.Madonna

Madonna insists she just wants to shake her tail feather with Confessions on a Dance Floor, but even at 47, she’ll inevitably ruffle a few, too, anyway. Tracing her love of dance to her earliest disco club experiences, she fills her latest album with Giorgio Moroder synthesizers and futuristic Vocoder effects. But don’t confuse the results with all the pointless dance-pop out right now — coproducing ea ch track with Mirwais and Stuart Price, she strives for a deeper multidimensionality, from infectious first single “Hung Up” to the transcendent “Future Lovers” to the flirty “Forbidden Love.” She even delves into female identity and original sin on “Like It or Not,” but regardless of topic, this is a disco-influenced record, after all, and Madonna is ultimately too busy kicking up her pumps to care much about deeper meanings or potential criticism. That’s most evident in “I Love New York,” where she digs her disco heels into potential detractors with If you don’t like my attitude/Then you can f__ off.