Camile Paglia returns to Salon with a review of Madonna’s Confessions On A Dance Floor. She’s obviously a huge fan of Madonna (a passion I don’t share) but is lukewarm on this album. Anyway, this caught my eye:

Nevertheless, the positive response to “Confessions” probably signals a thirst on the part of the pop audience for emotional directness and shaped melody, which have languished in the hip-hop era, with its aggressive, incantatory rhyming and grinding percussive effects. Even Madonna’s archrival, Mariah Carey, with her virtuoso lyricism, is given to long, meandering vocal lines that assert passionate feeling (stressed in performance by pentecostal hand-waving and arm swoops) but in fact go nowhere. It’s a crooning, swooning, melting style that makes too many of Mariah’s songs sound the same.

Incidentally, the claim repeatedly made by CNN and the British press that Madonna is now “the undisputed queen of pop” was undercut by CNN.com’s current poll, “Who is today’s real ‘Queen of Pop’?” After 93,000 worldwide votes (as of this writing), Mariah is kicking Madonna’s hot pants at 57 percent to 34 percent. Far behind trail Britney Spears, Kylie Minogue and Beyoncé Knowles — all of whose careers were in varying degrees influenced by Madonna. The poll results will surely surprise most observers because Madonna, unlike Mariah, has such a hammerlock on MTV and international magazine journalism.