If you’re the kind of music fan who learns by scrubbing lists of the best of things, you might see Ray of Light as the last essential Madonna album (or hang around ’til 2000’s exquisite Music, lured in by the folk-meets-Fennesz inversion of “Don’t Tell Me”), but trailing off there, you miss a world of bops, flops, and experiments Madonna pursues out of sheer tenacity and self-preservation. By year 20 of her career, she’d scored a Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Motion Picture and a New York Times best seller and topped the charts again with a studio album recounting everything she learned as a new mother and a student of Eastern mysticism and European dance music. In ten years, Madonna was a pop star with a dozen international hit records anxiously setting her sights on a lasting film career. In five years, she maneuvered through the eclectic scene at the lower-Manhattan nightclub Danceteria - which collected cool kids who didn’t make it through the door to party with the socialites and celebrities at Studio 54 - and pieced together a demo a resident DJ ran up the pipeline to the label heads who released her early singles and self-titled debut album. Madonna Ciccone moved to New York City from Detroit at 20 years old in the late ’70s with a dream of making it in showbiz, be it as a dancer, a rock star, or a singer. People want to remember their favorite figures at their best, but the miscalculations and recalibrations that happen afterward are just as integral to the story of a brilliant career as the moves made at the artist’s peak. There’s more love for “Taxman” and “Drive My Car” than “Say Say Say” or “Got My Mind Set on You.” The Queen movie’s narrative ends early at Live Aid the Elton flick calls it at “I’m Still Standing,” before things get weird in the ’80s.
We spend the next 20 years weaponizing their own standards against them, calling each album a “radical departure” or a “return to form” or else quietly losing interest in everything but the classics. We honor the first 20 years of music legends’ careers for the drive that elevates them from anonymity to celebrity and the vision that keeps them in flight throughout the best years. Madame X wants to be Eva Perón again, but it feels more like Carmen Sandiego.
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