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Madonna goes back to her roots and I love it! Hard Candy is as sweet as pop was in the 80's, only it's updated with a lot of electronic riffs, hip hop and much more bittersweet melancholy. She has dropped the likes of Mirwais and William Orbit for this project, and opting to work with the likes of Justin Timberlake, Kanye West and Pharrell Williams instead who may have given Madonna her umpteenth second wind as the album scores big with a lot of critics. The album is very personal, but it evades the "Shanti Ashtangi" magic of her much beloved Ray of Light, released more than a decade ago.

At 49, Madonna has spent the past decade incorporating trip-hop, Eurodisco and electronica in her music. They're all absent in this album this time, giving way to an unpretentious and poignant dance party. As Cary Ganz of Rolling Stone points out, Madonna's Hard Candy "is an act of submission." The rhetoric of "Hard Candy" is much more contemporary: the collection explores her midlife crisis on her own artistic journey, lambasting record producers indirectly by making use of--ironically--the musical syntax of artists whom record producers may be in love with at the moment.