Madonna – Celebration
[Warner Bros.; 2009]
5.7/10
“Time goes by so slowly,” goes the first line of Madonna’s silver-anniversary-or-so-in-showbiz collection, and she doesn’t quite make the case for that pronouncement. At the end of every decade, she puts out a greatest-hits set: 1990’s The Immaculate Collection was the kind of perfect straight-into-orbit retrospective pop artists dream of achieving, and if 2001’s GHV2 felt a little less epochal, it still collected a lot of magnificently melancholic dance songs from the following decade. Since then, she’s fallen off a bit– which is a strange way to describe eight years in which she’s recorded a dozen #1 dance singles, but “Hung Up” is really the only song from the post-GHV2 period that’s lodged in the American pop consciousness.
What Madonna is ostensibly selling here– the “celebration,” with its echo of her first hit, 1983’s “Holiday”– is 26 years of being Madonna, which does get a big gold star. (The chronological 47-video DVD version of Celebration is a lot closer to the mark: A lot of the fun of her career has always been its visual side.) But what she’s actually selling is an album, made for repeated listening, and that’s a trickier proposition. The 2xCD edition collects roughly half her singles, including everything on Immaculate except “Rescue Me”. For its first 12 minutes or so, it’s incredibly strong– the opening sequence of “Hung Up” into “Music” into “Vogue” is a convincing argument for her genius.
Then the sequencing turns random or even unfortunate. Following that opening salvo with the pallid “4 Minutes” kills the first disc’s momentum. Beginning the second disc with eight pre-1988 tracks can’t help but suggest that she peaked earlier than she actually did, and the “Take a Bow”/”Live to Tell” pair that follows a little later drags it into ballad purgatory. Putting “Erotica” next to “Justify My Love” has the peculiar effect of suggesting that sex was just something Madonna was interested in briefly (and following them with a new one in which she sings, “My sex is a killer/ Do you wanna die happy?” sours them in retrospect). And the title track (the other new one), a pro forma trance collaboration with Paul Oakenfold, comes off as less celebratory than obligatory: where the new songs on Immaculate pointed Madonna’s way forward for the next decade, these just sound like throwaways.
One critical line on Madonna was once that she was merely a trend-jumper, an appropriator of subcultural and dance-musical developments that she treated like so many berries ripe for the plucking. As it turns out, that’s exactly what’s made her special in the long term: Behind that not-quite-lovely bleat and the image she manages as carefully and transparently as, say, Cindy Sherman, her chief weapon is an unbelievably dead-on sense for what sounds and styles and sexualities are ready for the big time, and a sensibility that lets her spin four minutes of pleasure or melancholy out of anything. The Madonna singles that hold up best over time, though (“Ray of Light”, “Papa Don’t Preach”, “Don’t Tell Me”, “Secret”), aren’t just celebrations or ballads; they’ve got a sense of sadness or gravity that’s illuminated by the glimmering light of the disco ball. There’s a lot of remarkable music on Celebration– the work of an artist who’s spent a quarter-century in a passionate body-lock with the question of what exactly makes pop music popular. She deserves a retrospective more interesting than this haphazard piece of contract-filling product.
Sticky & Sweet 
Tom Munro 
Revolver 
Hope For Haiti 
Sticky & Sweet 
Madonna - Celebration 
Madonna - Celebration
Madonna - Celebration
Madonna - Celebration
Madonna - Celebration 
I Am Because We Are 
Filth and Wisdom 
I Am Because We Are 
Miles Away 
Sticky & Sweet 
Madonna Confessions 
Madonna 2009 
Give It 2 Me 
Give It 2 Me 
Hard Candy 
Hard Candy 
4 Minutes 
4 Minutes 
A collection of at least 30 top 10 and number one songs all of which have been widely critically acclaimed, many of which are true pop masterpieces. About 8 songs that failed to make the top 10 yet they were well crafted songs from pop icon’s heart.
