Today is Madonna Day in the Pitchfork Reviews section; in honor of her birthday, we reviewed four of her key records.
There was no reason Ray of Light should’ve been such a hit. After the collapse of grunge in the mid-90s, the music industry had begun to lean into the perky pubescence of Backstreet Boys and *NSYNC. 1998 was the year that “TRL” launched on MTV, and soon after, Britney Spears would release her teasing teen debut, ...Baby One More Time, catalyzing a string of young women—like fellow teens Christina Aguilera and Mandy Moore—to overrun the charts with coy love songs. But in the eye of this gathering storm of adolescence, Madonna, then 39 years old, released Ray of Light—and it became the best selling studio album of her career since Nielsen began tracking retail, a record it still holds. How did a monastic and austere album about emotional and spiritual maturity by a woman and new mother strike such a chord?
Madonna was still in full control of the serpentine pop instincts that had helped her masterfully navigate more than 15 years in the business. Her last studio album had been 1994’s Bedtime Stories, an alluring and accessible collection of mostly R&B, produced, in part, by Dallas Austin and Babyface. Bedtime Stories had been its own soft reinvention after the fetishistic and controversial era of Erotica, and it was a big deal: the Babyface-produced “Take a Bow” spent seven weeks atop the Billboard charts, her longest-ever run at No. 1. Presumably hoping to recreate that magic, Madonna turned to Babyface again at the outset of the Ray of Light sessions. But past success never presumes future performance for Madonna, and she abandoned Babyface after, as he put it diplomatically to Q, she “changed her idea about the album’s direction.”
It was another song on Bedtime Stories that offered the biggest clue into the Ray of Light to come: the Bjӧrk-assisted title track, “Bedtime Story,” a new age song on which she sings of relaxing “in the arms of unconsciousness,” and her deepest yet exploration of avant-garde electronica. After ditching Babyface, Madonna sought out William Orbit, an English producer best known for a smattering of understated ambient albums. Madonna liked Orbit, as she said in an unfortunately clumsy way, for “fusing a kind of futuristic sound but also using lots of Indian and Moroccan influences and things like that.” He would end up co-producing every song on Ray of Light but one.
Orbit’s work throughout gives Ray of Light a unified tonal consistency, a kind of cohesion that masterworks are made of. He has a light touch with techno textures, both relaxed (flashes of acoustic guitar ground some of the most digitized moments) and danceable—after all, it can’t be a Madonna album if it can’t work in the club. “Drowned World/Substitute for Love” opens the album with bleary sound effects that pulse like the sound of sonar. This submerged quality of sound will become the bleary canvas for the album’s philosophical manifesto, as clear a declaration as can be imagined of the new Madonna that we will meet on the album. Here, she not just embodies her reinvention, as she had done with previous creative shifts, but goes ahead and describes it in full detail. There is no missing the point.
In the hangover from the hedonism that was her early ’90s era, Madonna gave birth to her first child, Lourdes and had begun to embrace yoga and the Jewish mystical practice of Kabbalah. Gone is the wry kinkiness and, at least according to her, the addiction to the spotlight, replaced with wisdom and patience and a powerful maternal instinct. “I traveled ’round the world, looking for a home/I found myself in crowded rooms, feeling so alone,” she sings on “Drowned World.” “Now I find I’ve changed my mind/This is my religion.” It is a moving song, arguably the album’s best. In the music video, as she says these last words, she is seen smiling and hugging a toddler who has her back to the camera, a girl we assume to be Lourdes. Maybe those pulsating beats that open the album evoke not so much a world under the sea, but a child’s heartbeat heard through amniotic fluid, or even the sound of this new version of Madonna being gestated. Whatever they mean to you, Madonna, once more likely to embrace a near-naked man in one of her clips, manifests as a publically doting mother right before our eyes.
