Upon hearing Madonna was releasing yet another album, I was immediately skeptical. Images of Lycra and leather flew into my mind, combined with banal lyrics and so much bass you’d hear it a mile away. I decided I had to hear it. My assumptions were correct. Rebel Heart is one hour and 15 minutes of the musical equivalent of Nanna having one too many wines and putting up her hand for karaoke, exclaiming that no, she is not too old for this, while sliding on her beat up leather jacket from the ‘50s.
Skip the opener Living For Love if you’ve already dropped the bass today; Devil Pray has a strange country twang that makes you uncomfortable in the way you do when you have water in your shoes, and the lyrics kinda make you wonder if Madonna’s just trying to troll us all: “We can do drugs and we can smoke weed and we can drink whiskey, yeah. We can get high and we can get stoned” – really? That’s the best you could come up with, with over 30 years in the game? Come on, Madonna, you can do better than that. Moving down a few tracks to the ever-predictable name-drop-worthy list of feature artists, Nikki Minaj is first up, in Bitch I’m Madonna. Bitch, she’s Madonna, is what I came away with from this track.
Apparently Madge is also friends with Chance The Rapper, Mike Tyson, Nas, Kanye, etc. But let’s just put it this way – if you played a game called “count how many times the word ‘bitch’ is used in this album,” and drink every time you do, you’d be hammered by track six.
BY TAYLOR YATES
