th place.

You're right. We could have gone further. 

[Cruelty 6,172]

When you call my name, it's like a little prayer...

 

 

 

 

 

 

... I say a little prayer that you'll have mercy on me.

14 LOOKING FOR MERCY — average 5.85

The highs: 10 x 2 [@No Way Home @sillynate]
The lows: 1 x 3 [@Charmz @Blown Away @CyberRaga]

Your 14th favourite Madonna L-song is the most recent offering in this rate. A linguistically and musically eclectic album, inspired by the cultural melting pot of Portugal and largely produced by legendary Madonna collaborator Mirwais, 2019’s Madame X is one of M’s most innovative records—but you wouldn’t know it from this turgid bonus track. This is one of those tracks on Madonna’s Portugal-inspired album where she utterly forgets to be inspired by Portugal at all, and the result is a harmless but uninteresting track that says nothing that hasn’t been said already. It’s actually fine as a song, but fine doesn’t earn points, and I personally didn’t feel particularly motivated to give it anything above a 5. The most enjoyment I get out of Looking for Mercy, given the name of M’s daughter, is imagining that this is actually the musical aftermath of Madonna losing one of her kids for half an hour in Walmart.

As you’ll discover over the course of this rate, if I can’t think of anything intellectual to say about these songs I’ll just turn to your comments — and in this case, lots of you found something to like about Looking for Mercy, but nobody seems to enjoy the whole song. @monstertoronto labels it ‘way too long’, whilst @Frank Potion ‘didn’t really wanna hear the whole track’. For @sillynate, it’s a ‘great song about despair. A Madame X essential’, but they still think the bass sounds offbeat in the beginning. @Reject False Icons likes the lyrics but not the chorus, whilst @Crescent Bloom loves the verses but finds everything else ‘really annoying’. You get the idea. @whoresup summarises everyone’s attitude: ‘Parts of this are amazing but it does seem a bit repetitive where she repeats the title over and over again’. And @Blown Away gave this the harshest critique, saying ‘from the Auto-Tune to the lazy melody and the overall dullness of this song… It’s an instant skip’. Even though I pretty much agree with this, I can’t endorse anything Blown Away says, since they also wrote ‘Like the entirety of Madame X, this song is garbage’. When will any of your faves release an album with something as transcendent as God Control on it??

Madame X is a secret agent. She is a dancer. A professor. A head of state. A housekeeper. An equestrian. A prisoner. A student. A mother. A child. A teacher. A nun. A singer. A saint. A spy in the house of love. A… flop.

Comments

Spoiler

@danbekim LOOKING FO’ LOOKING FO’ MERCYYYYY

@No Way Home One of the best songs on MX, argue with the wall.

@Reject False Icons I like the lyrics but not the chorus

@Frank Potion I didn’t really get into this album so this is the first time hearing so my rating is probably a bit unfair but… I didn’t really wanna hear the whole track

@Blown Away Like the entirety of Madame X, this song is garbage. From the Auto-Tune to the lazy melody and the overall dullness of this song… It’s an instant skip.

@sillynate Great song about despair. A Madame X essential. That bass at the beginning always gets me though. Sounds offbeat when she starts singing until the other sounds come in

@nickkoko This song has grown on me so much; I really love the vocal melodies on the verses.

@Duella DeVil Such a good song

@Crescent Bloom I have mixed feelings on this track. Sonically, I love the production and melody on the verses, but I find the pre-chorus, actual chorus, and post-chorus really annoying.

@monstertoronto Vibey and moody, but sort of boring and way too long.

@whoresup Parts of this are amazing but it does seem a bit repetitive where she repeats the title over and over again.

 

[Chlorine 47,976]

1 minute ago, NeonSkeleton said:

The most enjoyment I get out of Looking for Mercy, given the name of M’s daughter, is imagining that this is actually the musical aftermath of Madonna losing one of her kids for half an hour in Walmart.

[Lucas 27,188]

I can't believe I actually gave a 6 to Love Song when it deserves a 3 at most 

So far so good. I'm suprised to read comments for Looking For Mercy though, I know the chorus is repetitive but I didn't think so many people think the song is straight up crxp 

[CyberRaga 342]

Songs like this ^ make me question the possibility, that Madonna was really replaced after y2006. 