Reinvention, thanks to the template that Madonna set, is almost a cliché ritual in pop, like a motion that must be gone through for every star who needs a hook upon which to hang their new album. So too is self-discovery: How many times have you heard an artist claim that this album, the newest one, is her or his “most personal one yet”? But on Ray of Light, Madonna is so all-in committed to her metamorphosis that it’s hard not to believe her. “Nothing Really Matters” is a Buddhist-lite song about living in the moment and discarding the selfish motives of stardom. Even the notable love songs on the album, like the transcendent “The Power of Good-Bye,” are about turning away from the chaotic romantic entanglements that once characterized her public life and lyrics. “You were my lesson I had to learn,” she sings, as if all the turmoil she sang of on past albums had just melted away.
With what’s happened to the culture since, it’s easy to bemoan Madonna opening up the floodgates of this airy, sacred lifestyle: Ray of Light has to be in some ways to blame for Goop and the countless other millionaire celebrities—everyone from Jessica Alba to Dr. Oz—who preach the gospel of wholeness and wellness, sanctimonious and Instagram spirituality. And yet, on Ray of Light, Madonna sounds so confident and alluringly in control of her powers, you might be able to overlook the more dubious moments, like “Shanti/Ashtangi,” in which she recites a hymn in Sanskrit over a techno-pop beat.
Madonna had recently taken voice lessons for her role in the musical Evita and, as she put it about her work prior to improving her technique, “There was a whole piece of my voice I wasn’t using. And I was going to make the most of it.” Her newly trained voice explodes out of the speakers on the title track, the character of her upper register suddenly like crystal. Though “Ray of Light” is “a mystical look at the universe and how small we are,” it’s also just one of the strangest songs in history to ever become a radio smash, a sugar-high piece of acid-club psychedelia. She also exposes a certain vulnerability that had not been on display in the heady days of Erotica. “Mer Girl,” which closes the album, is a tender psalm about the death of her mom. It ends the album on a remarkably reflective and unresolved note, while also pointing to the reason Madonna has needed to be so many different people across her life to begin with: “I ran and I ran,” she sings. “I’m still running away.”
Madonna played a large role in reopening mainstream American music to the club sounds of Europe in ways that have reverberated since. You can hear Ray of Light in artists as disparate as Britney, who worked with Orbit years after Madonna on “Alien,” to the adventurous producer and vocalist Grimes, who called Ray of Light a “masterpiece.” It is important, in 2017, to reveal something serious about yourself and the world through your work if you are a pop artist, and much of this can be traced back to Ray of Light, not to mention Janet Jackson and George Michael, who in the years before also made ambitious and weighty records.
If I have one major gripe with Ray of Light, it’s a certain dissonance that this born-again Madonna causes in me that other reinventions did not. As a young gay man, I had been ennobled by Madonna’s earlier hedonistic pride, excited by her exaggerated glamour (though also aware of its problematic aspects: her provocative image, particularly in the song and video “Vogue,” heavily cribs from black and latino gay culture) and defiant sexuality. There are times I feel a bit confused listening to Ray of Light as she all but dismisses her prior escapades, referring to them as a “silly game” on “Drowned World.” Perhaps it’s unfair to lay this responsibility at her feet, but I had always felt that Madonna’s liberated vision of life, in part, reflected my own, a life that, because of any number of circumstances or choices, might not involve kids and a family and red brick home, or any of the traditional domestic and spiritual touchstones venerated on Ray of Light. This is not a knock at her, really—life is complicated and filled with phases, something that Madonna’s career has come to symbolize.Maybe, too, it’s nice to have a fantasy of peace after the tumult that is our twenties and thirties, even if it’s mostly just that: a fantasy. I’m certainly not there yet, but it’s perhaps reassuring to hear Madonna—content on the other side of chaos—let us know that all the breakups and late nights and insecurities will someday culminate in stability.
Of course, we know how it ultimately ended. Just one album later, the disco-tinged Music, Madonna would admit to feeling trapped by the quieter life. “I feel like an animal that's, like, ready to be sprung from a cage,” she’d tell The Face at the time of the release of Music, which, with its winking attitude, helped her keep up with the vampy Britney, by then fully ascendant and coming for her crown. “I’ve been living a pretty low-key domestic existence and I miss things.” So much for all that. For a brief shining moment with Ray of Light, Madonna became Her Holiness, the sage of synth pop. And the world heeded the call.
