Album Review: Celebration by Madonna

Due to an editing error, the reviewer?s original grade in the magazine was inadvertently changed from an A to an B. EW regrets the error. Madonna, of course, is less about the Voice than the zeitgeist. At 51, she remains ? as strenuously au courant as ever; on the glitched-out dance-floor stomper ”Revolver,” one of two new tracks from her mammoth greatest-hits collection Celebration, she enlists raspy-voiced hip-hop scamp Lil Wayne, and delivers lyrical come-ons like ”My love’s a revolver/My sex is a killer/Do you wanna die happy?” Superfans may well die happy with this much concentrated Madge-estry: 36 tracks covering nearly every phase of her ? 25-year career.

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Madonna's run at the top of the charts lasted so long, longer than almost any other star, it's almost impossible to squeeze all the hits onto one collection. And so it is that Celebration, a double-disc, 36-track set that also has a companion single-disc condensation, misses a few songs, hits as gorgeous as "Rain" and as goofily camp as "Hanky Panky," but truth be told, they're not greatly missed on this parade of pop genius that's hampered only slightly by its non-chronological order. Out of order, it does emphasize Madonna's consistency, and the bigger problem with the collection is that it mixes up album mixes, single edits, Q-Sound mixes pulled from The Immaculate Collection, and a couple of stray odd edits and mixes.

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"Time goes by so slowly," goes the first line of Madonna's silver-anniversary-or-so-in-showbiz collection, and she doesn't quite make the case for that pronouncement. At the end of every decade, she puts out a greatest-hits set: 1990's The Immaculate Collection was the kind of perfect straight-into-orbit retrospective pop artists dream of achieving, and if 2001's GHV2 felt a little less epochal, it still collected a lot of magnificently melancholic dance songs from the following decade. Since then, she's fallen off a bit-- which is a strange way to describe eight years in which she's recorded a dozen #1 dance singles, but "Hung Up" is really the only song from the post-GHV2 period that's lodged in the American pop consciousness.

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