https://www.rollingstone.com/music/features/madonnas-ray-of-light-6-things-you-didnt-know-w516946
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Rolling Stone: Madonna's 'Ray of Light': 6 Things You Didn't Know
Twenty years ago, Madonna was at a crossroads. After launching her Maverick entertainment company in 1992 with her widely but not wisely panned Erotica album and Sex book, the star entered a period of relative caution. The exuberant queerness of those works gave way to muted ballads, followed by Evita, which made her feminism palatable to Middle America. After the birth of her daughter Lourdes in 1996, she sought spiritual enlightenment in Kabbalah and Ashtanga yoga, and immersed herself in the work of songwriters who shared their secrets via meditative electronic textures – particularly Björk, Everything But the Girl and Tricky.
All these factors shaped Ray of Light, an album akin to those artists' work, but also uniquely Madonna-esque. Rooted in the underground yet heard and loved by millions, it's the multi-platinum antecedent to today's popular EDM, but considerably more personal. Twenty years later, singers and producers alike are still chasing its finely finessed fusion of anguished rumination and beat-driven bliss. Rolling Stone spoke with key collaborators on this watershed LP. Here are six things we learned.
1. Although the project's synth-centric final results earned her the passing nickname Veronica Electronica, Madonna didn't initially plan to work with songwriter Rick Nowels or producer William Orbit.
After Evita, Madonna reunited with Babyface, co-producer and co-writer of Bedtime Stories' "Take a Bow," which had topped the Hot 100 for seven weeks in 1995. But according to the smooth-soul magnate, "Madonna didn't want or need to repeat herself." Spotting her at Barney's department store when he'd come to Manhattan for the Grammys, producer and songwriter Rick Nowels – now Lana Del Rey's primary collaborator – impulsively introduced himself. "I told her I was nominated for a Grammy for Celine Dion's 'Falling Into You,'" he recalls. Much to his surprise, she replied, "Oh, I love that song." This led to a meeting at her home, where, according to Nowels, "She said she had no idea what the new album was going to be." At Nowels' Mulholland Drive home studio, the pair wrote nine songs in 10 days.
"Until then, I had only written with friends – Ellen Shipley, Billy Steinberg, and Stevie Nicks," Nowels remembers. "It was quite unnerving to write one-on-one with the biggest star on the planet. But I loved her songs and felt an emotional kinship with her music. I got a lot of DJ records and old film score records and prepared loops to write to. Once the song was written, we'd drop the loop and program our own beat. 'Little Star' and 'The Power of Good-Bye' were written over a drum 'n' bass rhythm, which was happening at the time. 'To Have and Not to Hold' was written to a bossa nova beat."
Guy Oseary – chairman of Maverick Records – phoned synth-pop veteran William Orbit, who'd previously remixed Madonna's "Justify My Love" and "Erotica." Orbit's involvement expanded as the project evolved, although core Madonna associate Patrick Leonard and British producer Marius De Vries were both called in to assist as the album's creation stretched out over four-and-a-half months – an eternity for the fast-working Madonna.
2. Ray of Light is largely about spiritual transformation, but one song deals with the perils of hard drugs.
"Candy Perfume Girl" came out of a two-week writing and recording stint between Orbit and Susannah Melvoin, daughter of top L.A. session musician Mike Melvoin, brother to late Smashing Pumpkins touring keyboardist Jonathan Melvoin, twin sister to Prince and the Revolution's Wendy Melvoin, and former fiancée to Prince. She's no slouch herself: As member of the Family, a splinter group of the Time, she co-sang the original version of "Nothing Compares 2 U" and co-wrote one of Prince's sweetest songs, Sign o' the Times' "Starfish and Coffee." According to Melvoin, William Orbit offered her some tracks to write melodies and lyrics to and sing over for what she thought would either become her solo debut or an album by Orbit's Strange Cargo project, which she – and, it turns out, Madonna – both loved.
"I was on the floor [of Orbit's studio], just putting words together, and came up with 'Candy Perfume Girl,'" she recalls. "It was a personal track for me. At the time, I was mourning my brother [Jonathan died of a heroin overdose in 1996], and it was the allure of drug addiction. I was pretty jacked up about that record happening, and there were a couple of other songs that I had done with him there."
But Melvoin's publisher got a call notifying her that Orbit had offered Madonna the tracks they'd worked on: "Candy Perfume Girl" was going on the record, and Madonna wanted a third of the publishing. Melvoin maintains she also wrote the original lyrics to Ray of Light's "Swim," which, she says were "changed, but not significantly," as well as the original melodies, which she concedes were "manipulated." Yet in this case Melvoin didn't get credit or compensation. The songwriter emphasizes she has no beef with Madonna; she feels the superstar understood exactly what "Candy Perfume Girl" was about, and that she made a brilliant record. "But had I gotten proper publishing on Ray of Light," Melvoin asserts, "I wouldn't be worried about my financial life."
3. The album's defining techno-rock title track was based on an obscure folk oldie.
Just as Orbit offered Madonna his Melvoin material, he similarly sent her a tape featuring unreleased work with Christine Leach, an English singer who'd co-written and sang with Strange Cargo. Leach's uncle is David Atkins, who, as Dave Curtiss, had been half of Curtiss Maldoon, an overlooked folk duo that released a pair of unsuccessful albums on Deep Purple's label in the early Seventies. The first one yielded "Sepheryn," which Leach altered and sang parts of over the instrumental track given to her by Orbit, who had assumed Leach solely wrote what she sang. Madonna made additional changes, and the track became what we know as "Ray of Light," which is credited to Madonna, William Orbit, Clive Maldoon, Dave Curtis [sic] and Christine Leach.
