Madonna Taylor Swift Billboard 200

While the news of Madonna landing her tenth number one album on the Billboard 200 with Confessions II has been met with joy and triumph (except for those who will never concede to Madonna having any talent), there was also a dash of surprise and sadness to the news. Surprise, on the one hand, because it seems as if all of Madonna’s studio albums except the first one, when she was still a relative unknown, ought to have reached number one. Which would have made it so that she had fourteen number ones after Confessions II. But—and here’s where the sad part comes in—even that still wouldn’t have allowed her to surpass Taylor Swift who, for some mystifying reason, has fifteen number one albums under her belt.

However, a closer look at the list of those albums quickly reminds that the real reason Swift has so many number ones (while, in reality, only having twelve—not fifteen—records in her discography) is because four of them are part of her “Taylor’s Version” re-recordings (otherwise known as: the biggest troll in recent music history). And so it is that among Fearless, Speak Now, Red, 1989, Reputation, Lover, Folklore, Evermore, Midnights, The Tortured Poets Department and The Life of a Showgirl are four additional albums that ultimately serve as “repeats”—“From the Vault” song additions be damned. Those repeats are (listed in the order they came out for the second go-around): Fearless (Taylor’s Version), Red (Taylor’s Version), Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) and 1989 (Taylor’s Version). That’s right, four times when Swift essentially tricked the masses into making the same albums number one again, all by way of promising that it was, like, for feminism and autonomy and stuff. Though, in truth, Madonna has represented those things—in addition to genuine LGBTQIA+ allyship that “You Need to Calm Down” could never comprehend—far more during the extent of her forty-four year (and counting) recording career.

So maybe that’s why she hasn’t caught up to the same level of numbers-based success as Swift, ever since the latter started making it very clear that this entire “music thing” is very much a numbers game to her (complete with the nonstop barrage of album variants that speak on precisely that point). She wants the gold star, the assurance that she’s the top of the heap—the “best.” And maybe the reason why she—and everyone else that obsesses over her “talent”—is so committed to basing that on numbers is because she must surely know, somewhere way deep down, that there’s absolutely no depth to what she does (so it has to be quantified with cold, hard, antithesis-of-art numbers). And certainly not anywhere near what Madonna does through her own work, treating pop stardom as a conduit for political awareness and activism (again, the antithesis of what Swift does).

In this regard, it actually is quite a marvel that Madonna has managed to have so much chart success, being as polarizing and notoriously controversial as she is. Yet even an album as totally inaccessible to the general public as Madame X couldn’t keep her from claiming the top spot on the Billboard 200 back in 2019 (even if the album didn’t stay there very long). And it was surprising that the U.S. chose to embrace it at that position, whereas Madonna’s go-to Euro countries shut her out of being number one (stalling at number two in the U.K., Italy, Switzerland and Belgium, and number four in France, Greece, Austria and Scotland). After all, the U.S. has never really much “understood” Madonna’s work, especially after she started to get “too European” for their tastes as the 90s progressed.

To that point, even though it is consistently ranked among her best work, Ray of Light is one of Madonna’s five albums that didn’t make it to the top of the Billboard 200, perhaps being too “electronic” for American sensibilities at that time. Content as the population was to listen to Backstreet Boys and Will Smith that year (each of those “musicians” having among the biggest hits of ‘98 in the form of “Everybody [Backstreet’s Back]” and Gettin’ Jiggy Wit It,” respectively). But going back to Madame X, it’s a prime example of Madonna pushing through to the top even when her message isn’t as simple as, say, “I promise that you’ll never find another like me!” or “Have a couple kids, got the whole block lookin’ like you.” So maybe that’s why she also doesn’t have even half the Grammy recognition as Swift, who, in 2020 (before the lockdowns popped off), received three nominations including Song of the Year (“Lover”), Best Pop Solo Performance (“You Need to Calm Down”) and Best Pop Vocal Album (Lover). Meanwhile, Madame X wasn’t even considered (likely a compliment when considering that Swift is a Grammy darling). And, of course, a chart darling.

However, that might not necessarily stand in the years to come. For among the many rumors swirling before her tacky-ass Madison Square Garden wedding took place was the notion that Swift might take a break from recording “for a while” to “focus on marriage” (and presumably, being further “dickmatized” [a word she can’t even actually say] by Kelce’s “magic wand”). Tellingly, no such rumors ever circulated about Madonna, who seemed only to ramp up her workload after marrying Sean Penn in 1985 and then Guy Ritchie in 2000. In fact, her creative output in the immediate aftermath of both those marriages yielded some of her best work. Likely because, as it was once said of Carrie Bradshaw (albeit by that cad, Mr. Big), Madonna was never “the marrying kind.” And that’s because she’s the “true artist” kind…in spite of the many endorsement deals that might speak to the contrary.

To be sure, her capitalistic nature is often a key aspect of what’s made people discount her as a “real” or “pure” artist. Yet, ironically, that’s what people seem to praise Swift the most for—her business acumen. Her ability to expand her “portfolio” (whether real estate or otherwise) with her sea of similarly-themed music. But as Muriel Spark knew when it came to her own art, “I’m too interested in my writing: I couldn’t work at a marriage… My experience of men is that they resent it if you are successful—and I never had the slightest intention of not being as successful as I could be.”

Some might think Swift has the same sentiments, but the reality is that there’s no denying the commitment to traditionalism and “legacy” she’s shown the masses over the years. That means sticking to Kelce like glue after so much posturing about finding the right guy on every album. Not to mention that, “at her age,” she’ll want to get to the kid-having tout de suite. Because, honestly, she ain’t about to adopt à la Madonna (who, yes, did so after having two children “of her own”).

And so, if Swift really does “take a break” from music to focus on “being Mrs. Kelce” for a while, it might give Madonna the leg up on getting a few more albums to the top. Not to mention the fact that Swift should probably be skittish over the fact that her usual source of writing material—dissecting her relationships with exes—is no longer viable if she doesn’t want that prenup to kick in. Incidentally, Madonna herself didn’t sign a prenup when she married Guy Ritchie, resulting in his infamous payout of roughly ninety million dollars of her then four-hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar fortune. Further proving that Madonna is, much to her retroactive dismay (as also explored on MDNA’s “Love Spent”) the real “romantic” between her and Swift. Which, again, is probably part of why she hasn’t seen as many high rankings as “Miss Americana” in spite of the latter being thirty-one years her junior. Well, that, and the fact that Madonna doesn’t much go out of her way to cater to the parasocial relationships of her cloying fans.