Madonna, 2015-09-17 - Rolling Stone, Bitch, She's Madonna: NYC Stop Showcases Genius of Rebel Heart Tour

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/bitch-shes-madonna-nyc-stop-showcases-genius-of-rebel-heart-tour-20150917

Bitch, She's Madonna: NYC Stop Showcases Genius of Rebel Heart Tour

Sentimental, unapologetic show comes 30 years after her first MSG performance

By Rob Sheffield | September 17, 2015

Madonna performs in New York City on September 16th, 2015. Matthew Shelter

"You know what they say — it's lonely at the top," Madonna told the crowd near the end of her New York show last night. "But it ain't crowded!" And on the second U.S. show of her hotly awaited new Rebel Heart tour, Our Lady spent three hours proving what a goddess she is, not to mention what an Unapologetic Bitch. Damn right it's not crowded, because there's nobody else near her throne. The whole night was a tour of everything only Madonna can do. She's not the same. She has no shame. She's on fire.

She sang the Edith Piaf ballad "La Vie En Rose" in French, alone on the stage, strumming her ukelele. ("It's en français, though, okay? So try and sing along if you can.") After "Material Girl," she tossed a wedding bouquet to a gay couple up front, then snickered, "Suckers!" She used crucifixes as stripper poles, doing the "Vogue" rap while writhing against a dancer clad in a nun's wimple and feathery hot pants. Her cassocked dancers simulated a group-grope orgy at the Last Supper while the guest of honor chanted "Yeezus loves my pussy best!" And all night long, her banter was the toppest of notch, like when she introduced her gorgeous new acoustic country-hoedown version of "True Blue." "No swear words in this song," she announced. "This is a song about true love. I didn't know what I was talking about when I wrote it." Glad you're the one who brought that up, Madonna.

She hasn't reached so far onstage, musically or emotionally, since her 2001 Drowned World extravaganza. Her last couple of tours had spectacular performances, but dodgy set lists. This time Madonna has much stronger new songs to play with, from Rebel Heart — and she brilliantly revamps the hits. She played a Flying V for a punked-out "Burning Up," dropping to her knees for her guitar solo — the first time she played Madison Square Garden, 30 years ago, she got on her knees in front of the male guitarist while he played a solo, and don't think she doesn't remember these things.

Matthew Shelter

Opening act Amy Schumer helped set the tone — when was the last time you saw a stand-up comedian slay in an arena? Schumer was clearly right at home in a room full of Madonna fans: "I know who's here. It's like taking a warm bath in a tub full of dick that doesn't want you." She talked abut how hot Bradley Cooper's girlfriend is ("She's like a panther fucked a gazelle and they fucked Gisele") and how hot Bradley Cooper is ("you would just grab your ankles and say 'any hole's fine'"). For the encore, she came back out to let Madonna kick her in the ass, right before "Holiday."

But it was Madonna's night. "Body Shop" was a Fifties-style dance routine where she rolled in on the hood of a vintage Chevy, just like Christie Brinkley in Billy Joel's "Keeping the Faith" video," then frolicked in glitter ankle boots with a harem of hot greaser mechanics, all looking like the boy who knocked her up in the "Papa Don't Preach" video. (So true: Italians do it better!) Then she sat her dancers down on a pile of tires and adopted a Dolly Parton twang to tell them, "Like my grandma always said, if it's got tits or tires, it's gonna give you trouble."

"Like a Virgin" was one of the night's peak moments — the song got pimped up with the Egyptian-lover electro-beats from "Music," while she took the stage alone to revamp her cowgirl line-dance moves from the "Don't Tell Me" video. She wore fingerless black gloves, reading her 1984 Boy Toy self, yet she humps the stage with enough verve and wit to make the girl she used to be look like the shy type. She also said, "It's so hot in here," which is Madonna-speak for, "You don't mind if I strip this shirt off, do you?"

She kept getting surprisingly sentimental about playing the Garden, 30 years after her 1985 Virgin Tour. Back then, she always used to ask the crowd, "Will you marry me?" Tonight the girl was in a slightly shadier mood. "I don't know about marriage," she mused, after her bouquet toss. "Do you want to marry me?" When fans screamed, she replied, "No, you probably don't. But maybe it'll be third time lucky." She resurrected long-unheard gems like "Love Don't Live Here Anymore" and "Deeper and Deeper," along with a snippet of "Justify My Love." ("You put this in me, so now what?" — such an underrated but on point Madonna line.)

