New Madonna song ("The Beat Goes On") and old question: Did critics even listen to "The Immaculate Collection"?

I thought they did!

Certainly there was plenty talk about the version of "Holiday".

Sheffield did. I think that's the reason it's only a 9/10 in the Spin book.

It's an 8 out of 10!

Wasn't TIC released at the peak of academe's interest in Madonna? Suddenly she was the "respectable" iconoclast who'd just shocked Ted Koppel. Maybe the remixes, abridged mixes, and omission of several big hits (no "Who's That Girl," "Angel," or "Causing a Commotion") were accepted as one more shock technique.

Granted, I'm basing "so few reviewers" on what I can find now: The CD is the top seller for Madonna at Amazon, and the blurb says nothing about remixes. You're right that Sheffield in the Spin Alternative Record Guide was critical, but I don't think he mentioned remixes, just edits, and the book editors still put it on their list of essential albums.

Rolling Stone gave it four and a half stars, and never mentioned remixes or remastering. Christgau gave it an A+. Neither mention remixes, and Trouser Press doesn't, either.

The best review I've found is Allmusic's:

The songs that are included are frequently altered. Everything on the collection is remastered in Q-sound, which gives an exaggerated sense of stereo separation that often distorts the original intent of the recordings. Furthermore, several songs are faster than their original versions and some are faded out earlier than either their single or album versions, while others are segued together. In other words, while all the hits are present, they're simply not in their correct versions.

Which is okay as far as it goes, but there's remastering and there's remixing, and I think the lay-person's definition of the latter is when somebody actually alters the levels and echo and everything to the point where you're effectively changing the production of a song, one of the more obvious examples being "Like a Prayer." And Allmusic gives it five stars anyway and calls it "definitive"!

Oops, sorry for the redundancy. And it's not like this is the music-journalistic crime of the century. But it does seem like there are group mood swings.

horrible first 30 seconds. great chorus.
sounds as much of a gwen-rip as HUNG UP did 2 years ago!
only this time it's RICH GIRL ('on and on and on the beat goes' sounds like the 'na na na na-na naaaas)

the album 'Love Angel Music Baby's influence has been like woah! on pop these last 3 years.

yeah i recall MELODY MAKER talked about the q sound making things sound altered/different to the originals in it's original review
(by chris roberts?)

Which song did "Hung Up" rip off?

the 'time goes by...'/ ticky clocky thing = 'what you waiting for'.

Fernando.

um, and ABBA's "Gimme Gimme Gimme!!! (A Man After Midnight)"

well, the versions of "Like A Prayer" and "Express Yourself" are the remixed ones I heard in clubs at the time. The latter works fine; the former really needs its rock trappings for its power.

Dunno about the reviewers, but I knew before I bought and heard it that the tracks were remixes. Some, such as the "Truel Blue" tracks, are rather faithful towards the original mixes though, with no dramatic changes.

Hopefully she will soon release a full career retrospective containing all the singles in their original mixes though.

Heh, I wrote the Amazon review in question. Honestly, it seemed at the time of TIC's release that the shortening of tracks was designed to help everything fit on one CD. And I really can't see the omission of, say, "Causing a Commotion" as a major shock-the-squares move. As for the remixing, sure it could've been mentioned more, but it also feels kind of like a gray area, given that there had already been multiple versions of a lot of these tunes on 12-inch and so forth.

No "Keep It Together" or "Hanky Panky" either!

"Hanky Panky" was a really recent hit when this thing came out, and you could make the case that "Keep It Together," though one of my favorites (and one where the single mix is radically different than the Like a Prayer album cut), wasn't the biggest hit on a record that was already well represented.

What stands out in my mind is the fact that some people were super incensed by the album title. "How dare she," etc. I was working in a record store in the fall of 1990 and saw it.

I, of course, was so unchurched by this point that it had barely registered on me.

now we know why Erotica was bound to fail.

Well, she obviously overestimated the toesucker audience's interest in her music.

As for the remixing, sure it could've been mentioned more, but it also feels kind of like a gray area, given that there had already been multiple versions of a lot of these tunes on 12-inch and so forth.

Like I said, it's not the worst failure ever of music journalism, or even a terrible case of consumer fraud, but it's not a "gray area," either: These tracks all had a definitive hit version--the versions that appeared in videos, 7-inches, and albums (with little or no variance between the three mediums). The audience for 12-inch remixes was tiny compared to the mass audience for those hits. So it's a good guess that most people buy The Immaculate Collection expecting to hear the hits as they were in the '80s, and fault their own memory when (or if) they notice a difference.

The word "remix" appears nowhere in the package. There are credits only for mixing. Worse yet, producers are prominently credited, as if to reinforce the idea that you're hearing what they produced.

Obviously, somebody must have had second thoughts, because Madonna's second volume of hits consists of original mixes, and carefully notes all the edits.

i recall MELODY MAKER talked about the q sound making things sound altered/different to the originals in it's original review

There must have been some kind of PR campaign around the Q-Sound (no idea what that is), judging by the reams of mentions in Nexis, which somehow managed (intentionally or not) to obscure the fact that the songs were remixes.

I guess there was a lot of information to process around this release--the career, the Q-Sound, the two new songs, the title, the supposedly manipulated "scandal" of MTV not airing the "Justify My Love" video.

Q-Sound = trendy early-'90s mixing tool/technique not unlike the Aphex Aural Exciter credited on Excitable Boy, other records and rarely after 1979.

The Use Your Illusions carry a credit to the effect that they're mixed in "R Sound." Get it????

Ah, there'll be a Prince style 3CD collection of all the singles in a random order, one day.

I remember being annnoyed by this at the time, and I guess that's why I never listen to it, and why it never pops into my head as one of my favourite compilations (which is weird, given how many great hits she's had). At the time this came out, some of Madonna's club remixes were definitely better than the single versions (particularly stuff from LAP, the orig. versions of which I thought were really thin and lifeless), but the opposite is (mostly) true, if I recall, of the earlier stuff. Bottom line is I just don't think she should've tampered with it for a collection of "singles." She could have put out more remix albums like You Can Dance instead.

Hopefully she will soon release a full career retrospective containing all the singles in their original mixes though.

She already did (though unfortunately it only goes up to 1996)

What stands out in my mind is the fact that some people were super incensed by the album title. "How dare she," etc. I was working in a record store in the fall of 1990 and saw it.

I am amazed by this. People actually got pissed just because she called her album The Immaculate Collection? 1990 sure seems like a long time ago.

they booed sinead, you know

As for her new song, halfway through the first listen this is right up there with "American Life" and "Hanky Panky" and Evita. Horrible.

Yeah on the other thread I said, "It's not bad. It certainly doesn't evoke the same levels of excitement that the Confessions on a Dancefloor singles did, but it's not terrible." I still agree with myself a full day later, but yeah this seems like it could be destined for an "American Life" level of success (non-success). I just can't see this one climbing up the charts.

And that 30xcd collection seems like such an absurd and wasteful relic of the past. I mean who would buy a 40x3" cd collection now?. Sure, it was made for the must-have-everything collector, but two or three songs per cd? I realize cd singles were really no different and sold quite well I'm sure, but to buy a box set of them when all 40 discs worth of stuff would've fit on 3 or 4 discs is mind boggling a short 11 years later. Could you imagine changing 40 tiny cds to listen to the entire collection in one sitting?