This week Madonna releases her third greatest hits collection, that’s 1,769 fewer than Elvis Presley. The logical step would be to make ‘Celebration’ a third volume of her greatest hits, a companion to ‘The Immaculate Collection’ and ‘GHV2′ but no, there are only three songs that didn’t feature on her previous greatest hits collections.
Admittedly compiling a whole CD of Madonna songs released since 2001 that people will actually want to listen to is a task equal to finding signs of intelligent life in an Akon song. But what other way can we teach the generation of tomorrow about Madonna?
What do we tell them about the best-selling female artist of all time? That there’s more to her than her frequent child-grabbing jaunts to Africa? Which although nobody can quite explain what is morally or ethically wrong about her doing so, the fact that she has the full support of the Daily Mail is vindication for the doubters.
Including a new song is de rigeur for greatest hits compilations now (note that I didn’t say in vogue), so new single ‘Celebration’ is one of the three differences from GHV2/Immaculate Collection, along with ‘Hung Up’ and ‘4 Minutes’, none of which are worth parting with cash for. These are songs that don’t compare to ‘Material Girl’ or ‘Papa Don’t Preach’, hell, these are songs that don’t even compare to ‘La Isla Bonita’!
The whole compilation could serve as an advert for The Immaculate Collection, there’s good songs on Celebration for sure, but they already featured on the former. Almost as if Madonna knows in her heart what we’ve all been wrestling with for years: She’s rubbish now.
Madonna is the biggest argument for mandatory retirement ages, 1998’s Ray of Light was her last good album, since then we’ve had a trail of shudder inducing efforts with the occasional passable single as she continually reinvents herself: credible pop singer, cowboy, catwoman, englishwoman, guitarist, muscleman, film director’s wife, dance instructor (to the righteous disgust of millions), prune, child adopter, cactus, hotel porter, bicycle, dentist, the list goes on.
For those of us who used to listen to our grandparent’s stories of how her music used to be good, it’s mildly painful to watch and definitely frustrating, I mean what was American Life if not a smouldering pile of musical crap? The cover for Hard Candy could be confused with that of a magazine that was erroneously delivered to a newsagents I worked at at the time, called ‘65 and Up’.
But age shall not wither her, she’ll be releasing albums when she’s eighty (next year or something), which I guess I can live with, as long as she doesn’t release another ’sex’ book. I’m not sure I can guarantee that she won’t.
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