Jump to content

Archived

This thread has been closed to further replies because it was not updated for 12 months. If you wish to have this thread reinstated, please contact an administrator.

Angelus

Madonna day on Pitchfork: 6 Sides of Madonna That Explain Her Genius + Reviews of 4 albums

Recommended Posts

Photos from left by Mark Downey Lucid Images/Corbis via Getty, Ebet Roberts/Redferns, Frank Micelotta/Getty, S. Granitz/WireImage, Samir Hussein/Redferns via Getty

In celebration of Madonna’s birthday (August 16), we’ve deemed it Madonna Day on Pitchfork. We’ve reviewed four of her classic albums—her 1983 debut, 1989’s Like a Prayer1994’s Bedtime Storiesand 1998’s Ray of Lightand now we move onto the ties that bind her career.

 

 

If you were to see someone tweet the phrase “Madonna is everything,” you might attribute it to a very 2017 type of online hyperbole. And yes, Madonna is everything in that sense, but from a pop perspective Madonna also feels like everything because in a career spanning four decades she has attacked, absorbed, and conquered pop music from every possible angle.

When Madonna’s referenced as the Queen of Reinvention, it tends to suggest the linear series of career moves, from album to album, sonic era to sonic era, hairstyle to hairstyle. In reality, her layered approach to pop domination has frequently seemed to consist of multiple Madonnas existing at the same time. Here are six of her best, key to understanding her work.

 

Madonna, The Controversialist

Many of Madonna’s supposedly controversial songs (like ‘80s hit “Papa Don’t Preach,” with its subtext of abortion) are now more clearly identified as feminist statements or expressions of self, but that’s not to say Madonna has never deliberately courted outright controversy.

It’s easy to mock the quaint ’80s reaction to the lyrics of “Like A Virgin,” but it’s also fair to say that if a mainstream 2017 pop act—Ariana Grande, for instance—released the video Madonna made for “Like A Prayer,” all hell would still break loose. That video tackled religion, race, and sex, with scenes depicting murder, burning crosses, and Madonna with stigmata-esque wounds. It led to predictable complaints from the American Family Association, a denouncement by the Vatican, and a $5 million Pepsi ad campaign being benched. It would have been disingenuous of Madonna to feign surprise at the reaction. And she didn’t. Her response? “Art should be controversial, and that's all there is to it.”

Madonna upped the ante on her next formal album, 1992’s Erotica, and its accompanying artifacts, including the boundary-breaking “Justify My Love” video and a coffee table book called Sex, whose main shock value these days involves the inclusion of Vanilla Ice. Fast-forward to 2017, after decades of refusing to be silenced: Live on CNN from the Women’s March on Washington, Madonna delivered a passionate speech about change, sacrifice, rebellion, the tyranny of Trump, and the power of love. There was more, of course: “To our detractors that insist this march will never add up to anything: fuck you. Fuck. You.” Not great news for CNN’s switchboard but a fair point, well made.

 

 

Madonna, The Club Queen

When Madonna descended on New York in 1978, she’d just dropped out of a University of Michigan dance scholarship and was hell-bent on making it as a professional dancer. So, spoiler alert, she’s not averse to tripping the light fantastic, as her 1983 debut proved out the gate. Her discography is full of floorfillers, and she holds the record for the most No. 1 singles on Billboard’s Dance/Club Songs Chart, even if some of those chart-topping tracks—like the various mixes of the poignant gender-role assessment “What It Feels Like For A Girl”—make for a somewhat complex shimmy.

Peppered throughout Madonna’s career are more direct hints at what it might be like to actually—imagine this!—go dancing with Madonna. She likes to boogie woogie, this much we know from “Music.” On the 2000 album track “Impressive Instant,” Madonna reveals that her skills extend to both rhumba and samba (though bear in mind this was also the song where she declared, “I like to singy singy singy like a bird on a wingy wingy wingy,” so there’s that). Most significantly, Madonna’s belief in the dance floor as a sacred space is described in “Vogue” with words some will find as inspiring in 2017 as listeners almost three decades ago did: “When all else fails and you long to be something better than you are today, I know a place where you can get away—it's called a dance floor.”

