The GREAT Pat Leonard (producer) being interviewed by Boy Culture talking about Madonna.
Part 1:
http://www.boyculture.com/boy_cultur...k-leonard.html
Part 2:
http://www.boyculture.com/boy_cultur...t-of-view.html
OMG, SPILL THAT TEA, PAT....especially the BIB.
"BC: Madonna is consistently attacked as a non-artist, someone who has somehow skated by for 35 years on sex and hype. How do you react when people scoff at her musicality, who don't see her as an artist?
PL: It pisses me off, to be honest. The people that do get credited as being real artists often times are just “cool” and that gets interpreted as art. And these days, there are way too many talent-show winners, and they get called artists because they have some crazy-good voice. I have issues with these things, but I won’t go into it because I’ll probably have my house burned down by the people that make Auto-Tune. I can assure the world listening and looking at Madonna that they don’t have any reason to ever defend her or feel insecure about it and all I can say is I’ve worked with a lot of people — I’ve worked with a lot of people — and ... hard to be any better or more artistic than her.
There’s people with a more controlled voice — the word “better” is not fair, because how can you have a better voice than the voice that sang “Like a Prayer”? You just go through the list of singer-songwriters through the years — Neil Young, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, none of these people were “singers” But these are the ones that the most art came from. I think her lyrics were taken for granted all those years ago; you look at the individual lines and this is what people need to think about now, those statements she made all those years ago. I’m certain she’s still doing it.
My knee-jerk is to defend her always, but then I have the demos where she sang a song, having written it 15 minutes before, and it was a #1 record and remains valid 30 years later, who’s gonna tell me that’s not a real artist?"