My Madonna confession

Madonna’s new album, Confessions II, is due out this summer, and Saturday night she had an invite-only event at West Hollywood’s fabled gay bar, The Abbey, to celebrate her album.

As MC previously wrote, Madonna is bringing out a dance album just as Charli xcx declared the “dance floor is dead”, which is the kind of stunting we expect from popstars now, just as we expect Madonna to DJ a dance set at a famous gay bar. Madonna has, from her earliest days, always been tapped into queer culture, mainstreaming vogueing and New York’s ball scene in the early Nineties (Paris Is Burning and early Nineties Madonna basically wrote 2000s pop culture).

But my secret Madonna confession is that I haven’t liked any of her music since the 1990s. I fully support her right to continue making music and perform—as long as guys like Paul McCartney, Bruce Springsteen, and Steven Tyler are still touring, I don’t want to hear that Madonna is “too old” for this—I just don’t put any of her new music in rotation. I can feel MC’s eye muscles twitching from here.

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I’m not sure Confessions II is going to change that. The first track, “I Feel So Free”, is out, and it’s fine. It is a dance track. I bet I will hear this on other people’s work out playlists, just not my own. Presumably, it will also be big in da clurb. By the same token, though, I bet in a few years all the pop girlies will have a song that sounds like this. (Lily Allen, at least, is already on board, as she attended the Confessions party over the weekend.) Her music might not appeal to me, personally, anymore, but Madonna’s influence still looms large. Sorry, Charli, but as long as Madonna is putting out new beats, the dance floor is not dead, and in a few years, you’ll probably be ready for a new dance era, too.