“In the beginning there was the Boy Toy, the Material Girl, the born-again virgin with the wedding dress hitched up around her waist; then came the Sean Penn tabloid inferno, the ambiguities with Sandra Bernhard, the Warren Beatty imbroglio, Dennis Rodman; and, of course, the conical Gaultier bras, the Sex book, the $5 million Pepsi-ad debacle, the Letterman implosion; lately we’ve had the painted Kabbalistic novitiate, the Harrods-bought accent, and the spectacle of “Material Mom” Madonna as Style Queen of All London. Each and every one of Madonna’s dramatic shape-shifts could almost have been designed to distract us from the essential truth about the woman: not some tawdry secret from her seedy East Village past, not gruesome sexual proclivities or repellent personality traits, but rather the curious fact that Madonna Louise Ciccone stands as one of the great songwriter-producer-performers of recent times. And yet, where this particular disco strumpet is concerned, “music” is the love that dare not speak its name. In keeping the tabloids and the fanzines frothing, Madonna has managed to veil what is, in the final reckoning, her prime asset. Because even at those Madonna Moments when her name is on everyone’s lips, people rarely speak of the star’s musical alacrity - her masterly way with a hook, her uncanny ability to pick the perfect collaborators, her unerring instinct for the next pop-cultural mood swing. More likely they’re calculating how many months she has before she is “over.””