If the music's pumping it will give you new life

Continuing my trip back through the 1990 album charts.

05/08/90 : I'm Breathless - Madonna

In a perfect world, I'd be rejecting this as a film soundtrack - but I talked myself out of rejecting Jon Bon Jovi's effort and all the same arguments apply here, so I've left myself no choice.  I think I might have listened to it (but never owned it - 6/22) and remember not being impressed, but it was a long time ago so I could be mistaken.

No, I don't think I can have listened to this because I'd have remembered it since, for the most part, this is an odd album.  I'd say it's not to my taste, but it's recognisably a good album - but the thing is that it's a good Liza Minelli album.  I realise its (probably) in the style of the film and Madge does a good job with the material (better than I was expecting) but I'm not sure anyone was really crying out for it and I suspect repeat listens were very thin on the ground.  And then, right at the end, there's "Vogue" which is an absolute genius track that I won't hear a word against - but there's no way I would listen to the rest of the album again just to get there.

We're at #2 in the charts this week on her eleventh week of a twenty week run with it having peaked at #2 in its debut week and this week (I suspect "Vogue" was responsible for the bounce).  The rest of the top five were Elton John, The Beach Boys, Luciano Pavarotti and Phil Collins and the highest new entry was Michael Bolton, all the way down at #46.

Wikipedia has MASSES on the album (353 milliPeppers) with lots of it relating to Dick Tracy which is mostly pretty dull, but there's no doubt that having Madonna in it did it no harm at all - it was the ninth highest grossing film of the year in the US (I've never seen it, so can't comment further).  I didn't know that three of the songs were written by Stephen Sondheim - I'm intrigued as to how he got involved in the film.  Him and Madonna feel like an odd mix - apparently neither he or she were convinced the songs were going to work out well, but he continued encouraging her, which seems like the nice sort of thing he'd do.

As well as the film promoting the album (or vice versa), this was also the time of the Blond Ambition tour, which was quite the controversy magnet what with the pointy bras, on-stage masturbation and a myriad of other things the Pope didn't like.  And then this was all filmed and released as the Truth or Dare documentary (which I remember enjoying) - there was literally nothing that woman wouldn't do for publicity back then.  Mostly, the critics were surprisingly nice about the album but others were more "what is this?" with the legacy view being generally "not sure why she did this".  It did well commercially at the time though, making the top five in most countries and selling seven million copies worldwide.

"Customers also listened to" Paula Abdul, Janet Jackson, Sheena Easton and Gloria Estefan - no big personalities there at all!  But, even now, is there a bigger personality than Madonna?  But this album, whilst not exactly a mis-step, is certainly a peculiar side step.

29/07/90 - A stupendously successful album
12/08/90 - Not as bad as last time, but still dreadful