Madonna at 60

In all likelihood, the last thing Madonna would want to hear, this sixteenth of August 2018, is "happy sixtieth, Madge!" We really can't understand what growing older means for a woman who lives under the lens of showbiz, nor can we imagine how much harder her path becomes, despite all the battles already won and the well-earned privilege of having nothing left to prove to anyone. And yet here we still are, waiting to catch her out, because through her our own personal certainties take shape and then crumble. We're incapable of granting her the luxury of doing whatever the hell she wants, and she, in turn, responds in kind, in one of pop's longest-running vicious circles. We could argue for hours about what Madonna has meant to each of us, and the conversation would never run dry, thanks both to her most die-hard fans and to the eternal detractors who have criticized her every move since that distant sixth of October 1982, the day "Everybody" was released. Madonna remains an entity unto herself, the meta-popstar who has opened and slammed one door after another, driving generations of listeners both mad and wild, album after album. From taming (and at times breathlessly chasing) trends, to her unwavering need to perform "Candy Shop" live, from the glossy pages of Vogue to the orphanages of Malawi, Madonna "provokes" even when she's simply minding her own damn business. As she herself said during a famous speech:

“People say I’m controversial, but I think the most controversial thing I have ever done is to stick around”

To wish her a happy birthday, we've put together one of the many possible overviews of a staggering four-decade career in music, gathering a track not released as an official single from each of her studio albums – a commented playlist of songs that, inevitably, have been left forgotten in the shuffle of her bigger hits. Obviously this is just a bit of fun, and the list has been drawn up according to the tastes of the person writing it, but if you feel like it, you're invited to think up your own personal list of Madonna's best "non-singles" (or even the best singles, if you really must, just remember that in the absence of "Rain" your message will be automatically deleted for gross anti-Madonna-ism).

"I Know It", from Madonna, 1983

Crude, vulgar and with a shrill, gawky little voice – if you had to pick one face to represent the raw essence of nightclubs in the American post-disco landscape of the early 80s, Madonna is an excellent candidate. Not even her nights at Studio 54, her friendship with Warhol, or her romance with Basquiat managed to wipe that Midwestern little-hustler look off her face, but that's precisely her charm. Decked out in lace and crucifixes, a very young Ciccone shoulders her way with sheer nerve through r&b, funk and hip-hop, and irresistible singles like "Holiday" and "Borderline" will go down in history precisely thanks to the magnetic, shameless energy of the performer behind them. But true fans of Madonna's debut album also know that track four – "I Know It" – has the most video-game-eighties riff of the whole collection, a synth line so cheap-sounding it becomes unforgettable, not to mention that moment from about two and a half minutes in, where it's used to run pricey scales in a neoclassical vein. And then there's that chorus, harmonically as simple as it is instantly memorable, a fine demonstration of the effectiveness of Madonna's always-underrated songwriting.

"Love Don't Live Here Anymore", from Like A Virgin, 1984

This isn't the 1996 version, rearranged in orchestral style and released as a single from Something To Remember, but the original take on one of Madonna's favorite songs of the time – effectively her first official cover and the first ballad she ever recorded. Even within a bestseller like Like A Virgin, the track stands out. A bit like the still-inexperienced Grace Jones of her disco-music period (she was so out of tune that a furious Tom Moulton stormed out of the studio slamming the door), Madonna too knew back then that her voice wasn't exactly refined, but unlike Jones's diva tantrums, the Material Girl shows off her legendary iron discipline. Rather than pointlessly retracing the original version of the song – performed by an extremely elegant Rose Norwalt in 1978 – Madonna grabs the lyrics word for word and howls them at the moon with a lump in her throat, ragged vowels and an overdone vibrato. Like it or not, the song becomes "hers" precisely because of the naturalness with which she delivers it, rough and merciless as the New York landscape of the 80s. In doing so, another pillar of the Madonna dialectic also becomes clear: absolute bad luck in love. It's as if Madonna had already instinctively understood back then that music would be the only outlet she'd have to vent the anger and sadness of the disappointments dealt to her by all the men who would prove unable to stand by her side. And that list would be a very long one...

"White Heat", from True Blue, 1986

True Blue, the war machine: Madonna and Patrick Leonard put together the perfect pop album to storm charts across half the world and definitively turn the Lady into the leading female face of the 1980s. Even setting aside the five hugely famous singles pulled from it, "White Heat" sounds instantly familiar because it captures the essence of Madonna-thought at the peak of her youth – the voice that spurs the crowd on and gets straight to the point, launching right into the chorus without much fuss. The bed of rock guitars, the hulking keyboards in the background and the male backing vocals give it just the right dose of energy – Madonna's success by this point was already such that the shows on the previous "Virgin Tour" had started straight off in arenas and sports halls, and standing in front of thousands of people every night, the artist realized she needed a bigger, more powerful sound to fill such spaces. Elegant? Absolutely not, but "White Heat" drags you onto the dance floor with all the shameless, thrilling drive of the enormous stadium crowds of the 80s. The winning image of a popstar able to ride the wave of her own success.

