Ahead of Friday’s release of Confessions II, follow up to the seminal Confessions on a Dance Floor and fifteenth album release, Cece Blythe takes a look back at Madonna’s disco revolution—21 years on.
It’s 2005. YouTube had barely taken its first breath. Tom Cruise was the messiah of Scientology. Brangelina was born. The world was barren of energy, trapped in the post 9/11-G.W. Bush dictatorial apocalypse. God saw our despair, saw how we thirsted for a saviour. And so, She deployed Madonna to resuscitate. Disco was the prayer, and Confessions on a Dance Floor was the angel.
Following the relative flop of her 2000 album American Life, a politicised response to Bush’s war-mongering foreign policy, Madonna was in need of yet another epic reinvention, in a battle to regain the public’s favor. Whilst nurturing two side projects—“Hello Suckers”, a film about 1920s nightclub hostess, Texas Guinan, (for which Madonna was writing the music, which later became Hard Candy), and a Candy Darling biopic—neither of which materialised, Madonna “needed a release”.
Her leisurely respite of choice were weeks of all-nighters with producer Stuart Price, working on a new sound. She told Billboard, “When I would go to Stuart’s, and we’d go up to his loft, it was like, ‘Honey, I want to dance.’ I wanted to be happy, silly and buoyant.”
What transpired was a sound unlike anything Madonna had ever produced. It was nu-disco, a dash of EDM, hints of electropop and club—a tri-decade spanning pot of influences. Collaborating with Mirwais Ahmadzai, Patrick Leonard, and Price, the product was “ABBA on drugs”. Disco balls, 80s leotards, rainbow laser lights radiating at the ready.
The album unravels like a DJ set, each song seamlessly blending into the next. According to Madonna, that was exactly the vision, stating it was her intention to “Make a record that you can play at a party or in your car, where you don't have to skip past a ballad. It’s nonstop.”
With samples from ABBA themselves, Depeche Mode, Pet Shop Boys, Bee Gees, and Donna Summers—there was hardly an area of musical history or genre that went unincorporated.
Confessions was transcendentally self-referrential, pondering meta questions of materialism and fame, juxtaposed under the guise of “thumping, pulsing, shimmering dance beats,” enveloped in an intense spiralling under a microscope—hence the name Confessions.
Within the substance too, are references to the singer’s illustrious career, telling MTV’s Jennifer Vineyard in 2005, “If I’m going to plagiarize somebody, it might as well be me, right? I feel like I’ve earned the right to rip myself off.” “Get Together” interpolates Price’s rewrite of “Holiday” — “Music Sounds Better With You”; “Isaac” connects to a sped up “Frozen”; “Forbidden Love” shares its name with a song on Bedtime Stories; “Hung Up” features lyrics from Madonna’s duet with Prince, “Love Song”; “How High” includes references to “Nobody’s Perfect” and “I Deserve It” —both from Music.
And so, following a bombshell performance opening the 2005 MTV Europe Music Awards with a performance of “Hung Up” —clad in a indigo purple leather bomber, fishnets and matching leather boots—on November 9th 2005, Confessions dropped like the pulsating four-on-the-floor beat of “Disco Inferno”, to critical acclaim and cultural veneration. Billboard named “Hung Up” the most successful dance song of the decade. “Sorry” became Madonna’s 12th UK no. 1 hit, with “Get Together” and “Jump” also top 10 hits. The album peaked at no. 1 in 40 countries and the Grammy Award for Best Electronic/Dance Album.
Alan Braidwood for the BBC commented that “This is the most commercial album Madonna has made in 15 years and it’s magic.” Keith Caulfield of Billboard commented that Confessions was a “welcome return to form for the Queen of Pop.” Pitchfork’s Stephen M. Deusner noted that “Madonna again reinvents herself, and it appears she’s nearly lapped herself.” The impact of such a movement cannot be understated, nor can the recovered proliferation of Madonna.
The Confessions Tour, which ran from May to September 2006, was as prolific as the album itself, grossing over $194.7 million, rendering it the highest-grossing tour for a female artist at the time (a record now held by Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour). The show opened with Madonna being delivered to the stage in a disco ball, opening like Venus arising from Botticelli’s scallop shell, sending the crowd into a tizzied frenzy of dancepop melodrama.
Regardless of its success, as with the music industry, nothing comes without criticism, particularly with the concert’s performance of “Live to Tell”, which featured the saintly Madonna pinned to a cross, adorned with a crown of thorns, which drew condemnation from religious leaders. Madonna clapped back that the segment’s intention was to raise AIDS awareness, as she has consistently done throughout her career.
Christians weren’t the only religious sect with pitchforks out for Her Majesty. The album’s sole ballad, arguably, entitled “Isaac” drew criticism from a group of Israeli rabbis believing that Madonna was committing blasphemy, under a false pretence that the song was about Kabbalah scholar Yitzhak Luria (Isaac, when anglicised), when in reality, it was named for Madonna’s featured vocalist Yitzhak Sinwai, who sings background vocal hymns on the track, with references to the Biblical story of Abraham and Isaac, per Rolling Stone.
