Madonna: Obviously there is a person, or a group of people, behind this that were essentially terrorising me. Photograph: Kevin Mazur/Getty Images
Madonna is the original queen of pop media. Naturally she reigned on the radio, but, as she made her name, her print and TV interviews were also incendiary. Then, as the MTV generations breakout star, she helped define the concept of the modern pop video.
Even when the internet was becoming popular she found a way to own it and have fun with it. Her 2000 webcast from the Brixton Academy in London during which she namechecked the white hot online forum Popbitch broke viewing records at a point when most fans were still on dialup. In 2003, when her American Life album was being shared on peer-to-peer networks, she uploaded a fake file asking pirates: What the fuck do you think youre doing?
Media training is a part of any sensible new popstars pre-launch fitness regime, but Madonna didnt need it. She wrote the bloody book on it.
Then about eight years ago, social media came along. For some time, Madonna was conspicuous by absence. Her reluctance to get involved was, in its own way, incredible. But one still wondered: how amazing would be if Madonna one day simply appeared on Twitter?
One day in 2012 she did just that. By the following year, her Instagram account was also in full flow. At times, her updates have been brilliant. One picture, from May 2013, came with the caption: Cleaning up before the Met Ball, and showed a fully glammed-up Madonna wielding a vacuum cleaner in her bathroom.
More recently, though, with a new album on the horizon, Madonnas social accounts have become a hashtag-strewn, meme-littered jamboree of misfires through which the image Madonna spent three decades refining has begun to unravel.
She called herself ratchet (a term for someone who is, as Urban Dictionary puts it, out of hand, out of control), but spelt it ratchit, just as she misspelled the name of Avicii, the young producer with whom she was working. These attempts to be down with the kids have instead hinted that, actually, at 56, she might be completely out of touch. One spoof account, @madonnafanfic, imagines Madonnas daughter Lourdes constantly disconnecting the home internet in the hope of saving her mums career. That may not be too far from the truth: Madonna has admitted that her kids are effectively A&Ring the sonic direction of her new album.
All eyes were on Madonna just before Christmas when more than 20 demos for her next album, Rebel Heart, were leaked online. Most were works in progress; the release of Rebel Heart hadnt even been announced. It was an unprecedented security breach for an artist of Madonnas stature. But when she used social media to liken it all to rape and terrorism, she began to test even fans patience.
Suddenly, the pop icon who, little more than a decade earlier, faced leaked music in a way that was funny, smart and aggressive, was uploading a picture of a broken iPod as a symbol of my broken heart. Madonna, pops most brilliant control freak, was no longer in control. Rather than asking, What the fuck do you think youre doing? and windmilling her way into a fight, she was assuming the role of victim.
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Madonna: How the control queen lost her touch when media went social