The following is an actual conversation I had with a friend, who shall remain nameless, a few weeks ago:

Brian: "Happy New Year! What plans do you have for 2006?"

Anonymous friend: "I need to figure out the direction of my career, maybe work out more often. What about you?"

Brian: "I’d love to travel more."

Anonymous friend: "Oh, yeah? Where to?"

Brian: "Well, my partner and I have been dying to go to Australia. We’re planning on making that a reality later this year."

Anonymous friend: "Amazing trip. Do the winter. It’s the best time to go. When were you thinking of going?"

Brian: "We were waiting to see if Madonna will announce her tour in the next few months. We thought we might go then and catch her while we are visiting friends in Sydney."

Anonymous friend: "Oh. You’re a Madonna freak?"

Brian: "Um, yeah."

Anonymous friend: "Ah, the Gap of music."

"The Gap of music"?!? Have you heard this before? That phrase has been ringing in my ears ever since.

When there is a lot of Madge in the public consciousness, like now-ish, I’ve found that my friends like to point out little Madonna moments. It’s times like these – currently, we’re in what will come to be known as the Confessions era - that you’re proud to be a Madonna fan, huh? I involuntarily – but gladly - field stories on when friends experience her new music, whether on the radio or in yoga class, in clubs or while shopping.

Her pretty mug is everywhere and people are programmed to recognize her product, directly on ELLE magazine, say, or in little indirect ways. One of my buddies thoughtfully bought me a vintage Desperately Seeking Susan t-shirt upon seeing it, and yet another lead me to the Amazon.com listing for the Madonna 5 Book audiobook collection (what an alarmingly neat little compilation!) he stumbled upon. Everyone’s antennae are up. Among my good friends, I’m known as a huge Madonna fan and a repository for anything Madge-related. When she fell off that horse last August, I think I got more phone calls and e-mails from concerned friends and family members than I did on 9/11.

Don’t you just feel the love in the air? Everyone’s on the Madonna wavelength in early ’06. Album sales are pretty decent, airplay is heavy, and most pop culture mavens can mimic the Hung Up video’s choreography. Media coverage has been genial, even respectful

And yet the aforesaid anonymous friend (you know who you are!) took a little swipe at my taste in music – and, let’s face it, no other artist comes even close to my obsession with Madge – likening Madonna to a recognized brand that has come to mean corporate, cookie-cutter, and generic. As I am sure most of you have dealt with people with similarly condescending attitudes.

The mind boggles. Or at least mine does. What does it mean? How popular is that sentiment? And, really, is being "the Gap of music" necessarily a bad thing anyway?

I’ll tell you what it means.

What it boils down to is that people take Madonna for granted. She has been around, remarkably and noticeably, for well over twenty years. No matter who you are or where you’re from, for the most part, her music has surrounded over two decades of your life, the aural backdrop to the gyms and radio stations and bars and malls I mentioned above.
As I have said in previous columns, it’s sometimes trendy to pooh-pooh Madge’s work, in films, in publishing, in music, just because she provides a common discourse from which virtually everyone can spout off. Everyone has an opinion about her, good or bad. The nastier the attacks get, the cruder and less powerful they become, and the more personal my connection to Madonna gets.
In fact, the more critics bash American Life, the more I like it. So there!

Just as with the Gap, people are buying her product. Her successful career isn’t some mystery, like Paris Hilton’s (please, God, let that name be unrecognized when this column is old and grey), but based on consistent achievement, with the occasional (and well-documented) peaks and valleys. Madonna is a brand, a huge multinational brand that is a cottage industry unto itself. Between the merchandising, the promotions, the myriad deals she enters into every single week, and business endeavors we’ll never hear about, Madonna, Inc. masterfully puts forth this image of one woman. She is the fall guy, so to speak, and publicly takes the hit if a lawsuit pops up, a venture fails, or a business relationship sours. Attack the corporation and the burden lands squarely on her petite shoulders to carry, without a huge conglomerate or chain to diffuse the focus.

As to quality of the music, likening Madonna’s output yields accusations of banality, as standard as racks of denim and sensible button-downs. Keep in mind the so-called music connoisseurs will plug up their ears at (any) pop music. The bedrock of Madonna’s career is there, and there just isn’t any accounting for taste, so this is a losing battle. Madonna will most likely not be releasing a jazz album (let’s briefly pause and think about how nifty that would be, though!) or a rap album (after the ill-advised, allegedly ironic "rap" of American Life, I’d hope not). Does that make her music safe and overly familiar, like the Gap? Perhaps. Is that awful? Beauty is in the eye of beholder, my friends.

I’m not defending the Gap or its storefront-on-every-corner ilk, like the American fast food chain Subway. Quite the contrary, I’d like to differentiate Madonna in the music milieu from Gap in the context of other clothing retailers. With the Gap, you can be certain about what you’ll find inside. I’d argue Madonna’s product is never so predictable; who or what else has reinvented herself time and again on so many levels? Bucking trends is her modus operandi, with a sampling of different genres evident in, for example, I’m Breathless (Broadway), Bedtime Stories (rhythm and blues), and Ray of Light (electronica). She’s as likely to bust out in opera as the pre-Yoko Beatles were to do a country album, but that doesn’t mean her music is unappealing or unexciting. She takes risks, and, most of the time, mass audiences follow.

I don’t think people like Madonna because other people like her; she’s never had that kind of peer-pressure popularity. Her fan base has grown organically as a result of solid, well-timed and miracles in public relations and marketing. Hey, kind of like the Gap!

To quote Madge herself, "If you don’t like my attitude, then you can eff off." Seriously. If it’s lame to idolize an icon, a living legend who is always on the move, and for whom we all have a deep affinity for one reason or another, then, well, let detractors think I should stop by the local Starbucks, pick up some Gap jeans, and then grab a Big Mac.

The only important gap to me, the true blue fan, is, however, the one between Madonna’s two front teeth.