[Cruelty 6,172]

13 LOVE DON'T LIVE HERE ANYMORE — average 6.45

The highs: 10 x 2 [ @Thoth @CyberRaga ]
The lows: 1 x 2 [ @Charmz @Blown Away ]

This is one where the story is much more interesting than the song. Love Don’t Live Here Anymore isn’t even a Madonna original; it’s a cover of an old soul song from several years earlier, tacked onto Like a Virgin to add some emotional heft to the album (the timeframe is the equivalent of Madonna in 2022 covering Angel Down or something). Madonna’s recording doesn’t quite convey the pathos of the song – to me, it comes across more as a bratty teen than a jilted lover, although I’ll concede that the lyric ‘Through the windmills of my eyes / Everyone can see the loneliness inside me’ is perfect. Because that’s what you fear, after a breakup, isn’t it? That suddenly, the whole world knows that your love wasn’t strong enough, and that it didn’t work out, and that you’re a different person now. Love Don’t Live Here Anymore is a song about shame as much as anything else — it’s an intensely personal address to the ex-lover (‘you abandoned me’), but although it seems to be a rather one-note personification of love, it’s fully aware of the social capital that love possesses, what the ‘abandonment’ of love means on a social level. 

Intriguingly, this song resurfaces on the 1995 public-image-course-correction ballad compilation Something to Remember (at a time when the public had abandoned their love of Madonna, in a way), in a slightly remixed version which I probably should have asked you to listen to, but in the words of one of Madonna’s finest, ‘I haven’t got much time to waste’. But here’s the thing: IT BECAME A SINGLE! IN 1995! A full eleven years after it was first released! It is genuinely the equivalent of Gaga playing a new piano line over The Queen and releasing it as a single right now. What a gloriously odd popstar Madonna can be. Although, thinking about it, that spectacular 15-month pivot from Sexxx Dreams to Edelweiss is Gaga’s equally odd “please love me! I can sing!” journey.

You guys gave ‘Love Don’t Live Here Anymore’ a solid, average score, which I think reflects the fact that it’s an enjoyable listen from time to time, and a decently put-together song, but truly nothing special. Enjoy this video of M limping around a staircase on the Rebel Heart Tour, during the song’s only live outing – hilariously, she couldn’t even be bothered to pay for the rights to use this performance on the tour DVD, which I think says it all.

Comments

Spoiler

@nickkoko Some of her strongest vocals from the 80s here.

@Crescent Bloom This song tends to drag on, but I really like Madonna’s vocals here. Her vocal delivery, plus the melody, fits the lyrical theme of the song.

@Blown Away Madonna and slow ballads mostly didn’t work in the 80’s. The instrumental sounds cheap and empty and the vocals somehow sound even worse. I wish she’d re-recorded it in the 90’s with a better voice and a fuller instrumental, because it has a lot of potential actually.

@Duella DeVil The original version is so much better than any of the remasters

@CyberRaga I gave this 10 solely based on the music video version. The smooth RnB gets me everytime.

@monstertoronto Slow build masterpiece. Saw her sing this at the rebel heart tour I think and it sounded great.

@No Way Home Never have understood why the fans love this one so much. It’s fine but meh.

@Reject False Icons I like it but not my favourite

@danbekim meh

@Frank Potion Solid

@whoresup A little boring but it’s a fine ballad.

 

[CyberRaga 342]

No' y'all don't get it. The video version makes me cream. 

 

[Cruelty 6,172]

Buckle up, we're about to lose somebody's 11...

