Madonna sort of fell off my radar as the 90’s wore on. I’d started the decade listening to her quite a bit, enjoying Erotica once I finally bought it, and appreciating the far lighter but uneven Bedtime Stories. Bedtime Stories is portrayed as something of a commercial comeback, and while “Take A Bow” was a legitimate monster, the album itself only moved a million more copies worldwide than Erotica had. That’s an even less impressive comeback when you consider we’d entered the age of peak-CD by the time Bedtime Stories was released - Tori Amos moved around 3 million copies of Under The Pink during the same era, for crying out loud.
I’m one of those three million, and by the mid-’90s found Amos, Bjork and my growing collection of oldies from Bowie, Joni Mitchell and Dusty Springfield (among others) a heck of a lot more interesting than Madge warbling godawful Andrew Lloyd Webber tripe (even if she was practically born to play a vaguely fascistic climber). So I wasn’t exactly waiting around with bated breath anticipating the next single the Material Girl was set to drop. She frankly seemed somewhat out of step with the times, and headed straight for some sort of adult contemporary, middle aged beige ghetto. Pet Shop Boys and Bjork were supplying all the modern dance music I was interested in, anyhow.
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| Zzzzzzzz... |
She helped to confirm that impression by releasing the Something To Remember collection for Christmas of ‘95. That decade’s You Can Dance, it gathered single-only hits like "This Used To Be My Playground" and "I'll Remember" in one place, along with remixes and selected re-releases of Madge’s ballads like “Rain” and the title cut. “You’ll See” was the big hit here, the Latin-tinged sequel to “Take A Bow” sporting the sequel video. It was all too Celine Dion to attract my attention. Something To Remember had far too many cuts on it that were better forgotten.
I think I’d caught word she was working with William Orbit, but was only vaguely familiar with his work - I always got him confused with Moby. It sounded like she was aiming to produce a whole Bjork-like album, as opposed to just one single (“Bedtime Stories”), which probably should have got me excited but instead just left me a bit bemused. You do that, Madonna.
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| When acts like Natalie Merchant offer praise for a Madonna track, you know Madge has done something unique |
So when the “Frozen” video finally cropped up on MTV I was flat out stunned. Partly it was the video itself, darkly demonic, blue and brooding. But the song was similarly icy, and I couldn’t tell if she was addressing someone else or addressing herself with the lyrics. Musically she’d definitely moved in a Bjork-like direction, but unlike some of the cuts on Bedtime Stories this didn’t sound like Madonna just aping Bjork - this very much sounded like Madonna, but also like a very different Madonna from the gal who’d brought us “Take A Bow” and a bunch of West End junk over the past few years. There was little trace of her R&B roots, and with prominent Eastern influences and throbbing, burbling techno and strings, no trace of that adult contemporary ghetto she’d been dwelling in for her non-R&B work post-Erotica.
You could hear the results of her vocal training - less of that excessive vibrato, a less-soulful but more controlled, sometimes delicate sound. To some degree it’s more of a rock vocal than the R&B or dance diva vocals that had characterized her performances up to this point. Drenched with Kabbalah, with Hinduism and Buddhism in its lyrics and even in the music, Ray Of Light saw the Material Girl execute probably her most improbable transition yet, into the Ethereal Girl. By all rights, this should have been a commercial and critical disaster - on paper, it reads as way too ambitious and ill-conceived. How can the woman who dropped the f-bomb 14 times in one appearance on Letterman just four years before be credible as some kind of New Age techno hippy?
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| Madge and Orbit. She picked the right guy. |
And yet Ray Of Light got (mostly) critical raves, spawned a slew of hit singles, inspired some of the best videos of her career, and went on to become one of her best-selling albums, moving a whopping 16 million copies worldwide (even outselling the arguably far more accessible Like A Prayer). It inspired a little mini-techno boom that we’re probably still riding the tail end of almost two decades later, and helped drag electronica mainstream. Millions of yummie mummies, many of them Madonna wannabes in their teen years, hopped back aboard the fan train at the close of the millennium, adopting the same flowing, wavy bleach-blonde locks Madge favored for much of this era, along with the yoga, the henna tattoos, and the chic, sleek, dressed-down look. She pretty much scored a musical, visual, spiritual, cultural bullseye with Ray Of Light, releasing the right album at the right time with the right songs. She’s never again felt quite as on target - or as relevant - as she did in 1998.
This is a really melancholy record, probably the most (intentionally) depressing platter of her entire career. If she ever came close to producing her own Blue, Ray Of Light is it. And blue it is - the cover is blue, her shiny coat is blue, the “Frozen” video is almost black and white but tinted blue, the other videos are dominated by blue as well, and the record opens and closes with watery songs - “Drowned World / Substitute For Love” and “Mer Girl”, both musically evocative of water. Her stated aim was to produce something which sounded both old and new, and she achieved it in spades - lead single “Frozen” sounds both like something ethnologists recorded while on an expedition to some exotic Eastern locale and like a stomping techno workout from a London underground club. The dichotomy continues throughout the remainder of the record, the icy techno being continuously balanced by sounds - organic and synthetic - of a far more earthy variety. And the lyrics - across the board pretty much - are the consistently smartest of her career.
