Madonna's ‘Hard Candy’ is Stickier and Sweeter 13 Years Later
After an acclaimed return to dance music, Madonna enlisted a crack team of producers to double down for her 11th studio album, just as the sound landscape started to change.
In an interview with the German news program ZDF heute journal in 2008, Madonna described the sound of her 11th studio album Hard Candy: “It’s not straight-ahead, pure hip-hop…I don’t think you can really pigeonhole it. It’s not straight-ahead R&B, it’s not straight pop, it’s not straight hip-hop. Hopefully, it’s sort of a new genre. And I haven’t really come up with a new title for it yet.” In that interview—and in many critical writeups of the album following its release on April 28, 2008—journalists continuously alluded to what they perceived as Madonna doing something she’d be accused of for the next decade of her career: plucking genre trends from radio hits of the time and molding them to herself, a pop star aged out of the field she pioneered and clamoring at relevancy to fit in with a new generation. To them, Madonna, at the cusp of her 50s and having already reinvented herself more times than anyone could count, was now incapable of making a record with the same authentic vision and prowess she held throughout her entire career. The pop music landscape was rapidly changing, and many critics and listeners wrote Hard Candy off as her first attempt to keep up with trends rather than set them. Ironic then that 13 years on, Hard Candy sounds sweeter than ever before.
Provocation has been Madonna’s play since the earliest days of her career, so much so that it’s useless to get into the background of her most shocking moments. You know them: the “Like a Virgin” performance, the burning crosses, the Sex book, the original “American Life” video. But by 2008, Madonna had entered a curious new zone: the tech boom and rise of social media had given way to an entirely new roster of musicians and ways to market them. It was no longer enough to be the industry giant—Madonna, who spent 25 years toiling, now had to compete to prove herself to an entirely new generation: millennials. And I was one of them.
I first got my hands on a copy of Hard Candy when I was newly 14 years old—by mere hours. In 2008, I was starting to move beyond asking for anything for my birthday, but I was still smart enough to use the event to my advantage. My 14th would be my excuse to ask my sister to get me Hard Candy, that way she could be the one who went into Target and bought it instead of me, who would’ve been shaking with queer panic and afraid to be looked at wrong by anyone who saw me holding a Madonna album. I wanted the record desperately after falling in love with “4 Minutes,” the album’s lead single, a few months prior. I had grown up listening to Madonna, skipping downstairs after school to see what positions “Hung Up” and “Sorry” held on TRL’s daily video countdown. Of course, I was also devastatingly aware of the fact that boys who preferred Madonna and Britney Spears—as opposed to, say, whatever boring male act that may have been popular at the time that nobody remembers now—were going to be seen by their peers as gay. While that was a fact about myself I had consistently tried to push down, music was never something I could hide my interests in. As many times as I’d deny being gay to both myself and my bullies at school, my wrists would always go limp as soon as I heard the ABBA sample on “Hung Up” start to play.
Just as I hoped, my sister bought Hard Candy for me that year and gave it to me with a wink at a high school graduation party for her best friend, where I promptly snuck it home in the plastic Target bag it was still wrapped in. Why I tried to be so secretive with it I’ll never know, especially because I practically forced my mom to make it the soundtrack of that summer. We listened to it every time I rode in the front seat of her car, and by July we both knew every song by heart. There, in the passenger’s seat of her gold Chrysler Town & Country minivan was where I think I realized that my family was never going to judge me for being myself. I was a 14-year-old teenager listening to a 49-year-old pop provocateur sing about her sugar being raw, sticky, and sweet—of course I was gay! I came out to my family on July 14th (Bastille Day! Vive la Faggot!) and I credit Hard Candy and Madonna with a lot of the courage I had to do that. There was something special coursing throughout that album, something free and exciting yet deceptively introspective enough that I felt inspired to look into my own self and find something that I hadn’t yet tapped into. Hard Candy is the sound of being at the precipice of something new, at once looking back and looking forward, ready to groove through it all and shed a tear on the dance floor if necessary.
Hard Candy is an expensive album, that’s one way to put it. It sounds expensive because it was expensive. Madonna was collaborating with some of the most talented people in the industry at the height of the careers: Timbaland, who had just come off of major success with Justin Timberlake’s FutureSex/LoveSounds, Nelly Furtado’s Loose, and his own solo album Shock Value; The Neptunes, who had their hand in songs by industry titans like Mariah Carey, Beyoncé, and Britney Spears among a slew of others; and Danja, fresh off indelible work with Spears on Blackout the year before. Madonna enlisted all of these mega talents to take the sounds that they had refined as their signature and mold them to fit her latest personality: herself. Hard Candy, like Madonna, jumps across genres and styles and messaging in a way that’s difficult to nail down but never boring, just like the woman at its candy-coated center.
What’s so deceivingly delicious about Hard Candy is that, by seemingly playing to modern radio trends and working with producers whose songs had already topped the charts that decade, Madonna managed to make a record that bounces between genres so gracefully that it has become a clear standout among her late-period work. In their (two-and-a-half star) review for the album, NME suggested that “by leaving it until 2008 to work with Tim, Pharrell and Justin, Madonna joins the party just as the lights are going up.” While they’re technically right, Madonna’s insistence on doing things on her own schedule worked in her favor this time, unlike in later years when 2015’s EDM-tinged Rebel Heart debuted after the EDM wave had already crested. Hard Candy sounds just as good, if not better in 2021, largely thanks to the unassailable talents of its key collaborators. The Neptunes, Timbaland, and Danja are all in top form here, even after spending the better half of the ’00s crafting hit after hit for other artists.
