Today's more-flamboyant female pop stars enjoy the freedom to make music and perform the way they do, but they didn't create that freedom, says Howard Kramer, curatorial director of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum. Madonna -- who is performing Tuesday at Consol Energy Center in Uptown -- did the moving and shaking when she burst onto the pop-music charts in the early '80s, he says, and followed with hit after hit.
"Madonna and the career she carved out for herself made possible virtually every other female pop singer to follow," Kramer says. "She certainly raised the standards of all of them.
"She redefined what the parameters were for female performers," he says about Madonna. "She is, without question, the most important female artist, and one of the most important artists of the last half-century."
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