Some elements "Ray of Light" are strikingly similar to parts of "Sepheryn": The opening vocal melody remains basically the same while the lyrics deviate only slightly. But "Ray of Light" omits the multiple tempo changes of "Sepheryn" while maintaining a steady rhythm. These changes appear in the Leach rendition leaked online. Madonna's interpretation – which adds a crucial second, goddess-centric verse – is certainly closer to it than to the Curtis Maldoon original, but Madge's way with the melody commands and sustains attention in ways that Leach's does not. Madonna and Orbit managed to turn a compelling experiment in transformation into the cornerstone of a whole album about radical personal and spiritual growth.
4. Despite the borrowing, Madonna's Ray of Light collaborators consider the icon to be a top-level musical mind.
Having co-written and co-produced significant chunks of many Madonna albums, including Ray of Light, as well as serving as her keyboardist and musical director on two major tours, Patrick Leonard has worked with Madonna longer and more extensively than any other musician. He also co-wrote and produced Leonard Cohen's final three studio albums, so when he calls her "a helluva songwriter," it means something.
"Her sensibility about melodic line – from the beginning of the verse to the end of the verse and how the verse and the chorus influence each other – is very deep," he contends. "That's not common. Say 'Live to Tell,' for example, our first big single. The melodies I wrote are still there and she sings them for the most part, but it's where she departs from them that turned it into a song. Many times she's singing notes that no one would've thought of but her. Some of it can be perceived as naiveté because she's picking a note you wouldn't choose. But who needs the 'correct' note? You need the right note that tells the story, and she's great at that. She certainly made me look better. All I have to do is look at all the other people I wrote with over the years and how that went."
Los Angeles-based cellist Suzie Katayama has worked with many big names in rock and pop including Roy Orbison, Neil Young, Prince, Eric Clapton, Björk and Beck. Her association with Madonna goes way back to 1986, and for Ray of Light, she conducted its strings and woodwinds – 20 violins, six violas, six cellos, four basses, two flutes and an oboe.
"It was a long day," she recalls. "For that album, we did the orchestra in one day, both 'Frozen' and 'The Power of Good-bye.' That's why I don't remember much except for working really hard and fast. Everything that Madonna does, she is there. I have never been to anything that's hers that she didn't have the final say on it. She's hands-on. People can say whatever they want, but I remember when she did Dick Tracy, I had never seen anyone work so hard. I was impressed, and I think everyone was because she had to hold her own with a lot of people in that movie.
"This was the record where I had more people calling me, saying, 'Whoa, this is a great record,'" she continues. "It was real musical. Ray of Light showed a side of her that I don't think most people saw."
5. One of the songs written but not recorded for Ray of Light was released years later by an Italian superstar.
If you're not European or don't listen to Spanish-language radio, you probably don't recognize the name Laura Pausini. But the Faenza-born singer is pretty much a household name overseas, having sold more than 70 million records internationally. Her attempt to crack the U.S. market, 2002's From the Inside, flopped spectacularly. So for 2004's Resta in Ascolto and its European equivalent Escucha, Pausini returned to Italian and Spanish respectively, and together those albums sold more than 5 million copies, while the latter snagged both Grammy and Latin Grammy trophies. According to Nowels, their closing song, "Mi Abbandono a Te" ("Me Abandono a Ti" on Escucha) was originally titled "Like a Flower," and was composed by both him and Madonna during their Ray of Light songwriting sessions. Having re-written most of the Nowels-produced ballad's lyrics in Italian and Spanish, Pausini makes it her own. Nevertheless, the melody's melancholy Ray of Light–ness remains: The bilingual chorus couldn't be more Madonna if it poked you in the eye with a pointy bustier.
6. None of Madonna's records won a Grammy until Ray of Light.
The Recording Academy often rewards entertainers who release hit after hit, but this hasn't been the case with Madonna for much of her long career. In her first 15 years of releasing albums, she got a few scattered Grammy nominations – including nods for "Crazy for You," "Papa Don't Preach," and "Who's That Girl" – but her only win was for Blond Ambition World Tour Live, a long-out-of-print 1990 laser disc that's never been officially reissued on DVD or any other format.
But Ray of Light significantly interrupted her losing streak: It won for Best Dance Recording and Best Pop Album, and the title track's promo clip won Best Short Form Music Video. Since then, she's won three more times out of 15 subsequent nominations – including Best Electronic/Dance Album for her 2005 LP Confessions on a Dance Floor, which features a kindred mix of rhythmic extroversion and poetic reflection.
Rather than throwing the Academy some deserved shade, Madonna, taking the stage in a flaming red Jean-Paul Gaultier kimono, merely thanked her collaborators before she yanked William Orbit – who towered shyly above her – down and toward the mic, chiding him for mumbling his gratitude: "He does speak English; you'd never know it."