"Music" began as a jazz-flapper café ballet, with Madonna in Twenties Gatsby drag, before it blew up to hit the electro-sleaze heights. (As it happens, it was 15 years ago this week that Madonna released Music, still her hardest-rocking and most seductive album.) After the devils-and-bullfighters-and-Minotaurs pageant of "Living My Life," she began the gratifyingly long Latin segment with "La Isla Bonita," stretching into a generous and unhurried medley of "Dress You Up," "Into the Groove" and "Lucky Star."

"I'm feeling very nostalgic tonight," she told the crowd. "Do you people understand I played Madison Square Garden 30 years ago?" She kissed a fan in a 1985 Virgin Tour shirt who claimed he was there — for all we know, he might have been the goth club kid doing the cobweb dance in the "Into The Groove" video. It led to the emotional highlight of the night, when she picked up her acoustic guitar for one of her saltiest and best Number One hits, a song she hasn't performed since the Eighties: "Who's that Girl," leading the audience in the question "¿Quien es esa niña?" The question hung in the air. "I still don't know," Madonna said after the song. "I still don't know. I think I'm not supposed to know — maybe that's what life's about, figuring out who the fuck you are."

Matthew Shelter

In her producer Nile Rodgers' essential memoir Le Freak, he tells the story of taking Madonna to Madison Square Garden in 1984 to see Duran Duran, where she sat unnoticed and unrecognized in the audience. Just a few months later, she returned, except this time she was onstage as the headliner. (Duran Duran were back in NYC this week too — and like Madonna, brazen enough to jumpstart an excellent show with an excellent new song, "Paper Gods." The Eighties are the flattest of circles.) But that's why she's Madonna. She might be still figuring out who the fuck she is — but a stage this size is always the place she goes to look for clues.

Set List:
"Iconic"
"Bitch I'm Madonna"
"Burning Up"
"Holy Water"/"Vogue"
"Devil Pray"
"Messiah"
"Body Shop"
"True Blue"
"Deeper and Deeper"
"Heartbreak City"/"Love Don't Live Here Anymore"
"Like a Virgin"
"Justify My Love"/"Sex"
"Living For Love"
"La Isla Bonita"
"Dress You Up"/"Into The Groove"/"Lucky Star"
"Who's That Girl"
"Rebel Heart"
"Illuminati"
"Music"
"Candy Shop"
"Material Girl"
"La Vie en Rose"
"Unapologetic Bitch"

Encore:
"Holiday"

Madonna, 2015-09-17 - The Guardian, Madonna at Madison Square Garden review – 'There is no other performer like her'

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/sep/17/madonna-at-madison-square-garden-review-rebel-heart-tour-no-other-performer-like-her

Madonna at Madison Square Garden review – 'There is no other performer like her'

Madison Square Garden, New York
In the first of two Rebel Heart tour shows at the historic venue, the pop queen brings out Amy Schumer, Game of Thrones, transgender nuns, a ukulele … and her greatest hits


Madonna kicked off her two-night stand at MSG with her Rebel Heart tour.
Photograph: Splash News/Corbis

Madonna’s album Rebel Heart was bedevilled by leaks; she fell flat on her backside at the Brit awards; and her Instagram gaffes have made Jeremy Corbyn look like a Rupert Murdoch-style media mastermind. As she arrives in Madison Square Garden on the fourth date of her 10th tour – the last under her 10-year, $120m contract with Live Nation – she should be up against it. Yet Madonna is always at her best with her back to the wall, when the killer instinct that has sustained her through over 30 years in pop rears to the surface, a visceral refusal to be beaten.

Her choice of support act on this homecoming gig – since New York is the place she remade herself – is very Madonna, all wrong on paper but in practice, right on the money. Amy Schumer takes the stage in front of a massive backdrop of Madonna’s face staring at the heavens and clutching a sword to her breast, the massive machinery of pop music concealed behind it. Swigging from a bottle of champagne, and with nothing but a microphone and a stool, the comic of the moment says that she was asked: “‘Who better than you to open up for Madonna?’” “Uh,” she rhetorically answers. “Any band?”


Amy Schumer
Photograph: Splash News/Corbis

Yet Schumer’s perfect reading of the audience, in which straight men are such a minority as to be non-existent, (“It’s like taking a warm bath in a ton of dick that doesn’t want you”) weapons-grade filth (“We’re here to rethink cum”) and description of the Kardashians as a family who “take the faces they were born with as a light suggestion” reduce the crowd to marshmallow before Madonna has even made an appearance.