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| Celebrity cocoon |
The record opens with the beautiful, haunting “Drowned World / Substitute For Love”, which Madonna surprisingly released as the record’s third single overseas. It’s more like one of her experimental album closers, delicate and atmospheric, with a somewhat sprawling, rambling melody and caress of a vocal which rises to a howl at the song’s climax. I can’t help but wonder if it was inspired by Annie Lennox’s “Why” from six years before, a similarly-structured, non-commercial but incredibly effective lament that nevertheless managed to score a UK #1. With a video evocative of Princess Diana’s then-recent death - it depicts Madonna fleeing the paparazzi, finding safety back home with her daughter - and with some of her most-revealing lyrics to date it’s both her most unsettling album opener plus a preview of what’s to come. Even the title is unusual for a Madonna record, with “Drowned World” coming from the name of a 1962 J.G. Ballard (Crash) novel about a post-apocalyptic 2145 London.
“Swim” is as close to R&B as Ray Of Light gets, but it harks back more to Marvin Gaye and The Undisputed Truth than the trendier hip-hop and Babyface affectations of Erotica and Bedtime Stories. More water here - she’s gonna “swim to the ocean floor” and “crash to the other shore” - and a lament for the state of the world, where “students rape their teachers.” The darkness at the heart of the track was reinforced by real life events - Madonna recorded the vocal the day her friend Gianni Versace was assassinated by a deranged fan.
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| Mental |
The sun finally comes out on the record for its utterly bonkers title track, which is like nothing Madonna had ever done - or even indicated she was capable of - before. Somehow, she found a way to out-Bjork Bjork on this one, with the piece being based around a rewrite of a 1971 English folk music track called “Sepheryn”. Well, Madonna’s always been an old hippy at heart, but she never let her Aquarian Age freak flag fly quite like on this number, where her vocal is off the chain and out of control, including caterwauls, yodels, and a screeching yelp at 4:30 that makes the craziest of Joni Mitchell’s or Kate Bush’s early-career vocal experiments look positively tame. Again, on paper this track should be a complete disaster - instead, it’s a career highlight, including her Koyaanisqatsi-esque, Grammy-winning video that’s a perfectly-complementary hyperactive techno headtrip. Microsoft improbably picked the song for their 2001 Windows XP advertising campaign, which like XP itself was a massive success. Aural crack. If there’s one complaint I have with Ray Of Light, it’s that it needed two tracks like this but only has one, so while the album is startlingly consistent in mood, it might suffer slightly from being somewhat too consistent.
All traces of hip-hop haven’t been erased from this record - “Candy Perfume Girl”’s big beat certainly owes much to it - and her vocal here isn’t too far removed from something you’d have found on Erotica, at least until she once again lets her hippy freak out starting about three minutes into the song. I think this is probably the weakest cut on the album - there’s just not a lot there besides production and a single hook to sustain over four and a half minutes of trancelike club beats - but maybe this is the comedown you need after the title cut. Like a lot of this record it isn’t remotely commercial to my ear, so I can see why a lot of fans of her simpler ‘80s hits start tuning out right about now, but even on cuts like this one that don’t entirely work for me I greatly appreciate the attempt to branch out a lot.
Ray Of Light gets very Ethereal Girl on the next cut, “Skin”. “Why do all the things I say sound like the stupid things I said before,” gets repeated as something of a mantra (the album’s original title), and while like “Candy Perfume Girl” there isn’t a lot to “Skin”, the repetition works much better here with the faster, trippy, kinetic beats and Jarre-esque electronic twittering. That’s probably thanks to some truly inspired Eastern riffs that come to the forefront for the last minute and a half of the track, giving that Old World / New World contrast which elevates the entire album above many produced by contemporary techno peers.
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| Geisha audition failed - great video, though |
“Nothing Really Matters” stiffed somewhat as a single in the US, but ask me on the right day and it might be my favorite cut from the record, right from the sonar pings in its opening down to its infectious beat. It sports a perfect bridge (a Madonna specialty - does anybody write better bridges?), with one of her greatest lyrics, “nothing takes the past away like the future,” an epic little Madonna-ism. The surreal video was equally fantastic, even if she didn’t pass the audition for Memoirs Of A Geisha (which you know is what she was aiming for). Didn’t matter in the end - the film flopped anyhow; it didn’t need Madonna to ruin it…
Ray Of Light is just drenched with atmosphere, it streams off the tracks and out into the room by the bucket. “Sky Fits Heaven” is maybe the most atmospheric cut of all, in spite of its driving (but subsumed) kinetic beat. Madonna delivers a vocal that coos and cries over it all in equal measure. It’s slight, but effective. Even more extreme, “Shanti/Ashtangi” finds Madge singing and entire song in Sanskrit, I sh*t you not. She got the BBC to send her lessons! It’s Madge does Bollywood. The amazing thing is, it works! Who knew you could pull this off without being stoned on LSD? At least, I assume she wasn’t dropping acid…
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| Chris Cunningham was an unusual choice to direct a Madonna video, yet perfect for this piece |
The darkness creeps back in again on “Frozen”, maybe after “Live To Tell” the bleakest hit of her career. A ballad at heart, but dropped over a clacking, pulsing, modestly psychedelic electronic beat and punctuated by icy strings, it might be the boldest lead-single choice of her career and it’s certainly one of her boldest, eeriest videos - Madonna as some demonic, witchy force in the desert. She and her black-clad, henna tattooed doppelgangers transform into crows and dobermans, eclipse the sun, and absorb inky black water from the parched ground (there’s the water again). “If I could melt your heart, we’d never be apart,” is traditional love song material, but, “Love is a bird, she needs to fly, let all the hurt inside of you die,” ain’t. At 40, Madonna had just grown too old for pop like “Cherish” anymore - she was feeling her age, and her experience, and coming at pop with all the disappointment and frustration that middle age can muster.