Alan Light from Rolling Stone was of the opinion that “[Confessions] won’t stand the test of time like her glorious early club hits.” Evidently, Light was proven redundant, with the album certified platinum in December 2005, a month after its release, and was ranked 3rd in VICE’s 99 Best Dance Albums of All Time. In 2007, Confessions garnered the Guinness World Record for topping record charts in the most countries, securing a spot as one of the best-selling albums of the 21st century.
And now, 21 years on, Light has been proven erred once again. It seems God has been made aware of 2026’s eerie Madonna-ic coincidences with 2005. A new President at the helm to drain our energy. Madonna living back in London. Another failed biopic (this time about Madonna herself). Back in collaboration with Stuart Price after a 15 year hiatus. More ageism from the leotard-allergic internet sleuths. God has once again taken the hint, and sent Queen Madge back to Earth to deliver a New Testament—a sequel, CONFESSIONS II.
So why now? Why a reprisal, rather than a reinvention?
Madonna’s vision, as she told Interview Magazine, was that “The world is in a very dark place and people need to dance.” Perhaps the poignant parallels with 2005 were visible to Madonna herself, and the only solution was to rehash a medicinal remedy proven successful 21 years ago.
In said interview with Mel Ottenberg, admitting her motto while making this album was “What would David Bowie do?” and that she finds doomscrolling disturbing, Madonna confessed the new themes that accompany the familiar up-tempo, pounding BPM include her unaddressed trauma, following the deaths of her brother and step-mother, and a song of healing reconciliation with daughter Lola Leon. She said, “It’s like the script of my film. It begins with death and it ends with death, but there’s all this life in between.” Though many of the album’s songs are “confessional”, Madonna assured that others were “just joy” —seemingly just in time to shoot out her discotheque powers of healing from that conical bra.
Madonna and Price agreed that the successor to the classic had “got to be as good as or better than [Confessions].” Ahead of Friday’s release, the early reviews are in, and as the BBC’s Mark Savage puts it, “It’s not. But it comes close”, citing the album’s lowpoints as the “Bit of flab around the middle”, but “Soars when it gets autobiographical.”
Others argue CONFESSIONS II is “her best album in 20 years”, and the freshly tiled dancefloor gives the Queen of Pop a “newfound purpose”.
Though they may disagree with the semantics of good and bad, one opinion is resoundingly consistent throughout reviews—Danceteria is the highlight. The song, a story set in a New York 1982 fever-dream, illustrates the snipping of the velvet rope that took Madonna Ciccone to Madonna, in convincing Michael Kamins to play the demo that led to her record deal, at the Danceteria club.
In terms of fashion, Madonna has exchanged the Confessions Tour craftsmanship of the likes of Jean Paul Gautier’s equestrian riding breeches and chiffon peasant tops, or Yves Saint Laurent’s leather boots, largely for Gucci-made fitted skirt suits and transparent slingback heels by Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarrello (following her Carrington-inspired Met Gala look).
One thing that has remained virtually identical to the antecedent is ageism and misogyny. Madonna, now 68, has long been criticised for her unabashed sexuality, including her dancing liberated in fuchsia leotards at 47 during Confessions I. In the biography Madonna: The Rebel Life, Mary Gabriel wrote that Madonna’s 1992 photobook Sex painted her through the eyes of “all the stereotypes that patriarchal society concocted for women - dutiful daughter, gamine, blond bombshell, adoring wife, bitch - in her pursuit of a new woman, a person who exercised her power freely”.
Even when speculations ran rampant about her alleged cosmetic surgery following her appearance at the 2023 Grammy Awards for her, Madonna assured the comments were signs of “a world that refuses to celebrate women past the age of 45”.
The lead single, “Bring Me Love”, is a collaboration with Sabrina Carpenter, who, like Madonna, has been long subjected to a hate-train of anti-emancipation rhetoric towards women who are diametrically opposed to shying away from provocation in performance and songs about sex. This feature seems only necessary when the same criticisms made about Madonna over 40 years ago, are still the prayers of the hateful made about the likes of Carpenter today.
Madonna’s pursuit has eternally been one of revolution for women, encouraging them to grasp their autonomy by the discoballs, and meeting her on the dance floor to spin freely. Like Madonna puts it when describing the second chapter, “It’s hard to understand the world, but out here on the dance floor, I feel so free…It’s welcoming people back to that state of mind because everybody’s worried.” Madonna has changed, as she always does, but the one thing consistent is her refusal to comply—evident from the declaration that is so consistently glittered throughout the album, “I can be whoever I wanna be.”
The jury is still out on whether the sequel will match the notoriety of its predecessor, but what is abundantly clear from the state of things, as Madonna puts it in her interview with Vogue Italia, is that “We are isolated. I hope my record is an antidote”. Evidently, the antidote is one simple command sent from above—“Dance.”
CONFESSIONS II releases Friday, July 3rd.
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