(Source: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/features/madonnas-ray-of-light-6-things-you-didnt-know-w516946)
http://thequietus.com/articles/24053-madonna-ray-of-light-review-anniversary
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The Quietus: To The Heart Of The Nightmare - Madonna’s Ray Of Light 20 Years On
Lucy O’Brien posits that, in the tradition of the 1970s-style concept album, Ray Of Light is Madonna’s Dark Side Of The Moon
In February 1998 Madonna’s new album was literally a ray of light in stodgy UK charts made moribund by the Britpop comedown (Oasis’ Be Here Now, Stereophonics et al), and industry hits like the Titanic soundtrack. In the US it wasn’t much better, with Celine Dion and Garth Brooks at the top. The only other women on the album chart were Spice Girls, All Saints and Aqua, so unsurprisingly Madonna saw off the competition with aplomb. With its icy electronica and pulsing beats, Ray Of Light appeared as the pick-me-up for rave generation. It marked Madonna’s maturity as an artist, brought the MOJO demographic on board, and signalled to the world that a so-called pop bimbo can break down the barriers of that pop/rock divide.
However, it hadn’t been an easy journey, and despite its sunny title the album is a voyage into the darkness and terror of grief. Like Dark Side Of The Moon, it is an elegiac study of ego, mental disintegration and the fear of death. Pink Floyd’s epic drew on ‘70s psychoanalysis, R D Laing and the divided self, while Ray Of Light captures the 90s zeitgeist with its references to Kabbalah and the subconscious. Dark Side uses the sun and moon as symbols of life and death, while Ray Of Light revolves around the duality of sea and sky. Both albums require the listener to go the whole journey to get the full effect.
The album came at a crucial time for Madonna. After the high octane success of the 1980s, her 1990s were testing and difficult. $l*t-shamed over her Sex book and the Erotica album, Madonna engaged in angry attention-seeking exercises like saying “f***” 13 times on Late Show with David Letterman. She had lost confidence, and the tentative R&B of 1994’s Bedtime Stories felt like marking time. Veering off into musical theatre with the Evita project took her into safe MOR territory, but, ironically, rather than turning her into a 1980s pop has-been, those strenuous theatrical songs sung with a full orchestra gave her voice depth and tone. By then Madonna was in her late 30s and re-evaluating life, casting around for answers in study of Yogic philosophy. The birth of her daughter Lourdes in 1996 knocked out some of that infamous ego, so that when she returned to the studio in 1997 for the Ray Of Light sessions she had discovered a more intense, personal voice than the so-called “Minnie Mouse on helium” of earlier years.
Ray Of Light was created in old school prog rock fashion – with mainly one producer, over a period of months, in an intensively collaborative process. “She produced me producing her,” said William Orbit. Recorded in a modest studio in an unfashionable part of LA, the album was intentionally un-industry. Early sessions with Babyface were shelved, and Madonna’s longtime producer arranger Pat Leonard was sidelined in favour of an awkward English eccentric whose hardware kept breaking down. Although Orbit’s perceived amateurism made her nervous, Madonna knew from his dancefloor remix of 1990’s ‘Justify My Love’ that he could create the futuristic tone she craved. With Bass-O-Matic’s Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Bass (named after a Pink Floyd album), and the rave anthem ‘In The Realm Of The Senses’, Orbit had already declared an interest. Kabbalah and new motherhood opened Madonna’s mind, but it was the alchemy between her and Orbit – his trippy underground vibe and her willingness to experiment, that triggered her transformation of consciousness. With Ray Of Light they created the sonic space and musical textures for the sparse poetry that’s embedded in her songwriting. Previous hit-driven albums, with the exception of moments on Like A Prayer and Erotica, hadn’t allowed room for that potential to emerge. For the first time she could express herself in-depth.
Madonna did her background reading – everything from JG Ballard to Anne Sexton to Shakespeare’s sonnets were inspirations here – and did lengthy songwriting sessions with Leonard and Rick Nowells (“her lyric writing was poetic and intelligent,” the latter says, “she knows how to channel a song”) before she set foot in the studio. Once there, little Lourdes was installed in a playroom, and Madonna focused on the tracks that would eventually piece together a story. “I traded fame for love/ Some things cannot be bought… Now I find/ I’ve changed my mind,” she sang on opening track ‘Drowned World/Subsitute for Love’. The apocalyptic dreamscape of JG Ballard’s Drowned Worlds sets the tone. From there she moves into ‘Swim’, a low-slung electro song where Madonna delves into the religious themes of her pop past as the Sin-eater, carrying “these sins on my back”. ‘Ray of Light’ then provides a giddy moment of reawakening, with Orbit pushing her to sing a semitone higher than her comfort zone in order to stretch out that sense of hedonist abandon. This is the song, with its accompanying Jonas Akerlund video – all speeding lights, winking urbanscapes and fast motion skies – that relaunched her career, that married techno beats to cranked-up oscillators and wall-of-sound pop, and begged the question, did Madonna neck a zesty pinger?
The ecstatic moment melts into the addiction, obsession and dirty bass distortion of ‘Candy Perfume Girl’. Boy, girl, boy, girl, it’s all candy, it doesn’t matter. Aimless distraction gives way to the ghostly anime of ‘Skin’, a truly chilling track with Madonna’s voice gliding over the top of feverish psychedelic chaos, trying to catch something she can’t reach. In the same way that Pink Floyd’s ‘On The Run’ used a proto acid house pulse and electronic effects to create a feeling of unsettled angst, so Orbit’s pulverising techno suggests a dissolution of self. By the sweeping chorus of ‘Nothing Really Matters’ Madonna has found a way to slough off the feral, fame-hungry mindset that drove her to the top of the 1980s music industry, but which no longer serves her. “I lived so selfishly/ I was the only one/ …I realised that no one wins,” she sings in a moment of revelation. A sanskrit chant links into the desolate suffering of ‘Frozen’, Madonna’s big ballad ‘Us And Them’ moment. All of them pile in – from Orbit and Marius De Vries’s shifting dynamics and glacial production, to Leonard’s aching arrangements, to Chris Cunningham’s manga-inspired video depicting her as a witch goddess swooping through desert plains – perfectly capturing the sadness that kept her heart locked down.
