Ranking Madonna albums 1992-2005

Last month I ranked her albums without providing blurbs; I limited this ranking to her post-imperial phase. Madonna didn’t stop recording okay albums — her debut and True Blue are almost great to my ears — but she saw herself as an Artist instead of a person who records material that may or may not get rated as art and who gives a shit if it isn’t. Nevertheless, I love the records below, with a special apology to Rebel Heart.

1. Erotica (1992)

For years this 1992 album and 1989’s Like a Prayer have duked it out for best Madonna, but I’m afraid the latter has won. Like a Prayer has the hits, while Erotica has one still in recurrent adult contemporary (“Rain”), released to desperately reanimate Madonna’s lowest selling studio album to date. In a reappraisal for Stylus Magazine, I wrote with my usual understatement, “Erotica was too sophisticated for a mainstream besotted with The Bodyguard and a college-radio claque eager to praise R.E.M.’s opaque dirges for the wisdom that Madonna’s club fodder showed with less fuss and with a better rhythm section” (I like Automatic for the People, honest!).

Really, Madonna almost begged for backlash after her Poppy Bush Interzone peak when breathing on a kumquat guaranteed thoughtful New York Times Sunday magazine pieces. More self-plagiarism:

Each dance track emits its own idiosyncratic energy; there are more unexpected textures on Erotica than on any other Madonna album. The Kool & The Gang-quoting title track and biggest hit despite no airplay; the love-is-all-we-need shuffle of “Why’s It So Hard”; the Joni-Mitchell-Blue of her ”Fever” cover. “Words” is the greatest non-hit, relentless and sad, anticipating the after hours desperation of late ‘90s Everything But The Girl hits. But no one’s copied “Bad Girl.” This third single, a flop on release, switches from major to minor chords (signaled by the transition from verse to chorus) with a sophistication that puts the lie to those fools who (still) think Madonna has no input on her records (certainly no Shep Pettibone production attempts anything comparable). It remains Maddie’s most cogent response to a venal subject: the wages of fame, as experienced by a woman who’s cheated too often, smoked too many cigarettes, and is unable to meet expectations she had a large hand in shaping.

2. Confessions on a Dance Floor (2005)

For a decade, Madonna had blasted listeners with the full power of her training-enhanced vocals, as robust as her thighs and pecs. About as stiff too — often she enunciated like a Brazilian saying Henry James dialogue in the original English. On Confessions she loosened up enough for me to hear what she’d learned, and she projected a joy as full-bodied as a Californian red on “Sorry” and “How High.” Working with Stuart Price, lauded for his fulsome twelve-inch mixes of Gwen Stefani and the Killers, forced her to write A-grade vocal melodies again: I give you “Get It Together,” a luscious take on Everything But the Girl and Deep Dish’s “Future of the Future.” The “Let It Will Be-Forbidden Love-Jump” sequence is the most perfectly segued and sequenced threesome in her career if you discount what we saw in Sex as fiction. Even if the barnstorming “Hung Up” hadn’t existed, Confessions would’ve filled a dance floor anyway.

3. Ray of Light (1998)

She got herself a universe, populating it with mer girls and zephyrs; for a soundtrack she chose Britpop guitar licks, William Orbit’s whirring gewgaws, and a mix as aqueous as the thick blue wrap Madonna wears on the sleeve. A reinvention as un-cynical and predictable as David Bowie’s with Let’s Dance, Ray of Light was a marker, not the first chapter in a new sequence, for the next few albums are as batty and lubricious as anything she released in her 1986-1990 heyday — rather like Bowie, actually.

4. Bedtime Stories (1994)

The last album before Respectable Vocal Stylings consumed her — the show was over, say goodbye. Dismissed by many as ephemeral in 1994, Bedtime Stories foresaw the direction of R& for the next decade; it’s no more uneven than the usual Madonna album. Dave Hall provides the singer with the tinkly R&B with which TLC, Silk, and Usher would score contemporaneous hits, while Madonna put Babyface in charge of the balladry, in which she competed with Toni Braxton and won on her terms — was Braxton using Meshell Ndegeocello? I would’ve gone with an album’s worth of Bjork covers or new material.

5. Music (2000)

Overpraised as the Fun Playful Album after 1998’s series of thesis statements, Music can’t sustain its pace. Mirwais Ahmadzaï’s proto-laptop quash-beats and acoustic guitar accompaniment were fresh and rather interesting as pop music in 2000, but he was a better producer than songwriter, and while Madonna is underrated in both categories she brought enthusiasm instead of striking melodies and lyrics. “Don’t Tell Me” still impresses, “Impressive Instant” impresses instantly, and the well sung “What It Feels Like For a Girl” needs one more round of editing before I count it as one of her great ballads. Here’s a good Madonna ballad: “Gone.”

6. American Life (2003)

I won’t waste much time carping on the vacuity if not stupidity of this album — Madonna knows more about sexual politics than Simone de Beauvoir and Hélène Cixous but as a political philosopher she’s not John Stuart Mill or Hannah Arendt. But after two albums that restored her to former multi-platinum glories amid the Ashantis and Britneys, it took courage to release these Mirwais-sized chopped-up acoustic assemblages of aphorisms in a world reeling from the Iraq War. Unlike Music, Madonna brought strong melodies and iconoclasm: admitting to being “not religious” on “Nothing Fails,” harmonizing with herself yet confessing she’s not herself on “X-Static Process,” riding “Hollywood”‘s Eno-damaged distorted arrangement (Sheryl Crow, analyze this!). And one of the top five best Bond anthems rests comfortably in context.