I haven’t written anything in a while.  I’ve decided to go back into using this blog to talk about one of my favorite subjects:  Madonna.  See, I’ve been feeling emotionally fragile lately, and one of the ways I deal with that is to listen to Madonna.

I’ve decided to write a blog entry for each of her albums, discussing them from my least favorite to my favorite.  So, here goes:  My Least Favorite Madonna Album!

Hard Candy:  2008

Wow!  Hard to believe this album is 10 years old already!

Hard Candy ranks as Madonna’s worst album because it is mediocre, and it has no excuse to be mediocre.

The very best of the pop world at the time worked on it.  Besides Madonna there was Justin Timberlake, Pharrell Williams, Timbaland, and a pre-insane Kanye West.  (Please, Kanye, get help dude, you need it badly!)  Was it too many cooks in the kitchen?  It should have been the best album in Madonna’s career….and it’s just…..OK.

Seriously, Madonna and Justin Timberlake, probably the best two pop talents of our lifetime, and the best they could do was “4 Minutes”?  Really?  It’s not bad, it’s just not great.  And it should have been.

Most of the album is fine, aside from the truly horrible “Spanish Lesson.”  But it should have been so much more than fine.  The only truly great song is the frantic “Give It 2 Me,” a potentially heart-attack inducing dance masterpiece.  Aside from that, the only tracks of real interest are the two that foreshadowed Madonna’s upcoming divorce from Guy Ritchie:  “Miles Away” (about a physically and emotionally distant spouse) and “She’s Not Me” (infidelity).

The album also suffers from being the follow-up to “Confessions on the Dance Floor,” one of Madonna’s best-ever albums.  “Hard Candy” was a huge disappointment.