Although Madonna’s sound is usually demarcated by simple verse/chorus pop logistics, she is also good at unresolved yearning. From as way back as 1984’s ‘Borderline’, she knows how to defer, to anticipate, to wish for, but with no resolution. The songs ‘Learn To Say Goodbye’, with every word carefully annunciated, and ‘To Have And Not To Hold’, with its brooding bossa nova beat, bear this out. She is nearly there, caught in a state of tension. There is a brief flowering of motherly love with ‘Little Star’, a skittering reflection on her baby daughter. But this, eventually, is what gets her in touch with her own mother and the source of her pain.
‘Mer Girl’, the final track on the album, is Madonna’s ‘Brain Damage’, that moment when the lunatics are on the grass. Having travelled through psychological soundscapes, here she is in a nightmare with a hallucinatory black sky, running through the rain with matted hair to a place with “crawling tombstones”. In the same way that Gilmour and Waters worked with the spaces between notes, Orbit’s ghostly glitches and fragmented synths give way to silence, and Madonna’s voice drops to a cracked little-girl whisper: “I smelled her burning flesh/ Her rotting bones/ Her decay.” And it’s that image of her mother, buried alive, that makes Madonna realise what she has been running from all these years. “When she recorded that in the booth, we sat in silence, our hair standing on end,” Orbit said.
Resisting the urge to tie it up with a neat transcendent finale, Madonna finished the album there, without resolution, “still running away.” As in Pink Floyd’s closing ‘Eclipse (“everything under the sun is in tune/ But the sun is eclipsed by the moon”) she acknowledges that even when everything seems all right the dark side will haunt you. That refusal to create a happy ending is what makes Ray Of Light a masterpiece, and why it won four Grammys, and why it is in all those canonical ‘Best Of’ lists. It wasn’t an album made by committee, in five minute blocks by songwriting teams. Like Dark Side Of The Moon’s crisis of post-war masculinity and madness, this was a painful rebirth, calibrated with emotional intelligence and electronic precision. All you create and all you destroy indeed.
(Source: http://thequietus.com/articles/24053-madonna-ray-of-light-review-anniversary)
https://www.theringer.com/music/2018/2/16/17020288/madonna-ray-of-light-20-years
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The Ringer: Twenty Years Ago, Madonna Was Reborn in a ‘Ray of Light’
The pop icon’s stunning turn to electronic music showed a spiritual side we’d never seen before and was the last time we learned about her interior life
Madonna wrote what would become the last song on her 1998 album, Ray of Light, after going on a run. Her feet carried her, almost unwittingly, to her mother’s grave. It was a hot summer day not long after she’d given birth to her daughter Lourdes; she was visiting her father in her home state of Michigan. “I didn’t know where I was going,” she later recalled. “I just ran, and ran, and ran. The sky opened up, I was soaking wet, and I found myself in the cemetery where my mother was buried.” The grave “was grown over,” she said. “It looked like it hadn’t been visited in a while.” She stayed in the cemetery for some time, then ran and ran and ran home and wrote the lyrics to “Mer Girl.” It is a spooked, glitchy tone poem, a little reminiscent of the beloved Anne Sexton lines that haunted Madonna as a teenager. How unsettling that these are the last words that echo out across an internationally successful album:
And I smelled her burning flesh
Her rotting bones
Her decay
I ran and I ran
I’m still running away
Madonna Sr. died of breast cancer in 1963, when she was just 30 years old, and when her restless, destined-for-stardom daughter was 5. (“My mother is the only other person I have ever heard of named Madonna,” the singer told Time magazine, proudly, in 1985.) The elder Madonna was a devout Catholic who worked as an X-ray technician, and many people believe that the cancer was a result of her work environment: “The protective lead-lined apron that is now obligatory was then rarely used,” Madonna’s biographer Lucy O’Brien notes. Madonna Sr. was pregnant with her daughter Melanie when she was diagnosed with cancer, and she postponed treatment until after the child was born — by which time it was too late. For the Ciccones’ oldest daughter, who’d grow up to become one of the most famous women in the world, motherhood was subconsciously linked with self-sacrifice, death, and rigor mortis. Maybe that’s why she’s never stopped running.
“Obviously, you could say it has to do with my childhood, if you’re going to psychoanalyze me,” Madonna said a few years ago, when asked about her fabled obsession with control. And O’Brien did just that, quoting (quite convincingly) the psychologist John Bowlby in her 2007 biography, Madonna: Like an Icon. “The most frightening characteristic of a dead animal or a dead person is their immobility,” Bowlby wrote. “What more natural, therefore, for a child who is afraid he may die than for him to keep moving.”
