In a woman so committed to living in the most sophisticated place of the present, it is touching to see how she looks back to narrate how it all began. He does it at the height of song number five on his new album, Confessions II, released today Friday. Dance club The song is called, the same name of the New York nightclub where he premiered, in 1982, Everybody, his first single. In the lyrics, Madonna tells how Martin Burgoyne and Debi Mazar showed her the charms of the place and connected her with the club’s star DJ, Mark Kamins. “He’s the DJ, he hides the cocaine and he played my tape Everybody”, he sings.
He also cites in the text other personalities who frequented the venue or other places on the gay and punk club circuit of the then exciting New York: the artists Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat or Kenny Scharf, the musicians Nile Rodgers, David Byrne or B-52’s and “the Puerto Rican boys.” He even makes a symbolic nod to Walk on the Wild Side, that portrait of murky and hypnotic New York written by Lou Reed. “This is how we start the party,” Madonna intones, and with this tribute she is telling us what the album is about: most of those who were there have died; She has survived, many times it was not easy, but she is here and the friends who disappeared would have enjoyed seeing Madonna, at 67 years old, still partying.
Confessions II, which is sold as the second part of the fantastic Confessions on a Dance Floor (2005), is Madonna’s best work in two decades. It is true that the bar did not seem very high since Hard Candy, MDNA, Rebel Heart y Madame X They do not live up to what their author means, but this does not detract from this liberating album in which the singer advocates the shamanic nature of dance. Giving up her obsession with going a little further than what is heard the most, perhaps because what is triumphing today does not deserve attention, the artist has a party with club music from past decades, such as house or the italo-disco. After all, they are currents that you find in the albums of young stars like Dua Lipa, Sabrina Carpenter, Chappell Roan or Charli XCX.
As already happened in the Confessions from 2005, the album is made up of a sequence of songs that link together like a DJ session. There is no silence between the 16 pieces. Open the party I Feel So Free, that does not reach the genius of Hung Up, the beginning of the first Confessions, but in return he makes the best possible introduction, the greeting of what the listener is going to find, an invitation to the evening from a hostess named Madonna: “Thank you for coming. / Sometimes I like to hide in the shadows, create a new personality, a different identity. / I can be whoever I want to be, create a new personality. / Honestly, I wish I could be like other people and just not care about anything. / But here, on the dance floor, I feel so free.” And you can’t stop dancing anymore.
Madonna leaves challenging messages throughout the album, phrases arising from the experience of a woman always living under an examination that is difficult to bear. “People think that music dance It’s superficial, but they’re wrong. / The dance floor is not just a place, it is a threshold,” he sings in the remarkable One Step Away. “Why do you always make me feel so bad about myself? Why do I always feel like you want me to be someone else?” she complains in Everything. In Read My Lips He blames: “You like to be a bully, you always like to win. / Well, shut your mouth.” In the production he repeats, as in 2005, the British Stuart Pierce, who achieves with his games of mortar house an unstoppable first half hour, collaboration with Sabrina Carpenter included.
However, there are elements that undermine the good tone of the album. In the collaboration with Feid, there is precisely the Colombian, Bizarre It doesn’t measure up, and the last part of an album that lasts one hour and three minutes, with a slower pace that invites you to leave the dance floor and lean against the bar, has three songs left over. The protagonist is redeemed with a beautiful final theme, L.E.S. Girl, where Madonna looks back at the daring 18-year-old who left home to conquer New York: “A girl from the Lower East Side lost in a fragile world. / The night is kind, the day is sad. / Everything fades away, except you.” That’s it: after a few years of creative irrelevance, Madonna has managed not to dissipate and is back.