“People think dance music is just superficial,” Madonna announces early on her excellent new album, Confessions II. “But they’re all wrong. The dance floor is not just a place. It’s a threshold, a ritualistic space where movement replaces language.” That’s the threshold where Madonna has spent her whole life. Ever since she blew up in the Eighties, pop’s queen of queens has devoted her career to proving how complex, how dramatic, how ecstatic a dance floor can be.
On Confessions II, Madonna returns to the floor, the place where she always goes to rediscover herself. It’s a sequel to one of her most beloved albums, Confessions on a Dance Floor, her 2005 collaboration with the London disco master Stuart Price. But it’s also her best album since the original Confessions 21 years ago. It’s a 64-minute nonstop groove that flows like a club-DJ set, each song fading into the next, drawing from all over the history of dance music. You might hear a flicker of “I Feel Love” here, or “Apache” there, but it’s a history lesson that she turns into her musical autobiography.
She opens with a bang, in the triptych of “I Feel So Free,” “Good for the Soul,” and “One Step Away,” a 12-minute suite where she rides the electro-throb beat while pondering the inner neediness that drives her to the floor. “Sometimes I like to just hide in the shadows,” she murmurs over a groove sampling the Lil Louis house classic “French Kiss.” “I can be whoever I want to be, create a new persona. Honestly, I wish I could be like other people, and just not care — but out here on the dance floor, I feel so free.”
Stuart Price produced the whole album, with guest co-production shots from Andrew Watt, Cirkut, Mirwais, Arca, Triangle Park, Parisi, and more. Belgian artist Stromae joins her on the Catholic exorcism “My Sins Are My Savior,” while “Read My Lips” has Tainy producing and a Spanish vocal interlude from Feid.
“Bring My Love” is her heavy-breathing duet with Sabrina Carpenter, which the two stars debuted at Coachella in April. It soars on glimmers of Detroit techno, interpolating Inner City’s 1988 classic “Good Life,” as they hold their dialogue on artistic inspiration. “Bring it, Sabrina,” Madonna commands — a clever pairing, since she was ripping the man-children to shreds before Sabrina was born.
“Danceteria” is one of the album’s most delightful disco trips, her ode to the legendary Eighties New York club. She captures the thrill of the not-yet-famous party girl going out to meet her not-yet-famous friends, setting the scene with lines like “Get on the elevator/I run into Debi Mazar.” Fresh from the Midwest, she’s dazzled by all the stars she sees at the club, with downtown artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat, Fab Five Freddie, and Keith Haring. But she’s starstruck at all the music legends: “Nile Rodgers and David Byrne/The B-52s had money to burn/Lounge Lizards have so much style /Lower East Side, take a walk on the wild side,” before she goes off on her own version of the “Doo de doo” chant from the Lou Reed classic.
It’s a song saturated in different generations of New York glam cool, translated to the sweaty democracy of the dance floor. She chants the hook “Everyone here is a work of art.” But that could be a credo for her whole career, from her 1982 debut 12-inch “Everybody” to “Vogue” to “Ray of Light.” She sings about the thrill of hearing her own song boom out of the Danceteria speakers — the night DJ Mark Kamins played her “Everybody” demo tape, the moment that got her a record deal and started her whole story. As a fan, Madonna was taking it all in, from club beats to post-punk to early rap — the ultimate disco fan turned into the ultimate disco mastermind.
The original Confessions on a Dance Floor was both an obvious move and a career peak, two decades after she claimed her throne with her 1985 hit blitz of “Into the Groove,” “Material Girl,” and “Crazy for You.” But it was the last time — until now — she set out to make any kind of crowd-pleasing move. Confessions kicked off one of the weirdest eras in a career that has never been stingy with weirdness. She made a string of eccentric pop albums — Hard Candy, MDNA, Rebel Heart — before the bizarro 2019 experiment Madame X, a midlife travelogue ranging from Portugese fado to the ballet interlude to the declaration “Bitch I’m Loca.” Some of us hardcore fans happen to cherish this weird little album, but it’s understandable that the pop world was totally baffled by it.
