Madonna, or How I Learnt to Stop Worrying & Love the Recording Industry

First off, I've had this damn piccolo-synth line strutting around my head for two days now, unrelenting. It's got that damn marching anthem type underbeat to just add potency to the hook, as it were. Its Madonna's new track Hung Up that I am talking about, or more accurately, her use of ABBA's hook from Gimme Gimme Gimme. I could not tell you whether I like it or not. If the question were posed. Its just one of those melodies that has a certain, hrm, purity to it, for want of a better word. Insofar as that it just works. Genetically predetermined perhaps to absorb the sound signature, and some long unused portion of the brain is awakened and releases endorphins because it knows the signature to be happy. Or a mutation of part of the cerebellum during those disco days of the 70's caused by too tight denim hipsters recognises the signature and feels the call to disco. The incorrect and sadly initial assumption on my behalf was that Madonna was doing the usual pop music ploy of remaking old tracks by old artists and fooling the kids (hardly a difficult undertaking) into thinking it were straight out of the ghetto, or other interchangable collective noun for an area of highly concentrated self pity. Please, these people (eg: rap/hip-hop/r'n'b, err, 'artists') can barely construct an intelligible sentence, let alone write lyrics laced with double enterdre, or layers of track structure... oh wait, that isnt there anyway. So riddle me this; how is it concievably possible that a person can become a musical prodigy by having the singular ability to sing a couple of ditties that someone else has penned. Which reminds me of a -somewhat well placed- TISM line, from the rant at the end of B.F.W. (thats an acronym for Big Fucking Whoopie for you laymen) where Ron says: "Who writes the songs? / That's the thing / Any clotheshorse can learn to sing. / *beeped* (Kylies?) albums are all eponymous / But the songwriters stay anonymous." But I've digressed. What I was getting at is that the track uses a sample from an old track, an ABBA track, and then I realised that Madonna was about 21 when the ABBA track was released, and so probably remembers when the original came out so thats excuseable. That and she is nearly 50, she has quite amazingly maintained a pop-star status, somehow finding enough cracks to slip through and niches to fill. Which has to be admired. And I really had more important things to do than this, but I got sidetracked. Who knows what the original intended topic was. Probably about the weather or something.