PAST, PRESENT , and future catty teenage girls know: It's better sport to make fun of McDonna – er, Madonna – than to get behind whatever she's selling at any given moment. But being just off a jet from Osaka, Japan, where theme park-like malls with names like Whitey and Hep 5 turn shopping into pure spectacle, I'm almost ready to lay down my Mad money and buy anything when it comes to the Material Momma in her current dance diva-meets-"Beaver Hunt" pinup incarnation, on display in the "Bob Fosse reporting for duty in Style Wars" video for her single "Hung Up." The heavily ABBA-sampling track clocked in at number seven on Billboard's Hot 100 singles chart last week. It's her highest-charting song since February 2001 and matched Elvis Presley's high of 36 Top 10 hits.

From the sleek height of Miami Vice to the nightly CSI/Law and Order shuffle, Madge has practiced a slippery bait-and-switch costume change and playful, ultracommercial chameleon game that those bleached-auburn Osaka bling brats, Harajuku girls, and Gwen Stefanis can get with. A tattered new wave sex urchin, a Herb Ritts-y sun-swept celebutante, and a tell-all, show-all, trou-dropping Sex explorer – her strongest, steeliest guises have relied on her past as a dancer. From the first ticktock and submariner throb of "Hung Up," she got me. The lyrics of "Hung Up" – and much of the accompanying album, Confessions on a Dance Floor (Warner Bros.) – are meaningless clichés, and Madonna foregrounds and presses home the redundancy with a vocoder refrain on "Sorry": "I heard it all before." But in the process (with coproducers Stuart Price, Mirwais Ahmadzai, Bloodshy and Avant, and Anders Bagge and Peer Astrom) she turns a workout that threatens to turn tedious into a dance routine that's both torturous and pleasurable in its familiarity, much like the sexy stretches she goes through in the video and in her album art – the moves and the lyrics are both obsessive and releasing, divinely emptied of meaning and thus ready to be filled with all the thoughts that flicker through the minds attached to those sweat-drenched, bobbing bodies on the dance floor.

Miz Ciccone doesn't get much deeper than the controversial kabbalah-robics of "Isaac" – when she strays into deeper waters than those annoying one-word phrases in foreign tongues sprinkled throughout Confessions, the dancer stumbles. But mainly she keeps her wits about her, wisely stays mum, and remains in the enticing shallows, the mirror ball surfaces that she so excels at manipulating, reflecting and refracting our fantasies with a still-uncanny internal cultural barometer feeding on '70s disco and soft porn imagery as well as '80s synth pop and icy-cool inured vocals. Confessions – though offering few new genuine revelations (after all, haven't we seen all of our Lady Madonna) – sounds like the soundtrack for the coziest, most familiar disco in the world, multilingual and polished to a globally glam sheen for all you wannabe international jet-setting playboys and -girls. It's a big womblike tent, and the entrance seems to be located somewhere near that clitoral disco ball between M's coquettishly jackknifed legs on the Confessions cover.

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