Twenty-five years from her apotheosis, 1990’s Blond Ambition tour, Madonna’s vision of the pop concert – in which music is combined with dance, video and costume, in order to reconceptualise familiar hits into an overwhelming sensory bombardment – has now been copied by generations of pop stars. She’s also notorious for stuffing the setlist with new material, thwarting those who would love an oldies show. At first the signs aren’t promising: the show starts with film of Madonna writhing in a sequinned dress in a cage, while her voiceover chunters that creativity is being threatened by corporations (ironic, given that Madonna is a formidable corporation in her own right).

She then descends from the ceiling similarly banged up, while knights in armour march down the stage, which juts almost the length of the arena. It’s Madonna does Game of Thrones. The first song is Iconic, one of the dimmer bulbs from Rebel Heart, followed by Bitch I’m Madonna, a great title in search of a decent song. But when the dancers depart, and Madonna struts down the runway to strap on a flying V, the show has lift-off with Burning Up. One of her earliest records, it amounts to a manifesto (“I’ll do anything, I’m not the same, I have no shame”) and all these years later it still grabs you by the throat. Aged 57, Madonna is still palpably hungry, and her performance has an enduring rawness and truth. Unmediated and undiluted, she’s the ringmaster of her own circus, connecting with her hardcore in a totally instinctive way, regardless of the choreography, pyrotechnics and fancy costumes (created by a battery of top fashion designers – but really, who cares?).

Madonna’s striking ability to imbue songs that might seem throwaway with significance and depth is illustrated four songs in. On record, Holy Water is a mortifying extended metaphor for her, ahem, vaginal secretions. But on stage, it’s a Ken Russell fantasia in which a scene of transgender naughty nuns poledancing (including Madonna climbing some 12 feet into the air to stand on a revolving naked man, one of several moments which involve genuine physical peril) morphs into a genuinely unnerving demonic parody of the Last Supper in which Madonna ends up tied up on the table, legs akimbo.


Madonna performs at Madison Square Garden in New York City on September 16, 2015.
Photograph: Shaun Tandon/AFP/Getty Images

Two more album tracks follow – the dodgy Devil Pray and the lovely Messiah – before the show hits its second section, set in a 50s garage where Madonna and the dancers prance to Body Shop (another number DOA on record) before gathering on a pile of tyres for a ukulele singalong to True Blue. From then on, it’s clear that the Rebel Heart tour connects today’s Madonna with the energy and boldness of her early days – there’s precious little from the many eras in between. HeartBreakCity, performed atop a spiral staircase, morphs into her mid-80s, yearning cover of Rose Royce’s Love Don’t Live Here Anymore, before she tears into Like a Virgin, given a 21st-century update, but performed solo, with all the allure and aggression with which she infused it when it was first released.

The following section has a Mexican theme, Madonna in full Day of the Dead finery, and of course performing La Isla Bonita, the only song from her past she revisits on almost every tour, along with Dress You Up, Into the Groove and Who’s That Girl? – a song, she says, about “not knowing who the fuck you are”. It’s a moving affirmation of her ongoing, instinctive relationship with her Latino audience.

The title track of Rebel Heart is performed against a morphing backdrop of fan art depicting her many image changes, though the show actually reveals how consistent she has been underneath it all, endowed with an unswerving belief in the transformative power of pop. The final straight is pure pleasure, Madonna in a flapper’s outfit, performing a jazz-era take on Music (in visuals alone – musically it still packs the robotic punch that made it irresistible 15 years ago), then going into a showstopping Material Girl, performed on an upended video screen titled 45 degrees, in which Madonna pushes the top-hatted dancers down the slope, one by one, in a reboot of the famous video.


Amy Schumer and Madonna together on stage
Photograph: Splash News/Corbis

And then there’s a moment of intimacy, Madonna perching at the end of the circular hydraulic platform with her ukulele, announcing that she is going to perform one of her favourite songs. What ensues is an unaccompanied version of Edith Piaf’s La Vie En Rose, suddenly revealing that after all these years of being dismissed as a singer, Madonna has the pipes. Her rendition bites through the inherent campness of the concept to locate something unarguably moving. Finally, Madonna brings Schumer out again during Unapologetic Bitch, spanking her and then giving her a banana as a reward. Rising to the challenge, Schumer pretends to stick it up her backside, to the delight of the audience.

