In celebration of Madonnas birthday (August 16), weve deemed it Madonna Day on Pitchfork. Weve reviewed four of her classic albumsher 1983 debut, 1989s Like a Prayer, 1994s Bedtime Stories, and 1998s Ray of Lightand 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 Madonnas 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.

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

Its easy to mock the quaint 80s reaction to the lyrics of Like A Virgin, but its also fair to say that if a mainstream 2017 pop actAriana Grande, for instancereleased 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 didnt. Her response? Art should be controversial, and that's all there is to it.

Madonna upped the ante on her next formal album, 1992s 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 Womens 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 CNNs switchboard but a fair point, well made.

When Madonna descended on New York in 1978, shed just dropped out of a University of Michigan dance scholarship and was hell-bent on making it as a professional dancer. So, spoiler alert, shes 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 Billboards Dance/Club Songs Chart, even if some of those chart-topping trackslike the various mixes of the poignant gender-role assessment What It Feels Like For A Girlmake for a somewhat complex shimmy.

Peppered throughout Madonnas career are more direct hints at what it might be like to actuallyimagine 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 theres that). Most significantly, Madonnas 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 awayit's called a dance floor.

Released a few years earlier, True Blue album cut Wheres 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 couldnt wait to get older, before acknowledging that getting older hasnt been everything shed hoped, then looking ahead to the future: Don't want to grow old too fast, dont want to let the system get me down. Like some of the best pop songs, its 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 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 Madonnas upbringing with themes of defiance, resolve, and closure.

A more literal timepiece motif emerged during the 2000s, when the lead singles from two successive Madonna albums each began with the sound of a clock ticking. In the first, 2005s Abba-sampling behemoth Hung Up, the ticking clock was inspired by producer Stuart Prices earlier remix of Gwen Stefanis What You Waiting For, and was followed by Madonnas observation that time goes by so slowly for those who wait, those who run seem to have all the fun.

By 2008, it was Timbaland administering the ticks on 4 Minutes, rather improbably Madonnas second most-streamed song on Spotify. That songs lyrics (We only got four minutes to save the world grab a boy, then grab a girl) suggested procreation-based speed dating, but Madonna later explained that they hinged on living on borrowed time essentially, and people are becoming much more aware of the environment and how we're destroying the planet. Madonna may have overestimated the urgency but, well, that clocks still ticking.

The are various words we might use to describe Madonnas film career, one of the more generous being lengthy. Since the 80s, Madonnas screen credits have prompted a series of musical contributions whose quality has frequently, often mercifully, failed to correlate with that of the actual movie.

Were one to assemble those alongside songs contributed to films in which Madonna didnt even appear, youd have one of the modern pop eras most surreal career retrospectives. It would include glossy pop jam Whos That Girl, wistful ballad-banger Ill Remember (from a dreadful Joe Pesci-Brendan Fraser vehicle), the William Orbit-produced, Austin Powers-soundtracking Beautiful Stranger, a peculiar cover of American Pie featuring Rupert Everett, the slightly mind-boggling Hanky Panky" (and the rest of her *Dick Tracy* companion LP), futuristic Bond theme Die Another Day, and (on a technicality) Into the Groove.

By law, that compilation would also need to include Madonnas take on Dont Cry For Me Argentina, but not the version she sang in Evita. Instead wed have the castanet-strewn, 100 percent spectacular, seven-minute remix, for which Madonna recorded brand new vocals and a second chorus entirely in Spanish. Sadly, some may say criminally, this definitive version of Dont Cry For Me Argentina is unavailable on streaming services, but it does live on via YouTube.

Treat with deep suspicion anybody who links lyrical substance to low tempo. That said, while Madonna has definitely explored the extremes of human emotion via dance floor smashes, some of her most profound thoughts have arrived within her most elegant songs. On her wildly underrated American Life album, Nothing Fails boasts a tempo that barely reaches the status of mid, but for a truly downbeat masterpiece, try Ray Of Lights Drowned World/Substitute For Love, a prelude to a reflective and immersive album whose sonic departure made it the riskiest move in a career built on the avoidance of safe decisions. Its there that we found Madonna, whod previously sung plenty about being a daughter, singing for the first time about being a parent (via sparse lullaby Little Star) while also, on mesmerizing album closer Mer Girl, reflecting on the death of her own mother.

Madonna undoubtedly defined the role of sex in modern pop, but just as prominentlyin songs as diverse as Take A Bow, Get Together, and Borderlineare themes of romance, heartbreak, and optimism. The thing is, Madonna told Rolling Stone regarding 2015s Living For Love, lots of people write about being in love and being happy or they write about having a broken heart and being inconsolable. But nobody writes about having a broken heart and being hopeful and triumphant afterwards. I didn't want to share the sentiment of being a victim. This scenario devastated me, but it just made me stronger.

The survival spirit of Living for Love came to life in an unexpected way. One of the songs first performances took place at the 2015 Brit Awards, where, at a key moment, a dancer tugged Madonnas cloak. The garment should have billowed away to reveal Madonnas full performance outfit, but the clasp jammed. Madonna was abruptly yanked off the stage platform but was back on her feet within seconds, singing lines like, Lifted me up, and watched me stumble after the heartache, Im gonna carry on. She finished the song, conjuring a live TV victory where others would have conceded defeat.

The aftermath was Madonna in excelsis: She didnt block the performances upload to the Brits YouTube channel. She didnt hide the imperfection or pretend it had not happened. In fact, within a week, the full performance was on her official VEVO channel, where it remains. Elsewhere on Rebel Heart, Madonna sings, Im only humanwhich is true, of course. Madonna definitely is a human beingshe just happens to be one whose remarkable longevity and multifaceted creativity justify her reputation as the Queen of Pop.

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6 Sides of Madonna That Explain Her Genius - Pitchfork