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Madonna - Celebration
| Rollingstone |
| What? No "Hanky Panky"? Is this some kind of a joke? Given how obsessive her fans are, it's a thankless task for Madonna to assemble a two-CD hit collection. But from the opening one-two of "Hung Up" and "Music," two of her best ever, Celebration kicks off with pure bliss and never lets up. It's a dizzying, nonchronological spin through the Madonna years, years it makes you feel lucky to be living through. Her hitmaking genius is unmatched and — with the new Eurocheese blast "Celebration" and the Lil Wayne duet "Revolver" — undiminished. It's almost enough to make you forget that they left off "Angel," which is just plain crazypants....full text |
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| Slantmagazine |
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onfession from my own private dance floor: I've never been a fan of The Immaculate Collection, despite the canonization accorded it in the absence of any competing career compilation up until its companion volume GHV2 in 2001. In almost every case, I found Immaculate's QSound makeovers by Shep Pettibone (at the time, Madonna's go-to guy thanks to his revelatory work on "Express Yourself" and "Vogue") to be earsores, if not total desecrations, of the original works. The winningly tremulous qualities of her earliest hits were all but obliterated by Pettibone's glossy remixes, and don't even get me started on the deadening house beats he used to kamikaze "Like a Prayer," a song which, like no other song from her first decade, did not exactly want for urgency. The upside of the album was and remains this unique feat: how its obligatory new tracks, the simmering "Rescue Me" and the aromatic "Justify My Love," are considered by most fans to be among the singer's best work. Unfortunately, only one of those two songs survived the transition to Celebration, the "best of" reboot I've been wanting, needing, waiting for since 1990. Representing Madonna's first post-iPod compilation, the full two-disc version of Celebration promises more bang for your buck than her previous hits collections and, in the bargain, reverts many (but not all) tracks previously assembled on Immaculate to their original mixes, essentially making Celebration her most retro retrospective to date. The backward compatibility is born out in the album's cover art by Mr. Brainwash, which features a True Blue/"Vogue"-eras composite shot tarted up a la Andy Warhol. As she herself sang on the soundtrack to A League of Their Own, "Don't hold on to the past/Well, that's too much to ask." (Unless the past in question is "This Used to Be My Playground," which is the sole #1 not included here.)...full text |
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| Allmusic |
| Madonna's run at the top of the charts lasted so long, longer than almost any other star, it's almost impossible to squeeze all the hits onto one collection. And so it is that Celebration, a double-disc, 36-track set that also has a companion single-disc condensation, misses a few songs, hits as gorgeous as "Rain" and as goofily camp as "Hanky Panky," but truth be told, they're not greatly missed on this parade of pop genius that's hampered only slightly by its non-chronological order. Out of order, it does emphasize Madonna's consistency, and the bigger problem with the collection is that it mixes up album mixes, single edits, Q-Sound mixes pulled from The Immaculate Collection, and a couple of stray odd edits and mixes. This is a mess, but not quite enough to dilute what is one of the greatest bodies of work in modern pop — even in this mixed-up confusion, these singles are a joy to hear....full text |
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