Strawberry Saroyan: Madonna's new album, "Music," came out without generating a cultural thunderclap. Sure, the catchy, almost throwaway single is already at No. 1, but little more than a Rolling Stone cover and a Charlie Rose interview -- and, of course, several hours of old VH1 concert footage titled "Madonnarama" -- greeted the release. There were no Vanity Fair covers or People profiles or Time magazine controversies or visits with Oprah. Madonna records, it seems, are no longer the media events they once were.

Why? Certainly part of it is that Madonna isn't -- and hasn't really been since "Erotica" (1992) -- in her prime. It also may simply be that Madonna, at 41, is now a mother twice over, and was in the last stages of pregnancy during what would have normally been full-steam-ahead press time. She tried: In the Rolling Stone article, she is so determined that she meets writer Jancee Dunn at the offices of her Maverick record company even though she "feels like a whale." When asked one rather innocuous question, she nearly begins to cry in response, a clear result of hormones gone haywire. But it also seems that this record is being mistakenly overlooked musically. It has been reviewed, for the most part, in contrast to her last effort, the triumphant "Ray of Light," and called a "bunch of songs" rather than a concept album that has something to say, to quote the New York Times.

"Music" goes far beyond the fluffy, if empowered, pop of Madonna's earliest albums, and is a natural evolution past "Ray of Light," a record that she famously pronounced aimed to put "emotion in electronica." If "Ray of Light" was explicitly about spirituality, then the new record is just spiritual. Because on "Music," for the first time, Madonna really lets go: Her voice flies, electronically filtered, flitting all around, chasing itself. She also lets go by allowing Mirwais to once again reinvent what a Madonna record sounds like. (There's a great story about her meeting the producer for the first time in Paris and just staring at him: She didn't, in a very uncharacteristic moment, know what she wanted from him.) Perhaps even the record's unassuming quality is a letting go; she's stopped trying to do something so important this time around. Although musically the new record acknowledges her earliest stuff (1983's "Madonna," 1984's "Like a Virgin"), "Music" has a mature, full-circle perspective. To me, it's as though with William Orbit, her producer on "Ray of Light," Madonna just got revved up, and with Mirwais, she takes off.

Michelle Goldberg: I don't think the lack of hype surrounding the release of "Music" has that much to do with Madonna's second pregnancy, since if the press is really salivating over a new record, lack of access to the star often just whets the collective appetite. Instead, I think it's more that Madonna's celebrity tactics -- self-conscious artifice and zeitgeist surfing -- are now everywhere. Now it's just assumed that any famous person has meticulously constructed his or her image, be they Lil' Kim or Al Gore. That makes Madonna's metamorphic skills -- her ability to shed personas like snakeskin -- seem less remarkable.

One thing that's always interested me about Madonna is that she's often praised as a brilliant businesswoman. It used to be that art fancied itself separate from the vulgar mechanics of money and merchandising. Andy Warhol did an enormous amount to change that idea in highbrow circles, but Madonna made it conventional wisdom to conflate art and commerce. These days, no one asks why someone like, say, Puff Daddy, who's mediocre at best musically, should be a huge pop star, since in a way his self-promotion is his art. Meanwhile, musicians who are seen as insufficiently calculating are routinely trashed. Take Fiona Apple, reviled after her famous "this world is bullshit" speech at the MTV music awards, or Sinéad O'Connor, whose gorgeous voice has been obscured by a series of P.R. catastrophes.

Madonna's been celebrated for exposing the mechanics of celebrity artifice, but now those mechanics are naked. She pioneered this kind of multimedia, "life as performance art" approach to culture that now justifies a whole pantheon of hollow stars like Drew Barrymore and Chloë Sevigny -- people whose fame has less to do with what they create than who they are.

For a while, I anticipated new Madonna projects largely to see which cultural currents she would pick up on and amplify. That's where much of her genius lies. She released "Material Girl" near the height of the '80s money orgy. She did the whole S/M and profane Catholic thing with "Erotica" and the "Sex" book a few years after the controversy over Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano made bondage and blasphemy front-page issues. She recorded "Ray of Light" just as electronica was becoming ubiquitous. These days, though, there are so many people like, um, me, who publicly chew over the tiniest implication of every pop moment that there's less fresh grist for her mill. Similarly, she's adept at raiding various subcultures for inspiration. But because the trend cycle has sped up so brutally and the media has grown so voracious for signs of authenticity, there are few unexplored pockets of creativity for her to draw from.

Madonna's art -- and the reaction to it -- has always been an exploration of surfaces. So when her persona is no longer interesting to the media, neither is her music. In the case of "Music," that's really too bad, because I think it's one of her best records -- not her most shocking or groundbreaking, but definitely one of her tightest. The track "Impressive Instant," with its dirty, sexy, French house beat and tripped-out vocal production, is fabulous. Still, it feels slightly behind the curve. The vocoder effects on her voice aren't just familiar from underground acts like Basement Jaxx and Daft Punk -- they recall Cher's "Believe." Then there are her new cowboy hats, which are omnipresent on hipsters nationwide. Madonna's no longer breaking new ground, and I don't think that's necessarily because of her age. Her strategies have permeated the atmosphere so completely that it's hard for her to transcend them.

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