“She doesn’t have the vocal greatness of Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald, and she hasn’t seared a generation with raw rock ‘n’ roll like Janis Joplin or Patti Smith, but she is a towering presence in popular music because of her breathtaking range. Like a cultural magpie, she has picked her influences from thousands of sources and funnelled them into one vision. That in itself is a work of art.”
“Her style is confrontational, her ambition unbounded, yet she constantly, complusively turns her life into fascinating pop art.”
“It has often been asked, who is the ‘real’ Madonna? The popular negative stereotype is that of a publicity-hungry, manipulative ballbreaker, while for many women she is a beacon of feminism.”
“The only place where she seems truly herself is when she is doing her work. Away from that she can be self-conscious, status-conscious, everything-conscious. Only in performance are those layers stripped away and it’s just her. For the moment that she is caught up in the creative process, she forgets herself.”
“Madonna has become a goddess of our age, and an icon that we have all created.”