Released a few years earlier, True Blue album cut “Where’s The Party” was ostensibly a song about going out and losing control after a week at work. Madonna wistfully recalls that as a child she “couldn’t wait to get older,” before acknowledging that getting older hasn’t been everything she’d hoped, then looking ahead to the future: “Don't want to grow old too fast, don’t want to let the system get me down.” Like some of the best pop songs, it’s about living in the moment, even if the importance of doing so only makes sense in the context of what came before, and what will come in the future. Which leads us to…

Madonna, The Clockwatcher

Madonna looked closer to home on another time-shifting track, “This Used to Be My Playground” from A League of Their Own, with further songs like “Oh Father” and “Live To Tell” also looking back on Madonna’s upbringing with themes of defiance, resolve, and closure.

A more literal timepiece motif emerged during the 2000s, when the lead singles from two successive Madonna albums each began with the sound of a clock ticking. In the first, 2005’s Abba-sampling behemoth “Hung Up,” the ticking clock was inspired by producer Stuart Price’s earlier remix of Gwen Stefani’s “What You Waiting For,” and was followed by Madonna’s observation that “time goes by so slowly for those who wait, those who run seem to have all the fun.”

By 2008, it was Timbaland administering the ticks on “4 Minutes,” rather improbably Madonna’s second most-streamed song on Spotify. That song’s lyrics (“We only got four minutes to save the world… grab a boy, then grab a girl”) suggested procreation-based speed dating, but Madonna later explained that they hinged on “living on borrowed time essentially, and people are becoming much more aware of the environment and how we're destroying the planet.” Madonna may have overestimated the urgency but, well, that clock’s still ticking.

Madonna, The Moviegoer

The are various words we might use to describe Madonna’s film career, one of the more generous being “lengthy.” Since the ’80s, Madonna’s screen credits have prompted a series of musical contributions whose quality has frequently, often mercifully, failed to correlate with that of the actual movie.

Were one to assemble those alongside songs contributed to films in which Madonna didn’t even appear, you’d have one of the modern pop era’s most surreal career retrospectives. It would include glossy pop jam “Who’s That Girl,” wistful ballad-banger “I’ll Remember” (from a dreadful Joe Pesci-Brendan Fraser vehicle), the William Orbit-produced, Austin Powers-soundtracking “Beautiful Stranger,” a peculiar cover of “American Pie” featuring Rupert Everett, the slightly mind-boggling “Hanky Panky" (and the rest of her *Dick Tracy* companion LP), futuristic Bond theme “Die Another Day,” and (on a technicality) “Into the Groove.”

By law, that compilation would also need to include Madonna’s take on “Don’t Cry For Me Argentina,” but not the version she sang in Evita. Instead we’d have the castanet-strewn, 100 percent spectacular, seven-minute remix, for which Madonna recorded brand new vocals and a second chorus entirely in Spanish. Sadly, some may say criminally, this definitive version of “Don’t Cry For Me Argentina” is unavailable on streaming services, but it does live on via YouTube.

 

Madonna, The Pensive Chanteuse

Treat with deep suspicion anybody who links lyrical substance to low tempo. That said, while Madonna has definitely explored the extremes of human emotion via dance floor smashes, some of her most profound thoughts have arrived within her most elegant songs. On her wildly underrated American Life album, “Nothing Fails” boasts a tempo that barely reaches the status of mid, but for a truly downbeat masterpiece, try Ray Of Light’s “Drowned World/Substitute For Love,” a prelude to a reflective and immersive album whose sonic departure made it the riskiest move in a career built on the avoidance of safe decisions. It’s there that we found Madonna, who’d previously sung plenty about being a daughter, singing for the first time about being a parent (via sparse lullaby “Little Star”) while also, on mesmerizing album closer “Mer Girl,” reflecting on the death of her own mother.