Since Madame X, she’s done deep digs into her past, with Nineties archival projects like Veronica Electronica and Bedtime Stories: The Untold Story, as well as her career-spanning Celebrations Tour. That seems to have helped inspire the introspective, memoiristic aspects of this album. Confessions had one of her biggest, glossiest hits, “Hung Up,” the ABBA-sampling monster with the chant “Time goes by so slowly.” But she spends much of Confessions II looking back on times gone by. “Fragile” is her pained lament for her long-estranged brother Christopher, with whom she reconciled before his death in 2024. “The Test” is a moving duet with her daughter Lourdes Leon, where she apologizes for bringing her into such a crazy celebrity world. She quotes from “Little Star,” her tender 1998 love song to her newborn girl, while the adult Lourdes pledges her devotion.
“L.E.S. Girl” closes out the album with a pensive guitar ballad, on the morning after an orgiastic night in the clubs. It’s the young Madonna on the Lower East Side, waking up to the daylight in last night’s eyeliner, struggling to make the rent on Avenue B, but realizing she’ll never truly belong with the L.E.S. boy at her side. As she sings to her younger self, “The night is kind, the day is blue/Everything fades away except for you.”
After an hour of disco fireworks, “L.E.S. Girl” is a properly poignant comedown. But even at that early age, with her whole impossible career still ahead of her, she already knows she’s Madonna. She sounds like a hungry party girl ready to conquer the planet. On Confessions II, she revisits those youthful dreams — but she demonstrates smashingly how she made them come all true.
Holzman and Hughes at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.Courtesy of Ekko Astral
Holzman and Hughes in Brooklyn, May 2026.Griffin Lotz for Rolling Stone
There’s no immediate resolution in any of this. There’s no surrender either — and a lot of great escape. White’s slide guitar in “Dollar Bill” sounds like a National Steel on steroids until the solo, when it turns into what seems like a theremin gone postal. “I Can’t Believe What I’m Hearing” has a great pop-wise chorus closer to the Pretty Things than Son House. And don’t miss White’s wry aside to the White Stripes’ old creation myth in the second verse of “G.O.D.,” on the way to the real business at hand. “Well, it’s the beginning of the world now,” he declares at the song’s end. “Let’s do it all over again.”
Jay-Z has turned the 30th anniversary of his classic debut album into a major marketing event
Jay-Z Knows the Past Still Pays
There’s a pleasant absurdity to the advertisements for JAŸ-Z30 that are currently found across New York’s subway tunnels. Their dramatic imagery — a stark black backdrop pierced through the center with a pair of hands, presumably Jay’s, fixed into the famous Roc diamond — invites a kind of religious authority that feels a touch ironic for anyone who’s old enough to remember all types of handwringing over those very hand symbols only a few years ago. And maybe that’s the point. By now, nostalgia’s grip extends layers deep. So much so that you could find yourself waiting for the train, reminiscing on the days when people still made jokes about the so-called Illuminati.
Jay-Z’s months-long campaign commemorating the 30th anniversary of Reasonable Doubt and the 25th anniversary of The Blueprint has indeed resurfaced the rapper-turned-mogul’s success story. Reasonable Doubt, released in 1996, positioned Jay as not only a resonant voice in hip-hop but also in the increasingly lucrative business around it. After major labels passed, the album was released independently through Roc-A-Fella Records and Priority Records, setting the tone for Jay’s career as a business…man.
And in the full-court press campaign around this summer’s anniversaries, culminating in this weekend’s trio of performances at Yankee Stadium, Jay’s business acumen is again at center focus. You’d be forgiven for throwing around buzzwords like “multichannel” or “cross-platform” to describe the slate of festivities. There was a Spotify-backed takeover of the J and Z trains; custom JAŸ-Z30 subway maps and a Google Maps guide; commemorative Brooklyn Public Library cards; and most recently Bowery Station and DUMBO pop-ups with archival footage and merch. (That these Yankee Stadium shows come on the heels of Taylor Swift’s wedding at MSG suggests some sort of mega-rich takeover of cultural institutions, but let’s leave that one for another day.)
