Ah, the video to Hung Up. Can there be anything more pleasurable than watching Madonna looning around a brightly lit dance studio dressed in a baggy pink leotard with her arse hanging out? Really, it’s as innocent a joy as watching a dog with its head poked out of the window of a moving car.

Over three minutes and twenty-three seconds, Hung Up has as many sweet treats as a tin of Miniature Heroes. The diverting twist-and-drop-squat dance movement that will account for so many unhappy and rapidly sobering admissions to A&E during the Christmas 2005 office-party season. The bit where Madonna hammers on the huge mirror in the studio like a tipsy tranny trying to get into the video for Take on Me. The moment where, on third or fourth viewing, you realise that she really is wearing a pair of 10 dernier tights cut off at the knee and a leotard whose Lycra content has been grossly mishandled in a hot tumble-dryer — an outfit last seen on Mrs Overall on the Acorn Antiques Christmas special.

Of course, the most important moment of all is the realisation that, despite 22 years in the business, Madonna still dances as if it’s only on the dancefloor that she feels this free, still puts out singles that look like Single of the Year, and still has the ability to stop ongoing pop-culture conversations dead whenever she re-emerges and everyone assesses what the clever old bag has done now. That she is a pop-culture icon goes without saying. That she has been a pop-culture icon for 22 years is little short of astonishing — especially when one considers the nature of what it is to be an icon.

Being iconic isn’t simply about being very famous. If it were, then the BBC’s royal correspondent Nicholas Witchell would be an icon and clearly he isn’t. This is because one of the primary requirements for being an icon is a great complexity rendered very simply, and Witchell is simply a simple person rendered simply.

As an example of a true icon, consider, say, John Lennon. Your brain immediately returns a picture of him being a Beatle, playing Love Me Do and possibly wearing a hat. You could probably sketch him with five lines of a pencil. Anyone would recognise him from the description: “The gobby, druggy one with a hat from the Beatles.”

But of course, there were dozens of facets to Lennon. The sub-Dadaist political activist. The emotionally frail writer of Julia. The leather-clad wife-beater. The breadmaking house-husband. The surrealist author and poet. The bad father (Julian) and the good father (Sean). The composer of both some of the most accessible (Help!, Please Please Me, You've Got to Hide Your Love Away) and the most experimental (Tomorrow Never Knows, Revolution No 9) popular music of the 20th century. Girl and boy bands traditionally have “one of each type” — the joker, the sensitive one, the rough one, the talented one, the Gary Barlow. Icons have “one of each type” all on their own.

And, of course, each type not only brings with it its own fan base — Dylan fans who are into only the acoustic stuff, Judy Garland fans who liked her best when she was fat and avoided paying hotel bills by threatening to jump out of a window, screaming “Everyone will remember this as the place where Dorothy died!” — but it also keeps casual observers constantly intrigued. There’s something in an icon for everyone; they appeal to vastly different ages, cultures and sexual persuasions.

The mark of a true icon is when no one can ever truthfully say “I hate Elvis” or “I hate Michael Jackson”. No one really hates Elvis, or Michael Jackson. You might hate dim, manipulated GI Elvis, but you’ve got to love wearing-a-jumpsuit-getting-a-drug-badge-from-Richard-Nixon Elvis, or In the Ghetto Elvis, or Comeback Special Elvis, or shooting televisions Elvis, or Elvis’s face, or just the fact that he seemed to build a world full of screaming teenagers out of nothing but postwar depression and dust.

And so it is with Madonna. I wouldn’t trust anyone who said they hated Madonna. What — you hate all 27 Madonnas? It’s statistically unlikely that anyone who hated Madonna being, say, True Blue bleach-crop Madonna would also hate Madonna-turning-into-a-murder-of-crows Frozen Madonna, and Madonna-as-Evita Madonna, and Madonna-as-hippy-club-matriarch Ray of Light Madonna, and Madonna-as-pan-racial-sexual-evangelist Like a Prayer Madonna. The odds must be up there with hating, say, everyone in Cardiff, or everyone call “Jen”.

When Madonna was inducted into the UK Music Hall of Fame last year, no one could really argue the case against. In a list that included Elvis Presley, the Beatles, Bob Marley, Michael Jackson, Queen, the Rolling Stones and U2 she looked eminently at home, despite being both the only woman and the only dance artist. And after this year’s ceremony — she will still be the only woman in the Hall.

And she’s also starting to look like one of the only icons. The influx of musically exemplary but iconically lacking nominees — The Who, the Kinks, Joy Division/New Order, Pink Floyd — reinforces just how rare Madonna is. For not only is she one of the few artists who could fill three Best Ofs, spanning three decades, with no filler, but she still has so many Madonnas to chose from in her cupboard of heads that you never know who you’re going to get next.

This is not something you can say about the three men wearing jeans from New Order, say, or the four men wearing jeans from Pink Floyd, or the two men wearing jeans from The Who. And, of course, none of them has got that arse. Or, indeed, would put it there, like that.

The UK Music Hall of Fame is broadcast on Channel 4 on Thurs, Nov 17, at 9pm

UK Music Hall of Famers

2004: The Beatles, Michael Jackson, Madonna, Bob Marley, Elvis Presley, Queen, Cliff Richard & the Shadows, the Rolling Stones, U2, Robbie Williams. Honorary — Island Records founder, Chris Blackwell

2005: Jimi Hendrix, the Kinks, Pink Floyd, Bob Dylan, Joy Division/New Order, Ozzy Osbourne/Black Sabbath, the Who. Honorary — DJ John Peel

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