Madonna - The Immaculate Collection (1990)

The title is as blasphemous as is inaccurate, and you know it's Madonna because the title is blasphemous.  It's not a collection, it's a pile of steaming sewage, and there's nothing immaculate about it.  I've been consciously reviewing the most unlistenable records I could think of in these last weeks of 2025, the better to illustrate what an awful year this has been for America, and what better - or worse - way to emphasize the awfulness of this year than to review the worst greatest-hits compilation of all time, recorded by the worst singer America has ever produced?

This teeming piece of crud documents all of Madge's hit singles from the 1980s - you know the titles, I won't repeat them - that made that decade far worse than it already was.  They all have the same distinguishing characteristics that make them so unlistenable - overdone synthesizers, asinine lyrics, occasional parodies of the Roman Catholic Church's lexicon, and annoying, electronically treated, squealing vocals.  Nearly forty years after these singles first appalled us, we scratch our heads wondering how they could have possibly made their perpetrator the female performer to, as of 1990, compile more consecutive top-five hits than any other female recording artist in history - until we remember the shamelessly sleazy promotional videos, those churlish, kinky vignettes she concocted to get people to pay attention to her instead of musicians and singers with real talent.  There are also two bonus tracks, one of them the single with the promotional video that was too X-rated for MTV; you know the title, and I won't repeat that one either.  

Everything you remember about the 1980s is encapsulated in this spoiled crap cake - vapidity, style over substance, empty glitz and glitter, and big hair.  It's a victory lap for the performer, celebrating her unexpected longevity in popular music and avoiding the fate that befell far better eighties recording artists like the Go-Go's and Men at Work - only having three or four hits that might show up on a various-performers anthology using the eighties as a theme.  That she had fifteen hits in the eighties (not counting the two bonus tracks, one of which was also a hit) was proof that something went horribly wrong with popular music in that decade, and what was even worse is that she would have enough hits in the following decade to warrant a second greatest-hits compilation at the turn of the millennium.

Oh yeah, I ought to tell you about the special edition of this record, The Royal Box, which featured not only the record but also a one-hour video compilation of her offensive promo clips, a two-by-three foot poster (in color!) and an assortment of picture postcards featuring the performer herself.  All for a hefty increase in the retail price that parents in 1990 were willing to pay to give their teenage daughters something to hug and kiss them for on Christmas morning (doesn't that want to make you throw up?).  Those teenage girls today are in their fifties and are now dealing with their own daughters' obsession with Taylor Swift.  Only their daughters probably have better taste in pop than they ever did.  And if Steely Dan hadn't used the title first, this box set could have been called The Royal Scam. 

Madge got to where she is largely on slick self-promotion and cheap showbiz theatrics.  In that way, she's much like Donald Trump, as I noted before on this blog.  And as with Trump and his own con jobs, no one in the press, least of all those who knew better (in Madge's case, music critics), ever bothered to call out her scams and her lightweight work as a recording "artist," preferring instead to document and praise her every move because they knew it sold newspapers or attracted eyeballs to the TV set.  Far worse, like Trump, Madge represented and still represents today the phony opulence, the most shallow elements of popular culture, and, yes, the greed and avarice that defined the eighties and led to everything rotten with America now.  If you believed her when she said that her "career" was "all about the music," you're just as stupid as MAGA cultists.

I wrote and published this review on the day before a colonoscopy, which involves drinking awful laxative solutions, abstaining from real food, and crapping one's guts out.  But doing all of that is preferable to listening to this fetid compilation album even once.