First there's that modish whining noise, like Eeyore having swallowed a synthesiser. Then the lumpen beat which affectionately passes for "dance" in white circles comes in - clump, clump, clump, like someone goose-stepping across a huge biscuit tin. A few moments pause for the sheer, molten tension to build and then that timeless, wheedling, weaselly mid-western whinge kicks in: "Mewzick . . . mewzick . . . mewzick . . ." Make no mistake, we are now in the presence of a Titan, and one who is going to give us the absolute last word, the definitive statement on that lively art, the condition to which Walter Pater once so memorably claimed that all the arts aspire.
Yes, not since John Miles's immortal 1970s schmaltz-fest music (Music was my first love/And it will be my last/Music of the future/And music of the past!) has a song spoken to us so movingly of the transcendent power of the form: "Hey Mr DJ, put a record on - I wanna dance with my baby".
And from there it's all downhill, a low-point being the repeated use of the word "bourgeoisie" in the chorus - which with pathetic transparency is supposed to signify that this is not just another "dumb" dance record, but that the singer is "knowing".
Amazingly, people have picked up the idea from somewhere that if something is "knowing", it can't be crap. Whereas what it is, of course, is knowing crap. Which is certainly no better than innocent crap and may well be much worse.
This summer has been remarkable for both its lack of sunshine and glut of classic female dance singles. But summer is surely over and the rot of autumn about to set in, for a single is come among us which will ultimately get more airplay than all the beauties above put together.
I refer, of course, to Music, Madonna's latest. And, it must be said, the direst record released by any major artist since, oh, American Pie. In the annals of bad records, this one has legs - it is very conceivably worse than the Birdie Song, Aga Doo and the last Phil Collins combined.
Some books, songs and films really do make you believe that the chief ape in "Planet of" was right when he maintained that human beings were lower than chimps: Music is one of them. Give 1,000 chimps access to recording equipment for 100 years and they would not, could not, produce anything as boring as this castrated, truncated funk.
Who in the name of God could summon up the motivation to walk into a record shop, enunciate the words, "Please can I have Music by Madonna?" and put their hand into their pocket? Beats me.
If you really can't stomach excellence and must have Limp White Dance Music, the latest from Roisin Moloko, Sophie Spiller or even good old Kylie (fast becoming the Vera Lynn of Generation Pecs) are far better bets. Music is a bad handshake of a record: limp, clinging, hard to shake off and leaving one with a distinct feeling of having been soiled by contact with a mediocrity so extreme it fair takes the breath away.
The main problem is not that Madonna has no talent, but that she has hung around for the best part of 20 years throwing this in our faces. Most talentless people disappear quite quickly; very few hang on decade after decade, as though they were a Sinatra or a Callas, and when they do, it feels like they are taking the piss, to be blunt.
And even though she is nowhere near as gnarled and sad as the Rolling Stones, and even though we are used to the ace faces of pop being old and bald and greying, is it too much to ask that pop music should be the province of the young, the thing that speaks to and from their hearts?
I certainly wouldn't want to be working at the New Musical Express at the age of 41, and I don't understand why an intelligent and cultured woman such as Madonna still wants to sing lyrics such as the aforementioned: "Hey Mr DJ, put a record on - I wanna dance with my baby" at the age of 42.
It's just embarrassing for everyone, like seeing your parents "get down" when they turn up drunk to pick you up from the school disco. Personally, I thought she was brilliant in Evita; couldn't she just stick to show tunes, like Elaine Paige? It would be a lot more becoming.
Her youthful exuberance and sheer force of character made her initial vocal shortcomings seem unimportant, but Madonna was actually the first major singing star who sounded like a karaoke version of herself right from the beginning.
Without her, there could be no Britney Spears or Victoria Beckham, who sound like girls who won a holiday talent contest pretending to be Britney Spears and Victoria Beckham. What stupid old punk began - "Can't play an instrument? Can't sing? Right, go out and form a band!" - Madonna carried through to its logical conclusion.
Madonna, to her credit, is a product of hard work - but, like all women over the age of 35 who retain their girlish figures, there is something desperate and neurotic about her dedication to physical fitness.
And like the man who invented jogging and then dropped dead of a heart attack while doing it, and the woman who wrote all those diet books like Let's Get Healthy and then died of bowel cancer, the sad events of August 12th, when Madonna was taken to hospital a month early after a massive haemorrhage, must have made her brutally aware that Man was made for Nature, and not the other way round.
I don't know what a detached placenta is - the life-threatening condition for both mother and foetus which led to the caesarean section a month early - but I bet it isn't helped by putting one's ankles behind one's head on a regular basis while eight months pregnant.
Couldn't she have just put her feet up for a few months and relaxed? Or does she feel some horrible misanthropic compulsion to torment us with bad records until the end of her natural life? When I realise that Madonna may still be putting out records like Music in 20 years' time, it honestly makes me want to cry.
It has to be said that hooking up with Guy Ritchie has served to make her far more objectionable than she was before. Madonna, it must be said, has a phoney streak a mile wide. Add that to Ritchie's (the only wide-boy young-blood whose father is a baronet, whose sister is a Tabitha and who got his impressive facial scar from falling off his pony and landing on his silver spoon) and you have a recipe for nausea.
Together, there is just so much about them that makes one want to be really childish and do exactly what Madonna did behind poor Kevin Costner's back in Truth or Dare: that is, stick fingers in mouths and make vomiting noises. Whether taking tea with Charles and Camilla, nursing a "pint" in a "pub" or having the "wrap" of Snatch at a "lapdancing club", they truly are the King and Queen of Hurl.
Despite all this, I feel no animosity towards Madonna. Who wouldn't milk it for all that they could if they got the chance? It would be as silly as feeling cross with a lottery millionaire.
No, rather in the same way that I hate the people who watch boxing rather than the boxers themselves, it is those people who should know better - journalists, pundits, social commentators - who are responsible for turning the eyes of the world on an individual who simply cannot cut it.
Let us not forget that Madonna was an appealing if weak-voiced singer of charming, light-weight pop records until a lazy media, always hungry for sex, ambition and an easy, sleazy handle on feminism, set upon her as a symbol of practically everything.
It gives me no pleasure to admit that, for a long period during the 1980s and 1990s, I was one of them: "She drags feminism along casually in her slinking stride like a cavewoman who has just killed her dinner . . . Her predatory pursuit of all that life, love and Securicor has to offer is a good deal more inspirational to young women than those milch-cows mouldering away at Greenham Common . . . She looks like a whore and thinks like a pimp, which as everyone knows is the very best type of Modern Girl." Reader, I wrote that swill.
As Oscar said, some men use flattery to kill the thing they love and, in Madonna's case, being told what a big, important signifier she is for so long has pretty much destroyed her chances of ever becoming a decent singer, songwriter or actress.
So what next? Her records and - especially - her films are likely to get worse and worse as her youthful bravado fades and mid-life weariness sets in. But by all accounts, Madonna does have one area of accomplishment; she is apparently a devoted, creative, rigorous and loving mother. And she has recently recorded songs which state boldly that fame is worthless and motherhood everything.
In the light of this, would it be too much to ask that she retreat for a season or two from the three-ringed circus of studs and starlets, pierrettes and poltroons, drolls and dolls who compete to distract us from our supposedly dull lives with their tragic attention-seeking?
Let it be so, and let Madonna heed the words of one of those great English wits she is so fond of: "Madam, please go - you have delighted us long enough!"