Another man, another analysis: When he was dating her in the early ’90s, and her body was toned taut, boy toy Warren Beatty (about 20 years her senior) used to tell Madonna that he thought she exercised to avoid depression. “And he thought I should just go ahead and stop exercising and allow myself to be depressed,” she recalled. “And I’d say, ‘Warren, I’ll just be depressed and not exercising!’”
I ran and I ran
I’m still running away
“Madonna has now become ‘toxic’ figure for millennials,” declared a headline in the U.K. paper The Independent two years ago. The evidence was a recently published USC study that polled 1,000 students about the relevance of 500 celebrities. The study’s damning research showed that she “now ranks among the lowest of 500 celebrities, when the attributes ‘honest’, genuine’ and ‘cool’ were tested.” And yet, curiously, Madonna’s was the only of those 500 celebrity names that made the headline. Even when griping about her, she strikes a nerve: We cannot stop talking about her, scrutinizing her famously on-display body, psychoanalyzing her open mind.
Especially given that generational shift in public opinion, it feels strange now, 20 years after its February 22, 1998, release, to think that Ray of Light was such a massively successful album. (It has sold 16 million copies worldwide and, though it was her seventh full-length, it was her first to win a Grammy.) Ray of Light is odd, dark, and a bit of a relic: Though it presented itself like a computer-generated transmission from the future, it did not accurately predict where pop music went. Madonna’s next album, 2000’s Music — with its compressed, cyborgy, and gloriously synthetic sound — was far more prescient. Though it came out only two years later, Music sounds far more modern than its predecessor. And yet I find Ray of Light infinitely more fascinating, challenging, and revealing than almost anything in her discography. If Music was Madonna’s first posthuman album, that must mean that Ray of Light was her final human one.
Madonna sought out the underground British producer William Orbit to coproduce the album. She liked some of the remixes he’d done for her in the past, with their fusion of electronic beats and Eastern-influence sounds: “I wanted it to sound old and new at the same time,” she told the U.K.’s Q Magazine. Over the four-month recording session in Los Angeles, there were usually more computers and machines in the room than live musicians — a novel concept for a Madonna album, at the time. (Though her name was sometimes synonymous with mass-produced pop, it’s easy to forget that Nile Rodgers and some other members of Chic were her expert backing band on Like a Virgin.) As a result, there’s a sense of isolation and loneliness to these songs, far from the gospel-choir assists of Like a Prayer. Still, Madonna didn’t want the reliance on computers to make the album sound too sleek. “Don’t gild the lily,” she would tell Orbit in the studio. As in: Keep it a little rough around the edges, but also nature is a language, can’t you read? He acquiesced, but the recording was a slow, arduous process. Madonna tends to work quickly and decisively, but Ray of Light took the longest of any of her albums to record.
The frenetic title track was the album’s biggest hit, of course, but it’s an outlier; there’s not much more sun shining on the record. Most of it is more in line with the moody, macabre lead-off single “Frozen.” “Swim” is a kind of electronic baptism, helmed by a sorrowful vocal that she recorded the day her friend Gianni Versace died. “Kiss me, I’m dying,” she sings on the aqueous, thumping fifth track, which centers on the eerily imploring refrain, “Put your hand on my skin.”
In retrospect, Ray of Light feels like a record about the anxieties of existing in a female body, in which time goes by so quickly and every tick of the second hand can be deafening. It is the sound of a woman on the brink of 40 — our culture’s unfair and arbitrary expiration date for so many things, and a decade past the age her own mother died — trying to transcend the human body, to outlast upstarts half her age, to become something eternal. Who can blame Madonna for failing to achieve her own impossibly inhuman goals?
Ray of Light was the first album Madonna made after filming Evita, an experience that turned the key to a whole new space in her throat. While preparing to play the iconic Argentine first lady in the film adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s musical, Madonna subjected herself to rigorous lessons with the vocal coach Joan Lader. “Lader taught Madonna how to sing from her diaphragm,” Lucy O’Brien writes. “Every night Madonna would go home, thrilled at the sounds she could create. She would call friends and sing to them over the phone at full volume.” Humanizing stories about Madonna in the ’90s aren’t as easy to come by as they were a decade prior, but this is one of my favorites. I love picturing it: Madonna sending her human voice over distorted telephone wires just to prove to her friends that she was still growing, newly exhilarated by the things her body could do.
It is probably sacrilege to quote Dennis Rodman in an essay about Madonna, but what better way to honor Madonna than with a little sacrilege? “Madonna’s a connoisseur of bodies,” Rodman wrote in his autobiography (which pissed her off). “She studies them and watches them closely.”
Madonna’s body: What an all-American locus of controversy and conversation! It appealed to so many women in the mid-’80s on a visceral level because, at first, there seemed to be a contagious joy in it. “She didn’t have a perfect body,” Kim Gordon (who named one of her side projects Ciccone Youth) has written of Madonna. “She was a little soft, but sexy-soft, not overweight but not sculpted or as hard as she would later become. She was realistic about her body type, and she taunted it, and you could feel how happy she was inhabiting that body.”
