Madonna: 'Celebration'

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Sigmund Freud, analyse this: "Unlike the others I'll do anything / I'm not the same, I've got no shame." It's a couplet from Madonna's 1982 single 'Burning Up', probably the most obscure selection on her new Greatest Hits compilation. At the time La Ciccone was singing about her desperate plight to win over an impassive male, but 27 years later it sounds like a snappy summary of her entire career.

She hasn't quite been prepared to do anything - though she did kiss a black Jesus, Britney and Guy Ritchie - but Celebration portrays Madonna as anything but chicken. The music here is pop at its most varied and adventurous, cherry-picking elements of house, disco, electronica, R&B, soul and 60s psychedelia while rarely forgetting the importance of a big fat hook. She may have a fondness for rhyming "wait" with "hesitate", but Madonna also scored massive hits singing about child abuse ('Live To Tell'), teen pregnancy ('Papa Don't Preach') and S&M ('Erotica').

What isn't here, of course, could fill another disc and then some. It's easy to quibble with Celebration's tracklisting - where are 'Deeper And Deeper' and 'True Blue'? What happened to the ballads? How the hell did 'Miles Away' make the grade? - but everything truly vital is included. Fans will sneer at some of the edits, and the sequencing isn't always spot on, but it's hard to feel short-changed by a 36-track compilation on which half the songs could legitimately be called iconic. How's this for an opening quintet: 'Hung Up', 'Music', 'Vogue', '4 Minutes', 'Holiday'?

It almost goes without saying that most of the tunes are brilliant. Pop doesn't get more thrilling than the choir breakdown in 'Like A Prayer', more provocative than the moment you think she's going to drop the F-bomb in 'Erotica', or more moving than the first minute of 'Frozen'. Perhaps unsurprisingly, in such exalted company the two new tracks don't exactly sparkle. The title track and single is a perfectly serviceable slab of dancefloor candy, but 'Revolver' is the creative nadir of this entire collection. Suffices to say that it features the line "I'm a sex pistol, my love should be illegal" and sounds like Madonna channelling recent Britney. Shouldn't it be the other way round?

Still, the odd slip-up aside, Celebration paints Madonna as one hell of a popstar - a singer who transcended her lack of technical ability to impose herself on virtually any song, a songwriter with a knack for an ear-snagging lyric ("Romeo and Juliet / They never felt this way I bet") and a pop brain with, until recently at least, a seemingly bottomless well of ideas. Sampling Abba, for example, may seem obvious, but who else thought to do it? As Celebration proves, Madonna has always been unlike the others - though it's much more than a lack of shame that sets her apart.