Song: “Hung Up”

Last night I played this song on my iPod for a girl who hadn’t heard it yet. She stood in a crowded patio and rocked out like her own little commercial for portable music devices. I wanted her to hear it because I seem to be the only person who remembers when the lyrics for this song were on Like a Prayer, in the Prince-penned “Love Song.”

Madonna’s rehashing lots of lyrics on this album, which sounds like I’m stuck inside an episode of Queer As Folk.

Eric aptly described a moment in “Hung Up,” as: The song goes for a little walk. Daft Punk does it too, where the song seems to be leaving you for a little while, checking out what’s going on in the other room, and then comes back in. I suppose it’s for when you’re at the dance club, so you can lean over and scream into someone’s ear, “Do you want to go?”

So my cassette of Like a Prayer, purchased in Mayde Creek, Texas, right after it debuted, is Patchouli scented. No, really. Did anybody else get the scented cassette? The thing was so stinky that I had to keep it in a shoebox because my mother accused me of hiding hippies in my closet. Years later I always know when I’ve found the box that contains my old cassettes because it still smells like a Hackey Sack circle in there. Years and years have passed, and my Like a Prayer still smells like Madonna’s late-Eighties phase. I suppose it could be worse. It could smell like her Erotica album, which was pretty stinky.

And since I’m talking Madonna, can someone please make it so that I can sing “Love Don’t Live Here Anymore” at every Karaoke joint for the rest of my life?

This new album is fine for playing in the background, for unleashing my inner gay boy — who in my head looks exactly like my old friend Cory Cruiser when we were doing Polaroid Stories (which is to say, hot, skinny, and a shaved head covered in glitter, with a big fun laugh and the hint of a Texas twang) — but it’s lacking a kickass song like “Music,” that absolutely rules.

But this song about New York? Where she makes it rhyme with “dork”? Then she says “eff off.” And then she tells you to go to Texas, where “they golf.” I had just forgotten about the pilates incident, and now this.

When Madonna thinks she’s being patriotic, singing about American Life, New York, or American Pie, it all goes horribly wrong. I much prefer it when she just wants to slap my ass and turn the volume up.