12 LOVE SPENT — average 6.68

The highs: 11 x 2 [ @Reject False Icons @LDGA ]; 10 x 2 [ @GaGaLB @DrewPa ]
The lows: 1 x 2 [ @Charmz @CyberRaga ]

This is not a love song
—'Love Song' (1989)
—'Bye Bye Baby' (1992)

This is where the rate meets Guy Ritchie, the marginally less awful of Madonna’s two husbands. There’s a much rosier song about him later on in the results, but Love Spent was written about their 2008 divorce, and the alleged £60 million Ritchie got in the settlement. (Legal disclaimer: I should probably add that Madonna said that this report was ‘misleading and inaccurate’, but then she released this song about how Guy Ritchie’s hunger for money led to their divorce, so…)

Love Spent talks, incredibly honestly, about the consequences of greed. With an estimated net worth of up to $800 million, it’s inevitable that Madonna has met her fair share of hangers-on desperate for some of her money. But how utterly tragic that she seems to have realised that her husband was one of these parasites. The acerbic, and emotionally devastating, line ‘Would you have married me if I were poor?’ injects some trademark Madonna bite into the MDNA album, and tacitly answers the media’s speculation about the cause of her second divorce. The love that was the wholehearted focus of Love Profusion (more on that later) has become corrupted by greed, to the point where ‘you had all of me, you wanted more’. In Love Profusion, love is priceless; in Love Spent, it has become worthless. The metaphor (love of money=love is money) is pushed until it frays at the edges, but there’s a striking honesty about Love Spent that helps to sell it. Global megastar Madonna reduced to talking about something so mundane as a joint account!

The song clearly comes from the perspective of someone who has tried everything not to get to this point. Someone who can feel her marriage slipping out of her grasp, and is forced to debase herself to the point where all she wants is for him to ‘hold me / Like you hold your money, / Hold me in your arms’. The lyrics are some of Madonna’s best, and they far outclass the aged-like-milk production. Listen, I respect the ridiculousness of whoever turned up at the studio saying ‘let’s do Hung Up with banjos!’ But MDNA’s production often vanquishes any trace of emotion in the lyrics (not that there’s an abundance of it to begin with), and I think this is a casualty of that. It goes against my principles to score anything from MDNA *too* highly, but this is a solid song, all it needs is another pass on the vocals and a polished production.

And yes, Hung Up is sampled (technically, it’s Gimme Gimme Gimme by ABBA that’s sampled, but I think the universe has agreed that that sample is now Madonna’s). I honestly can’t be bothered researching this, but I’d guess that they accidentally wrote a song that sounds like Hung Up and then added the sample to pretend it was on purpose. But it’s tempting to interpret it as a deliberate inclusion. Hung Up is a song where Madonna urges her husband to spend just some of his precious time on her; when the sample resurfaces in Love Spent, muted and decayed, it’s clear that he couldn’t even do that.

This one was like a windsock in a storm during the voting process, starting off in the top 5 before plummeting to the bottom half of the board. We all seem to agree that it’s one of our favourites from MDNA, but that’s like having a favourite sexually transmitted disease. For two of you, though, this was your 11. To mark the solemn occasion of the first two raters losing their 11, here are their comments in full:

@LDGA First time I listen to this song and I am really captivated by it, I love this bop <3

@Reject False Icons MDNA has grown so much in me… I know I have a storm coming to me but I don’t want to go with the classics

Comments

Spoiler

@nickkoko One of the better songs on MDNA.

@Blown Away One of the better songs on MDNA, but that’s not a good thing. The instrumental sounds basic and overproduced, the melody and vocal delivery sound uninspired and the vocals are overprocessed.

@danbekim poor attempt of a dance ?? techno ?? song ??

@Lucas One of the few great tracks from MDNA imo.

@whoresup I don’t think it’s as amazing as people make it out to be but it’s still a highlight for MDNA.

@Frank Potion One of her best “modern” songs…

@Madame Goo Goo Could have been better, but still a highlight of MDNA

@Duella DeVil The second verse’s melody is really weird “if we opened” is dropped an octave then it suddenly raises the octave. Unlike the first verse. Always been a peeve of mine.

@Crescent Bloom I like the guitar loop. There are a couple of decent melodic moments, but like a lot of MDNA, there are songs that have really nice sections and then somehow nose-dive into really awful territory.

@monstertoronto I forgot about this song but I like it. Great pre-chorus and chorus. I like the brief musical reference to the beginning of Hung Up.

