Kissing Anybody That’s Around Us

Madonna featuring Nicki Minaj “Bitch, I’m Madonna”

The last time Madonna released an album I wrote a whole thing about how depressing it is to hear her struggling to chase trends and fit in with contemporary pop when really, that ought to be below her. I would love to hear a Madonna without compromise, especially when that would mean the fully honest expression of a woman in her mid ‘50s. It’s not necessarily the trend-chasing that’s the problem – that is an essential feature of Madonna-ness, really – so much as the feeling that on a lot of her recent records, she’s dumbing down or regressing.

But it’s exhausting to second guess an artist like this, and maybe a little insulting too. “Bitch, I’m Madonna,” a song she made with Sophie, Diplo, and Nicki Minaj, is something that sounds genuinely fresh and strange. The Diplo bits are as hard and dirty as you’d want from him, and the bits that are obviously attributable to Sophie take the regressive impulses of Madonna’s recent music and pushes it into ridiculous abstraction. Sophie speeds up her voice to sound cartoonish and uncanny, and it’s cute in a way that’s both charming and unsettling. This is a song that seems to put the idea of fun and youth in scare quotes – it’s self-consciously embracing these things, and going a bit too hard on them as a means of overcompensation. It rings emotionally true, in the sense that the age you ~feel~ becomes a more variable thing over time. I think a song like this is very earnest, but the music is produced in a way that context and self-awareness frame a lot of lyrics that might otherwise seem entirely vapid.

Buy it from Amazon.