I’m in gay dance heaven tonight. While waiting for my order of Madonna’s new album Confessions on a Dance Floor to arrive in the post, I decided to download the iTunes exclusive version, which is a non-stop mix which runs for just under an hour. It comes with the video of Hung Up, which ably demonstrates the remarkable effects of liposculpture performed by top surgeons (man, those thighs and that backside cannot be real on a woman of her age, or anybody for that matter) and it also comes with a PDF of questionable value, described as a ‘digital booklet’ which is ooh-tech-speak for a scan of the album art and CD label.

Putting aside the combination of jealousy and horror at her (paid for) youthful looks, the new album shows the Queen of Pop is back on form. Every track is a stonking dance number, apparently each one produced with an eye on the potential for countless remixes. Madonna has always maintained an extensive farm of cash cows and now, it appears, she is intent on milking them like never before, the poor beasts. Then again, to be fair, she has kids to support now as well as a husband whose film career started and ended with one film. Life at home must consist of counting the pennies in the jar and wondering whether to buy Stork margarine or go crazy, get the best butter and be damned. Not. But anyway…

The album is immediately more than likeable to any Madonna fan but I do have a reservation, a nagging doubt at the back of my mind. I can’t help feeling she’s tickling my fancies in quite a mercenary and contrived manner. She’s always been a bit of a prostitute, let’s face it, but this time round it feels like she’s practically begged us for cash, desperate to show she can still give head like a youngster. I mean, after American Life, the woman is lucky to have been given another chance. That album, while it had some wonderful tracks which kind of slipped under the radar, gave us its inexcusable title track with that god-awful rap which turned Madonna into a joke overnight. Personally I blamed her homophobic and talentless husband for leading her astray at the time. That, and she lacked someone in the studio who had the balls to say ‘no Madders, you can’t do that because it’s going to sound crap’.

This time round, (nearly) everyone’s favourite pop icon has gone for the dancefloor jugular big time. There are no political views on display here, only those of a supreme hedonist. The lyrics, such as they are, range from the cheesy to the completely nonsensical and there doesn’t seem to be any integrity on display. But what does that matter when you’ve produced a feel-good album which will make any party a great one? There’s a place for shallow, even if we are being manipulated. Madonna is, after all, no stranger to manipulation and in producing this album has demonstrated keen survival instincts.

Perhaps not so strangely as you might think, I am reminded throughout the album of Culture Club’s Karma Chameleon – a huge hit in the 80s but one which, by Boy George’s own admission, was a complete nonsense song (forgive me Madders, for mentioning George, as I know you two don’t exactly see eye-to-eye). Pop doesn’t have to mean anything and none of the songs on Madonna’s new album have any meaning, any message, to impart other than ’shake your booty on the dancefloor’. You can’t take anything she has to sing about here with anything other than a massive pinch of salt. Take the brilliantly Donna Summer-esque I Love NY, for example: the woman lives in London now yet in this delightfully cheesy number, filled with dodgy rhymes and backed up by an I Feel Love electro-beat, she has the audacity to claim she loves New York and really, um, doesn’t like London one little bit. It’s patently untrue but it doesn’t matter. She’s acting, luvvies and that’s all there is to it. She’s playing a part which, once upon a time long ago, she invented and later moved away from. I Love NY is a beautiful monster, as is the entirety of the album, crushing all opposition and making today’s pre-pubescent pop fodder and wannabe slutsters like Christina Aguilera look like the amateurs they are. Go back to the playground, Madonna tells the contenders to her throne: I’m back and I’m throwing some seriously hefty disco queen bitch weight around. As a gay man, I do like strong women and this one’s never come across as stronger, or bolder.

Queers will buy this in their millions, of course, as will anyone who hankers after some classic, meaningless, well-crafted pop music. I get the sense that the whole R&B/Hip-Hop thing is finally starting to wane, with people increasingly concerned over the number of violent gangster types waving guns while they sing of their love of raping women and killing homos. If it’s acceptable (not to me, but hey) for some black guys (oh, and Eminem) to sell themselves and others short, then I think it’s more than okay for Madonna to return to her Good Time Girl persona and make us smile, clap, dance and cheer. Madonna proves with Confessions on a Dance Floor that pop music never went away. It only went out of fashion for a while and, with any hope, is set with this fantastic album to make a major comeback. We shall see. Whatever happens, buy this album. Unless you’re boring you’re going to love it. You’re going to love it and play it over and over and over again. Until you die. But at least you’ll die happy.

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