 

Madonna, The Hopeful Romantic

Madonna undoubtedly defined the role of sex in modern pop, but just as prominently—in songs as diverse as “Take A Bow,” “Get Together,” and “Borderline”—are themes of romance, heartbreak, and optimism. “The thing is,” Madonna told Rolling Stone regarding 2015’s “Living For Love,” “lots of people write about being in love and being happy or they write about having a broken heart and being inconsolable. But nobody writes about having a broken heart and being hopeful and triumphant afterwards. I didn't want to share the sentiment of being a victim. This scenario devastated me, but it just made me stronger.”

The survival spirit of “Living for Love“ came to life in an unexpected way. One of the song’s first performances took place at the 2015 Brit Awards, where, at a key moment, a dancer tugged Madonna’s cloak. The garment should have billowed away to reveal Madonna’s full performance outfit, but the clasp jammed. Madonna was abruptly yanked off the stage platform but was back on her feet within seconds, singing lines like, “Lifted me up, and watched me stumble… after the heartache, I’m gonna carry on.” She finished the song, conjuring a live TV victory where others would have conceded defeat.

The aftermath was Madonna in excelsis: She didn’t block the performance’s upload to the Brits’ YouTube channel. She didn’t hide the imperfection or pretend it had not happened. In fact, within a week, the full performance was on her official VEVO channel, where it remains. Elsewhere on Rebel Heart, Madonna sings, “I’m only human”—which is true, of course. Madonna definitely is a human being—she just happens to be one whose remarkable longevity and multifaceted creativity justify her reputation as the Queen of Pop.

http://pitchfork.com/thepitch/6-sides-of-madonna-that-explain-her-genius-listening-guide/

Link to post
Share on other sites

Madonna artwork 

8.2

Quote

The driving force of Madonna’s debut remains its palpable physicality, born out of New York dance clubs, a new pop mandate to move your body in ways both public and private.

Today is Madonna Day in the Pitchfork Reviews section; in honor of her birthday, we reviewed four of her key records.

Sire Records founder Seymour Stein was lying in a hospital bed the first time he heard Madonna. It was 1982, and the man who’d signed the Ramones, Talking Heads, and the Pretenders had one of his usual heart infections. Listening to his Walkman, Stein perked up when he heard a bass-heavy demo of Madonna’s first single, “Everybody.” He called the DJ who’d given him the tape, Mark Kamins of New York’s anti-Studio 54 utopia Danceteria, and asked to meet Madonna, a Danceteria regular and waitress. Hours later, the 24-year-old dancer-turned-musician from Bay City, Mich. was in that hospital room, hoping Stein was well enough to draw up a contract.

Stein did sign her, and the following year put out Madonna, a cool and cohesive debut that helped resituate electronic dance-pop at Top 40’s apex with hits like “Holiday,” “Lucky Star,” and “Borderline.” But the suits at Warner Bros., which had acquired Sire a few years earlier, didn’t quite know what to do with the former punkwho was writing and performing muscular R&B for the club. Their early inclination was to work her at black radio stations, favoring a cartoonish urban collage for the “Everybody” cover instead of Madonna’s already perfected thousand-yard stare. Listeners weren’t sure what to make of the singer cooing those pleading vocals on the rising dance hit, but it wouldn’t be long before Madonna did something about that too.

At Madonna’s convincing, the label let her shoot a chintzy performance video for “Everybody,” followed by a more polished video for her striking second single “Burning Up.” In it, she tugs at a thick chain looped around her neck and rolls around in the street while singing lines like, “I’m not the others, I’d do anything/I’m not the same, I have no shame,” her panting underscored by Hi-NRG beats and raunchy rock guitar solos. A man drives towards Madonna, but at the end, it’s her behind the wheel—the first great wink to her signature subversion of power through sex. Though her 1984 MTV Music Video Awards performance is now considered erotic lore on the level of Elvis’ censored hips, that writhing set to “Like a Virgin” would have had little context without the slow, sensual burn of Madonna throughout ’83 and ’84. It was a record that seemed quirky but innocuous enough based on the feel-good wiggle of its initial crossover hit, “Holiday,” but the driving force of Madonna remains its palpable physicality—a mandate to move your body, in ways both public and private.

