These Are the Best Madonna Books

At 60, Madonna has yet to write an autobiography. Some might say that she doesn’t need to—that the body of work she’s released over the past three-plus decades, the countless interviews she’s conducted, the speeches she’s given, and, more recently, her regularly updated Instagram stories should suffice as her statement on herself. But the appetite for books on Madonna is large, and the variety of approaches writers, editors, and photographers have taken to craft their portraits is a testament to how her career has both inspired and provoked. She’s a singular pop star with a body of work that ranks among the genre’s best. She’s also adept at getting and (this is the hard part!) keeping the public’s attention.
The books listed below represent some of the most essential writing about Madonna—her life, her loves, her travails, and even her music. They’re a useful snapshot of how the public took in her rise and reign, which was fueled by her charisma, cultural savvy, and doctorate-level knowledge of how the media works. Along the way, she ran into the roadblocks faced by so many women, particularly when it came to being taken “seriously,” but she handled them if not with grace, at least with enough guts to consistently come out on top.

The One Book That Has It All

Encyclopedia Madonnica 20 by Matthew Rettenmund (2015)

Weighing in at 604 pages and jam-packed with facts, figures, track listings, and arguments, this book is a thorough, opinionated, saucy leap into Madonna’s career through 2015, with individual encyclopedia entries on songs, people, phrases, tours, and ideas, as well as interviews with fans and tons of photos. Author Matthew Rettenmund is a brilliant observer of pop and the quixotic ways it’s discussed in the mainstream. “People do not argue over the relevance of artists who are not relevant,” he (correctly) asserts in the entry for “Irrelevant,” which is a disguised broadside toward those who take an ageist tack while pooh-poohing Madonna in the 2010s. Meanwhile, the entry for “Hitler, Adolf” notes that the dialogue surrounding Madonna in the early 1990s was so out of control that the president of Boston University compared her “message” to those delivered by the notorious führer and Saddam Hussein. (“Huh?” Rettenmund replies.) Encyclopedia Madonnica 20 is a crowdfunded reference book that reaches many high-on-knowledge peaks and makes you wish Rettenmund—this time, backed by a publishing company—was masterminding an entire series of these on various appropriately notorious pop figures. ... [mehr] https://pitchfork.com/features/lists-and-guides/these-are-the-best-madonna-books/