"Love Song" ft. Prince, from Like A Prayer, 1989

One could argue for years about the album that marked Madonna's artistic coming-of-age. This is certainly where the famous, larger-than-life popstar everyone knows momentarily sets down the mask and shows the world the bare face of Louise Veronica. A record where the songwriting occasionally turns sharper-edged, more varied, and definitely less crowd-pleasing, yet never loses sight of pop's guiding light. Even setting aside show-stopping singles like the title track – and having already covered the matter of "Till Death Do Us Part" elsewhere on these pages – the tracklist offers nothing but an embarrassment of riches. Still, the meeting between Madonna and Prince is undoubtedly one of the key moments, if only because the collaboration miraculously avoids sounding like it was phoned in. It would have been all too easy to make a mess of it – two of the most recognizable (and megalomaniac) faces of the decade clawing at each other like the bitches in "Heathers" to squeeze in their own part. Instead, here they are playing on equal footing on a deliberately minimal track, held up by a bass backbone, a skeletal drum machine and a couple of crossed keyboard lines. There's only the two of them: Madonna – the self-absorbed Diva – and Prince – the Star who openly despises anyone who doesn't understand music – sizing each other up and studying one another on the sly in an extremely subtle game of mirrors. Maybe they love each other, maybe they hate each other, but the chemistry is palpable. A sultry, sensual song, a magical meeting between two icons that plays like a small lifetime-achievement award for both – well deserved, I'd add, given the services the two had already rendered to 80s music.

"I'm Going Bananas", from I'm Breathless, 1990

Madonna and Cinema, a painful chapter. For every time Ciccone manages to truly inhabit a role, there are just as many where the performance never quite escapes the powerful popstar image she's built around herself, resulting in moments that are either predictable or terribly stiff – Cher still teases her about it to this day. But Madonna isn't one to give up easily, despite her 80s comedies having been panned by critics and much of the public alike. She forces then-lover Warren Beatty to get her cast in the gangster movie "Dick Tracy", and he simply can't manage to leave her out of it (say "no" to Madonna? I wouldn't dare). This time, though, the role fits her like a glove: Ciccone plays a flashy nightclub entertainer, and the result leaves her so thrilled that she decides to record an entire album in that style. I'm Breathless is a studio album, but because a couple of its tracks appear in the film, it gets mistaken for a soundtrack, and as a result the work isn't officially counted among her studio albums. It's certainly not her most memorable moment, and the massive success of "Vogue", also included here, soon erases this odd little LP from the public's collective memory. But this is where we meet Madonna the cabaret performer, the sensual, capricious vintage diva, and "I'm Going Bananas" is undoubtedly the vocal and performative peak of the bunch: a barely two-minute Hollywood interlude in which Madonna turns into Carmen Miranda and runs wild, free of any preconception, like a giddy girl dressed in flowers and fruit. Way too much fun.

"Where Life Begins", from Erotica, 1992

October 1992, Madonna releases Erotica and its visual companion piece "Sex," a book of photos, comics and stories in which she explores sex in all its forms, from S&M and the loss of virginity to bisexual encounters and the intimacy of coupledom. The proverbial sky, as in "Asterix," is about to fall on her head. The press goes wild, the Church wavers, accusations pour in from every corner of the globe: "how dare a woman voice her own sexual desires? How dare a woman take the reins of her own pleasure?" Even though in public Madonna keeps flashing the middle finger (and two years later the inimitable "Human Nature" will go down in history as the greatest kiss-off ever recorded), behind the scenes she's living through one of the darkest moments of her career. The unshakeable Material Girl finds herself completely stunned by the wave of hatred crashing over her, and is forced to reckon with the fact that, in the society she lives in, men and women operate on different terms. Paradoxically, those who accuse Madonna of treating her own body like an object seem to overlook the fact that the female body has already been treated as an object for millennia, and that reclaiming ownership of it is not only legitimate but, in the end, also an effective form of self-defense.

