Music : MADONNA NEW ALBUM - HARD CANDY

Dominance isn't just a fetish for Madonna, it's her religion. It's no accident that she opened each show on 2005's Confessions on a Dance Floor tour by clenching a riding crop in her hand, jerking a gagged male dancer around by a leather leash. And she never puts down the whip: Since 1986's True Blue, Madonna has claimed writing or production credits on every one of her songs, even when she worked with dance-music artists such as William Orbit, Mirwais Ahmadzaï and Stuart Price. So it's surprising that her eleventh studio album — her final one for longtime label Warner Bros. — is an act of submission. For Hard Candy, Madonna's midlife meditation on her own relevance, she lets top-shelf producers make her their plaything.

A songwriting team of American chart royalty helps Madonna revisit her roots as an urban-disco queen. Madonna isn't even the star on the first single, "4 Minutes": Timbaland and Nate "Danja" Hills provide a clanging whopper of a beat, and her vocal bobs alongside Justin Timberlake's, fighting not to drown in the brassy funk of a marching band. Timberlake is the album's melody doctor, and he steals from his own broody "What Goes Around . . . Comes Around" on Madonna's "Devil Wouldn't Recognize You." Madonna co-wrote but didn't co-produce the Timberlake-Timbaland team's five songs, which smack more of their creators' stamps than her own. The songs are solid, but slightly anonymous, as though they could be stripped down and peddled to other singers.

The creative tension between Madonna and the Neptunes' Pharrell Williams crackles. Williams bangs on paint cans to generate the beat on the innuendo-laden opener, "Candy Shop", and pumps up the thumpy self-empowerment anthem "Give It 2 Me" with clubby synths that trumpet one of Madonna's favorite life-dance-sex metaphors: "Don't stop me now, don't need to catch my breath/I can go on and on." "Heartbeat" pulses like "Lucky Star," and the soulful "Beat Goes On" (which features an uninspired Kanye West cameo) is one of a handful of tracks with bells and whistles — the classic disco "toot-toot, beep-beep" — traceable to two of Madonna's touchstones: Chic, whose Nile Rodgers helped steer her early career, and Donna Summer.

Like Confessions, Hard Candy celebrates dance as salvation, but even the euphorically groovy "Heartbeat" and "Dance 2night" strike wistful notes. Although the uptempo set features no ballads, the dominant lyrical themes — regret, yearning, distrust — are far from upbeat. Morphing from a syncopated shuffle into a lathery, orgasmic hysteria, Pharrell's "Incredible" is a challenging song about longing for a relationship's idyllic beginning. There's a melancholy pining in Timbaland-Timberlake's lush "Miles Away," which implies that all is not peachy in the house of Richie. "You always have the biggest heart when we're 6,000 miles apart," Madonna sings. International pop megastars — they're just like us!

The album's weakest moment is its most emotionally vapid. Madonna dips into Español for the painfully literal "Spanish Lesson." She has said the music was inspired by a Baltimore dance called the Percolator but seems more indebted to Timberlakeís fast-strummed "Like I Love You." Fortunately, there's also the bass-popping retro-boogie "She's Not Me," where Madonna imagines her lovers feeling buyers' remorse for being seduced by a copycat who "doesn't have my name." The offender who's "reading my books and stealing my looks and lingerie" could be any young pop starlet. But it also seems like an oddly timed barb at Madonna's now-fallen successor, Britney Spears, who has teamed up with many of the guys on Hard Candy — Pharrell, Danja and (ahem) Timberlake — and Madonna herself.

Madonna can still scoff at wanna-be's half her age because she's stayed so flexible with her sound. (She's performed a similar feat with her body, devoting herself to a yoga regimen that's made her impossibly elastic — name another near-fifty-year-old who can still rock a hot crotch shot on her album cover.) Even when she wrestles with Pharrell's abrupt stylistic changes or lets herself get absorbed in a Timberlake melody, Madonna still finds her way back on top. The atmospheric closing track, "Voices," poses the question "Who is the master, who is the slave?" before its operatic wind-down ends in a dramatic bell toll. The answer to both questions is still Madonna.

CARYN GANZ

taken from : www.rollingstone.com



4 Minutes - Madonna ft. Justin Timberlake & Timbaland Lyric

(Timbaland)
I‘m outta time and all I got is 4 minutes
Come on
Yeah
Break down
Come on

(Madonna)
Come on boy
I‘ve been waiting for somebody
To pick up my stroll

(Justin)
Well don‘t waste time
Give me a sign
Tell me how you wanna roll

(Madonna)
I want somebody to speed it up for me
Then take it down slow
There‘s enough room for both

(Justin)
Well I can handle that
You just gotta show me where it‘s at
Are you ready to go
(Are you ready to go)

(Madonna and Justin)
If you want it
You already got it
If you thought it
It better be what you want
If you feel it
It must be real just
Say the word and imma give you what you want

(Madonna and Justin)
Time is waiting
We only got 4 minutes to save the world
No hesitating
Grab a boy
Grab a girl
Time is waiting
We only got 4 minutes to save the world
No hesitating
We only got 4 minutes 4 minutes

(Madonna and Justin)
Keep it up keep it up don‘t be a pri hey
Madonna uh
You gotta get in line, hop
Tick tock tick tock tick tock
That‘s right keep it up keep it up don‘t be a pri hey
Madonna, uh

You gotta get in line, hop
Tick tock tick tock tick tock

(Madonna)
Sometimes I think what I need is a you intervention yeah

(Justin)
And you know I can tell that you like it
And that it‘s good by the way that you move ooh hey

(Madonna)
The road to hell is paved with good intentions yeah

(Justin)
But if I die tonight
At least I can say I did what I wanted to do
Tell me how bout you?

(Madonna and Justin)
If you want it
You already got it
If you thought it
It better be what you want
If you feel it
It must be real just
Say the word and imma give you what you want

(Madonna and Justin)
Time is waiting
We only got 4 minutes to save the world
No hesitating
Grab a boy
Grab a girl
Time is waiting
We only got 4 minutes to save the world
No hesitating
We only got 4 minutes 4 minutes

(Madonna and Justin)
Keep it up keep it up don‘t be a pri hey
Madonna uh
You gotta get in line, hop
Tick tock tick tock tick tock
That‘s right keep it up keep it up don‘t be a pri hey
Madonna uh
You gotta get in line hop
Tick tock tick tock tick tock

(Timbaland)
Breakdown
Yeah
(tick tock tick tock tick tock)
Yeah uh huh
(tick tock tick tock tick tock)
I only got 4 minutes to save the world