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Dear Gloffy,
I have a rock and roll boyfriend. I love everything about him … except for his jeans. He wears them every day. He never washes them. They are full of holes. They stink. I tell him how gross his jeans are. He laughs at me. Sometimes in front of his friends he will make me smell them for a laugh. I know he's just being a guy. But seriously … I want to barf sometimes, they reek so bad. I'm sure if anyone knows how to get a guy out of his favorite pants, it's Jeremy Gloff. So what's your secret?
Signed,
Grossed Out

Dear Grossed Out,
First of all thanks for your confidence in my skills. I never kiss and tell! Asking a rock and roll boyfriend to disregard his favorite jeans is like asking Liberace to ditch the fur, like asking Whitney to ditch the crack, or like asking Michael Jackson to ditch the young boys. When it comes to rock and roll boys, dirty jeans are part of the package. If you really want to get even you could stop washing downstairs. Next time Mr. Rock and Roll goes in for the kill, you can provide him with a sniff of his own medicine honaaaay!!! Or just love your boyfriend as is, like Stevie Nicks did in her 1994 classic "Blue Denim" ("I saw him the other day/he reminded me of blue denim … "). I wonder how bad Mick Fleetwood's pants stunk.

Dear Gloffy.
I had a friend that is driving me crazy. He's cool, but all he does is name drop. It's starting to grate me and drive me nuts. He talks about how much this person or that person at the club loves him. He brags about being on guest lists. He brags about getting backstage at shows and about his connections. How do you tactfully let someone know how stupid the shit they say sounds?
Signed,
Not Impressed

Dear Not Impressed,
Being a z-list local celebrity myself (also known as a fauxlebrity), there are certain conducts and codes that come with the territory. First, never talk about how much people love you … let your popularity speak for itself. Second, never take advantage of your connections. If you get in the club free, or if you're granted access behind the scenes … let the photographer's photos do the talking. A true fauxlebrity never acknowledges how awesome they are. I challenge someone to argue with me that the most fabulous icon to ever grace this earth is the divine miss Grace Jones. G-Jo sang her chilly night life anthem "Nightclubbing" with the perfect amount of irony and sass. Grace Jones never bragged or name dropped. Her fierceness spoke for itself. My advice to you is tell your friend to take a page out of the book of Grace Jones.
 
Write to me!!!  Go to JeremyGloff.com and click the link to DEAR GLOFFY!!!!  Look for me on Reax.TV!!!!

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After my series of ten blogs I think I've at least hinted that I'm a Madonna aficionado. Sure enough, Madonna's been with me the greater part of my life. Her new albums are events. It was with great anticipation that Hard Candy made its way into my life.

The night of Hard Candy's release was certainly a special one. I drove with three friends to Downtown Disney in my car, which was re-named "THE HARD CANDY TOUR BUS". Virgin Megastore was holding a Madonna release party. Trivia. Fellow Madonna fans. The evening held great promise, and it did deliver. Driving to Orlando we listened to Confessions On A Dance Floor one last time…officially drawing a close to the Confessions era. We all knew all the words…and it reaffirmed what a great album Confessions was. This album had separately been the soundtracks to all of our lives. And our love for it was now shared in a car.

There was a really cool vibe at the Virgin Store. Naturally, there were lots of gays. None of the strangers really talked to each other, which is unfortunate. It would have been cool to make new friends and bond with strangers based on the common thread of loving Madonna. But it wasn't to be.

Regardless, my crew and I had a wonderful time filling up our arms with Madonna stuff. It was with great eagerness we cashed out at the register and ran back to my car to listen to the new album. Sure, a couple of us heard it on her myspace page…but to actually hear Hard Candy "out in the field" was a whole different experience. Madonna's music works sitting at a computer, but its real place is out in life. In the car. On the dance floor. In motion.

