Marcel Winatschek

She Still Wants Everything

Madonna released Give Me All Your Luvin’—spelled with a deliberate apostrophe, the way pop stars abbreviate to signal lightness—just before her Super Bowl halftime performance, and the combination of Nicki Minaj and M.I.A. on the track made it feel, briefly, like something other than legacy management. Two artists who at that moment seemed genuinely combustible, and here was Madonna borrowing their frequency. She’s always known how to do that: identify whoever’s currently making the room nervous and position herself adjacent.

What I’ve always found interesting about Madonna, underneath the reinvention mythology, is the unsentimental efficiency of it. She doesn’t romanticize her pivots. She tunes to a new station and moves. Give Me All Your Luvin’ is that process made audible—a song that wants love and attention and says so without irony, directly and loudly. Whether that’s disarming or faintly alarming probably depends on your own relationship to wanting things out loud.