But Erotica's stock takes a hit, and that's a shame, because the record is one of her best. Anyone who bothered to listen to it in full knows well that it isn't just about sex, but rather offers a full panorama touching on love, jealousy and melancholy with rare refinement, wrapped in a sound that captures all the hushed elegance of house-pop at the time. The softly-spoken-word of "Where Life Begins" is a piece of writing all its own; over a hazy acid-jazz backing, Madonna delivers instructions on female oral sex, tracing for the listener a map that starts with the art of seduction and arrives, six minutes later, at the secret garden – one of the longest tracks she had recorded up to that point, as one would expect from a garden that needs its time to let its petals unfurl. And all of this is laid out without a single crude word: the entire lyric is a double entendre that could just as easily be read as poetry. Given the general disinterest in female pleasure found in pornography as much as in most arthouse erotica, "Where Life Begins" is a journey into true female pleasure as dictated, fittingly, by a woman – which should be obvious, and yet there are still plenty of people who haven't quite grasped it.

"Forbidden Love", from Bedtime Stories, 1994

After the drubbing of Erotica comes the fatale phase of feather dusters and silk sheets – sex, yes, but comfortably reclined in a boudoir. Madonna has met Tupac, discovered Meshell Ndegeocello, and is at work with BabyFace, co-author of dozens of glossy chart hits of the era. Bedtime Stories is slow, crowd-pleasing bedroom-r&b, all softness and lascivious ballads, though here and there it lets slip glimpses of the ennui and loneliness typical of the newly rich. On the seductive "Forbidden Love" you can also feel the hand of Bristol's Nellee Hooper, who adds a gorgeous electronic pulse and gives the track that noir touch so well suited to Madonna's more melancholic, confessional side – and indeed we'll soon find her working directly with Massive Attack on the beautiful cover of "I Want You". Add in the contribution of Bjork, who helped Madonna turn the single featured here, "Bedtime Story", into a fabulous avant-garde piece, and we already have every early sign of the next shift in direction – from America toward the far more thrilling sounds circulating in Europe – a European bender that will last all the way through 2005 and help Madonna release some of her finest work.

“Skin“, da Ray Of Light, 1998

That is, the Ray of Light marking the most flamboyant of her thousand career rebirths. After Bedtime Stories came "Evita" and the ballads collection Something To Remember, important building blocks that helped the author (now a new mother) present herself to the public as a striking forty-something possessed of expressive maturity and vocals to match. But the miracle only happens when Madonna manages to fuse that maturity with a return to the dancefloor; she and Leonard had already written a few tracks, but it's her meeting with London-based composer William Orbit that ignites the whole project. His quiet yet intense oscillator modulations manage to stretch and dilute the songs, helping them break free of the usual verse-chorus format and move toward trance and experimental electronica – without ever losing sight of the goal.

It's impossible to pick a favorite track from Ray Of Light, I'll say that right away. Let's say "Skin" is perhaps the one that best captures the new direction: a techno charge that manages to be epic and personal at once, its melodic line – which on its own would be quite slow – streaked with Indian textures over a backing that cracks toward synthetic static. Six and a half minutes that pull body and mind toward a different kind of meditation. Ray Of Light is the record that even people who don't like Madonna end up liking; it's the album of critical redemption and a return to "official" success after years of side projects. Sure, a few months before this record, and before a track like "Skin," there had in theory already been Kylie Minogue's "Say Hey", but since her album passed by unnoticed, it falls to Madonna to drag pop toward electronica and ensure that the '90s would perhaps be the last decade in which a push from the underground could conquer the charts and win over both audience and critics alike.

"Runaway Lover" from Music, 2000

Music, the patchwork one, or how to listen to three records in one, all held together as best they can with a cowboy's lasso. Madonna with her trousers so low-slung her backside pokes out, Madonna dressed like a coked-up hustler, Madonna assembling one of the worst booklets ever put together (check it out if you have the CD to hand: a nausea-inducing kitsch design). What can't be denied, though, is that once again Madonna has full command of her craft, and Music is another successful experiment. Since it's a collage, there's no shortage of choice: there are several tracks one could pick, all equally strong and wildly different from one another (Guy Sigsworth's exquisitely delicate touch on the album version of "What It Feels Like For A Girl", the wonderful litany of "Paradise (Not For Me)", the list goes on). Here we go with the irresistible march of "Runaway Lover," where an arsenal of hi-tech electronic blips and a frantic dance beat marry a bulletproof melody built on concentric spirals with a power-pop edge. A thoroughbred track delivered with just the right dose of nerve, one that also lays the groundwork for future vintage-psych-dance hits like "Love Profusion".