And so the new Madonna album played. I remember upon first listening to the album my friend Okie and I agreed that Madonna's voice sounded grating on the album. I wonder to myself…if this is just because we've gotten used to her deeper and more emotive singing. Back in the early days, during Madonna and Like A Virgin… her voice held a similar high-pitched quality. Had those albums only come out now…how would we have felt about her voice on those albums? Hard Candy is certainly topically a return to the care-free lyricism of the first couple albums. I suppose it's only appropriate that Madonna's voice resumes shades of that early era. "Candy Shop" to "Four Minutes" and on. At some points during the ride back to Tampa the energy in me reached the fever pitch that the perfect Madonna song has sometimes given me. Each song was catchy. The album flowed nicely…the only glaring mis-step at first seeming to be "Spanish Lesson".

So what are my thoughts on the new Madonna album now that's it's been in my life for a few days? I like it a lot. But I cannot say I like it a lot with the gusto I was once able to say that about a Madonna album. I have a huge CD collection…and when I put a new Madonna CD in that collection…it always stood out glaring like a diamond. Hard Candy is a good album…but it doesn't have any more impact or relevance to my life than anything any of my other favorite artists have released this year. It's more than up to par. But it was a soul moving experience like every other Madonna album had been up to this point.

So what happened? Am I just getting older? Am I outgrowing pop music? Is it me? Or is it Madonna? In a way, Hard Candy is the perfect follow-up to Confessions. I think we can all agree that pushing the dark-weighty-topical grooves of Confessions any further would have been stale. There is a certain freshness and spunk to Hard Candy. It's fun. It's sassy. It's primarily weightless…like I said earlier…much like Madonna's first two albums. Sonically, many of the songs throw back to the early 80s/late 70s sound in a way Confessions promised to but didn't. Liner note readers will notice that former Prince and The Revolution guitarist Wendy Melvoin adds some funky licks to the sassy "She's Not Me". It's almost feels like 1982 again.

Despite the pop nature of the album, there are the somewhat experimental moments. "Incredible" goes from a melancholy stuttering pop song into a long coda full of grunts and swirling synth loops. "Give It To Me" benefits from an off-center bridge.

The albums best songs are the ones that invoke the "be free and get up on the dance floor" aesthetic of Madonna's early work. "Give It 2 Me" is a shouter. "Beat Goes On" and "Heartbeat" are effective calls to the dance floor. The only track to recall the more emotive, mature feel of later Madonna is the affecting "Miles Away". I do have to admit I found myself crying to this song driving for lunch the other day…recalling a life experience the song spoke of. I did take a couple other small nuggets with me from the album. "Incredible" is a call to recapture some of the romanticism of youth…while "Beat Goes On" and "Give It 2 Me" both urge forward movement and independence. I could use a bit of all of the above in my life.

I think what I miss most about the new Madonna album is her heavy emotional stamp. Our culture has moved into a place where most everything is centered around mindless fun. Madonna's earlier carefree pop music was released along-side the female-folk boom in the late 80s, alongside grunge albums in the early 90s, alongside the ska-punk revival in the mid 90s. And as society dumbed down, Madonna wised up. In the early part of this decade, as pop got more and more mindless (and counterculture became first commercial, then completely dissolved) Madonna delivered smart, thought provoking dance music. At fifty years old, I suppose our Madonna has a right to want to join the fun. But Madonna always had something different to offer. As trite as her lyrics sometimes got, at least at best Madonna was always attempting to channel into a depth of thought. Hard Candy is a very very effective Madonna dance album…it's a classic in some ways. But it's the kind of product and music that blends right into everything that's going on now…rather than sticking out from it. Hard Candy keeps Madonna afloat alive and well in this modern age. This album will keep her relevance among the youth market and most of us older fans. And probably an album like this is the only way Madonna can survive the current state of pop culture and the entertainment industry. But I'm still a bit bummed. I liked when Madonna was a pioneer for us weird ones too. At 33, I always appreciate a call to the dance floor, or even in the case of Hard Candy, six calls to the dance floor. But it takes more than that these days to catch and keep my interest for a long time. This may be the Madonna album with the shortest shelf live in my life. Time will tell.

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