Sarah Marshall - 3/30/2012
This month saw Madonna release her twelfth studio album, MDNA, in her decade-spanning music career, which has seen her branch of into several different directions in between, including writing, acting, and directing.
To coincide with MDNA's release, the fantastic best-selling artist has simultaneously released a marvellous limited-edition boxset, containing the Complete Collection of all of her albums between 1983 and 2008 - the eleven albums prior to her latest:
Madonna, Like A Virgin, True Blue, Like A Prayer, Erotica, Bedtime Stories, Ray of Light, Music, American Life, Confessions on a Dance Floor, and Hard Candy.
Eleven albums that span twenty-five years in the business, and this magnificent collection allows you to really and clearly see just how she has developed and grown over the course of that quarter of a century - an impressive milestone by any measure. And with the first three albums appearing here in remastered form, the quality is like you've never heard it before!
Her first album, the self-titled Madonna, saw her career get off to a fantastic start, and a sense of nostalgia really sinks in as I listen again to one of my favourite of Madonna's single, Lucky Star, a song I haven't listened to in years.
Then of course came her follow-up album, Like A Virgin, which soared to the top of the charts - both the album and the title-track single - and ensured 'Madonna' was a name nobody would be forgetting anytime soon. And almost thirty years later, nobody has.
Next in the collection we come back to True Blue, a classic Eighties album, with the song Papa Don't Preach. The song has been covered dozens of times since by a handful of prominent artists, but no one does it quite like Madonna!
The next decade saw her release a further four albums, all reaching the Top 10 in charts across the entire world, and all great fun to listen to once more in this fabulous collection.
Then she returned in the new millennium with the outstanding Music, her eighth studio album. The title-track on this record is one of my favourite songs of all time, and Madonna really showed off her amazing diversity with this CD. Along with the lead single, Music, the two songs Madonna co-wrote with the brilliant William Orbit - Runaway Lover and Amazing - are absolutely essential listening, with wonderful keyboards coming from Orbit beneath Madonna's ever-impressive vocals.
Music was then followed by the great American Life, including the great single Hollywood, and then Confessions on a Dance Floor, which brings us to the final album in the collection: Hard Candy.
Madonna's eleventh studio album was released back in 2008, and went straight to Number 1 (like so many of her records) in more than three dozen countries in the world. For the first time in her career, she had guest vocalists collaborating with her on her singles, releasing 4 Minutes (featuring Justin Timberlake and Timberland) as the lead single of the album. And it was a huge success! The trio work brilliantly together, and their musical chemistry comes across so well from the second the song starts, with Timbaland bringing the music in before Madonna and Timberlake take the verses opposite each other.
Like nobody else, Madonna knows what pop music is. Very, very few artists can claim to have a career as strong and long as hers, that has been so prominent and influential from the very start. She's an artist that has left her mark on the mainstream music industry more than anyone else still writing and recording music.
Not only has she kept up with the changing trends, she's kept ahead of them and worked hard to set the tone and raise the bar with every successive album. The Guinness World Records officially recognise her as the highest-selling female artist in the world - a claim literally only Madonna can make, and it is so easy to see and hear why she rose to such enormous fame as we retrace the first eleven albums of her career. I really hope that we'll have another eleven in the years to come!