Like a true artist, Madonna is many things to many people. And through no other media more than music has she "spoken" to us all at one time or another. Her songs pop up on radio and, more increasingly, in the mainstream consciousness in fits and starts, percolating every so often, all the while forming a soundtrack to our own lives. When faced with choosing among the works of so prolific a performer, song preference becomes very personal and illuminating. And the more we get to know our icon, the more attached we become to certain tunes.

Ask the average person what his or her favorite Madonna song is and I'll bet the answer will most likely be a relic of the 1980s. Not to say the infectious tunes of Madonna's rising years aren't worthy of reverence. Like a Virgin, Holiday, Material Girl, and the other Immaculate Collection oldies-but-goodies are already classics and have rightfully seeped into pop culture bedrock. (Rolling Stone magazine recently anointed Like a Prayer one of the best rock songs of all-time.) You can't attend a wedding, bar mitzvah, or sweet sixteen here in the States without at least one of Madonna's recognizable nuggets getting air-time. In fact, while growing up, I had heard Holiday so often, I thought Madonna's version was merely a cover of an even older song.

The greatest legacy of those early videos and scandalous performances will be the songs themselves. We don't have to look much farther past the front page to see this; the press still regularly dubs Madonna the "Material Girl" (I suppose it's no worse than "Madge," but I digress...)
It's no surprise that these arguably more "famous" songs get the most rousing crowd reactions during Madonna's concerts. Those who attended the recent Re-Invention tour will agree Like a Prayer set the audience afire, increasing by decibels the ear-piercing shrieks heard 'round the arenas. By contrast, during the show in New York, when Madge got slammed down into the electric chair and looked longingly up, breaking into the sweet, brittle Lament, a guy in front of me told his confused girlfriend that it was most likely some Kabbalah chant. And some people actually used Bedtime Story, Hanky Panky, and Deeper and Deeper as a bathroom break. But everyone was back, bladders emptied, for Crazy For You and Into the Groove!

When fans like yourselves were polled, the results were considerably different. A very small percentage of those who responded to my little survey named a song that pre-dates Ray of Light in 1998. Still, try as I might to make sense of the results of my highly unscientific straw poll, getting a bead on some sort of pattern is near impossible.
A respectably sized sliver of Tribers named a true classic - that is, songs like Like a Prayer, Cherish, and Borderline - as their all-time favorite. Many cited the familiarity of the tunes or recalled their first Madonna experience and linked it to a more recognizable hit.

Surprisingly, the "darker"albums (Erotica, Bedtime Stories) didn't place well either. I was always under the impression that Erotica was THE fan favorite, but maybe people's tastes changed as Madonna matured and experimented musically and went on to release Music and American Life, the source of a larger block of fan picks, from the obscure Nobody's Perfect and Easy Ride to crowd-pleasers Music and Hollywood. A developing fan favorite seems to be Nobody Knows Me, the club stomper that brought down the house during Re-Invention, the most-mentioned song off American Life. The lyrics speak to the listener and, as personal as they are to Madonna, can be grafted onto all of us.

Although album sales may never strike the lofty heights of Like a Virgin and Immaculate Collection, the sheer amount of accessible songs from which to choose is and will continue to be staggering. The Grammy-winning, watershed album Ray of Light yielded by far the biggest number of favorite songs. In fact, all tracks but the slightly off-putting Mer Girl and the lackluster To Have and Not To Hold were picked by at least one person. The title track, my personal selection, reminded many of a great time in their lives or brought up memories of a Madonna at the top of her game. An openness to adapt to new approaches to music craftmanship is clearly evident, and the people who picked Ray of Light songs surely weren't the concertgoers who left Drowned World and cried, "Where was Like a Virgin?!?"

E-mail after e-mail chided me for having fans choose a favorite song. "It's like choosing a favorite child!" many said. Secretly, though, doesn't one song get repeated more often or have more resonance in your life? I mean, even my mother would relent and say I was her favorite. (Right, Mom?!?) Likewise, eventually, Tribers did offer up their favorites - sometime in lists or rankings - and often expressed the difficulty of the choice. With so many songs to choose from and with so many moods and feelings expressed, styles unveiled, and meanings discovered, we're offered a plethora of titles. Agonized e-mails detailed the "Sophie's Choice"-type pains (pains! Oh, the horrors!) of selecting a favorite, and no one would have it any other way. Can fans of any other artist be similarly "tormented" by such a conundrum? Let's face it: we're spoiled! And, fear not: This Used To Be My Playground won't be insulted that you switched to I'll Remember. And Beautiful Stranger won't get drunk and hold up a video store because you decided to listen to Santa Baby a couple more times this holiday season.

What's unique about being a big Madonna fan is that if our tastes change, surely there is a Madonna song to fit the bill; she's pretty much covered the range of pop music. And song preferences among fellow worshippers is so scattershot that it's an egalitarian fanhood. Like fellow Hall of Fame inductees U2 or The Beatles, the breadth of Madonna's career is so expansive as to cast a wider net of fans, precluding any "clique" mentality as evidenced with, say, The Grateful Dead.

Madonna, we know you consider yourself a better dancer than singer or actress. Whatever the case, all of us are appreciative you put your voice out there and gave yourself something to move to... and gave us something irrevocably "ours" to listen to.

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