Hail To The Queen
Photo: RobyReinvention
Laura Barton, host of BBC Radio 4’s Notes on Music, discusses how quick we’ve been to mock and chide Madonna – when what she deserves, really, is immense respect in a new article from the December 2023 issue of British magazine Prospect.
Somewhere, amid all of this, we have lost sight of Madonna the artist. Of the songwriter who, like Jackson, wants access to the anatomy of music. She has a sublime gift for the melodic hook, clear from the early days of “Lucky Star” and on to “Erotica” to “Hung Up” and beyond. She has drawn on dance-pop, electronica, fado and reggaeton, house, the Harlem ballroom scene and much more. She has worked with innovative collaborators, from Reggie Lucas to William Orbit, Shep Pettibone to Nicki Minaj.
If all of this means little to you, then know simply that Madonna is the most successful solo artist in the history of the US Billboard Hot 100 chart, the bestselling woman of all time, the first woman to earn $1bn in concert revenue.
Yet, of late, it strikes me how busy we have all been, passing judgement. How in our focus on her age and her outfits and surgeries, we are abandoning one of our greatest artists. How ungracious we have been. How churlish and dumb. We must not let this magnificent creature slip through the cracks; not when she still has a world to set on fire.
Read the Full Story on prospectmagazine.co.uk or in the December 2023 issue of the magazine.