Holiday, performed with the stars and stripes rampant, is a victory lap. Madonna had said: “I’m feeling pretty nostalgic tonight … I performed here 30 years ago.” Her Madison Square Garden concert seems simultaneously like the latest stage of a 32-year durational performance art piece about stardom and an affirmation that there is simply no other performer like her. Tonight, Madonna kills it.

Madonna, 2015-09-17 - billboard, Madonna Gets Surprisingly Nostalgic at First NYC Tour Stop, Then Kicks Amy Schumer's Ass

http://www.billboard.com/articles/review/6699797/madonna-rebel-heart-nyc-tour-amy-schumer-madison-square-garden

Madonna Gets Surprisingly Nostalgic at First NYC Tour Stop, Then Kicks Amy Schumer's Ass

By Joe Lynch, New York | September 17, 2015 2:49 AM EDT

For an artist who rarely looks back creatively, Madonna was in a particularly wistful mood during her Madison Square Garden concert on Wednesday (Sept. 16) night, the first of three NYC dates on her Rebel Heart Tour.

"I'm feeling very nostalgic tonight," Madonna said (twice, actually). "I played Madison Square Garden 30 years ago. That's crazy." When she trailed off for a moment, you almost thought she was lost in sentimental reverie. But as always, Madonna was laser-focused on the present, even while reminiscing. "You were there?" she asked a fan in the front row who had been talking to her. "Then I gotta give you a kiss." For the record, a Madonna-on-fan kiss is a controlled affair: She kissed her fingers and touched the fan's forehead, like a messiah gracing her faithful follower with one touch.

Nostalgia aside, Madonna's restless creative spirit is on full display on the Rebel Heart Tour. Refusing to coast by playing faithful, familiar live renditions of her hits, Madge recast a number of her classics in different musical molds, with mostly positive results.

Strapping on a guitar, she skuzzed up "Burning Up" to hard rock heights and turned "True Blue" into a ukulele sing-along. For "Like a Virgin," she lost the original instrumentation, her backup dancers and most of her clothes while turning her breakthrough hit into a sparse, Pharrell-esque jam.

In a lengthy nod to her Spanish-speaking audience, Madonna delivered a Latin-tinged medley of "Dress You Up," "Into the Groove" and "Lucky Star." The maracas might have been a little much, but the crisp Spanish guitar successfully made the songs sound newly organic. And while there weren't as many French speakers in attendance at MSG, Madonna nodded to her Gallic fans with a surprisingly full-voiced version of Edith Piaf's "La Vie En Rose." (Was it as good as Lady Gaga's recent live "La Vie en Rose" cover? That's a topic for opposing fan groups to viciously discuss in the comments section.)

Later in the show, Madonna began "Music" as a Jazz Age ballad before kicking the No. 1 hit into banger mode. The presence of "Music" was an effective reminder that while some compulsive naysayers tsk the Queen of Pop for trend chasing with Diplo, she brought techno to the pop mainstream years before EDM was a ubiquitous term.

As always, Madonna will never be everything to everyone. Some were undoubtedly let down to see her make it through the "Vogue" spoken word section during "Holy Water" without segueing into the full song -- and to see the lights come up without any "Like a Prayer."

But the classic tracks Madonna did pull out were judiciously selected, with attention paid to material rarely performed on her live tours. An acoustic "Who's That Girl?" (not seen on a Madonna tour in nearly 30 years), a pumping "Deeper and Deeper" (absent from her setlist for 11 years) and "Love Don't Live Here Anymore" (which segued out of new song "HeartBreak City") were all resurrected to huge applause.

Speaking of resurrection, Catholic themes occupied a sizable portion of her stage show, as you would expect -- but always with the Ciccone wink. There was a bacchanalian Last Supper, nuns gyrating on stripper polls and famous faces from Renaissance religious paintings projected onscreen during the aforementioned "Vogue" roll call.

Aside from the stunning Minotaur-filled "Living for Love," the most effective new song in her Rebel Heart Tour arsenal was "Body Shop." While the song was light to the point of forgettable on the album, its low-key, affable sound worked to the choreography's advantage as Madonna teased and flirted her way through a stage filled with tires, muscle cars and muscle men.

"My grandma always said, 'If it's got tits or tires, it's going to give you trouble,'" Madonna said in a faux Southern accent after the song. "Sorry, I know I'm not as funny as Amy Schumer, but I'm trying."

Schumer, incidentally, killed her opening set (last night was her first of three opening slots for Madonna in NYC). Repeatedly mocking the flowering falsehood that it's a new Golden Era for women in Hollywood while still making jokes about the First Lady taking a hot load, Schumer's ability to pivot between the bawdy and the incisive proved the perfect fit for a Madonna opener.