That carefree revelry didn’t last much past the Like a Virgin album cycle, and I wonder if the “toxic” feelings Madonna evokes these days — the stereotype of the youth-obsessed, Pilates-toned cultural vampire — have something to do with that, the fact that what she became felt like such a betrayal. There was a radicalism to the way Madonna presented her body in the early ’80s, but what she’s accused of doing now — worshipping youth, dressing “half her age” as she’s preparing for her 60th birthday — feels disappointingly conservative. “Madonna could not seem to escape the trap of America’s conventional attitudes about aging,” the critic Ann Powers wrote in her recent book Good Booty: Love and Sex, Black and White, Body and Soul in American Music. “Instead of using midlife as an opportunity to develop a new vision of mature sexuality, she still sought to be that material girl whose pleasure in feelings herself stimulated lust in others. That many found this stance implausible indicated that even Madonna’s dares had their limits when it came to redefining American eroticism.”
One of the most annoying, even tragic things about Madonna is that she is so often bested by (and complaining about) the very dynamics that she helped create. “I have to stay current,” she said, sighing, to some friends not long after Ray of Light came out. “God help me, but I guess I have to share radio air time with Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera. What choice do I have?” Madonna turned 40 the year Ray of Light was released, just a few months before a then-17-year-old, like-a-virgin Britney Spears released her debut single, “…Baby One More Time.” Madonna was suddenly forced to compete with a cadre of young, blond pop starlets less than half her age — but she was also partly responsible for the environment that created them.
I love Ray of Light and yet I blame it for a lot of bad music and terrible delusions of spiritual profundity that have plagued our modern pop stars, so maybe in the end, cosmically, its existence works out to a draw. It was the beginning of pop-star-as-guru-slash-lifestyle brand: You do not get Katy Perry’s Witness without Ray of Light, nor do you get Katy Perry thinking she could dress like a geisha, or… Katy Perry’s 24-hour livestream. We should have known that a kabbalah bracelet was not going to save Britney Spears.
And yet its anniversary is a good reason to revisit it: Ray of Light is infinitely stranger, better, and more uniquely personal than the “kabbalah album” stereotype. It is one of the rawest pop albums about motherhood that I can think of — a reckoning with death and life by a motherless new mom, a woman who seemed to have everything but was deeply haunted by the few absences in her life. Her mother’s absence helps explain, more than any of her records, who Madonna has become, and from where her obsessive and sometimes alienating quest to perfect and transcend her perpetually moving body comes. There was a blank space in Madonna’s story where a mother would have been. “Madonna did not grow up with a constant model of motherhood,” O’Brien writes, “but in the end, that gave her an alternative way of looking at the world.”
When Eva Perón was dying of cancer, at age 33, her husband decided that she would be embalmed and that her body would be put on display after her death. “Before she died,” O’Brien writes, “Evita was injected with chemicals to preserve her organs and flesh, and not allowed painkillers that interfered with the process.” The night of her death, the famed Spanish embalmer Dr. Pedro Ara performed a complicated process in which her blood was replaced with glycerine, making her seem like she was merely undergoing an “artistically rendered sleep.” The morning after she died, he proudly proclaimed, “the body of Eva Peron was completely and infinitely incorruptible.”
The movie (somewhat wisely) doesn’t focus on these grotesque details. Still, as she was gestating the ideas that would become Ray of Light, Madonna was immersed in her study of Perón’s short life and seemed to feel a deep connection with the tragic woman she was hell-bent on portraying. “I can only imagine how she must have suffered,” Madonna wrote in a diary for Vanity Fair while filming Evita. She also claimed to dream of her frequently. “I was not outside watching her. I was her,” she wrote. “I felt her sadness and her restlessness. I felt hungry and unsatisfied and in a hurry.”
(Source: https://www.theringer.com/music/2018/2/16/17020288/madonna-ray-of-light-20-years)
https://www.attitude.co.uk/article/17142/madonnas-ray-of-light-turns-20-a-track-by-track-review-1/
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Attitude: MADONNA’S 'RAY OF LIGHT' TURNS 20: A TRACK-BY-TRACK REVIEW
Matthew Barton looks back at one of the Queen of Pop most career-defining records.
In 1997, Madonna was at a career crossroads. She had just turned in an acclaimed performance in the film version of Evita, was a new mother to daughter Lourdes… and hadn’t released a new album of original material for nearly three years.
The bold and brazen sexuality of 1992’s Erotica and its sister “coffee table” photobook, Sex, threatened to derail a career that had been in the firm ascendancy since 'Lucky Star' broke Madonna out of New York City’s underground dance scene in 1983.
1994’s low-key R&B LP Bedtime Stories, 1995’s ballads collection Something to Remember, and 1996’s Evita clawed back some of the credibility unfairly lost during the Erotica era by dialling down the sexual bravado, but just who was Madonna in 1997? What did she have to say? Where else was there left to turn?
It seemed that Madonna herself didn’t have the answers. That spring, she convened with Bedtime Stories collaborator Babyface again on “'Take a Bow'-ish” new material, but, abhorring repetition, scrapped the sessions.
Soon after, songwriting sessions with Rick Nowels yielded some notable fruit, but again much of the material remained unused as Madonna struggled for direction. Sessions with long-time songwriting partner Patrick Leonard, again, provided some inspiration but not the elusive sound Madonna craved.
It wasn’t until her manager Guy Oseary introduced her to British producer William Orbit that the fundamentals of what later developed into Ray of Light came into focus. Marrying her pop instincts with a fresh, original electronic drive, a painstaking four-and-a-half month recording process produced a landmark opus, not just in Madonna’s catalogue but in the landscape of modern pop music.
Released twenty years ago this month, Ray of Light changed the way electronica and EDM was interpolated into mainstream pop; the chameleonic Madonna expertly synthesised an array of influences from alternative and underground scenes and ushered in a bold new age.
