The way that you can tell whether a pop song will last is how it interacts with an every day environment. If you find yourself hearing it in the mall shopping, or waiting for the doctor and think-I like that, it works.
I like the new Madonna single, but was worried that it wasn’t a pop song, using those criteria.
I was worried because it didn’t fit with the bond girl genre, because it shredded the tropes she was working with to shreds, it had too many allusions and it was too clever.
I quit worrying when coming home from the doctors and stopping in at a 7-11 to buy milk. I heard die another day, and noticed how it slithered like the Serpent and how it glittered like broken glass, I found myself singing along to the chorus and realized that there is something in Her blood that makes singles hits no matter who she is working with.
Perhaps this is why she isn’t trusted as serious musicians by the pop establishment, who mock, swipe and dissect her with equal vigor.
Her ability to create new sounds from the painfully hip, while making ‘the little girls understand’ is amazingly difficult- and here reflexivity, her bending of any genre to a core voice is almost unheard of.
If you asked in 1983 who would be the bigger star in 2003, and gave the options of Madonna, Prince and Michael Jackson, no one would have said Madonna.
But Jackson is so thoroughly nuts that even his best, most inventive work of late has been lost (the jay-z remixes of invincible, the single scream, blood on the dance floor)
Prince has gone all hermetic, locking himself into his studio, shitting into CD cases and selling it to loyal fans. (Madonna and Prince were both libertines and now they are not- Jesus kills the spirit of pleasure, and Prince trapped and alone embraced Jesus as a way to kill persona, Madonna, with husband and children moved into a new life, not refusing the royalties of her old one.)
Madonna is the only artist to have survived the first years of MTV fueled stardom, she used it, she tweaked it and she grew larger then it.