Slant Magazine: The 100 Best Albums/Singles of 80s/90s/00s

[Angelus 11,476]

The 100 Best Albums of 1980s

60. Madonna, True Blue

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Sure, some of the production choices on True Blue sound chintzy and dated in comparison to those on Madonna's other '80s releases, but there's no getting around the fact that five of the album's nine tracks are among the strongest individual singles of her career. More importantly, though, True Blue was the album on which it became readily apparent that Madonna was more than just a flash-in-the-pan pop star. It's when she began manipulating her image—and her audience—with a real sense of clarity and purpose and made sure she had quality songs to back up her calculation and world-dominating ambition.

 

33. Madonna, Madonna

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Few would deny that Madonna went on to pursue deeper goals than the simple pop perfection of Madonna. But any debut album that yields a “Holiday” and a “Lucky Star,” both released as singles in the span of two consecutive days (albeit an ocean apart), is still pretty untouchable. Wistful and eager to please, Madonna's sparkling ditties aren't so much “post-disco” as they are “disco ain't going nowhere, so shut up and dance.” Like a heavenly body atop the surging underground currents of every synth-heavy dance subgenre that preceded her, Madonna's cultural co-opting is nothing if not fervent.

20. Madonna, Like a Prayer

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For her fourth album, Madonna went back to her roots. Like a Prayer is decidedly retro, the ultimate genre pastiche of all of singer's early influences: Sly Stone, Simon & Garfunkel, the Association, the Beatles. More significantly, it found Madonna reflecting on marriage and family, subject matter that bonds her musical influences together into a cohesive—and confessional—collection. For all of her vocal limitations, Madonna often sings with more feeling than many of her more technically gifted peers, and with her voice left shockingly unpolished here, the album offers some of her most soulful, vulnerable performances. Upon revisiting Like a Prayer, I made a new discovery: a whirring synth on “Till Death Do Us Part,” a non-cloying song about her marriage to Sean Penn, that mimics the sound of a car speeding away as the song fades. Likewise, the album begins with a slamming door—the closing of a chapter, if you will, and the beginning of a new one. By the late '80s, Madonna was already one of the biggest pop stars of all time, but with Like a Prayer, she became one of the most important.

 

 

 

Only artist with 3 albums on the list

2nd highest ranked female album

3 out of 4 released albums

The rest is coming now. We need post and we need to appreciate her acclaim more  

 

[rose 23,236]

congrats to the queen 

[Vertigo-go 18,832]

Did Ray of Light get through the 90s part?

[Angelus 11,476]

The 100 Best Singles of the 1980s

43. Madonna, “Open Your Heart”

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David Byrne once sang, “Watch out, with that attitude you might get what you want,” and it feels as if Madonna has made a career of realizing that ambition by any means possible. It's funny to think that “Open Your Heart” could have ended up with someone other than the Material Girl. Yes, Cyndi Lauper might have spun something altogether more poignant from this unabashedly sincere and playfully metaphoric love song, but the conviction Madonna reveals throughout, as exhaustible as Patrick Leonard's fluttering rock-dance bassline, finds her in a strikingly confessional light. As in the song's polar opposite, 1993's “Bye Bye Baby,” an anti-love song in which she coyly makes the man do the chasing, Madonna was and always will be credible only at her most naked.

28. Madonna, “Live to Tell”

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Madonna's first and, arguably, most dramatic reinvention was scored by the spare and haunting ballad “Live to Tell,” which wasn't just a daringly demure introduction to her third album, but also posed a challenge to pop-radio programmers keen on instant gratification: The song begins with almost a full minute of music before the singer starts to tell her tale, and includes abrupt key changes and a half-minute midsection in which nearly all of the music drops out. Of course, it worked like a charm, and “Live to Tell” launched a fruitful professional relationship between Madge and producer Patrick Leonard that would last for more than two decades, and set the stage for the fearlessly autobiographical material to come. The song features one of Madonna's richest vocal performances, full of soul, yearning, and hurt, with lyrics that can surely resonate with anyone who's ever endured a detention of silence—self-imposed or otherwise.

 

26. Madonna, “Into the Groove”

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Leave it to Madonna to make the campy, throwaway, opening lines of a B-side into a career-defining mission statement. She's at her most coy as she speaks, “You can dance, for inspiration,” over the first few bars of “Into the Groove,” the theme from Desperately Seeking Susan and, somewhat inexplicably, the B-side of the considerably less brilliant “Angel” But who cares that one of Billboard's technicalities kept the song from charting on the Hot 100: Madonna's never come up with a more apt assessment of how her music works best. Whenever she's lost her way artistically, she's headed back to the dance floor to get her head right.

