In celebration of Madonna’s birthday (August 16), we’ve deemed it Madonna Day on Pitchfork. We’ve reviewed four of her classic albums—her 1983 debut, 1989’s Like a Prayer, 1994’s Bedtime Stories, and 1998’s Ray of Light—and now we move onto the ties that bind her career.

If you were to see someone tweet the phrase “Madonna is everything,” you might attribute it to a very 2017 type of online hyperbole. And yes, Madonna is everything in that sense, but from a pop perspective Madonna also feels like everything because in a career spanning four decades she has attacked, absorbed, and conquered pop music from every possible angle.

When Madonna’s referenced as the Queen of Reinvention, it tends to suggest the linear series of career moves, from album to album, sonic era to sonic era, hairstyle to hairstyle. In reality, her layered approach to pop domination has frequently seemed to consist of multiple Madonnas existing at the same time. Here are six of her best, key to understanding her work.

Madonna, The Controversialist

Many of Madonna’s supposedly controversial songs (like ‘80s hit “Papa Don’t Preach,” with its subtext of abortion) are now more clearly identified as feminist statements or expressions of self, but that’s not to say Madonna has never deliberately courted outright controversy.

It’s easy to mock the quaint ’80s reaction to the lyrics of “Like A Virgin,” but it’s also fair to say that if a mainstream 2017 pop act—Ariana Grande, for instance—released the video Madonna made for “Like A Prayer,” all hell would still break loose. That video tackled religion, race, and sex, with scenes depicting murder, burning crosses, and Madonna with stigmata-esque wounds. It led to predictable complaints from the American Family Association, a denouncement by the Vatican, and a $5 million Pepsi ad campaign being benched. It would have been disingenuous of Madonna to feign surprise at the reaction. And she didn’t. Her response? “Art should be controversial, and that's all there is to it.”

Madonna upped the ante on her next formal album, 1992’s Erotica, and its accompanying artifacts, including the boundary-breaking “Justify My Love” video and a coffee table book called Sex, whose main shock value these days involves the inclusion of Vanilla Ice. Fast-forward to 2017, after decades of refusing to be silenced: Live on CNN from the Women’s March on Washington, Madonna delivered a passionate speech about change, sacrifice, rebellion, the tyranny of Trump, and the power of love. There was more, of course: “To our detractors that insist this march will never add up to anything: fuck you. Fuck. You.” Not great news for CNN’s switchboard but a fair point, well made.

Madonna, The Club Queen

When Madonna descended on New York in 1978, she’d just dropped out of a University of Michigan dance scholarship and was hell-bent on making it as a professional dancer. So, spoiler alert, she’s not averse to tripping the light fantastic, as her 1983 debut proved out the gate. Her discography is full of floorfillers, and she holds the record for the most No. 1 singles on Billboard’s Dance/Club Songs Chart, even if some of those chart-topping tracks—like the various mixes of the poignant gender-role assessment “What It Feels Like For A Girl”—make for a somewhat complex shimmy.

Peppered throughout Madonna’s career are more direct hints at what it might be like to actually—imagine this!—go dancing with Madonna. She likes to boogie woogie, this much we know from “Music.” On the 2000 album track “Impressive Instant,” Madonna reveals that her skills extend to both rhumba and samba (though bear in mind this was also the song where she declared, “I like to singy singy singy like a bird on a wingy wingy wingy,” so there’s that). Most significantly, Madonna’s belief in the dance floor as a sacred space is described in “Vogue” with words some will find as inspiring in 2017 as listeners almost three decades ago did: “When all else fails and you long to be something better than you are today, I know a place where you can get away—it's called a dance floor.”

Released a few years earlier, True Blue album cut “Where’s The Party” was ostensibly a song about going out and losing control after a week at work. Madonna wistfully recalls that as a child she “couldn’t wait to get older,” before acknowledging that getting older hasn’t been everything she’d hoped, then looking ahead to the future: “Don't want to grow old too fast, don’t want to let the system get me down.” Like some of the best pop songs, it’s about living in the moment, even if the importance of doing so only makes sense in the context of what came before, and what will come in the future. Which leads us to…

Madonna, The Clockwatcher

Madonna looked closer to home on another time-shifting track, “This Used to Be My Playground” from A League of Their Own, with further songs like “Oh Father” and “Live To Tell” also looking back on Madonna’s upbringing with themes of defiance, resolve, and closure.