"I thought I was gonna bomb so hard for months," Schumer said when her set was over. "This is the best feeling ever."

That feeling might've been one-upped (or quashed?) later on in the evening when Madonna brought Amy out during "Unapologetic Bitch," bent her over and literally kicked her ass (in addition to pretending to penetrate it). Schumer was ecstatic and surprisingly rhythmic while dancing with Madonna onstage, but the Queen couldn't let her go without some hazing.

Before Schumer left the stage, Madonna put a sock puppet on Amy's hand and made it tell her, "Hi Amy -- I'm a sock, bitch!" Waiting a few beats for an actual joke to follow, Schumer exploded into confused laughter when it became clear that was pretty much all Madge had to offer with the skit. Madonna might be good at changing creative lanes, but her attempt at improv was like switching lanes by means of rolling out of a moving car.

When the show came to a triumphant close with "Holiday," New York's favorite adopted daughter marched around in an American flag cape while her dancers -- dressed for a Gatsby-style rager at this point -- paraded about with jubilant relief. It was clear they felt the rush of owning Madison Square Garden and relished it. Madonna, on the other hand, kept her composure. Clearly, failure to dominate MSG on Wednesday night was never an option for her -- just like failure to dominate New York City was never an option for Madonna more than 30 years ago.

Madonna, 2015-09-10 - Daily News, Madonna seemed to be happy at last during upbeat 'Rebel Heart' tour opener: review

http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/music/madonna-rebel-heart-tour-shows-singer-blast-article-1.2354738

Madonna seemed to be happy at last during upbeat 'Rebel Heart' tour opener: review

NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

Thursday, September 10, 2015, 1:51 AM

BY Jim Farber

Ryan Remiorz/AP

Madonna takes to the stage on her "Rebel Heart" tour at Montreal's Bell Centre Wednesday night.

The most shocking thing about Madonna's "Rebel Heart" tour, which opened at Montreal's Bell Centre Wednesday, had nothing to do with sex. (How could it at this late date?)

And it had nothing to do with religion (though she did offer such token Madonna-esque stunts as nuns on stripper poles and dancers gyrating on holy crosses).

Instead the surprise of the show came in smiles.

Throughout nearly the entire two hour event, Madonna could barely stop grinning. For anyone who has followed Madonna tours from the start, the sight of it couldn't help but startle. Never a warm live performer, Madonna tends to grimace through her concerts, stressing athleticism and discipline over all. This time, she seemed to having a blast. It made for an infectious night that brought the Canadian crowd to a series of spontaneous, and escalating, standing ovations. It didn't hurt that she sang "La Vie En Rose," both in French and in bold voice.

Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for Live Nation

The 57-year-old's show used elaborate props ...

Ryan Remiorz/AP

... but wasn't afraid to go it alone.

Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for Live Nation

The show used imagery from a variety of cultures.

The bright tone of the show made for a striking contrast to the star's last tour, "MDNA," a dark and violent affair that often ended up puzzling to boot. "Rebel Heart" had no such pretense. In fact, it may be Madonna's lightest roadshow to date.

That's not at all to say it's unsubstantial. On the contrary, the triumph of the "Rebel Heart" tour is how it finds Madonna taking ownership of her legacy with an unprecedented maturity.

Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for Live Nation

The "Vogue" singer returned to the religious imagery she has used in the past.

Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for Live Nation

Madonna was joined by costumed dancers for much of her setlist.

She began that approach on her like-named album, which found her in a newly self-referential mode.

Madonna mirrored that here by featuring no fewer than nine of its tracks, including the show's opener, "Iconic." For this initial section of the show, Madonna drew on her time-honored mingle of the erotic and the reverent. Her twenty dancers, dolled up as medieval warriors, bore cross-topped weapons. In a more slow and graceful take on "Vogue" Renaissance images of religious figures replaced movie stars while Madonna and her dancers posed at The Last Supper table.

While the star used to position such displays as pointed social commentary, here they seemed to have more to do with simply reasserting her own long history with them.

 

?@MyArianaconda

Madonna appears to surf board a half naked nun during her concert Wednesday night.

Madonna delved deeper into her personal story in the second act, which found her on the hood of a '60s Chevy in an auto repair shop, a clear reference to her Detroit roots. She emphasized a rare sincerity here by singing the unashamedly romantic "True Blue," while accompanying herself on, of all things, a ukulele.

