Madonna Louise Ciccone is about to turn 60, a “big birthday” by anybody’s reckoning. I remember her at the time of her breakthrough 1983 single, Holiday, a mischievous mess of bangles and swinging crucifixes, boasting that she was so hot that you could fry an egg on her belly button. From that point on, Madonna was omnipresent – confrontational, audacious, sexual, occasionally annoying and weirdly vulnerable (brought up in a strict Italian-American Catholic family, Madonna’s mother died when she was a child).

She pounded through personas (boy toy, material girl, Hollywood royalty, dancefloor vixen, gangsta momma,), like an all-singing all-dancing one-woman variety show. It was never just about the music. Madonna embodied the devilish voice in your ear, saying: “Why not?” A pop queen with a big dirty rock mouth, she was one of the first great influencers, daring at least a couple of generations of girls and young women (not to mention all her loyal gay fans) to be bolder, stronger and, crucially, a ton less humble and apologetic.

The ironic question “What would Madonna do?” isn’t still doing the rounds for nothing.

No surprise, then, that witch-burners have long been out in force against Madonna. She’s been called everything: ball-breaker, whore, user, crone, narcissist, talent-vampire. Vulgar taste-free zone. While taking criticism is part of the fame gig, it was as though Madonna served as a cautionary tale for women who get too darn uppity.

In truth, popular culture still reeks of Madonna’s influence for a good reason: she’s earned it. Far from being a shallow shape-shifter, she always knew her way around a pop classic (her oeuvre is full of them), and developed a flair for choosing talented collaborators to keep her music fresh. Moreover, back when she could have played it safe, Madonna called herself an artist and acted like one, tirelessly reinventing herself. From plonking a black saint in the Like a Prayer video to putting out a book called Sex, at the peak of her fame, just about everything Madonna did alienated middle America, because she wanted to define the zeitgeist, not merely reflect it.

In recent years, Madonna, also mother to Lourdes (by Carlos Leon) and Rocco (by Guy Ritchie), has been criticised for adopting four Malawian children (perfectly legally), having “work done” (such a shock in celeb circles) and having much younger partners (you mean, like 99% of famous older men?). Every time she tours, there’s gnashing of teeth about her “inappropriate” stage outfits – euphemisms for “too young for her”, as if someone of Madonna’s vintage should crawl on stage in a candlewick dressing gown, begging for forgiveness for not being 25 any more. Burn the witch! Burn her good!

I interviewed Madonna in the mid-90s in her New York apartment. If I was unprepared for her doll-like tininess, I was impressed by her attitude, as we talked about fame, rape, dehumanisation, and everything in between. There was no tiresome stonewalling, bristling at questions or monosyllabic answers. Madonna was friendly, relaxed and engaged. She was also sane and funny, not traits to be taken for granted at her level of stardom.

Not that it’s all been gravy. It’s probably best to politely ignore all that Kabbalah nonsense. It’s astonishing to me that such a clever woman managed to marry beneath her, not once but twice. I suspect that on some secret panel somewhere, Madonna has been voted “The control freak’s control freak”. (Her own brother, Christopher, wrote a memoir about working for her that could have been entitled Sissie Dearest). Her acting has been patchy at best – her personality is so strong, it always seems to seep through her performances like blood through a badly tied bandage. In retrospect, snogging Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera on stage looked less like passing on the pop baton and more like sucking their souls out through their mouths.

And perhaps, in the interests of pop sisterhood, Madonna could have been a tad more gracious about Lady Gaga’s (ahem) homages.

Madonna on the set of her Hung Up video, 2005. Photograph: Annika Aschberg/PA/PA

However, I’m just not into slating Madonna and not just because I’m heartily sick of everyone else doing so. Most of the things people criticise Madonna for, I tend to find rather funny, including that gigantic, nuclear-strength ego, frying to a cinder all before it. At some point, we have to ask ourselves: what do we want from our stars – humility and jogging bottoms or magic and dynamite? I know which way I’d usually go.

At this stage, perhaps Madonna’s greatest achievement is that she’s a survivor. Of her era of superstars (Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, Prince), she’s the last one left standing, living proof that maturing in music doesn’t just mean the Rolling Stones – it can be a wild, untamed feminine energy too.

Nor has she done it via endless comebacks and the nostalgia trail. Sure, she’d be idiotic (and ungenerous) not to perform songs from her extensive back catalogue, but Madonna has been genuinely active and creative all the way through, always with a new project on the horizon. So, happy birthday to Madonna. She’s sung, danced, acted, yapped, provoked, riled, worked her butt off, kept a sense of humour and taken all the sexist slurs with her head held high. Here’s to an artist who can’t come back because she never went away.

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