Third instalment dedicated to Madonna, today we're talking about "Confessions On A Dance Floor".

 

The artist's tenth studio album, "Confessions On A Dance Floor" (2005) distances itself from the previous "American Life" (2003) to make way for a sound that draws on 70s disco, 80s electropop and 2000s club music. The album's production, initially entrusted to Mirwais Ahmadzai, soon passes into the hands of Stuart Price, who offers his own home as a recording studio. The album is structured like a DJ set, with the songs following one another without interruption. The dance floor is the setting that initially hosts songs with a light and carefree mood, before giving way to dark melodies and introspective lyrics, as the album title testifies. Madonna expresses her thoughts on love, fame and religion and shows a change of direction compared to the singles taken from previous albums: if in "Music" the unifying power of music was at the centre ("Music makes the people come together"), in "Hung Up", as in "Sorry", a more emancipatory and self-sufficient perspective emerges ("I can't keep on waiting for you", from "Hung Up", but also "I can make it alone", from "Sorry"). The only track that comes close to a ballad on the entire project is "Isaac", for which Madonna was unfairly accused of blasphemy by a group of Israeli rabbis. In the song, a long-time friend of Madonna, Yitzhak Sinwani (Isaac is simply the English transliteration of the name Yitzhak) makes his appearance, intoning some passages of a Hebrew poem and making references to the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac, with the sole aim of conveying a message of liberation and hope. The dance music artists from whom Madonna draws inspiration for this record range from the Bee Gees to the Pet Shop Boys, from Depeche Mode to Giorgio Moroder, in some cases more evidently as for the samples of ABBA's "Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)" in "Hung Up" or Donna Summer's "I Feel Love" in "Future Lovers". It is precisely thanks to "Hung Up" that Madonna achieves record listens: the track reaches the top of the charts in 41 countries, becoming, according to Billboard, the most successful dance song of the decade. Thanks also to the subsequent singles ("Sorry", "Get Together" and "Jump"), the album reaches first position in 40 countries, totalling around 4 million copies sold in the first week alone. In addition to receiving critical acclaim, "Confessions On A Dance Floor" takes home the award for best dance/electronic music album at the 2007 Grammy Awards, after a world tour that was also a record-breaker (it recorded the highest gross for a female artist in history).

 

Today we suggest letting yourselves go to the overwhelming rhythm of "Hung Up", with an invitation to take inspiration from the iconic choreography of the music video. Enjoy listening!