Regardless of the mix or chronology preference, even if you take an average count between the songs positions on the charts(populaarity) together with at least 5 major reviews from established music publications(critical aclaim, this album ends up somewhere around 8 out of 10.
Therefore, the real joke is on the person who wrote this reviewed. The above review is a joke no matter which way you bend it, turn it and explain it.
This collection contains a large chunk of Madonna’s great songs. No other artist can ever match this.
Who is Beatles, Elvis,MJ,,
they were nothing and I mean nothing compared to MADONNA. They never made it throgh three decades. Madonna has.
One can not get over Madonna’s impact on music and culture just like that.
A MEN.
I have read other reviews from this (is it wise to call it) site and they always giver 5 or 6. I think Celebration is great, it passes through all her career and the new tracks are awesome. Madonna’s career after 2001 is still in fire, you know. I just think that people underrate this decade like they did with th 90’s in 90’s but now the call it great. So time will show. And again, don’t visit this site.When you let your judgements about a persong overshadow your judgement about hi/hers music then you are not a critic.
exactly
it’s true. celebration is beneath madonna. maybe i’ll be it used someday… maybe.
oops
*maybe i’ll BUY it used someday…
I agree in the sense that there was no logic in the way they put the songs in order. I really should have been done the way Immaculate Collection was done, via chronological order of how they were released and album. I also agree where Justify My Love and Rescue Me were good songs and pointed forward, the 2 new songs on Celebration do sound like throw away songs. Well, we all know that Revolver was just a lazy recording of the demo given to her.
Who cares about the order? Does anyone actually listen to a cd in the oder the songs are on there? I always press the random button and listen to my cd’s that way. I like the surprise of what I will hear next.
I love the order the tracks are in. I actually think it’s very well sequenced.
just read all the madonna reviews on their site, even confessions had a bad grade, they just dont like her, they say there’s a lot of remarkable music on Celebration so why it is just 5.7? they are reviewing other thing that they dont like about her minus her music
I agree with you. This review contradicts itself. Once upon a time they used to criticize like a virgin, papa don’t preach, justify my love, vogue and Hung Up too.
It is the oldest strategy in the book: when the songs proved the critics wrong, outlasted their critics and became Holly classics, then the critics started to compare new Madonna songs with the old ones, in order to make their biased opinions seem legitimate.
These are three decades of not only pop songs but GREAT songs.
agree with you
Well put!
IT’S JUST CRITICS, IT DOES MATTER IF IT IS SELLING IN LONG RUN and LIKE IM.STR AND GHV2. I COULD’NT CARE LESS ABOT CRITICS AND HATERS NOW.I JUST DESPISE THOSE SO-CALL FAN WHO BETRAY MADONNA TO OTHER SO-CALLED DIVA.
You’re all wrong actually. It’s the packaging, song choice and order and over all marketing and presentation that pulls the grade down so much
you are wrong in the end who cares about the marketing or package when you have such wonderful tracks, the point is that the critics focus on everything but the music and that is what the album is all about, the reviewer is just takieng the chance to talk shit about her.
He is right…Madonna’s last 2 albums were just forced creation to honour her Warner’s contract. They paid no attention to details for this compilation…which is nothing more than a best of for those you dont own the albums/CDs.
Madonna needs to up her game and become a trend setter … enough of kaballah ….
COADF was brilliant, sorry.
AGREED, Cal! COADF was one of her best. So what if it wasn’t critically acclaimed! Critics crack me up. Only ONE persons opinion, people! They are not GODS as they think they are…
they are right: revolver and celebration are throwaways
pitchfork is a indie rock oriented page, but they insist to review madonna records, all of them with awful comments and bad grade, they forget that she make pop music not alternative indie rock
Good point, why do they even bother? Just another opportunity to talk shit.
“The 2xCD edition collects roughly half her singles, including everything on Immaculate except “Rescue Me”. ”
WRONG! Oh Father is not on Celebration either.
WRONG again, oh father wasnt on immaculate. well done…