Madonna: Give Me All Your Luvin’

The music video arrived in 2012 with all the pageantry you’d expect—Madonna still convinced she could provoke the internet, still convinced the internet cared. M.I.A. and Nicki Minaj flanking her like the pop equivalent of a power play. The whole thing was so determinedly scandalous, so carefully calculated to offend, that it kind of did the opposite. You watched it and understood exactly what she was doing, which meant there was nothing left to do.

But the song itself is better than the controversy around it. It’s poppy and dumb in the way that works—the kind of thing that gets stuck in your head not because it’s deep but because it doesn’t pretend to be. Madonna chasing relevance by chasing younger collaborators, which is what you do when you’ve already been relevant longer than most people are alive. There’s something sad about that, actually. Not in a way that makes the song worse, just in a way that makes it more honest than she probably intended.