 

16. Madonna, “Express Yourself”

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It was David Fincher's music video for this smash from Like a Prayer that introduced us to Shep Pettibone's remix, which, aside from the lethargic come-and-git-it cowbell that intermittently takes Madonna from the church steeple and straight onto the prairie, matches in its uptempo the soulful fervor of the singer's call to arms. But MTV doesn't play music videos anymore, and when I'm listening to this song on my iTunes, it's the original album version I prefer, as it evokes something altogether more subversive: Fritz Lang's robot Maria hanging out inside a Detroit dance hall, forcing men to their knees as the big-band sound rocks the house. He has it coming in both versions, but in Stephen Bray's original Madonna comes fearlessly out of nowhere.

 

7. Madonna, “Like a Prayer”

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With an atypical structure in which the drums drop out completely during each verse and the chorus is all but abandoned halfway through the song in favor of ad libs, what's now considered a perfect pop song seemed more fit for a church than Top 40 radio at the time. Though she'd evoked religion before, most notably with heaps of rosary beads dangling between her décolleté, it was, perhaps, inevitable that with a name like Madonna, the so-called Material Girl would more seriously explore the faith with which she was so strictly raised. But while there have been about as many interpretations of the song's lyrics as there are remixes (she's singing about God, she's singing about giving a blowjob, she's singing about giving God a blowjob), “Like a Prayer” begs for a more refined reading than a brainy conflation of spiritual and sexual ecstasy: It's a song about love.

 

Highest ranked female single

 

Moving on to 90s

[Angelus 11,476]

5 minutes ago, Vertigo-go said:

Did Ray of Light get through the 90s part?

You'll have to wait and see

[Vertigo-go 18,832]

1 minute ago, Li'l Sebastian said:

You'll have to wait and see

is this pay-per-post

[Angelus 11,476]

The 100 Best Albums of the 1990s

63. Madonna, Bedtime Stories

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Over the years, Madonna has cited influences as disparate as the classical composers who soundtracked her early dance training and, despite Kurt Cobain's assertion that she “ignored” them, the punk bands from her days as a drummer in the East Village, but R&B had the most audible impact on her music during the first 15 years of her career. So to view Bedtime Stories as anything other than an extension of what she'd been doing all along would be remiss. And instead of simply following American trends of the time, Madge infused the album with the edgier trip-hop sounds that were happening on the other side of the pond. But it was her refined literary taste, from Proust to Whitman, and both the media and the public's rejection of her sexual politicking that truly informed the singer's seventh album. Whether licking her wounds over lovers (“Take a Bow”) or critics (“Human Nature”), Madonna has never sounded more emotionally vulnerable or more cerebrally plugged in than she does here.

 

47. Madonna, Ray of Light

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Don't call it a comeback. Because while Madonna's immediately preceeding genres of choice (R&B, adult contemporary, Broadway) were quickly rendering her relevance a thing to be admired only in the past tense, her chart prowess was still in fine form. No, Ray of Light was a rebirth, the sound of a queen, sitting on her throne, taking inventory of her icy, empty fortress—and not liking what she saw one bit. From “Drowned World” to “Frozen” to “Mer Girl,” water is a recurring theme, serving as a symbol of purification throughout. Madonna's lyrics are notably devoid of any trace of cyncism here, and though it's tempting to interpret her “answers” as obvious or absolute, it's her sense of wonder and searching—and, of course, Patrick Leonard's gorgeous melodies and William Orbit's immaculate yet playful production—that elevates Ray of Light above mere New Age hogwash.

28. Madonna, Erotica

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No Madonna album was ever met with a louder backlash or was more rampantly misrepresented than this dark masterpiece, so you know it was doing something right. Released on the tail-end of AIDS hysteria, Erotica is far from the opus to guiltless sexual fulfillment it—and its even more ridiculed accompanying tome Sex—was made out to be. Though there's no doubt it espouses taking joy in physical pleasure (“Let me remind you in case you don't already know/Dining out can happen down below”), no album seems more empathetically haunted by the act's countless side effects (i.e. “Bad Girl,” “Thief of Hearts,” a purposefully monotonous house cover of Peggy Lee's “Fever”). Underneath Madonna's bondage getup and Shep Pettibone's oversized drum tracks beats a truly pained heart.

