Amid the distorted synthesisers and razor-sharp beats of Girl Gone Wild, the second single from her 12th studio album, we find Madonna repeatedly insisting: "Girls, they just wanna have some fun." Let us banish from our minds the thought that there are perhaps more dignified approaches for a 53-year-old woman than singing "Girls, they just wanna have some fun" in a song named after a series of porn videos in which women are encouraged to strip off in exchange for free baseball caps, and which has furthermore been dogged by a series of allegations of the sexual exploitation of minors. This is a Madonna album, which means that if we start worrying about the value of its lyrical content, we'll be here all day. It may self-consciously reference her three unequivocal long-playing classics – opening with a quote from Like a Prayer's Act of Contrition, returning Ray of Light's sonic architect William Orbit to the producer's chair and carrying a hint of Confessions on a Dancefloor in the four-to-the-floor pounding of its opening four tracks – but the words weren't up to much on those, either. Suffice to say that MDNA also includes a rather saccharine song called Superstar, on which Madonna opines "You're like James Dean driving in a fast car", then adds "you can have the keys to my car", which does rather prompt the response: if he drives like James Dean, love, I'd keep your car keys to yourself, unless you want to lose your no-claims bonus.
Let us instead recall that another singer once suggested girls just wanna have fun, and that said singer, Cyndi Lauper, was briefly considered to be Madonna's rival. It sounds bizarre now, a reminder of just how remarkable Madonna's career is. In the week she first made the British charts, she was vying for attention with Tracey Ullman, the Thompson Twins, the Flying Pickets, Roland Rat and That's Livin' Alright by Joe Fagin. Hip-hop was still in its infancy, house music had yet to be invented and one of the guest artists on MDNA, rapper Nicki Minaj, had recently celebrated her first birthday.
What's striking isn't that Madonna is still with us – everybody's still with us, up to and including the Flying Pickets, who are about to wow the Schloss Burgfarrnbach in Nuremberg – so much as where she still is: a commanding presence at the absolute centre of pop, as capricious and changeable a genre as music has to offer. The question of how she's managed it is a good one. The stock, rather snide answer is that it has more to do with perspiration than inspiration, and there are certainly moments on MDNA when it's audibly straining to keep the pace or to shock you. The ecstasy-referencing title seems unwittingly quaint in a world of meow meow and black mamba. Give Me All Your Luvin' may be the weakest thing here: its position as the album's lead single seems to have had more to do with showing off the presence of Nicki Minaj and MIA than its featherweight melody. On the other hand, Gang Bang (not, alas, a cover of the song performed by Agadoo hitmakers Black Lace in Rita, Sue and Bob Too) isn't a bad track: augmented by a dubstep interlude, its atmosphere somewhere between brooding menace and the trance-state of a dancefloor at 4am. But it's way too long, extended largely in order for Madonna to say "bitch" a lot.
Equally, however, she can make the business of maintaining a career in pop into its 30th year look entirely effortless: Turn Up the Radio's sudden shift from ballad into house music; I'm a Sinner's metallic clank and see-sawing chorus riff. There's something hugely appealing about I Don't Give A's fizzy remodeling of the old Too Much Monkey Business/Subterranean Homesick Blues model of rapid-fire lyrical inventory, its focus shifted from not needing a weatherman to know which way the wind blows to the more pressing matter of how Madonna's polymath talents are thriving following her divorce from Guy Ritchie. The closing Falling Free is flatly fantastic: an Orbit-helmed, beautifully turned ballad, subtly decorated with strings and soft electronics.
It's one moment when MDNA reaches the heights of the predecessors it keeps referencing. The rest is neither the return to form it thinks it is, nor the disaster Madonna should rightly have delivered at some stage in her musical career but never quite has: there have been highs and lows, but never an outright catastrophe – a state of affairs she's more than made up for in the world of celluloid. Instead, MDNA turns out to be just another Madonna album. It's already had the biggest single-day pre-order in iTunes history: business as usual for the most remarkable business enterprise in pop.
