Station to Station: Madonna's Nonstop Erotic Cabaret

Confession: My favorite Ma­donna­ album is You Can Dance, which is barely even a Madonna album at all. It’s really just a bunch of quickie disco remixes with an excellent red cover and a photo of our girl wearing a funky bullfighter costume and no slow songs at all, just the continuous electro-throb of “Physical Attraction,” “Over and Over” and “Into the Groove.” It came out at the end of 1987, the year the Madonna philosophy of music conquered radio so thoroughly that everybody thought it would never fade away, which turned out to be true. “Candy Shop,” the lead track on her new Hard Candy, is my favorite song in the universe right now—but it would fit right in on You Can Dance. It’s got a very ’80s groove, with Madonna chanting, “My sugar is raw!” over the Neptunes’ version of a cheap Latin-disco synth-thump. If you heard it on the radio, you wouldn’t necessarily know it was Madonna. But you’d know it was a Madonna fan.

You can never tell what anybody’s favorite Madonna hits will be, because she has satu­rated pop music so deeply for so absurdly long. For me it’s “Angel,” “Who’s That Girl,” “Live to Tell,” “Keep It Together”; for you it might be “Papa Don’t Preach” or “Deeper and Deeper” or “Frozen.” Some of her songs are so beautiful it hurts to feel them pierce my body, making me too sad to listen to them (“What It Feels Like for a Girl,” “Promise to Try”). Some make me happy every time, like “Dress You Up”—that thwamp-thwamp-thwamp robo-snare intro, exactly­ one second long, and exactly as perfect as any number of equally joyous seconds in that song. Some become my go-to karaoke jams (“Crazy for You” on a vodka night, “Justify My Love” for bourbon); some evoke deep historical para­doxes (“Angel” is the same song as both Lou Reed’s “Crazy Feeling” and the Stylistics’ “Betcha by Golly, Wow”—how did that happen?); sometimes she says, “whee!” and sometimes she says, “hey!” Either way, I’m always listening.

Madonna screwed me up good, so I always care what she’s up to. She was the first woman who ever told me I can dance (I can’t), and the first who told me I came when she wished for me (I’ll have to take her word on that one). Of all the complex females in my life, Madonna was the one who taught me how to be completely exasperated by a woman, and how to like it. She taught me devotion in the Catholic sense of the word, which means a ritual that signifies getting burned by the universe over and over. She’s frequently kind and she’s suddenly cruel, busting horrific moves like Evita, the English accent or the “Secret” video—all just her way of showing me that love is pain. But the way she growls the word “heart” in the second verse of  “Crazy for You,” the moment in the “Open Your Heart” 12-inch remix when she sneers, “Whatsa matter? Are you scared of me or something?”—these are cosmic events in my Madonnadolatrous universe. I honestly never go to the movies without thinking about the scene from the “Into the Groove” video where she puts her head on the guy’s shoulder and lets him feed her popcorn. Oh, Madonna—you put this in me, so now what? So now what?

She’s been into time travel ­lately—her last couple of albums have lead singles where she sings, “tick tock, tick tock,” a bold move for a pop star who will soon celebrate her 50th birthday. The ABBA-­sampling “Hung Up,” from her 2005 gem Confessions on a Dance Floor, was her best hit in ages, and “4 Minutes” is almost as great, using the ticking-clock sound effect to hype the urgency of the dance floor, but also as a way to sing about time passing. Madonna, Timbaland and Justin Timberlake appear as a mod-squad trio of superheroes, with the song marking the final countdown to Disco Armageddon. Madonna is out to save the world by making it dance, except she’s made her four minutes last 25 years.

Hard Candy, like You Can Dance or Confessions on a Dance Floor, is a love song to disco, piling on ’70s flourishes like the Miami-style ring-my-bell percussion and faux–Nile Rodgers guitars. Madonna was always a disco fan who was enraptured with disco more fiercely than anyone ever dreamed—while your average disco singer couldn’t wait to graduate to show tunes or mainstream R&B (Donna Summer used to talk about operetta), Madonna was possibly the first great disco singer who aspired to be a great disco singer, rather than a lapsed rock, jazz or soul singer. She lived to get lost in the nonstop erotic cabaret of postpunk synth-pop, the Egyptian-lover sound-clash of early electro, the perfect beats of the New York hip-hop that already seemed impossibly long-lived in 1983—she couldn’t imagine anybody needing to hear any music besides disco, because the way she heard it, disco could do it all.