Madonna w/ Avicii
Yankee Stadium
Thursday, September 6

Better than: The VMAs.

If ever you need a concise summary of Madonna's year, the billing for her New York dates will do nicely. There's Madonna, her name in no way styled to resemble that of a party drug. And there's Avicii, a Swedish stadium-dance wunderkind riding a mad-money trend of the same. They knew each other before, that sort of special connection that's only forged by stage-bantering about ecstasy and producing hand-waving freakoutery the blogs over. Madge ether pretended to deny or actually, earnestly denied all knowledge of a drug she namedropped in bleary MDNA track "I'm Addicted." Various DJs called her on her shit, then re-dredged the shit from all the '90s morality campaigns. Deadmau5 got involved, as part of his year of omnidirectional trolling. Nobody involved looked good, but Madonna had the most to lose. "Is it all over for Madonna?" the Telegraph gasped, hands wrung and headline begging for response, and though the piece was a mess, a strawman battlefield, name-dropping Dylan and Leonard Cohen and girls screaming for One Direction and-and-and the Authenticity Madonna supposedly forsook for unilaterally witless electro, the mostly sneering comments suggest the opinion wasn't unpopular.

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Courtney Love, facepalming on behalf of all of us.

"Good music programmers are rock stars to the women of this generation, just as guitar players were for their mothers."
—From the Beloit College Mindset List, in which two dudes at a Wisconsin college attempt to get a bead on What The Freshmen Class Might Be Thinking via the making of a list with claims both rooted in fact and, er, less so. This item—No. 41 on the list, which is crafted with people born in the year 1994 in mind—stuck out in particular, since 1994 was also a year in which quite a few women made their own stamp on the pop, rock, and R&B worlds, proving that they didn't need to flutter their eyes and faint over men in order to participate in the musical agora. (Also, what does "music programmers" mean, anyway? People who decide what gets played on radio stations?) Below, an extremely partial list of songs that, after I recovered from my rage blackout, immediately came to mind and fueled my anger so much I almost passed out all over again.

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In an mmmbop, it's gone.

This morning I took an exercise class—"piloxing," a combination of Pilates and boxing that results in its attendees punching the air for about 45 straight minutes and that I highly recommend for anyone who reads the Internet too much—and its mix of music was decidedly '90s-centric; high-energy versions of "What A Girl Wants," "I Want It That Way," and "Bye Bye Bye" were on the table, as was a remix of "Good Vibrations." (The Marky Mark one.) There was one point, though, where I thought the present would intrude on the past—an extended intro for something that sounded a lot like Lady Gaga's "The Edge Of Glory" crept up, only to turn into a similarly triumphant pop song from the year I graduated college. TO THE EMBEDS!

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Whatever you thought of her performance at this year's Super Bowl, Madonna's halftime appearance had the desired effect: It drummed up awareness for her first album in four years, the longest recording gap of her career.

When the Billboard 200 album chart is tallied in the middle of this week, Madge's new disc MDNA is expected to dominate handily, with anticipated first-week sales of at least 300,000 copies. That tally would put MDNA solidly in the middle of the pack of Madonna studio-album debuts since the turn of the millennium—ranging from a low of 241,000 copies for 2003's American Life to a high of 420,000 for 2000's Music. All of these albums debuted atop the album chart, and MDNA will be her fifth consecutive No. 1 studio album, after Music, American Life, Confessions on a Dance Floor (2005) and Hard Candy (2008). That streak outdoes her previous three-album run of chart-toppers, Like a Virgin, True Blue and Like a Prayer, notched in her '80s heyday.

The debut of MDNA will also mean the album chart and the Hot 100 are simultaneously topped by recordings boosted by the 2012 Super Bowl. "We Are Young" by fun., heading toward its fifth week as Billboard's No. 1 song, hurtled up the chart in February after its appearance in a Chevy commercial that debuted during the game. Never, ever doubt the promotional prowess of America's national consumerist holiday.

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This week Madonna's 12th studio album and dive into the deep end of the EDM pool, MDNA, came out. I didn't like it very much. But what I like even less is the sexism-tinged age-baiting that the record seems to be inspiring in so many critics. Forbes was likely the worst offender of the bunch, going so far as to call MDNA "Madonna's Mighty Menopausal Comeback." (Uh, was that claim fact-checked, "straight woman half her age" who wrote that piece?)

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@MDNA2012/Twitpic

Madonna at Ultra over the weekend.

Ultra Music Festival pummeled Miami's Bayfront Park last weekend, motivating innumerable fist pumps over thirty hours of music, but it was the brief speech by a 53-year-old woman wearing a shirt emblazoned with the letters "MDNA" that has prompted disbelief within parts of the electronic dance music community. That woman is Madonna, who as part of the scorched earth roll-out for her new album MDNA introduced headliner Avicii and incited the overwhelmingly young attendees with the question: "How many people in this crowd have seen Molly?"

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​Sound of the City's search for the quintessential New York City musician enters Round Two this week, with battles in the Round of 32 daily. Keep up with all the action here.

In their more carefree, young-turk days, Madonna and the Beastie Boys went on tour together, shocking parents and delighting the makers of fingerless gloves. After years of big-selling albums and experimentation of all sorts (sonic, sexual, film-making, etc.), both are firmly ensconsed in pop's pantheon of legends. Today, the Material Girl and the Beasties tangle once again—this time, in Sound of the City's search for the quintessential New York musician. Who will emerge victorious?

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​The Round of 64 for Sound of the City's own version of March Madness—in which you, the Sound of the City voting public, help determine the quintessential New York musician—finishes up this week, with the Round of 32 scheduled to kick off Monday. (The schedule and results so far are here; the full, updated bracket is here.) This time out we head to the Downtown quadrant for a battle between the ever-provocative Madonna and the explosive Jon Spencer. Check out the arguments in favor of each below, and vote at Facebook for your favorite.

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Forget that the latest song to be released from Madonna's upcoming album MDNA is biting its title from a noxious DVD series run by one of the worst people ever to be hailed as a "celebrity" by American culture (a pretty impressive feat, that); never mind that it rhymes "fire" and "desire" on its prechorus, despite the peppy track being absolutely nowhere near as good as The System's sparkling "Don't Disturb This Groove" and thus failing the "does this track have enough redeeming qualities to allow me to overlook the No. 1 lyric cliché of all time?" test. No, the most glaring quality of "Girl Gone Wild," which hit the web yesterday, is the way that Madonna seems to be pretty absent from the track.

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Maybe it's all that misguided Year of the Woman chatter that dominated year-end roundups, or the slow, agonizing creep of Fashion Week, or the coming apocalypse, but hoo boy has there been a lot of terrible writing about female musicians in the past few weeks. The latest offender is the New York Times style magazine T's cover-worthy profile of Lana Del Rey, which manages to be offensive from its first sentence and somehow gets worse from there. (There are even photos by the terminally icky Terry Richardson.) This piece inspired me to put forth four questions that writers, whether they're male or female, whether they're people with Tumblrs or those important enough to score offices at the New York Times building, should ask themselves before hitting "send" on their next piece about a woman making music.

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