@sillynate Idk if it was the Mary Jane Holland talking to me or what but is the ABBA synth from Hung Up in this one??

 

[CyberRaga 342]

Love Spent got not one but two 11? This has to be satire. 

But kudos for MDNA for not being in the bottom for once 

[Cruelty 6,172]

Life is a mystery...

 

 

 

 

 

Life is a paradox and it doesn't make much sense.

11 LIKE IT OR NOT — average 7.03

The highs: 10 x 3 [ @lasagna @RAMROD @sillynate ]
The lows: 1 x 2 [ @Charmz @CyberRaga ]

2005’s Confessions on a Dance Floor broke the Guinness World Record for topping the charts in the most countries, has sold 10 million copies to date, won a Grammy, and was ranked by Vice as the third greatest dance album of all time. I thought we’d lead with those stats just in case you’d forgotten the calibre of popstar we’re dealing with here. And so, when commenting on ‘Like It or Not’, a lot of you mentioned Confessions, or referred to this being the album closer—@Lucas says ‘it feels a bit flat compared to the rest of the album’, whilst @Frank Potion finds it ‘a great ender for COADF’ and @ssslyboy dares to label it ‘the snoozefest of Confessions’. A lot of us were thinking about this song in its original context, and that’s a testament to the cultural power of an album like Confessions, but it also sets the song up to fail; there’s certainly a less massive energy about this one compared to some of the disco behemoths it follows. Lyrically, however, it’s a perfect fit; Confessions is self-consciously an ‘imperial phase’ album, hyperaware of Madonna’s longevity. In ‘Like it or Not’, the theme reaches its apotheosis, explaining just why Madonna has carved out such a successful legacy: because she doesn’t care what you think about her.

With those big claps and that fully unbothered vocal, Like It or Not feels like a chant, written by a woman who has given her everything to a vicious world, and is fed up of its rebukes. ‘All of my fruit is yours to take’ — if you want it, it’s there. And if you don’t, ‘you can love me or leave me, ‘cos I’m never gonna stop’. Just think about the bravery involved in rejecting the way others perceive you and relying entirely on whatever sense of an inner self you might have. And then think about how confidently and unapologetically Madonna does just that. The message is relevant to the trailblazing Madonna of the 1980s, expanding the boundaries of what pop lyricism could accommodate. It’s relevant to the maturer Madonna of the 2000s, increasingly mocked for her age and vilified for adopting Malawian orphans. And it’s relevant to the Madonna of the 2020s, showing off her BBL on Instagram and trying her hardest to shed light on the world’s inequalities, even if the thought sometimes outstrips the execution.

Like It or Not landed in the cruellest position on the leaderboard, missing the top 10 by just 0.03. So. Like it or not? The consensus is… meh? But at the end of the day (and at the end of the album), Madonna doesn’t care either way. ‘Like It or Not’ is not an invitation for you to share your opinions about Madonna, it’s an invitation to sit the f**k down and watch her take over the world.

Please enjoy the song’s Confessions Tour live performance, in which Madonna has sexy times with a chair:

Comments

Spoiler

@Lucas Probably my least favourite track from COAD, it feels a bit flat compared to the rest of the album

@monstertoronto Testament to how strong COADF was that the deep cuts like this are still perfection.

@sillynate I love this song I think it’s a perfect bridge for AL to confessions

@Frank Potion Solid, a great ender for COADF

@Blown Away This is a cute ending of the Confessions album. It’s nothing special, a bit basic even, but I like it. She has a wonderful tone in the song and the melody is quite catchy.

@Reject False Icons The last 2 songs on confessions mmm not as strong

@ssslyboy the snoozefest of Confessions

@No Way Home An iconic closing track and one I’d be happy to see her dust off again just like she did for the second Tears of a Clown show!

@danbekim we don’t talk about ha!

@Duella DeVil One of my favorite cuts from COADF

@nickkoko Good closer to Confessions.

@Crescent Bloom In my opinion, this is just forgettable. It’s a bit boring and I find myself wanting to skip it.

@whoresup Great lyrics and production.

@CyberRaga No comment.