Hard Candy – Madonna – 2008

I’ve been listening to Madonna’s Hard Candy on and off over the past few weeks, trying to get into it and I think it’s finally starting to sound good to me, but then music shouldn’t be this hard to like.

Don’t get me wrong, I love “4 Minutes”, “Candy Shop” and many of the other songs on the album but I feel that the album is less Madonna and more about her collaborators.

For instance the afore mentioned “Candy Shop” is written by and probably produced by Pharrell Williams, I don’t need the sleeve notes to tell me that, the song sounds very N.E.R.D. the phrasing is Pharrell all the way.

Then there is the hit single “4 Minutes” featuring Justin Timberlake and Timberland, a song that wouldn’t sound alien on a Justin Timberlake album.

I guess my feeling is, I’m not hearing a lot of “Madonna” in Hard Candy. But then maybe the thing is that people like Timberland have changed the face of music.

In the past a Producer would sit in the background, a single credit in the sleeve of the album, but these days they are laying down their own vocals and infiltrating the song of the artist. Perhaps without these infiltrations I would have more readily accepted this album as another Madonna reinvention.

It’s growing on me… I guess the other thing impacting my music of late is that I now travel to and from work with David and after 11 years together the one thing remains the same, our music tastes are very different with only the occasional overlap. So my ability to listen to new tunes has become somewhat limited.

I also had to find this album as it is not yet available on the Australian iTunes Store even though it was released on April 28.

And the final word, I’m glad “Beat Goes On” was reworked from the previously *leaked* version that surfaced last year.