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Rorschach Test

I'm finding the online - mostly Facebook - reaction to billionaire child rapist Jeffrey Epstein's "suicide" particularly informative. As a global sex trafficker with ties to some of the wealthiest, most powerful business, academic, entertainment and political figures around the globe, Epstein mysteriously died in his jail cell the same night  his case files were unsealed. The timing couldn't be more obvious.  He was apparently taken off suicide watch a few days before (why?), the guards didn't make their usual rounds the night he died (curious), there's a report that Barr himself visited the jail recently (WTF?), and now we've learned the surveillance cameras weren't working (hmmm).  If this wasn't a hit, it's the most amazing string of coincidences in world history. Frankly, I find the whole notion that a raging narcissist like Epstein - a guy who wanted to seed the human race with his DNA  (you can't make this shit up) - would
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Ray Of Light

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 exa
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Something To Remember / Evita

Don't have much to say about either Madonna project from this era - her ballads collection Something To Remember  or Evita  - other than it was clear Madge was doubling down on the slow, classy, pretty ballads in the wake of the monster success of "Take A Bow".  Commercially I suppose this made sense, up to a point.   But Madonna was never just about ballads, and the disturbing run of them began to make it sound like she'd been taken over by a pod person.  From the planet B'oring. It was nice to get single hits like "This Used To Be My Playground" and "I'll Remember" collected in one place, since they hadn’t appeared on a proper Madonna album before.  When coupled with tasteful , ballady album hits like "Rain", the collection helped to demonstrate that Madonna could, in fact, do justice to ballads (and write 'em, too).   Hello, Mr. Evita Producers! Here's my audition tape! It's sure breezy where love d
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Bedtime Stories

Coming off the artistic - if not the commercial - high of Erotica , Bedtime Stories is a real mixed bag.  It's straight up '90s R&B for the most part, all hip-hop, Dallas Austin inflected product .  There's art here, but it's screaming to get out from underneath the oppressive packaging.   Speaking of packaging, they curiously opted for the upside-down image of Madonna...but didn't adjust the font color for the titles, making them impossible to read.  Nice teal CD tray, tho... Now, if you like '90s R&B then you're probably going to enjoy the product, because this is a really good example of it in my opinion.  Madonna it must be said delivers some of her best vocals yet on tracks like "Secret" and the title cut, and some of the melodies here are really good (again "Secret" and especially "Take A Bow" - a surprise monster hit that essentially reestablished her superstardom).  The singles are an interesting
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