As a major contemporary composer, Madonna should not let the eye dictate to the ear.

Very gifted people may be sociopathic in varying degrees.

For all the feminist jabber about women being victimized by fashion, it is men who most suffer from conventions of dress. Every day, a woman can choose from an army of personae, femme to butch, and can cut or curl her hair or adorn herself with a staggering variety of artistic aids. But despite the Sixties experiments in peacock dress, no man can rise in the corporate world today, outside the entertainment industry, with long hair or makeup or purple velvet suits.

RIHANNA IS TODAY'S MOST FASCINATING PERFORMER, A MYSTERIOUS AMALGAM OF AMIABLE WARMTH AND GLITTERING CHARISMA. WITH HER KEEN CREATIVE EYE FOR LINE AND COLOR, SHE HAS BECOME A FASHION ICON, LIKE AUDREY HEPBURN. YET SHE IS A TEMPESTUOUS WILD CHILD AND INTERNATIONAL ADVENTURESS, LIKE AVA GARDNER. MOST IMPORTANTLY, AS AN ARTIST IN THIS OVERMECHANIZED AGE, SHE BRAVELY DRAWS ON DEEP WELLS OF PURE EMOTION, ENDEARING HER TO MILLIONS OF FANS WORLDWIDE.

Madonna's great instinctive intelligence was evident to me from her earliest videos.

The North American intellectual tradition began, I maintain, in the encounter of British Romanticism with assertive, pragmatic North American English - the Protestant plain style in both the U.S. and Canada, with its no-nonsense Scottish immigrants.

When anything goes, it's women who lose.