It's a surprisingly honest, if musically uneven, album from the Queen of Pop.

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Well, then. So much for the "World Peace" message she left us with at the end of her Super-Bowl halftime performance this year. Then again, it was never the right message for Madonna, pop music's most excellent conflict-causer for three decades now. When she reemerged into the spotlight at the beginning of 2012, she was in full provocateur mode, sniffing that Lady Gaga's music was a mere "reductive" knockoff of her own material, tossing antifeminist insults at Ricky Gervais during the Golden Globes, and releasing a track list replete with click bait titles like "Girl Gone Wild" and, well, "Gang Bang." She was reminding people not only that she was back, not only of her staggering rap sheet of hits, and not only that she started this whole game that Gaga, Rihanna, Perry, Ke$ha, Britney et. al. have been making so much money playing. She was reminding that more than any of those new-nice upstarts, Madonna's edge is that she has edge.

The music is huge, and some of it good. The factory-ordered club fizz of "Girl Gone Wild," though, opens things inauspiciously, making it appear as if MDNA will be entirely about chasing last year's chart trends. But then the Material Girl goes actually wild in her dancefloor aspirations with a one-two followup: the aforementioned robotic revenge tale "Gang Bang," and the spider-web synths and cascading choruses of "I'm Addicted," which takes the love-as-drug cliche and embodies the icky rush that the cliche suggests. It's not till the eighth track, though, that MDNA delivers its biggest jaw-dropper. Producer Martin Solveig opens "I Don't Give A" with some chintzy '80s FM funk guitaring, and then Madonna starts rapping: "Wake up, ex wife, this is your life." It's a narration of the her daily routine in the wake of her 2008 divorce with Guy Ritchiethe way she hustles about with her kids, meets with managers, forgets to say her prayers, and can't escape recurring guilt about her failed marriage. It's a fun, fun song that also, in its specificity, feels true. Rarely do pop stars as high gloss as this one so convincingly reveal their inner lives to be a mess.

Maybe this is why the lead single, "Give Me All Your Luvin'," has failed on the charts: It's peppy, but, lately, Madonna isn't. The song's speaking-and-spelling cheerleader choruses feel put-on and fakey. Ditto for "B-Day Song," a bonus track featuring M.I.A. that might just be ironic in its sunniness: "I'm a happy girl" Madonna insists over and over. But with an album title like MDNAa nod to club drugs and to the idea that here we have Madonna at her Madonna-esteven the dumbly smiling radio grabs feel like noble failures. Guilt's been with Madonna since before her "Like a Prayer" days, and so has the idea of pop music as escape from it. "World peace" was indeed the wrong slogan for her. The kind of serenity she's really after is personal.

Excerpt from:
Madonna's Manic, Personal 'MDNA'