Madonna

For more than a quarter of a century, Madonna has kept the pop world anticipating her next move like an Oscar®-night red-carpet reporter keeping an eye out for the next limo. A virtual Hindu goddess, she boasts three distinct faces, each expressing a different facet of the Madonna trinity. The first is her Catherine the Great face: the outward display of insatiability. From its earliest stirrings in the new wave dance anthem "Material Girl" to the later, more sophisticated "Vogue", she's been endearingly brazen about wanting it all. Here is an artist who, on the 2008 Pharrell Williams collaboration "Give It 2 Me", showed absolutely no sign of letting up: "Don't stop me now, no need to catch my breath, I can go on and on and on." In Next Steps, we go to Madonna's dark, kinky side.

Madonna's second goddess face reveals her as a femme fatale. No longer the somewhat ambitious girl next door by the time she had transitioned from 1990's The Immaculate Collection to 1992's Erotica, Madonna had already taken her anti-censorship outrage to prime time television. The latter album's title track was banned by MTV — and the artist herself kicked up an angels-versus-demons furore after she was forbidden from entering the Vatican — in the midst of a worldwide thunderstorm over her book, Sex . . . which, of course, sold 1.5 million copies within three days of release, making it the most successful coffee table book in history. But it's Madonna's third face — which she unveils in our Deep Cuts — that separates her from your run-of-the-mill, lights-on-but-nobody's-home diva.

Madonna's third and final goddess face uncovers her mystic side. From the Catholic icons in her early videos to her very name, Madonna has always embraced her spirituality. In a flash of insight during "Drowned World/Substitute For Love", she closes with "Now I find I've changed my mind/this is my religion" . . . and that track appears on an album — 1998's Ray of Light — which also features a yoga mantra sung in Hindi over William Orbit's production set. Madonna has always exploited the inherent ambiguity of the religious lexicon (her songs are peppered with "angels", "confessions", "devils", and "infernos") and "Oh Father" strikes an especially poignant balance between the physical, the emotional, and the spiritual.

Madonna's quarter-century reign as the queen of pop is so much a part of our musical landscape it's easy to overlook the staggering nature of its scope. Consider this: she's been cranking out hits since Maggie Thatcher was in her first term of office, Dallas was the national TV soap obsession, and Beyoncé was in nappies. In the meantime, she established herself as the Coco Chanel of pop — each season crafting new, and newsworthy, designs — an unrivalled trendsetter in music, fashion, and even religion. Never one to shy away from controversy, her inner gyroscope allowed her to push up against the edge of public acceptability without sailing over it. And in a business where women traditionally enjoy the shelf life of a dairy product, her repeated reinvention has kept her fresh as tomorrow's headlines.