Here, we look back at each of the thirteen songs that make up this classic record:
'Drowned World/Substitute for Love'
Madonna’s audacious new sound is in evidence immediately as a soft, mid-tempo arrangement of burbling electronica, chiming guitars, and serene synth washes set a contemplative mood.
The soul-searching lyrics, where Madonna admits that she “never felt so happy” as when her “many lovers…settled for the thrill of basking in my spotlight,” are a volte-face from the bullish tone of some of her other '90s records, and sets the tenor of introspection and reflection.
Vocally, the clear diction and rich timbre developed from her Evita vocal coaching sessions is in full flight. An aggressive bridge adds a further layer to this complex song of celebrity gone sour.
It became the album’s third UK Top 10 hit in the summer of 1998 and gave its name to Madonna’s breath-taking 2001 world tour.
'Swim'
The oceanic imagery continues with this beautiful slice of hazy trip-hop; murmuring guitars and low-key wave effects, with some keening background vocals, provide the bed on which Madonna intones her lyric of letting go of the past, of “[washing] away all our sins.”
The water is regenerative, rather than ominous. The terrific vocal, however, is full of passion and fury and emotion - perhaps unsurprising given it was reportedly recorded on the day her friend Gianni Versace died.
'Ray of Light'
By now, the listener has settled into the Ray of Light modus operandi – melodic guitars, synth washes, mid-tempo beauty – and the title track begins similarly…but then it storms into something else entirely, a bizarre and beautiful cacophony of sounds and styles that somehow fuses into something genuinely electrifying and life-affirming.
'Ray of Light' is exquisite – it’s a bit dance, a bit pop, a bit electronica, a bit folk (listen out for 'Sepheryn' by folk duo Curtiss Maldoon, upon which 'Ray of Light' was based) and a bit mad – in a good way.
Lilting guitars, peculiar bleeps, bloops, and alarms, and rippling bass frame what is surely one of the greatest vocals of Madonna’s career. She uses all of her range, power, and dexterity of tone here, screaming and growling and exultantly crying out the blissful chorus.
And that’s before we get to the impeccable video, directed by Jonas Åkerlund, which expertly immortalises in film the high-speed joyous chaos of the song. This kaleidoscope of sounds still thrills twenty years on.
'Candy Perfume Girl'
One of the record’s most underrated songs, 'Candy Perfume Girl' is an unorthodox, off-kilter downbeat trip-hop experiment. Madonna’s enigmatic lead vocal and spectral harmonies, coupled with the understated programming, create a brightly-lit end-of-the-world vibe.
Madonna sings like an intangible woman in a secret Japanese discotheque, her stream-of-consciousness imagery detailing a “velvet porcelain boy” and a “fever steam girl” who “throb the oceans.”
There’s a strange fairground-esque break before the arrangement suffocates under the weight of squalling grunge guitars, walls of vocals, and heavier programming. It’s an unusual, eerie gem.
'Skin'
Once rumoured as a potential final single from Ray of Light, 'Skin' finds Madonna reunited with Patrick Leonard but in a very different setting.
The superior pop songwriting partnership that brought much of 1986’s True Blue and most of 1989’s Like a Prayer is subverted into a jungle of skittering beats, jittery electronics, stop-start rhythmic pulses, and offbeat Arabic flavours. It’s dark and synth-based, and it sounds like a wild, sweaty flight through a nocturnal city.
'Skin' is anxious and wired, and only in the minor key chorus can you hear the classic Madonna/Leonard power ballad melancholy. This trance-like song is one of the best places to hear Orbit’s complex production work.
'Nothing Really Matters'
'Nothing Really Matters' is a bit more of a traditional Madonna/Leonard composition, with a William Orbit sheen of synths and electronic gurgles for good measure.
Melodically, it’s somewhat more classic and straightforward in a traditional EDM/pop vein, and dutifully it became the album’s fifth UK Top 10 single in 1999 on the back of an iconic, sleek geisha-inspired video.
The chorus in particular has a high-energy soulful dance style, replete with backing vocals from Donna DeLory and Niki Harris, that harks back to 1990’s Blond Ambition Tour as well as the Erotica album – proving that Ray of Light isn’t an entire departure.
'Sky Fits Heaven'
“I think I’ll follow my heart / it’s a very good place to start,” sings Madonna on this gorgeous song that fits the central Ray of Light themes of rebirth, regeneration, and self-reflection.
It’s a light, airy, spacious piece that musically is more about mood, feeling, and atmosphere; but it’s not as amorphous as it may initially seem, as it blooms into a classic chorus with a soaring Madonna/Leonard melody.
'Shanti/Ashtangi'
If ever a song typifies Madonna’s burgeoning interest in Eastern mysticism, 'Shanti/Ashtangi' is it. A hypnotic melody sung in Sanskrit, it’s a splendid production job by Orbit and the unconventional treatment on Madonna’s vocal lends it an extra mesmerising vibe.
Madonna performed a version of this song at the 1998 MTV Video Music Awards with Lenny Kravitz on guitar, and legend has it that the BBC arranged for Madonna to take elocution lessons with Sanskrit scholar Vagish Shashtri to perfect her pronunciations.