Part of what gives Madonna such affecting rhythm is its use of electronic instruments that sounded like the future then and typify the ’80s sound now—instruments like the LinnDrum and the Oberheim OB-X synthesizer. Disco had brought dance music to pop’s forefront, where producers like Giorgio Moroder traded its saccharine strings for robotic instrumentation, but by the early ’80s, the genre had cooled off. People still danced to synthesizers, but their positioning was crucial—both within culture and musical compositions. The Human League and Soft Cell scored two of 1982’s biggest and most synthetic smashes, but back then the gulf between punk-derived new wave and bygone disco seemed wider than it ever really was. Disco and disco-adjacent stars like Donna Summer and Michael Jackson still were programming their hits, but the overall focus was back on a full-band sound. There’s no shortage of organic instruments on Madonna’s debut—“Borderline” wouldn’t be the same without the piano’s melodic underscoring, standout album cut “Physical Attraction” without its funky little guitar line—but the slinky digital grooves often take center stage. Through this, Madonna is able to achieve an almost aggressive twinkling that still feels fresh: the effervescent fizz at the start of Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Cut to the Feeling” seems cribbed straight from “Lucky Star.”

Madonna vaguely criticized her debut’s sonic palette while promoting its follow-up, 1984’s Like a Virgin, but its focus is part of what makes the album so memorable, so of a time and place. She would soon become known for ritual pop star metamorphosis, but with a clearly defined musical backdrop, Madonna was able to let shine her biggest asset: herself. The way Madonna’s early collaborators talk about her—even the ones who take issue with her, like Reggie Lucas, who wrote “Borderline” and “Physical Attraction” and produced the bulk of the album—often revolves around her decisiveness, her style, the undeniability of her star quality. Some of these songs, like the self-penned workout “Think of Me,” aren’t all that special, but Madonna telling a lover to appreciate before she vacates is so self-assured, the message carries over to the listener. And when the material’s even better, like on “Borderline,” the passionate performance takes it over the top.

Maybe the New York cool kids rolled their eyes at the Midwest transplant after she blew up, but she had effectively bottled their attitude and open-mindedness and sold it to the MTV generation (sleeve of bangles and crucifix earrings not included). Innocent as it may look now, compared to the banned bondage videos and butt-naked books that followed, Madonna was a sexy, forward-thinking record that took pop in a new direction. Its success showed that, with the right diva at the helm, music similar to disco could find a place in the white mainstream—a call to the dance floor answered by everyone from Kylie to Robyn to Gaga to Madonna herself. After venturing out into various genre experiments and film projects, when Madonna needs a hit, the longtime queen of the Dance Songs chart often returns to the club. This approach doesn’t always work, as her last three records have shown, but you can’t fault her for trying to get back to that place where heavenly bodies shine for a night.

Link to post
Share on other sites

Like a Prayer artwork

9.0

Quote

Madonna’s spectacular fourth album revealed just how grand, artistic, and personal a pop star could be at the very height of her fame.

Today is Madonna Day in the Pitchfork Reviews section; in honor of her birthday, we reviewed four of her key records.

Read the reviews of Madonna’s blockbuster 1989 album Like a Prayerand you’ll see a lot of confession-related imagery—not because of how her career had been steeped in Catholicism, but because of the narratives surrounding the superstar as she geared up to release her fourth album. She tried to act on screen in Who’s That Girl and on stage in David Mamet’s Speed-the-Plow; she turned 30; her tabloid-dominating marriage to bad-boy actor Sean Penn had ended. “Was this to be her atonement?” brayed the subtext.

These were ideal conditions for listeners to use an album by pop’s most notorious—and most famous—woman as diary pages, but to at least one interviewer, Madonna bristled at the concept. “People don’t see that you can take some of your experiences from real life and use part of them in your art,” Madonna told Vogue in May 1989. “They try to make everything an absolute truth.” Yet elsewhere, she also noted that Like a Prayer was in part about her taking greater control of her narrative. “My first couple of albums I would say came from the little girl in me, who is interested only in having people like me, in being entertaining and charming and frivolous and sweet,” Madonna toldInterview in May 1989. “And this new one is the adult side of me, which is concerned with being brutally honest.”

