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Source: Breakfast
I was an impressionable age when I first encountered Madonna. She was rolling around seductively on a suburban street in her 1983 video for Burning Up.
Despite that impression, I could not have predicted that 24 years later I would insist her dance anthem Hung Up be on the soundtrack to my wedding.
Such is the longevity and influence of her career that there can be few people with a passing interest in pop culture who don't have some sort of connection to her - whether they like it or not!
Since 1983 Madonna has imposed herself on popular culture, her tireless work ethic seeing her become an icon several times over - pop music, style, sexual, music video, gay, business, and (anti?) religious icon to name a few.
Without her would Kylie, Britney, Pink, The Spice Girls, J Lo, even Destiny's Child, exist or be the same as we know them today? Nearly 30 years after her first release, Madonna remains one of the most popular, powerful, and influential artists of our time.
Madonna has now released her third greatest hits album - Celebration. And it truly is a celebration of her pop music career; a whopping 36 remastered songs (including two new songs), half from the 1980s and the other half evenly split between the 1990s and 2000s.
However the running order is not at all chronological, which keeps it interesting, but also forces a reassessment of some songs - for instance Sorry (2005) suffers next to the superb Ray Of Light (1998).
The sequencing also highlights the strong influence her various producers (e.g. Nile Rodgers, William Orbit, Timbaland) have had on her sound over the years, and picks out different Madonna eras as strongly as her constant self-reinvention.
While for this listener there is probably as much pleasure hearing some of the nearly forgotten songs (for me, Burning Up), as there is temptation to skip past the lesser material (Lucky Star anyone?), there is a lot to enjoy in Madonna's musical legacy.
In particular the remastering breathes life in to the 1980s material, allowing them to stand beside and often out-perform later songs.
However, for a retrospective of such an icon, it is disappointing there are no liner notes or even a short message from Madge herself to accompany it.
Justify My Love appeared as a new song on her 1990 greatest hits Immaculate Collection. There can't be too many artists whose "bonus" track on one compilation appears on a subsequent greatest hits album.
So will either of the two new tracks on Celebration appear on her next compilation? Hopefully not the dated trance of the Paul Oakenfold produced title track, but Revolver, with critics' favourite rapper Lil Wayne, may well stand the test of time.
While Ray Of Light and Like A Virgin remain her most iconic albums, Celebration contains all the Madonna songs most iPods will ever need. And canny as ever Madonna has ensured this one supercedes all previous greatest hits as the best celebration of her music.