The moves come as nostalgia continues to drive a considerable chunk of the music industry’s profits. In an era when old songs can circulate infinitely on streaming platforms, gaining new life in the form of everything from samples to memes, and when superfans are willing to spend on physical goods, limited merch, and live experiences, album anniversaries have become their own product launches. Jay-Z’s Reasonable Doubt campaign is only the splashiest recent example.
No wonder, then, that Beyoncé already appears to be setting the stage for her own run of commemorations for the upcoming 20th anniversary of her album B’Day in September. Over the weekend, she released her first new song in two years, titled “Morning Dew (Donk),” to tease the upcoming reissue. According to Luminate, older music still dominates attention, with only 43 percent of U.S. on-demand audio streams in 2025 coming from tracks released in the previous five years. This is also one reason why vinyl and physical formats have seen renewed value in recent years, with the RIAA reporting that vinyl sold 46.8 million units in the U.S. in 2025, compared with 29.5 million CDs. Luminate says superfans are 20 percent of U.S. music listeners and spend heavily on live events and physical merchandise; 73 percent of these fans purchase physical merch, versus 26 percent of general music listeners.
In today’s industry, having a major anniversary is like having a new product to promote, a way to participate in an already thriving marketplace for nostalgia. The demand is visible well beyond official artist stores: Vintage concert tees now trade as collectibles, with one 1967 Grateful Dead shirt selling at Sotheby’s for $19,300 and rare rap tees treated as wearable archives of hip-hop history. Anniversary campaigns give artists and labels a way to reclaim that energy, turning the secondary market’s appetite for old symbols into new, officially sanctioned products.
Jay-Z’s official anniversary store turns that logic into a menu of objects: a $1,500 collector’s crate, a $300 cassette box, $400 Yankees jerseys, and four-figure varsity jackets. Of course, Jay is far from alone when it comes to legacy acts cashing in on nostalgia. He’s more like one salient example of a much larger wave of artists and promoters marketing anniversary products that includes the Smashing Pumpkins’ Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness 30th anniversary super-deluxe edition, My Chemical Romance’s Black Parade stadium tour, and the returned Warped Tour, among many others.
Five years before Reasonable Doubt became the occasion for library cards, pop-ups, collector crates, and stadium spectacle, its 25th anniversary was marked by an NFT. In 2021, Sotheby’s and Roc Nation auctioned a one-of-one Derrick Adams artwork tied to the album, billed as the only official Jay-Z-authorized commemoration of the anniversary. Around the same time, Roc-A-Fella was in court over co-founder Damon Dash’s attempted sale of a Reasonable Doubt-related NFT, a dispute that ended with a judgment making clear that no shareholder could sell or dispose of an interest in the album — including through an NFT — without the company’s authorization.
That ownership question is becoming harder to avoid as music enters the AI era, where the archive is not only something to reissue, exhibit, or sell, but something that can be scraped, modeled, and trained on. Last week, SZA took to Twitter to express frustration with AI music company Suno, notably calling out Diplo by name as one of the company’s investors. “DO NOT GIVE AWAY YOUR VIBRANIUM !!! DO NOT TRAIN AI WITH YOUR GENIUS,” she wrote on Twitter. Her complaint was joined by Kenneth Blume, who said Suno’s workers were “stealing from countless struggling musicians.”
For an artist with a legacy as impactful as Jay-Z’s, the current anniversary boom feel like the latest phase of a longer project of deciding who gets to turn hip-hop history into intellectual property. Jay-Z’s legacy deserves preservation; few catalogs have made a stronger case for it. But the more that preservation arrives through limited-edition objects, auction platforms, luxury merch, and authorized experiences, the more it has to answer a harder question: When does protecting the archive become another way of extracting value from it?