'Frozen'
This magisterial jewel was the first missive from Ray of Light in early 1998 and became Madonna’s first UK No.1 in eight years. It’s a slow-burning, soaring Madonna/Leonard ballad with a majestic, desolate string arrangement that recalls Björk’s 1997 LP Homogenic in its lush, romantic drama.
Orbit’s glacial production is suitably spine-chilling, and twenty years later it’s still a rush to recall how fresh, different, and unexpected this song was. The exquisite Chris Cunningham-helmed video, filmed in a bleak Mojave Desert, remains a high watermark of the genre.
And who can forget the iconic BBC National Lottery lip sync performance, with this enigmatic reinvention of Madonna, with henna on her hands, braids, a black corvine outfit, and wind machine? Stunning.
'The Power of Goodbye'
The first of a trio of Madonna/Rick Nowels co-writes that appear on the album, 'The Power of Goodbye' is as close to pure pop as Madonna gets – an archetypal, insistent pop melody, smooth verse/chorus transitions, and a heartbreak lyric, it’s a microcosm of what Ray of Light as a whole deftly achieves – fusing modern synths and programming with guitars, strings, and striking melodies to stunning effect.
In another world, it could have been a late 90s Eurovision winner (and that is, of course, a compliment), such is its end-of-the-night power pop beauty. Extra points for the Joan Crawford beach scene reference in the dusky video.
'To Have and Not to Hold'
This early song from the sessions is the album’s most sensual song, a hidden gem with a gently swaying, rhythmic quality. It has a shadowy, hazy Spanish feel, like a low-lit midnight alt-'La Isla Bonita', and wears its electronic influences subtly.
It’s an unusual sort of song for both Madonna and Nowels, and Nowels told Songwriter Universe in 2015 that “working with Madonna was a career-changing experience for me.”
'Little Star'
Several songs on the album allude to new motherhood and the preciousness of new life, but “Little Star” is the album’s only explicit ode to Madonna’s baby daughter Lourdes.
“Having a child and questioning my own mortality and feeling incredibly responsible for someone else’s life and being aware of how much my behaviour affects her – you have to step back and realise that we all affect each other,” she told Spin in 1998.
Musically, it’s a quirky fusion of lullaby and late 90s video game music – parts of it sound uncannily like a Japanese Playstation game. But the softly emotive chorus – “God gave a present to me, made of flesh and bone…” – is an undeniably heavenly melody.
'Mer Girl'
Ray of Light revolves around themes of regeneration, and water is a recurrent motif. 'Mer Girl' is the album’s most inscrutable, mysterious piece, more of a sketch than a song, as Madonna’s soft-focus vocal weaves around Orbit’s restrained production.
It’s a haunting and personal conclusion to a highly personal record. “I cursed the angels, I tasted my fears,” she sings, in one of her most poetic lyrics. Understated, and all the better for it.
'Has to Be' (Japan bonus track)
Subtle, serene, beautiful, compelling – 'Has to Be' is possibly the essence of the Madonna/William Orbit/Patrick Leonard partnership and would have been a beautiful addition to the record – but Madonna insisted on only thirteen songs, as thirteen is a lucky number in the Kabbalah.
As it is, this elegant song of quiet, dignified yearning has become a justifiable fan favourite over the years.
“I wanted it to sound old and new at the same time,” said Madonna of her intentions for Ray of Light, and it is evident that she adroitly succeeded. It wasn’t a complete transformation – indeed, bringing back Patrick Leonard proved that Madonna was keen to incorporate her past into her present – but the pervading influence of Ray of Light on modern pop, by virtue of its freshness, cannot be understated.
Her long-standing reputation as a master of reinvention, a magpie collecting disparate sounds and styles and collating them and presenting them in an inventive new way, largely stems from her restless and courageous experimentation on this record.
At heart, the blissful, shimmering pop melodies were always what Madonna had done best anyway, but never had she utilised electronic production in such an integral way. Ray of Light also re-contextualises the rest of Madonna’s catalogue, and brings the significance of Erotica and Bedtime Stories into sharp focus.
What were once derided in some quarters as sub-par, wrong turns, unedifying missteps are now celebrated as beacons of pop individuality and experimentation, of brave choices, of daring risks taken in the face of public consternation.
The interest in electronic dance production and subversive genre experiments makes more sense to both the Madonna and casual music fan with Ray of Light’s pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, but it also highlights the strength and core vision Madonna had always proudly adhered to.
The Madonna of the mid-1980s – the exuberant Madonna of 'Like a Virgin' and 'Material Girl' – subtly shifted, at 27, into the pop behemoth of True Blue, a status cemented by the artistic magnum opus of Like a Prayer where, for largely the first time, her critical stock matched her commercial fervour.
By the time of Erotica, Madonna had earned enough stripes to experiment but was roundly ridiculed, and in some cases reviled, for doing so. Ray of Light is the sound of a survivor, a pop maverick coming out the other side of a period in the wilderness at 39 with a perfect marriage of titanic pop smarts and alt-pop experimentation. It’s arguably a twin peak in her catalogue along with 'Like a Prayer', and enabled Madonna to continue her pursuit of pop innovation through the next phase of her career.
It is debatable whether Madonna has, or will, scale the artistic heights of this era again, but regardless – 20 years later, Ray of Light still sounds as fresh, assured, bold, and beautiful as ever.
(Source: https://www.attitude.co.uk/article/17142/madonnas-ray-of-light-turns-20-a-track-by-track-review-1/)