There comes a point in the career of any established artist when looking backwards seems to be the only possible way to move forwards.
Madonna was a great pop star until she wasn’t. Confessions on a Dance Floor, released in 2005, was her last really successful record; ‘Hung Up’, from that album, her last truly unforgettable single. Ever since she has been chasing musical trends with increasingly diminishing returns, the heavy-handed concepts and contrived personae – Madame X, anyone? – no longer supported by anything approaching a properly decent song.
Ms Ciccone seems to have belatedly remembered that Madonna is, and always has been, the concept
So Confessions II is an act of both commercial and creative necessity. Its reclamation of the past is twofold. Most obviously, it calls back to Confessions on a Dance Floor by reuniting Madonna with producer and co-writer Stuart Price, as well as returning to the direct, uncomplicated house-adjacent sounds and love-to-club themes of that record. Good call. Direct, retro dance-pop proves a far better fit than recent attempts to hitch her wagon to anything from trap to fado.
But Confessions II goes back further than that. Several songs reminisce on Madonna’s origin story. This is rich source material: the young and hungry heroine newly arrived from the Michigan sticks, trying to make it as a dancer in the fleshpots of early 1980s NYC, liberated by dance and the scuzzy Lower East Side counter-culture.
