Undeniably, there is a scale to Madge’s assult on the Old Country, everything from the horsey rural estate to the creeping mid-Atlantic accent. Stefani, by contrast, will lose her flat, half-swallowed Californian vowels when hell freezes over, and anyway, she hasn’t even truly relocated to England; she and Brit rocker husband Gavin Rossdale have for the past 10 years split thier time between the house in London’s tony Primrose Hill (neighbors on either side are Jude Law and his ex, Sadie Frost) and a manse in L.A..

But if Madonna does it bigger, it is no longer hersey to suggest that musically, Stefani does it every bit as well. After 17 years of fronting the redoubtable rock/ska/reggae band No Doubt (she should make the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on the strengh of one immortal break-up tune alone, “Don’t Speak”), Stefani took the solo plunge. Her 2004 giddy confession of dance tunes Love. Angel. Music. Baby. went triple platinum. (”I remember telling Madonna I was going to do an ’80s dance record,” Stefani says, “and she rolled her eyes, because I think when you’ve lived through it like she did, she’s like ‘Whatever.’ But alot of my influences came from her early work, like directly, like a Xerox.”) That album spawned one monster single, “Hollaback Girl,” a saucy cheerleader chant that taught teenage girls how to spell the word bananas and simultaneously established Stefani’s urban street cred as a white suburban rapper comfortable with the “S” word and with pop-hop notables the Neptunes’ marital beats.