 

3 out of 3 albums

It's worth mentioning that other than Janet who's at lower side of top 100, her other peers from 90s are not featured on the list

[Vertigo-go 18,832]

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the act's countless side effects (i.e. “Bad Girl,” “Thief of Hearts,”

wait is this bad

but those are her best tracks there

[Angelus 11,476]

The 100 Best Singles of the 1990s

42. Madonna, “Secret”

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Despite the common misconception that she often sings about sex, Madonna's songs aren't always sexy. “Secret” is perhaps the finest exception to that rule. As it slinks along a simple R&B backbeat and an unfussy acoustic guitar figure, “Secret” is also one of the most organic-sounding singles of Madonna's career, taking its sweet time to get where it's going and not giving up too much along the way. The arrangement gets off on being withholding, and, at least for one glorious single, so does Madonna: When she sings, “You knew all along/What I never wanted to say,” she sounds positively rapturous.

 

36. Madonna, “Deeper and Deeper”

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Among Madonna's finest achievements, the angsty pop anthem “Deeper and Deeper” is both an acute distillation of Erotica's smut-glam decadence and the singer's lifelong blond ambition. The song, like its video, practically plays out as an autobiography of the singer's life: Atop sambalicious disco, Madonna delivers a burning, poignant fairy tale of yearning and escape in which she plays both Little Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf. Armond White once praised Madonna for how she took “outsider art inside herself”—which is to say, justified it by personalizing it. The uncontrolled, fierce tension of the song derives from the feeling that Madonna is taking a plunge into some hedonistic abyss of her own liberated, uninhibited making.

 

34. Madonna, “Erotica”

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Madonna accepts the burden of her throaty, spent-from-touring voice, which makes Erotica's taunting, aggressive lyrics—an elaborate exploration of sex, from seduction to disease—feel unmistakably honest. The title track, whose opening put-a-record-on scratchiness mirrors that of Madonna's most divisive instrument, is the singer's invitation to the dance, a slithering, sinister snake rising from a gaudily ornate chalice. The beats are, by design, hypnotic—at once alluring and devious. With “Erotica,” Madonna promises to get you off, but not without giving you something.

 

16. Madonna, “Ray of Light”

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Once the Material Girl made it her mission to bring electronica to the masses, she could have named her collaborator. Her decision to work with William Orbit shows that, for all the flack she's faced for “appropriation,” her interest in underground dance music is deep and not wholly commercial. Madonna discovered techno just as she turned 40 and took up Kabbalah, and listening to “Ray of Light,” it's easy to imagine Madonna finding in rave culture not just a new image, but a way of expressing her spiritual awakening. The beat is restless and Madonna sings breathlessly, but she exudes contentment: “I feel like I just got home!” Her emotional warmth is what establishes the song as a standout single even in a catalogue as replete with classics as Madonna's.

 

10. Madonna, “Vogue”

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Much has been written (specifically on this site) about the cultural impact of the appropriation of queer and nonwhite motifs in Madonna's “Vogue,” so I'll focus instead on the song's musical archaeology and influence. Lest I completely ignore its substance, Madonna's message is clear (“Beauty is where you find it”), but the track's origins are part and parcel with its star's mining of gay club trends and Old Hollywood: Inspired by the Salsoul Orchestra's “Ooh, I Love It (Love Break)” by way of Danny Krivit's remix of MFSB's “Love Is the Message,” the song has a family tree that even includes producer/DJ Shep Pettibone's remix of Janet Jackson's “Miss You Much” and serves as a sort of musical map of disco. Pettibone recorded “Vogue” with Madonna as a B-side for her single “Keep It Together,” making its impact all the more impressive (it would go on to inspire a glut of pop-house copycats) and begging the question: If disco died a decade earlier, what the fuck was this big, gay, fuscia drag-queen boa of a dance song sitting on top of the charts for a month for?

 

Again in top 10 

Acclaim

[Angelus 11,476]

The 100 Best Albums of 2000s

38. Madonna, Confessions on a Dance Floor

 

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Confessions on a Dance Floor could've just as easily been called Ghost of Madonnas Past: at once a thumping tribute to the restorative power of dance music (this was the workout album of the decade if there was one) and a treatise on the singer's own fame (“I spent my whole life wanting to be talked about”), in which all her musical tics headily come to fore (singing in foreign languages? Check. Faux-tribalistic hymn? Check.). References to the past are everywhere, from the ABBA sample of “Hung Up” to her silly love letter to the city where she got her start, “I Love New York,” but Madonna has always been a thoroughly postmodern pop artist, and as such, songs like “Hung Up,” Sorry,” and “Forbidden Love” aren't so much throwbacks as updates of the disco sound to which she's indebted

 

31. Madonna, Music

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Though Madonna would collaborate with William Orbit on three tracks on her follow-up to Ray of Light, the album otherwise represented a seismic shift from its predecessor's warm-and-gooey spirituality (a Book of Revelation to many fans, anathema to others). Mirwais's defiantly experimental, Eurotrashy, wholly artificial production—awash in Auto-Tune and Nintendo beats—was bound to disappoint some, but no one does ersatz like Madonna, and fittingly, this is also one of her most soul-bearing works, from the feminist “What It Feels Like for a Girl,” to the Toni Morrison-alluding “Paradise (Not for Me), to “Nobody's Perfect,” a slow burn that's never less than affecting.

