OPEN POST: Manor Music Monday With Vadge!

It's February, hors, or as DJ Li'l Scratch laments, the shortest damn month to gather up your mortgage or rent. Which means he's taking on extra gigs at the Manor's Tickle Stick Lounge, but, hey, gotta keep that catnip and Alaskan cod coming, amirite? Today, Li'l Scratch presents you with an artist you're likely very familiar with. She has many sobriquets: Madge. Nonnie. Esther. Vadge. Gammy. So many names for a pop star who's determined to stay "relevant."

Is she succeeding? For many decades she did, and then - ka-boom! - she ran out of gas, drove off a cliff and exploded in a fiery blaze of meh, whatever and pff with her 2008 release, "Hard Candy," her first album in which, as many critics noted, she followed pop music trends instead of making them, utilizing near-passe hit producers, like Timbaland, The Neptunes, and, of all people, Justin Timberlake, whose careers were already flagging or soon to extinguish. Every song is lazy, programmatic, and hardly "street" or "edgy," as she'd wanted them to be. Is it her worst album? I'd say so. Originally, the album was to be titled "Black Madonna," but saner minds convinced her to change it. 

So what's the former master of reinvention doing next? Unfortunately, she's looking backwards. She's reputedly working on a new "disco" album with Stuart Price, the producer of "Confessions on a Dance Floor," a disco album which she released two decades ago. Two. Decades. Ago. Feel old yet? Bring it on, I say, but after the nearly unlistenable and howlingly pretentious "Madame X," my hopes are not high.

Should she even bother making new music? Or should she, like many pop stars of a certain age, put out an album of standards, or maybe suck the life out an old as Lady Gaga did with Tony Bennett? But is that really what we want from her? Maybe there's a middle-ground, one that she might (briefly) explore.

She won't, of course, but if she did, it might sound like "Symphony," an astonishing, fan-made recording posted in 2018 by someone known only as "Maddy LCiccone7," which brings together a handful of her better vocal ballads and backs them with lush orchestral strings. It shouldn't work. It should be awful. And at first, it seems all wrong. But keep listening. It's the dreamiest, most sumptuous Madge LP you'll likely ever hear. Whether she likes it or not. 

What are you listening to this week? DJ Li'l Scratch want to know. 

Till next time...purr, bitches, purr! 🐾

Photo Credit: Getty Images

Peckerwood's Weekly Lunocracy Post is RIGHT HERE.