I had a listen to this whilst working this afternoon and I'm amazed it's listed as one of the best 1100 albums. It's terrible.
I don't mind Madonna's singles, they are catchy and decent pop songs. I'd put them up there as some of the best songs of the 80s/90s at times. That said, I strongly suspect that the real hard work was done by the likes of Nile Rodgers who could take pretty much any artist and song and make a foot-tapping belter of a tune.
However, this album is simply not very good. It is very dated and doesn't have many catchy songs on it. It tries to be obviously sexy, but obviously sexy isn't sexy. I was expecting at least some catchy melodies as most of her singles are, but there's not much there. It's just a collection of nothing-songs really and one of them reminded me of a Jimmy Nail song, that's how poor I thought it was.
The album is clearly been created by marketing types and it's so blatantly obvious what they are trying to do. It's not music created by people who enjoy making music, it's music designed purely and simply to market and sell an image. That's what really shines through for me.
I think that, once the marketing hype is taken away from Madonna there's just... not much there. She isn't a great artist. She is in the same bracket as Rihanna, Michael Jackson, etc where the marketeers make out they are astonishing musicians, but they aren't. They are frontmen/women for other people. There's nothing wrong with this and both have fronted some great songs, but the author of the book should be able to tell poor albums from great ones. He's failed here. If you're making a list of great albums and this is on it then your list is too long!
Sorry Madonna but it's 2/10 and you only get 2 as it is a Friday afternoon.