 

2 out of 4 albums

Only artist that was featured on 80s list that is featured on new millennium's list

 

[Angelus 11,476]

The 100 Best Singles of 2000s

36. Madonna, “Hung Up”

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“Hung Up” employs a ticking clock to represent fear of wasted time, but Madonna isn't singing about aging or saving the world—she's talking about love. It had been years since Madge sounded this vapid. With its pitched-upward vocals, infectious arpeggio sample from ABBA's “Gimme Gimme Gimme (A Man After Midnight),” and the bridge's unironic, archetypical key change, the track decidedly points to the past, and it proved that, 20 years into her career, Madonna was still the one and only Dancing Queen.

 

 

33. Madonna, “Don't Tell Me”

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Madonna's Y2K-era dalliances with electronica could oftentimes verge on the theoretical, so it's a tad ironic that the one hit from her Orbit-Mirwais daze that still packs fully loaded pistols is also the most engrossed in chemistry-set beat science. “Don't Tell Me” is first and foremost a concoction: two parts corn pone, one part glitch, with reliable disco strings to serve as the catalyst. What seals the deal, though, is that lyrically Madonna's on board too. Tell the peanut butter of acoustic guitars to stay away from the chocolate of digital bass drones, but don't tell Madonna she can't eat both and spit back manna.

 

25. Madonna, “Music”

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From its generic title to Madonna's anonymous vocal performance, “Music” is a blank slate of a song. To wit, the song has had almost as many makeovers as Madonna herself. Okay, so not quite that many, but each of the performer's tours during the last decade has featured a new incarnation of the song: Kraftwerk-inspired electronica, '70s disco, and most recently, '80s hip-hop (the next logical embodiment would be '90s house). If music truly is a universal language, then “Music”—in all of its meta reinventions and retro dialects—might be the best piece of evidence we have that music really does make the people come together.

 

 

 

It's not just that she is the only artist that is featured on all time lists in 3 different decades, she's also featured on both albums and singles, and on top of that, featured multiple times every time

NO ONE HAD THAT LONGEVITY IN QUALITY SHE HAD. BOW DOWN

[Angelus 11,476]

@Tasso Can you add /00s to the thread's name? I tried several times and it won't let me change.

[Angelus 11,476]

If we rank them all by numbers:

63. Bedtime Stories

60. True Blue

47. Ray of Light

38. Confessions on a Dance Floor

33. Madonna

31. Music

28. Erotica

20. Like a Prayer

 

Singles:

43. Open Your Heart

42. Secret

36. Deeper and Deeper

36. Hung Up

34. Erotica

33. Don't Tell Me

28. Live To Tell

26. Into The Groove

25. Music

16. Express Yourself

16. Ray of Light

10. Vogue

7. Like a Prayer

 

 

Music era being of her most acclaimed as always

 

 

[Courtney Love 4,389]

 

 

 

 

I'm surprised Like A Virgin (the single) wasn't somewhere considering its impact  

[Saiga 16,485]

JUSTICE FOR BEDTIME STORIES

[Angelus 11,476]

17 minutes ago, Erotic said:

 

 

 

 

I'm surprised Like A Virgin (the single) wasn't somewhere considering its impact  

Album or single?

[Courtney Love 4,389]

15 minutes ago, Li'l Sebastian said:

Album or single?

For this post I'll just say the song itself, but a little bit of both any other time. Like A Virgin is a quissential 80's record

[Angelus 11,476]

3 minutes ago, Erotic said:

For this post I'll just say the song itself, but a little bit of both any other time. Like A Virgin is a quissential 80's record

Yeah, both song and album were/are actually acclaimed, but it just happens that she outdid herself by mile in 80s, and there's no room for everything she released.

[Vertigo-go 18,832]

58 minutes ago, Erotic said:

 

 

 

 

I'm surprised Like A Virgin (the single) wasn't somewhere considering its impact  

I loathe Into the Anus and love Virgin, I'm so with those old bitches who complain that reissues have ITG while they originally bought a CD/LP without it

[Vertigo-go 18,832]

I don't know how it did back then (I saw it often on mtv though), but I feel like Don't Tell Me is her most underrated single this century ( ). Maybe because she doesn't perform it minus Miley one time, but it's like the song is completely decayed  It's amazing, and her clear vocals on it are her best in years.