Talent and genius are not the same.
So far as I see, pretty much all TOP level female pop stars have talent. In more recent times, think of Miley Cyrus, Katy Perry, or Taylor Swift. They have all been induced, as their careers progressed, to push more outright degeneracy and politics, but they all started as attractive young women with many virtues. And talents… I like many of their songs without particularly wanting to.
Something of the same goes for Madonna, as I see it. In contrast to those others, who started as more virtuous and "progressed" to greater degeneracy, Madonna's career began with a sort of bad-girl image, but it was a very conflicted bad-girl image, and it strikes me that the conflict wasn't entirely fake.
^^^ relevant
The lyrics, the emotional range, the musicality and the dance made for an engaging pop personna. But towards the end of the 80s she started with more overt "messaging" and I mostly viewed her with growing horrror.