A couple weeks before delivering her second baby Rocco, Madonna found herself in a "pre-partum" depression: "I get to the end of my day sometimes, and I think, 'OK, I'm pregnant. I'm fat. I can't exercise. I can't wear cool clothes. I don't feel like dancing. And there's absolutely nothing remotely cool or cutting-edge about me right now. I've become a domesticated cow. Sometimes I burst into tears just thinking about it.'"

Some of us fear heights. Some of us fear death. But do any of us fear being uncool? That incessant dread of suddenly being dismissed as irrelevant, that haunting possibility of becoming "domesticated" drives Madonna to be so desperately ambitious, impossibly brilliant and acutely self-aware. Madonna knows the impact of her own revolutionary spirit--the world has become incredibly small to her, if you think about it--and that has brought her both gargantuan fame and the stigma of arrogance. There is no question that Madonna has developed into somewhat of a pretentious personality. She clings to a smarmy British accent, bashes Britney Spears and the other teen pop stars even though her early music was just as packaged and diluted, complains about the "sucky" scripts being sent to her even though she can't act her way out of a paper bag, and even carps about the nudity in the British tabloids--this from the woman who posed lasciviously with animals in Sex!

But accusing Madonna of hypocrisy is not only futile, but nave. She is evolution. She exists on the momentum of contradictions, on the trajectory of postmodern appropriation. Always on the lookout for new material, Madonna is an artistic migrant--she moves from subject to subject, from body to body, to claim (or reclaim) a plot of the cultural landscape. Whether it's S&M, Indian yoga, geisha fashion, or now ruby slippers and cowboy gear, Madonna inhabits each new specter so effortlessly and completely that we have to believe her. Sure, she can't act onscreen but the reason is so painfully obvious: Madonna's entire career relies on our ability to accept each of her new incarnations as genuine. Not only is she baffled by how to differentiate her acting onscreen from her public posturing, but how can we accept the "constructed" persona for two hours on a movie screen when we entrust our society's "coolness," all our most valuable fads and fashions, to the "real" Madonna?

Somewhere in all of this postmodern muddle lies the reason that Madonna is, in fact, still relevant. The music. Now pay attention to this next sentence, because it's a bold statement, but it's absolutely indisputable. No other artist in music history has taken as many risks as Madonna, as many unnecessary risks simply for the sake of art. Sure, you can point to someone like Bjork or musicians on the fringe, but Madonna's case is singular. She never needed to change, she never needed to evolve. Every Mariah Carey record is the same. Every Whitney Houston record is the same. Every Britney Spears record will be the same. But Madonna cannot stand repetition. Repetition is boring, repetition engenders complacency, complacency ensures the rule of "kiddie pop" and bands like 98 Degrees. Madonna abhors these bubblegum pop queens simply because she hates their laziness and their casual desecration of all the values she's held sacred in her musical career--after all, Britney and Christina Aguilera say that Madonna "inspired" them. But to Madonna, inspiration equals risk. Every new record will not only sound completely different from everything you've produced before, but from anything and everything languishing in the current musical landscape.