Let’s pretend that Westlife didn’t ruin what has been a great autumn for chart-toppers: Oasis, Gorillaz, Sugababes and Arctic Monkeys all with top quality number ones in September and October 2005. And now here’s Madge, wrapping the season up with the best of the lot?
Hung Up, by Madonna (her 11th of thirteen #1s)
3 weeks, from 13th November – 4th December 2005
The sole impressive thing about ‘You Raise Me Up’ was Westlife scoring one of their biggest hits six and a half years into their career. Madonna sees that, thinks ‘cute’, and smashes it out of the park with ‘Hung Up’, a full twenty-three years on from her debut single.
What’s so good about it? It’s a dance anthem, but then so are many of Madonna’s hits. It’s neo-disco, but that’s yet another return for the genre in a new millennium that hasn’t been short of seventies inspired tunes. It’s a very ‘00s-era mash-up, but not the first to make the charts, or number one. Maybe it’s just the pure joyousness of it: it soars, it pounds, it flirts. It is my personal favourite of all Madonna’s thirteen chart-toppers.
At the same time, I’m also deliberately ignoring the big pink elephant in the room. The ABBA sample. Madonna + ABBA (an ABBA song inspired by Donna Summer) = gay heaven. I’m not sure allowing Madonna to get her hands on the electronic pan-pipes from ‘Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)’ could have gone wrong, but this was only the third time that Benny & Bjorn had ever permitted a sample from one of their songs. They needn’t have worried.
Cleverly, ‘Hung Up’ sticks to the spirit of the original, about needing a man in the middle of the night, so much so that it feels like Part II. But importantly, while Frida and Agnetha’s sexual tension is never resolved, Madonna quickly loses patience with her reluctant man. From Waiting for your call every night and day, I’m fed up, I’m tired of waiting of you… to You’ll wake up one day, But it’ll be too late…
In the video, Madonna runs through a particularly sexy ballet warm up, wearing a pink leotard. I remember some disparaging comments at the time, about a woman of her age blah blah blah, but watching it back now she looks amazing. If my arse looks that good at forty-seven, I will happily parade around town in a pink leotard. It is even more impressive to watch, knowing that she had broken eight bones in a horse riding accident weeks before filming.
It wasn’t just ‘Hung Up’ that brought Madonna back to the forefront of hit making. The ‘Confessions on a Dancefloor’ album was seen as a big return to form, and potentially the best LP of her career. So good that it would offer one further #1, a song every bit as good as this…
Strangely, even though I shouldn’t like, I kind of dig “Hung Up.” Perhaps the sampling of ABBA’s ‘Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)’ – yes, I suppose I’m the rare rock fan who likes ABBA!
IMHO, “Hung Up” is Madonna’s most recent decent song. While I like some of her early songs from the ’80s, her music over the past 20 years hasn’t been my cup of tea.
Why shouldn’t you like ‘Hung Up’, or ABBA, Christian! You do you, as the kids say, and leave the rock snobs to miss out 😉
After American Life, where Madonna swung for the fences and tried, and I emphasise tried (I’m still mesmerised by her complete mastery of rap – move over 2Pac, Jay Z and Biggie – on the title track and such lyrical masterpieces such as “I’m drinking a soy latte/I get a double shot/It goes right through my body/And you know I’m satisfied”), to make some grand political and social statement while embracing revolutionary imagery and iconography, only to be rewarded with some of the worst reviews of her career and a disastrous commercial reception, with disappointing album sales, radio airplay and singles performance, this was Madonna retreating to the safety of what she knew best: dance-pop and nu-disco. She was clearly determined to get herself another massive hit, and thank God for that.
Because this is a fantastic song. I absolutely love it. It’s ridiculously catchy, instantly memorable and has an infectious energy that makes it almost impossible not to enjoy. I actually remember hearing this song before I ever heard ABBA’s “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)” and I remember the older kids in my primary school talking about how she ripped of ABBA and even my mom was complaining about it not understanding how sampling worked.
Some people have criticised Madonna’s use of the ABBA sample as lazy or overly reliant on an already iconic hook, and I can understand where they’re coming from. But personally, I think she uses it brilliantly. Rather than simply coasting on the familiarity of the original, she builds an entirely new dance-pop banger around it, and the sample fits so seamlessly into the song that it feels like an essential part of the composition rather than a cheap gimmick.
After the pretentious, painfully self-serious and occasionally downright embarrassing mess that was American Life, hearing Madonna abandon the political posturing and get back to making irresistible dance-floor anthems was an enormous relief. Sometimes you don’t need to make some profound statement about society or the state of the world. Sometimes you just need to make a great dance-pop song with strong nu-disco elements, and that’s exactly what she did here.
I will defend the rap from American Life to my dying day… I drive my Mini Cooper and I’m feeling super duper… Iconic! Hollywood, the album’s second single, is great too. Hell, so’s ‘Die Another Day’. All three were #2s in the UK, so while the album might have been slated, she was still commercially successful, in Britain at least. I don’t think ‘Hung Up’ had the feel of a huge comeback in that sense, at least.
But at the same time… Hung Up is next level altogether. Like you say, the sample makes the song, but doesn’t define it. It really does feel like a continuation of what ABBA made 25 years earlier, in tone and lyrics.
Totally back on top form with the album and this first single – I saw Madge for the 3rd time on the Confessions tour and I think it was the best one of the 3. I bought Holiday when that came out and I never stopped rating Madonna, right up to her 2026 dance comeback which is fab too, a great album chocka block with great dance tracks of varying moods – and not to mention the Kylie joint top 10, the double divas being amongst the 20th century elite who can still go top 40 with new material – that’ll be Cher, ABBA and The Beatles then of the pre-90’s crowd, and precious few others from the 80’s. I’d also add that Gimme Gimme Gimme wasnt the most popular ABBA iconic dance track until Madonna’s sampling – that was Voulez Vous or Lay All Your Love On Me (Dancing Queen isnt really banging disco dance, more of a euphoric shuffle that they came back to in the non-single If It Wasn’t For The Nights, too frit to release as a single sadly after the slagging Chiquitita got for resembling Fernando, which is doesn’t).
I thought Confessions II was great as well, and was very happy for her Kylie duet to go top 10. Who’d have thought that both Kylie and Madonna would have more Top 10s in the 2020s than they did in the 2010s!
And while Hung Up might have helped Gimme Gimme Gimme become one of ABBA’s most popular tracks, we all know it started when it was used as the theme tune to an iconic sitcom 🙂
Louise strike again.