Madonna came the closest she's ever going to get to a "greatest hits" display in the third act, where she offered touchstones from "Lucky Star" to "Everybody." The latter she hasn't performed live since the early '90s.

Even so, none of the older songs sounded anything like they had on album. To suit the matador-theme'd theatrical accompanyment, Madonna reimagined them as Spanish-tinged ballads.

Madonna included in her run of oldies "Who's That Girl," which she delivered as a solo acoustic ballad. After singing it, she admitted that it took her a hell of a long time to answer just who this particular girl may be. Then, she went into "Rebel Heart," a song about the joy of self-discovery. That theme allowed Madonna to run through a wide range of characters in the show - including a '20 French cabaret star - while maintaining a solid through-line.

It also helped her pull off what may have been the show's most stunning move. When performing "Like a Virgin," she appeared on the gaping stage entirely alone, dancing with a freedom and even an innocence, that made her, at 57, seem once again new.

Set List:

Iconic
Bitch I'm Madonna
Burning Up
Holy Water
Devil Pray
Messiah
Body Shop
True Blue
Deeper and Deeper
Heartbreak City
S.E.X.
Living For Love
La Isla Bonita
Dress You Up
Who's That Girl
Rebel Heart
Illuminati
Music/Candy Shop
Material Girl
La Vie En Rose
Unapologetic Bitch
Holiday

Madonna, 2014-12-22 - TIME, Madonna’s Next Album Is Shaping Up to Be Her Best in a Decade

http://time.com/3643968/madonna-rebel-heart-new-music/

Madonna’s Next Album Is Shaping Up to Be Her Best in a Decade

Jamieson Cox - @jamiesoncox - 10:04 AM ET

The singer's surprise release of several new songs reveals that the Queen of Pop hasn't lost her edge

When a handful of Madonna demos leaked last week — an event she called “artistic rape” and a “form of terrorism” — she decided to fight fire with fire by releasing the official versions of six songs cut from her upcoming thirteenth studio album, Rebel Heart. The bundle of new tracks represent her first collection of new material since 2012’s MDNA, a lukewarm flirtation with contemporary club music. Thing is, though, there’s a joy to every new Madonna release that’s just separated from determining the quality of the actual music: at this point in her career she’s pop’s cockroach, resilient and hardy and shockingly adaptable. With each new record, there are lessons about the genre’s present and near future in the specific sounds and figures she chooses to help realize her vision.

Based on this first batch of Rebel Heart material, Madonna is looking to strike a balance. First, there’s are the figures at the centre of EDM and synth-pop, her chosen modes of operation — meaning writers and producers like Diplo, Avicii, and Savan Kotecha. Then, she ropes in artists working at the vanguard across a variety of genres, from superstars like Kanye West to relative nobodies like producers Ariel Rechtshaid and Sophie. This is a savvy move — what a surprise, a smart play from one of the canniest pop stars to ever roam an arena — because it allows her to play to the masses while still pushing boundaries.

The songs that lead off this first Rebel Heart blast, lead single “Living for Love” and “Devil Pray,” could fit in neatly on the radio beside this year’s British house-pop crossovers and Avicii’s own “Hey Brother.” The ones that close it, namely the abrasive half-rapped Kanye collaboration “Illuminati” and caffeine-drunk trap anthem/Nicki Minaj feature “Bitch I’m Madonna,” hew closer to the spirit of PC Music’s obscure SoundCloud accounts and the sharp edges of Yeezus.

And because Madonna exists in rarefied air, the kind reserved for luminaries like herself and Prince and very few others, each of her new releases is less of an independent statement than a response to everything she’s done before, another chapter tacked onto an epic novel with no definite end. The tones, themes, and imagery that make up her musical toolbox — the frank sensuality, the various methods of intoxication, the lapsed Catholicism, the uncompromising confidence — are gospel at this point, and they elevate some of the more forgettable Rebel Heart material to a base level of pleasure. It’s fun to hear Madonna deliver a line like, “It might sound like I’m an unapologetic bitch / but sometimes you know I gotta call I like it is” (and try on 2 Chainz’ flow, just for kicks) because she has three’ decades worth of unapologetic bitchiness in her back pocket. It’s an easy score, sure, but it’s effective. And if the complete version of Rebel Heart, due March 10th via Interscope, can deliver a few more of those easy scores alongside a bit more adventurous songwriting, the album could be Madonna’s finest in almost a decade.