Madonna
All through her career, it has been impossible to divorce Madonna’s music from her image, as they feed off each other to the point where it’s hard to tell which came first, the concept or the songs. Glancing at the aggressively ugly cover to Hard Candy — its blistering pinks and assaultive leather suggesting cheap bottom-barrel porno — it’s hard not to wish that this is the one time Madge broke from tradition, offering music that wasn’t quite as garish as her graphics. That is not the case. Hard Candy is all brutal hard edges and blaring primary colors, a relentlessly mercenary collection of cold beats and chilly innuendo. Sex has always been a driving force for Madonna, but she’s never been as ruthlessly pornographic as she is here, (more…)
A few lines from a couple songs and some suggestive presentation guarantees that a significant amount of the reaction to Discipline, Janet’s tenth studio album, will feast upon the singer’s lack of judiciousness when it comes to expressing her sexuality. Leave the teasing and explicitness to the teens and younger twenty-somethings — not the grown women — right? Janet should get back to making sunny, uncomplicated songs like "Escapade" and pretend that the occasional-to-frequent salaciousness extending back to Control never existed. She should do that and, while she is at it, act her age. (When the three years younger R. Kelly releases his next album, no protests of a similar nature will be heard; ditto whenever the Rolling Stones perform "Brown Sugar.") While Discipline is dressed up like a racy affair with track-to-track titillation, it has only a couple moments where Janet 