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| The Awakening |
“The Power Of Goodbye” being a perfect example of that. One of her most gorgeous post-Evita ballads and a perfect showcase for her improved vocals, the track’s lyrics detail the sad, final breakdown of a relationship (“You were my lesson I had to learn, I was your fortress you had to burn.”). Mostly substituting burbling aquatic synths for “Frozen”’s icy strings, the track manages the delicate feat of being simultaneously cold and impassioned, anchored by a beautiful, aching melody. The video is - if anything - even more exquisite, with Madge cast as the wealthy but abused (physically and mentally) partner in a toxic relationship, ensconced in a beautiful but stark seaside home, locked in charged chess matches with her partner (played by handsome, intense Croatian actor Goran Višnjić). All aqua tones and loaded camera angles, the ambiguous conclusion of the video is one of the most disturbing of the era - borrowing from Kate Chopin’s novel The Awakening - as Madonna exits the relationship by walking straight into the ocean. “True Blue” this ain’t.
Ray Of Light pulls back a bit from such stark emotional tragedy on the hypnotic “To Have And Not To Hold”, another lovely melody that perhaps harks back a bit to the Madonna of the ‘80s, but cocooned here in a far more delicate and involved techno swaddling. Melancholic instead of tragic, the loping quality of the track and the reflective lyric (“Like a moth to a flame, only I am to blame”) almost play like a track from some fin de siècle, techno-Hejira. There were flashes of this in her earlier works, but nothing so fully-formed. She may not be quite as eloquent as Joni Mitchell on Ray Of Light, but she’s almost as revealed as Mitchell was on her most emotionally-bare works, and for multiplatinum pop this is pretty literate stuff. She’d never so thoroughly mixed art and pop before, and she’s never done it since.
“Little Star” is - after the title track - the lightest thing on the record, and of a piece perhaps with earlier, candy sweet Madonna tracks like “Dear Jesse”. But “Little Star” feels far more organic than any of those efforts, directed at daughter Lourdes, and genuinely tender. The Maternal Girl? Believe it. The track coyly skitters off into the unsettling “Mer Girl”, which opens with ambient noise and the sound of an unanswered telephone line. It finds Madonna running - from her house, from the memory of her mother, from “a daughter that never sleeps.” A companion piece to “Drowned World / Substitute For Love”, it bookends Ray Of Light, with Madonna whispering a tale of a surreal, dreamlike stagger thru the rain. It’s beautiful, spare, and mesmeric, but also increasingly dark, as the forest earth of the cemetery ultimately opens to swallow Madonna, at which point she smells her mother’s “burning flesh, her rotting bones, her decay”. The dream as it turns out is at least half-nightmare.
If you live long enough you reach an age where you realize you’re never going to outrun who you are. Ray Of Light is the sound of Madonna reaching that age. Sadly, in spite of its commercial and critical success, each subsequent record has felt like something of a betrayal of the growth Ray Of Light documented. The backsliding to the more-vulgar Madonna of the infamous Letterman appearance began on the subsequent Music, and has continued (and if anything accelerated) on most of her more recent releases. It’s kept her surprisingly in touch with the “Anaconda” times, but not so much in touch with the yummy mummy audience who embraced Ray Of Light in droves or the record sales that came as a result. She's certainly still capable of much more, as tracks like the haunting “Falling Free” off MDNA demonstrate, but seems to have opted not to put as much of herself into her work going forward. I think that’s critically and commercially unfortunate, but with most of her revenue coming from touring and catalog sales anyhow, perhaps Madonna the savvy businesswoman realizes albums don’t really matter much anyway.
But maybe that’s all a discussion best reserved for the upcoming records. I think Ray Of Light is as good as Madonna got, a surprisingly un-commercial commercial triumph and a pretty incredible artistic stretch for an act that seemed to be falling into an irrelevant rut. It capped an incredible fifteen year run as a pop superstar - unprecedented for any act, but particularly for a woman - and remains the standard all of her subsequent releases are measured against. Fortune favors the bold.
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