While Madonna was no shrinking violet during the first chunk of the ’80s—the decade of Madonna wannabes, MTV Video Music Awards-ready wedding dresses, and “controversial” her officially recognized prefix—Like a Prayer does showcase her growth as a pop artist, from the gnarled guitar that opens its title track all the way through its warped-tape closer “Act of Contrition.” She takes more chances lyrically and musically, and while they don’t always work, they do give a glimpse at her restlessness and increased willingness to take musical chances, whether she’s bringing in Prince or letting her voice’s imperfections into songs or taking on heavy, personal-life-adjacent topics.

“Like a Prayer,” with its lyrics of redemption derived from spiritual surrender or some sort of sex act (or a combination of the two) and roof-raising gospel choir, shimmies and saunters, Madonna using its lite-funk building blocks to anchor a giddy sing-along. “Express Yourself” is led by one of Madonna’s most bravado vocals, ready-made for lustily singing along with in a mirror or on a tense solo elevator ride. Though it’s worth noting that the version on Like a Prayer sounds anemic compared to the utterly superior Shep Pettibone single remix, which foregrounds the cowbell and makes the bouncing-ball bassline a go-on-girl counterpoint to Madonna’s message.

“Till Death Do Us Part,” on first blush, comes off like a breakup-themed update of earlier Madonna synth-pop offerings, like True Blue’s “Jimmy Jimmy,” or Like A Virgin’s “Angel.” She sings of feeling bereft over chiming synths and popping guitars—“When you laugh it cuts me just like a knife/I’m not your friend, I’m just your little wife,” she sighs. But the glittery vibes and hopped-up tempo take on a sinister edge in later verses, sounding more glassy-eyed as Madonna’s world-weary alter ego narrates the dissolving love and as the disturbing imagery—fading bruises, growing hate, flying vases—piles up. The final verse, which describes the circular nature of abusive relationships and which punctuates the titular phrase with the sound of shattered-glass, only adds to the song’s despair. Its follow-up “Promise to Try”—a slowly building ballad directed toward a young girl who’s struggling with the death of her mother—is mournful, the loneliness it describes sitting uncomfortably close to the cycle depicted in “Till Death.”

The windswept textures of “Oh Father”—loping pianos, drooping strings—give Madonna’s voice room to move. It swoops and swerves in a childlike voice as she sings of an ambivalent father-daughter relationship. Madonna’s mezzo, which wobbled on low notes and sometimes felt stretched in its upper registers, was often tsk-tsked by her critics, but her vulnerable vocal on “Oh Father” also shows why her music was so beloved; even if she’s singing of characters, as she claimed to Vogue, her gasps and shivers gave voice to the complex dynamic so many children have with their parents—whether biological, by marriage, adoptive, or spiritual.

That was, in part, an outgrowth of Madonna performing in the studio with her backing musicians. “We had every intention of going back and fixing the vocals, but then we’d listen to them and say, ‘Why? They’re fine,’” she told Interview. “They were a lot more emotional and spontaneous when I did them with the musicians… There are weird sounds that your throat makes when you sing: p’s are popped, and s’s are hissed, things like that. Just strange sounds that come out of your throat, and I didn’t fix them. I didn’t see why I should. Because I think those sounds are emotions too.”

The emotions on Like a Prayer aren’t all fraught. “Cherish” is a feather-light declaration of devotion that calls back to Cali-pop outfit the Association while updating Madonna’s earlier exercise in retroism “True Blue”; “Dear Jessie” engages in the reaching toward sounding “Beatles-esque” that was in vogue at the time, pairing fussy strings and tick-tock percussion with images of pink elephants and flying leprechauns. “Love Song,” meanwhile, is a synth-funk chiffon co-written by none other than Prince, one of Madonna’s few pop equals at the time. The two of them feel locked in an erotically charged session of truth or dare, each challenging the other to stretch their voices higher while the drum machines churn. Prince also played, initially uncredited, on “Like a Prayer,” the sauntering pop-funk track “Keep It Together,” and the album-closing “Act of Contrition,” a two-minute maelstrom that combines Prince’s guitar heroics, backward-masked bits from the title track, heavy beats, and its title inspiration, the Catholic prayer of… confession.