In retrospect, Hard Candy was the record that ushered out that string of stylistically similar music from mid-aughts by nostalgia staples like Gwen Stefani, Fergie, and Nelly Furtado. Already, the sounds curated by those artists were warring with a burgeoning return to sleek electronic pop, led by a new artist called Lady Gaga, whose debut single “Just Dance” was beginning to climb the charts after being released on April 8, 2008—just days before Hard Candy. By October, Gaga’s The Fame was poised to change the sound of pop entirely. That album’s combination of slick electronic synthesizers and techno-heavy beats paired with the DIY aesthetic of Gaga’s early career was a hit among the general public, alerting the course of mainstream pop for years to come. And yet, Hard Candy’s production, the same production that critics were already calling dated and attributing to Madonna’s ploying for relevancy, sounds cleaner and more modern today than anything on The Fame. While both albums are undeniably strong, The Fame is very much a product of its time. Hard Candy transcends it. The production is clear and crisp. The mixing is exceptional, even when Madonna’s voice traverses so far into the song that it practically gets lost in the beat, it’s completely intentional. By harnessing the talents of some of the finest producers in the game, putting them in a blender, and sending them through a factory before coating them in a shiny, strawberry pink, M-emblazoned cellophane wrapper—like an ultra-sexy episode of Unwrapped—Madonna did what no critic at the time thought she could do, especially at 49 years old: make a record that was ahead of its time.
Far and away, Hard Candy is home to some of Madonna’s best—and most interesting—dance records. There’s the high-energy relentlessness of “Give It 2 Me,” which should have a place on any and every cardio playlist. The sex-tinged “Candy Shop” is filled with sweltering grooves and enough double entendres to make my mom uncomfortable even to this day. The glittering synths of “Heartbeat” give way to the unforgettable earworm chorus delivery of, “you know I feel it in my heartbeat!” There’s even the superb six-minute kiss-off to a cheating lover’s mistress, “She’s Not Me,” that dissolves into a pulsing “never will be, never will be, never will be” repeated outro. But none of that can compare to “Beat Goes On,” a thumping, disco-funk career high. Against a signature Neptunes beat, Madonna hits the dance floor and doesn’t let up for four minutes and twenty-seven seconds, going even harder when Kanye West enters with a well-earned braggadocious feature verse.
Though Hard Candy is largely a dance record at face level, Madonna does occasionally allow a glimpse into parts of her inner psyche. “Miles Away” is another underrated Madonna classic buried beneath the handclaps and funk drums that score most of the album. A clear letter to her soon-to-be ex-husband Guy Ritchie, Madonna sinks into plaintive resignation. “You always love me more, miles away/I hear it in your voice, we’re miles away/You’re not afraid to tell me, miles away/I guess we’re at our best when we’re miles away.” It’s one of the record’s rare moments of introspection, still as exceedingly melancholic—and terribly catchy—as ever, the perfect breakup song. Elsewhere, “Devil Wouldn’t Recognize You” and “Voices” provide a welcome midtempo cooldown to a record that’s otherwise entirely danceable. As the album’s coda, they’re reminders that even the tastiest confections can’t last forever.
Maybe that’s true in a larger sense, too. Hard Candy is Madonna’s last great album—cohesive and clear, a concept seen through until the last breath of the final track. It doesn’t play to trends like 2012’s MDNA. It doesn’t stretch itself too thin, overstaying its welcome like the 25 tracks that make up one of the many versions of 2015’s Rebel Heart. It doesn’t get lost in its ambitions or make its intentions murky, like 2019’s Madame X. Hard Candy is as strong as the woman on its cover, clad in boxing bandages and a champion’s belt. It’s that rock-solid toughness, that supreme confidence, that Madonna began to lose when the sound started to change. Instead of doing a victory lap around the dancefloor after a career of nothing but wins, Madonna let herself get shaken up by the new contenders in the ring. Four years later, a year after the controversy surrounding Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way” purportedly sounding like a ripoff of Madonna’s “Express Yourself,” Madonna mashed up the two songs on her MDNA tour before leading into the chorus of “She’s Not Me.” It was a petty moment, cruel and immature. Here was Madonna—armed with an ironclad legacy—taking jabs at an artist she paved the way for, one that cited her as a lifelong inspiration. Instead of valiantly leading the charge in an ever-changing industry like she had done so many times before, Madonna went low. And the music followed suit.
Madonna and her art are at their best when they’re reveling in their self-assuredness, and Hard Candy is full of it. While glimpses of that conviction can be found on the records that have followed it, none of them have Hard Candy’s top to bottom listenability. And yet, it’s an oft-forgotten record in Madonna’s discography, lost in the fold between a string of hits and a few consecutive duds, buried beneath other records from the same period that wear their years more noticeably. It’s unfortunate that the album’s sugar rush couldn’t have lasted longer, but maybe that’s what makes it such a rich treat. Hard Candy, like its namesake, has no real expiration date. It’s all sugary sweet chemicals and impossible to pronounce syrups and dyes, factory-made by pop’s premier confectioner for long-lasting flavor, whenever you may choose to unwrap it.