Music

Pop fans d’un certain age will remember the jolt: the electrifying shock of the new, followed by the realisation that nothing will ever be the same again.

That was Madonna, not only at the start but over and over and over, in a career full of classic pop singles, each of which summed up their era yet haven’t aged an iota; mastering the pop video format before anyone else understood its power; appropriating and subverting countless notions of femininity, and pretty much leading fashion, pop music and pop-culture iconography from the front for the best part of two decades.

If she’s done more than a few dodgy movie roles and disposable mum’s-favourite ballads, and if she has occasionally suffered from over-seriousness and lost her way, well, ‘Nobody’s Perfect’, as Madonna says on Music. It’s her strongest and most musically adventurous album in years.

Although 1998’s William Orbit-produced Ray Of Light was her first foray into what we’ve now come to refer to as ‘dance music’, Madonna has, remember, been a dance artist all along. And this album is less a continuance of …Light than, marvellously, an echo of the transcendent lost-in-music ethos of her Immaculate Collection era, updated for Y2K and beyond.

Music was largely co-written and produced by Mirwais Ahmadzai (until recently, a quirky also-ran in French electro-funk circles), he brings an angular, plasticky, funked-up and blissed-out sensibility to the party, as well as – significantly – an irreverence for Madonna’s voice: he treats her not as that Evita-era ‘proper singer,’ but as source material. She’s distorted halfway to fuck, twisted through Vocoders, left harshly bare – and she hasn’t sounded better in a decade.

And (sigh!) the singles – the staggering dance monolith of ‘Impressive Instant,’ the album’s standout track, is Björk’s ‘Violently Happy’ via Underworld. The spun-sugar Hello Kitty keyboards of ‘What It Feels Like For a Girl’ is a ‘Little Fluffy Clouds’ for the under-16s, sweet but not sentimental. The hipster swing of ‘Amazing’ is Austin Powers via ‘Express Yourself’. And the louche, delicious ‘Music’s squelchy stop-start grooves showcase the finest-ever use of the word ‘bourgeoisie’ in a pop song.

So what if there are some needless attempts at profundity (the forgettable journal jottings of 'Gone’, the aerobicised karaoke horror of 'American Pie'). The production is innovative and imaginative enough to make the whole album a consistently surprising and engaging grower.

They don’t make pop stars like they used to. Madonna, mother of two, thirty-nine years old: the original and best, in full effect.