"Easy Ride" from American Life, 2003

I won't hide it: American Life is just plain bad. Aside from a mere two of the four singles pulled from it, this is perhaps the weakest collection of Madonna's career. Let's even set aside the poetic license of the dreadful anti-Bush rap on the title track, and let's welcome back French producer Mirwais, a formidably skilled studio rat promoted to official producer after his contribution to the previous Music, but here, for the first time, we're faced with a genuinely empty songbook, and the sound does nothing to help matters. On one side there's Madonna, who has learned to play guitar and feels the need to stick it in everywhere; on the other there's Mirwais, who spends whole months in the studio on Pro Tools dismantling, polishing and reassembling every single recorded line. The result is a sound with a textbook folktronic accent of remarkable sonic cleanliness, but one so clinical that it only makes the poverty of ideas in Madonna's songs more glaring. Still worth noting is the closing ballad "Easy Ride," an introspective moment where a string section and a background electronic beat join the guitar, while the crafted use of interludes and unexpected arrangements distracts from the verse/chorus monotony and turns the track into an unusual electro-orchestral suite.

“Future Lovers” from Confessions On A Dancefloor, 2005

Here we're truly spoiled for choice, every track is a free-for-all bomb. Another blatant example of reinvention and reconquest of charts worldwide through the marriage of dance and spirituality, Confession On A Dancefloor is the product of the meeting between Madonna and the little-known (but still British) Stuart Price. Twelve tracks linked together in a continuous disco-mix, a rise and fall of tension and epic choruses that follow one another hypnotically like the coils of a cobra. Why “Future Lovers”? Because the eternal Moroder-esque motif of “I Feel Love” by Donna Summer, woven into the backing track, is just a pretext to grab the listener's attention: Madonna whispers and half-sings for a good minute and a half while the track builds, then when the beat finally explodes, the world ends. The purest ecstasy of disco music as interpreted by someone who, back in the disco days, actually went to Studio 54, but who today is too skilled to do things by the book and takes the liberty of dragging us all towards a utopia of techno-futurism and mechanical riffs. Flawless.

“Heartbeat” from Hard Candy, 2008

Freshly divorced from Guy Ritchie, disappointed but still too burned and angry, Madonna literally cuts ties with Europe and its introspection and repatriates to America chasing the vital energy of r&b and hip-hop. The return to the dancefloor with Hard Candy is foul-mouthed and brash, the cover photo is simply hideous, but at that moment Madonna really needs to let off steam and get back to her Midwestern essence after years spent trying (unsuccessfully) to be part of the English aristocracy. It's not an entirely irrational move, mind you: the shrewd operator has hired three of the biggest mainstream producers of the 2000s — Timbaland, Danja and Pharrell Williams — and the result is a collection of lean, lively tracks propped up by ultra-smooth beats and a myriad of synthetic overdubs. At its best moments, Ciccone has nothing to envy in Timberlake, Kelis or Aaliyah, and “Heartbeat” is a missed single: a verse/chorus pairing so well crafted it recalls her 80s radio hits, with a dazzling Pharrell production able to color the synth-pop rhythm with shimmering 80s glitter without ever sounding trite. Thirty-five years in the business, and still in great shape.

“Love Spent“, from MDNA, 2012

MDNA is another record packed with good ideas and thunderous lapses of taste, a cauldron in which Nicki Minaj, the Benassi brothers' cheesy EDM tricks, a touch from Martin Solveig and an ancestral Celtic ballad co-written by old William Orbit (?) are all boiled together. Once again Madonna is at her best when she focuses on a straightforward melodic structure and puts the fallout of her divorce down in black and white — by now she's speaking bluntly about money and alimony. “Love Spent” is exactly the right title to illustrate the disconnect between love and household economics: the banjo and strings of the intro give way to a synthetic little march, and Madonna sings with a touch of cold irony that curdles into cynicism — much as happens when a wealthy couple fights over the country house and custody of the kids.

“Messiah“, from Rebel Heart, 2015

One fine morning Madonna wakes up to discover a document circulating online containing forty unreleased songs she's been working on. Furious as hell, she unleashes her lawyers online, and an Israeli hacker responsible for the theft is soon arrested. But it's already too late: the public is already devouring these demos (some of them, frankly, in pretty embryonic form — what pleasure could people possibly get from listening to this stuff?), and the surprise factor has gone out the window. Rebel Heart is forced to land ahead of schedule, and in an attempt to capitalize on the sheer amount of leaked material, it's released in no fewer than three formats: the standard fourteen-track version, the nineteen-track deluxe, and the twenty-five-track super-deluxe. Special mention goes to “Messiah”, a track that unfortunately ended up on the deluxe edition and was left stylistically sidelined from the rest of the record's sound (despite having been one of the earliest previews months before). A shame it turned out that way, because the soft bed of strings and piano and the rolling timpani lend weight to one of Madonna's finest songs of the entire 2010s, almost a neoclassical prayer delivered with feeling by candlelight.

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