Paper Monitor
A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.
Despite a 29-year recording career behind her, it remains difficult to escape from Madonna in this morning's papers.
Not only does she have an album - the tabloid-furore-inviting MDNA - but, according to the Times, she risks being drawn into a ".
A pledge by the singer to defy a ban on promoting gay rights is behind the potential flare-up.
But what of her new record? The paper's rather ungallantly, in light of her recent divorce from Guy Ritchie, suggests that it is "a bit like you'd imagine being married to Madonna might be: thrilling, hard work at times and over before you know it".
Nor is the impressed, suggesting that it relies on "cliche and uninspired re-runs of old ideas".
Alexis Petridis of the Guardian is more generous, offering four stars and
What's striking isn't that Madonna is still with us - everybody's still with us, up to and including the Flying Pickets, who are about to wow the Schloss Burgfarrnbach in Nuremberg - so much as where she still is: a commanding presence at the absolute centre of pop, as capricious and changeable a genre as music has to offer. The question of how she's managed it is a good one.
Perhaps her ability to generate newsprint has something to do with it.