@ Matthew H: The soundtracks and remix album were to buy her some time while she took a well-earned break and worked on her next album. Incidentally, ‘You Can Dance’ has the song ‘Spotlight’ which she recorded for – and left off – ‘True Blue’, and it’s a cracking song.

Madonna was very much about controversy even back then, and she clearly had the pop-knowledge to see that a song about a teen pregnancy would resonate with her fans and give her some headlines. She was clearly trying to step up in terms of maturity after the ‘adult’ ballad ‘Live To Tell’, and everything on PDP – from the strings to the subject matter – was designed to show it.

I’m really surprised nobody has drawn a line to her other ‘controversial’ song just 18 months earlier, ‘Like A Virgin’: There we have Madonna – all puppy fat and squeaks – singing about sexual intercourse with someone that makes it feel like “The very first time”. Here we are the next year and she’s – uh-oh! Pregnant! She herself probably understood this connection. She had managed to rope in the teenage audience of ’85 by making them feel ‘naughty’, and here she was many months later attempting to keep them interested by being naughty and mature. It worked. She stayed a star and managed to build on her fame. ’86 was the year pop shed itself of the also-rans. True Blue was the first post-Thriller pop ‘event’ album. After ’86 it would be the US stars – with all the money the US record companies have to throw at them – that would endure as international icons (with one exception). Michael Jackson, Madonna, Prince, Whitney Houston… and George Michael, were all pop stars in a different league.

I like PDP; it’s a strong pop single from a strong pop album, and it has that hint of controversy that Madonna used a lot. An understandably instant hit.

I’d agree with Tom’s 9/10, the urgency of the music and the performance work well for me – it’s maybe not quite as good as preceding single ‘Live To Tell’ though.

I’m not much for the “PLLLLLEEEEEEEAAAAAAAASSSSSSE” but then I’m not much for this album in the first place, it was as if getting married had made her more normal (in the Kirsty Young sense) than was good for her art. Not her success, obv.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPf0jCF1wHQ

That is truly dire on so many levels.

I wasn’t aware of the plagiarism suit – it seems a superficial similarity to me

Not sure how to do the html code, but his video is on youtube, the spam protector is not letting me post the link or even register for some reason.

@49, Steve. The strings don’t sound especially synthetic to me either. Punctum above seemed to suggest that the strings are real later on, i.e., in the middle eight and thereafter. Can anyone confirm this? They sound the same to me, and, in general, it would be a bit odd to pay for a bunch of string-players and then not use them (except possibly as a sample source) for your big F-minor intro.

Utterly unrelated point: the font on the single sleeve reminded me of The Mary Tyler Moore Show font (a big influence on any ’70s childhood!). Comparing images now, the font’s not *that* close, but there’s something there.

True, Steve, synth brass always sounds like a crap Roman fanfare, and some house piano sounds pretty mousey now. It does sound like “house piano” though, rather than an attempt to be Beethoven.

Ahem. My nomination for pop’s most exciting intro, setting up a song that never relents…. Blockbuster. And the air horns on Set You Free do a similar “pay attention!” job.