Critics have been carping for literally decades about Madonna being too old, too out of touch, too fake and too lightweight. Time and again, they fail to understand her continued success.

Madonna’s strength is not in her consistency, or her perceived hipness in any given year. She is, instead, the world’s leading exporter of Madonnaness. Through smash hits or Shanghai surprises, she never lets up. To paraphrase The Terminator, she can’t be bargained with. She can’t be reasoned with. She doesn’t feel pity, remorse or fear. And she absolutely will not stop, ever, until she is dead.

PHOTO GALLERY: Crowd and concert photos from Madonna’s concert at HP Pavilion.

What’s strange is that Madonna herself seemed to have forgotten how she got where she is through the entire first half hour of her show at HP Pavilion Saturday night.

As she kicked off almost entirely with songs from her new album, MDNA, she proceeded to give the audience absolutely everything they didn’t want from a Madonna show.

Attempting to do for violence what she did for sex, she squandered her stage time with the world’s most poorly timed gun show (and I’m not referring to her arms). Blood and tissue were splattered across the video screens as she pretended to shoot dancers in the head and kept pointing her fake gun at the audience like it was a nervous tic.

VIDEO: Madonna’s Five Most Outrageous Moments.

Considering that Madonna’s subversiveness was always in her message of self-acceptance and positivism, guess how this went over? The energy in the building, already taxed by the show’s late start, was sucked out entirely, even from her adoring hardcore fan base. It all seemed forced and desperate, a poorly thought out rip off of MIA’s warmongering shtick and Lady Gaga’s own dark take on Madonnaness.

The irony was upped when Madonna finally cut the hardboiled crap and came out to a pretty impressive staging of “Express Yourself,” in which she poked fun at Lady Gaga by demonstrating how effortlessly “Born This Way” fit into the melody of her own song (she has, of course, accused Gaga of stealing it before). As drum majorettes marches through the air above the stage and cheerleaders twirled, she took her first step toward reclaiming the territory she actually owns.

Madonna at HP Pavilion. // Photo by Aron Cooperman.

By the time she’d gotten to “Vogue” and “Candy Shop,” she was slinking through stylish black-and-white tableaux, lesbian bars and vintage cool. That’s the Madonna concert people want to see, because that blend of sophistication, sexuality and pop camp is what Madonna does better than anyone else.

COLUMN: Why Madonna Still Matters

She worked her way through the hits, but the night’s best moment may have been when she acknowledged that it was the 30th anniversary of the release of her first single, “Everybody.” On a stage uncluttered by her big-budget sets or eye-popping stunts (and the stunts were ridiculously good all night, it should be noted), she made an actual connection with the audience as she enlisted their help singing it, having claimed to have possibly forgotten the words. It was fun, it was unexpected, and it showed that Madonna still knows how to surprise her audience in a good way.

Did you make it to the show? Share your thoughts in our comments section.

Madonna IS, for better or worse, regarded (both high and low) as the Queen of Pop, and, contrary to popular belief, the title does mimic the sound her veiny arms make when stuffed in cheerleading garb, flailing left to right. One gets the very real sense when looking at Madonna in 2k12 that we have in every way reached the endpoint of the 1980s. Where once one was speechless looking at ol’ Madge, a single phrase comes to mind when seeing her now: “It has literally come to this.”

She is, however, still Madonna, and she’s still coming to San Jose for a two-night stand at HP Pavilion, Oct. 6-7, and in the same way that parental advice may not hold the same weight it once did but nevertheless remains at least peripherally relevant, Madonna endures, cementing her place as pop-culture’s slightly enjoyable mosquito bite.

In honor of the queen’s arrival, a moment must be spared (just one) to truly digest what exactly it is that Madonna represents in the vacuum of contemporary culture. Because, as you’re likely to be reminded—often by Madonna herself—she has opened doors for many young people with vaginas and a desire to sing.

The door is also often left ajar for spores of the sincere flattery of imitation (valid or not—here’s looking at you, Lady Gaga, also coming to San Jose, on Jan. 17), but any comparisons seem moot: There will never be a “new Madonna,” because there will never again be a moment like the one when Madonna came into prominence. She is so purely the byproduct of her era that discussions of originality are almost wholly aimless.

For instance, believe it or not, Gen Zers, there was a time in which the ironic appropriation of religious imagery was actually a big deal. As in people actually cared. As in affiliates of the Catholic Church actually protested. Now it’s just this side of yawn-inducing (at least in the West), with everyone flipping a cross upside-down as a way of making a statement.

Even Madonna is still beating her own sacrificed horse to death; her current MDNA Tour features cathedral set design and some holy cooing that may be more the result of bad acoustics than aesthetic intention. Either way, Madonna (whose own name stands as a sort of self-fulfilled prophecy) was one of the first to really push the buttons of all who love that Birkenstock-wearing-long-haired hippie.

True, she wasn’t alone. The 1980s was the time when scorned Catholic kids grew up and started putting their religious resentment in their art (Bruce Springsteen completely; the Cure maybe in part). But Madonna did it first, did it best and literally won’t stop doing it, so some sort of praise must be given as a way of shutting her up.

She’s elsewhere too, namely any heinous “’80s-themed” party that a friend made you attend. Walk in and feast your eyes on the striking binary: vague neon for the men; eclectic mixing for the women. The whole “throw-and-see-what-sticks” fashion style—which ended up turning into “throw-and-everything-sticks”—was at least partially constructed by the pop star.

I’d like to say also that the word “star” in the previous sentence was autocorrected to “store,” and if that doesn’t tell you everything you need to know about the current state and inherent nature of pop and music and culture, then I don’t know what does.