So maybe Madonna’s protests that Like a Prayer wasn’t autobiographical were a bit of a ruse—or just another way to keep the minds of America’s pop-watchers thinking about her music as she gave them an album where she was less afraid to show her flaws, more willing to try on new personas that had bits of her selves attached. After all, as she told The New York Times in 1989, “What I do is total commercialism, but it’s also art.” Like a Prayer straddles those two ideals with gusto, with even its less satisfying moments adding to the heat given off by the MTV era’s brightest star.

 

Link to post
Share on other sites

Bedtime Stories artwork

6.5

Quote

Released in 1994, the warm and mellow sound of Madonna’s sixth album has its seductive charms, but of all her work, it remains a curious non-event in the pop star’s wildly eventful career.

Today is Madonna Day in the Pitchfork Reviews section; in honor of her birthday, we reviewed four of her key records.

Bedtime Stories, the confused, the misunderstood. The early ’90s found Madonna at peak levels of media saturation. Inescapable! Seven years of hits compiled on The Immaculate Collection,Madonna featured on virtually every award show, Dick Tracyparaphernalia in the McDonald’s Happy Meal. I saw her name on a religious pamphlet: “We Christians must reject the mainstream acceptance of the ethics and morals of Marx and Madonna.” I saw her in The Far Side, her Gaultier-ensconced breasts puncturing an inflatable life raft in a cheap sexist gag. She was less a musician and more a holy ghost. Bedtime Stories was the first Madonna album that felt like a non-event, an asterisk to her omnipresence, another hot day in a heat wave.

And as such, this album has been difficult to assess as an art object. Madonna was, in 1992-1994, an artist under siege. Sex, her soft-core porn coffee table book, had been called obscene; it has been subsequently been reassessed as a smart and entertaining post-feminist grand jeté. Her previous album Erotica, with its diversity and effective New Jack Swing tourism, was received generally well and is now considered among many of her acolytes to be her masterpiece. But Bedtime Stories is, if we must go full Pepsi Challenge with Erotica, a blurry non-event of an album.

Closing track and hit single “Take a Bow” is a kind song, lush in production and sentiment, and deservedly hung around the charts longer than any other of her singles. Babyface’s appearance here, at the height of his own artistry, is frankly lovely. It is for many fans, myself included, Madonna at her most sensitive and brave.

Bedtime Stories’ final single, “Human Nature,” in contrast, did poorly on the charts, and yet is one of her most effective grooves, with her anti-slut-shaming slogan, “I’m not your bitch, don’t hang your shit on me” thwocking its way through Jean-Baptiste Mondino’s amazing video. It is handily one of Madonna’s best songs.

Conversely, the album’s most successful worldwide single, “Secret,” beloved by many, just meanders—even upon its release I recall my young ears being distracted by the single edit’s monotony when it appeared on radio playlists. On the album proper, the track drags interminably over five-plus minutes. Listening again now, it sounds like a lesser version of subsequent album Ray of Light’s “Frozen,” the dry crumbs of “Secret”’s acoustic guitar tracks waiting to be muted and replaced with William Orbit’s thrilling, tensile production.

Most infamously, we have “Bedtime Story.” Like many other former teenagers falling head over heels for Björk’s first solo album, I recall staring incredulously at the B. Guðmundsdóttir credit when it appeared in Madonna’s liner notes. The song itself is unimaginably disappointing—sterile and static, a less-daring second cousin to “Violently Happy.” Björk’s detached science-textbook approach toward a love-song, which works so well when paired with her own mystic Icelandic aesthetic, doesn’t sit well alongside Madonna’s enthusiastic consumerism. Perhaps the song has some appeal, decades later, now that we’re familiar and tolerant of the sound of Björk-on-autopilot. Perhaps we view it affectionately as a blueprint for her subsequent masterpieces on Ray of Light. Ultimately it remains, to my ears, Madonna’s first truly embarrassing flop.

