One more dance—then what?
I bought Madonna’s new album, Confessions II, last week because optimism is a condition from which I have never fully recovered.
I had no expectation that any of its singles would become a hit or even trouble the Billboard charts. The album itself managed a week at No. 1 on the Billboard 200, which feels about right for Madonna now: the faithful arrive en masse, buy the record, and then everyone goes home.
Then there is poor Sabrina Carpenter, who somehow emerged from the proceedings with her first certified flop, Bring Your Love.
The album is not exactly bad; that would almost be more interesting. It is boring. Fragile is the one song I would call genuinely good, while One Step Away has performed the peculiar trick of becoming considerably better after you’ve heard it enough times to qualify for Stockholm syndrome. Several of the others are doing the same thing. Stuart Price’s instrumentation is lovely: polished, atmospheric, and occasionally hypnotic. Then Madonna starts speaking over it, and I find myself wishing Price had gently told her not to.
But perhaps that is also why I cannot quite dismiss the record. Beneath all the spoken bits, the poses, and the determined attempts to remain culturally dangerous, there are flashes of something much more interesting: an older artist with an extraordinary history and a distinctive voice.
Which leads to the Madonna album I still dream of.
No insistence that 68 is the new 27. No inappropriate stunts. No desperate wink at TikTok. Give me Madonna doing a Dietrich: standards, torch songs, perhaps a little Cole Porter, a little Gershwin—something smoky and devastating. Put her in a decent, elegant gown, give her an orchestra—or better yet, just a pianist—a microphone, and one spotlight. Let the years, the history, and the voice do the work.
Because old age need not be the enemy of reinvention. Sometimes the boldest reinvention is to stop running from the person you have become. Madonna has spent forty years teaching popular culture how to look at her. It might be fascinating, at this stage, if she simply stood still and let us listen.