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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We didn't even talk about this guy. Let's hope she brings him along!

​Fresh off her Super Bowl halftime performance, and its attendant digit-borne controversy, Madonna has announced a world tour in support of her forthcoming album MDNA. Its New York stop is set for September 6 at Yankee Stadium, which has a big wide-open schedule surrounding that date, just FYI. (Madonna's tour goes from Boston on Sept. 4 to New York on the 6th to Ottawa on the 10th.) Tickets for the show go on sale on Monday, February 13, at 10 a.m., with prices ranging from $52.90 to $375.05. (That's with fees, in case you were wondering; the low end price is for upper-upper deck seats, although seats in the Stadium's top level aren't much more expensive than that, ranging from $69.50 to $84.50 before Ticketmaster's surcharges get slapped on.)

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​Well! When I went to bed last night I figured I'd be writing about a couple of aspects of Madonna's Super Bowl halftime show, during which she ran through her catalog with the assistance of Nicki Minaj, M.I.A., Cee Lo Green, LMFAO, a marching band, a choir, and gladiators. There was the whole notion of bringing voguing, which she plucked out of the gay underground two decades ago, to the most heteronormative major event America's spectacle has to offer; there was the nitpicking over the set list (sure, it's a relatively minor hit in the Madonna catalog, but "Causing A Commotion" would have slotted into the medley nicely); and there was, of course, the cruel exclusion of Shufflebot from LMFAO's cameo. (Seriously, what?) But this morning all the chatter was about the controversy stoked by the controversy-stoking M.I.A., who flipped off the camera as a way to put a period on her verse on the still-underwhelming new Madonna track "Give Me All Your Luvin." Just when you thought it was safe to bring pop music back into the halftime show... a finger happens. The only way this could have inspired more silly outrage is if her finger had been drizzled with truffle oil first.

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​The video for "Give Me All Your Lovin'," the first single from Madonna's MDNA, premiered in full this morning, and there is something vaguely... jeans-commercialish about the way the song sounds? I don't know if it's the stuttery beat or the electronically tweaked guitars accompanying Madge on the pre-chorus, or if it's just that she's singing most of the track in her way-airy head voice, but it all sounds very perfunctory, like it's just waiting to be licensed for a spot advertising a juice cleanse or a cruise. Meanwhile, in the video, Madonna reaches back to the past a bit, crowdsurfing a slew of faceless football players in a way that evokes the clip for "Material Girl" and getting her '90s pile-o'-curls on at a later point; Nicki Minaj and M.I.A. are relegated to cheerleader status for most of the video, only getting to wear outfits evoking the "Like A Virgin" ersatz-wedding-dress period for their brief, somewhat rote cameos. Watch below.

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