And most of the rest of the album never really achieves any level of indispensability. Several attempts at New Jack balladry have lovely moody productions married to unremarkable songs or performances. Opening track “Survival,” as carefully constructed as it is, sounds, well, much tidier than Madonna’s contemporaries. The “Inside of Me” sample of Aaliyah’s “Back & Forth”—out the same year—just reminds me as a listener about how 1994 was the year of Toni Braxton, Salt-N-Pepa, and Janet Jackson; far more exciting music than this.

The deep cuts on the B-side of Bedtime Stories have their fans. Babyface is here, Massive Attack’s string arranging collaborator Craig Armstrong is here also, with an expensive sounding moment, and there’s a cute Herbie Hancock sample on “Sanctuary.” But these songs, for me, are undone by all having nearly identical melodies and moods to “Secret.” What attempts to be sultry and smooth comes off as beige and un-fascinating; my mind wanders and my time is wasted. When Madonna plays tourist with gay culture, with Broadway, with Hollywood, with UK jungle, she is able to keep things (usually) deferential and still interesting, and often, achieve transcendence. But here, she sounds woefully out-of-her-depth as a songwriter and singer when slinging these square attempts at R&B balladry.

It is a compliment to the artist that only here, over a decade into her career, on her sixth studio album, does she, for the first time, let this listener down. Take “Human Nature” and put in on a golden record, play “Take a Bow” at my funeral, and let the rest of this sleepy album be forgotten; it is, to my ears and memory, Madonna’s first truly inessential moment.

 

Link to post
Share on other sites

Ray of Light artwork

8.1

Quote

Channeling acid electronica, Kabbalah, and motherhood, Madonna’s 1998 reinvention stripped away the controversy of her past and became one of her most unexpectedly successful albums.

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.

 

Link to post
Share on other sites

8.2 / 8.1 / 9.0 when will your unholy faves. bey6

A lot of stuff I agree with :

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?

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.

The windswept textures of “Oh Father”—loping pianos, drooping strings—give Madonna’s voice room to move. It swoops and swerves in a childlike voice as she sings of an ambivalent father-daughter relationship. Madonna’s mezzo, which wobbled on low notes and sometimes felt stretched in its upper registers, was often tsk-tsked by her critics, but her vulnerable vocal on “Oh Father” also shows why her music was so beloved; even if she’s singing of characters, as she claimed to Vogue, her gasps and shivers gave voice to the complex dynamic so many children have with their parents—whether biological, by marriage, adoptive, or spiritual.

“What I do is total commercialism, but it’s also art.” Like a Prayer straddles those two ideals with gusto, with even its less satisfying moments adding to the heat given off by the MTV era’s brightest star.

Link to post
Share on other sites
1 minute ago, Jjang said:

8.2 / 8.1 / 9.0 when will your unholy faves. bey6

They called AL underrated so they probably stan that album too jj2 

I'm sure LAV and TB would've had high scores too, 7.5-8.0, Erotica and Music - i have no idea.

 

Link to post
Share on other sites
7 minutes ago, Angelus said:

They called AL underrated so they probably stan that album too jj2 

I'm sure LAV and TB would've had high scores too, 7.5-8.0, Erotica and Music - i have no idea.

 

I'm glad we finally have a Pitchfork review for LAP, though. Now all major publications have reviewed it.

Rolling Stone (album guide) 5/5

Spin Alternative (album guide) 5/5

Q 10/10

NME 10/10

AllMusic 10/10

Entertainment Weekly A 

Slant 4.5/5

Pitchfork 9.0/10

 

We also have 'Pretty Much Amazing',  'A.V Club' and 'The Guardian' praising the hell out of it but providing no score.

 

 

 

Link to post
Share on other sites
  • Replies 38
  • Created
  • Last Reply

  • Browsing now   0 members

    No registered users viewing this page.

×