Word: madonna
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Until there's a body count, until there's a tearful post-rehab Barbara Walters interview, until there's vehicular wreckage in a Parisian tunnel, most of us have limited tolerance for celebrities who gripe about the supposed burdens of fame. That Madonna, of all people, of all celebrities, should make the rejection of stardom and materialism the major theme of her new CD, Ray of Light (Maverick/Warner Bros.) should rightly make thinking people pause. Didn't she, from the very start, insist that we love her, demand that we worship her golden calves, her exposed iconic midriff, her conical...
...this is Madonna '98, at the close of an exhausted millennium, when shock comes hard, when irony is so overdone it can only be used ironically, when everything has come full circle and the Spice Girls can look and sound the way Madonna did 15 years ago and still be hailed as fresh and fun. So you move on. Madonna is the head of the record label--the aptly named Maverick--that released last year's band of the moment, the electronica-charged act the Prodigy (Maverick is part of Time Warner, the company that owns TIME). It makes sense...
...Madonna, in the lyrics on this album, finds solace in family and philosophy. "You breathe/New life/Into my broken heart," she sings on Little Star, a swirling lullaby-like song about her daughter. On another track, the chanting Shanti/Ashtangi, Madonna sings in Sanskrit--something that, not too many years ago, would have been about as unthinkable as Hanson today singing in Serbo-Croatian. In translation, a line of Shanti/Ashtangi reads "I worship the gurus' lotus feet/ Awakening the happiness of the self revealed." Madonna in only six years has gone from sucking on feet to using them as catalysts for spiritual...
...album has a liquid feel; melodies and rhythms wash and flow into each other. This, however, is not a current of water but of electricity: the album is propelled by synthesized sounds, electronic drumbeats and artificial noises. Madonna is clearly borrowing heavily from cutting-edge electronica-tinged performers, including Goldie, Bjork and Aphex Twin. William Orbit, Madonna's collaborator on the CD (he co-wrote and co-produced nearly every track) says she might release a second CD featuring the songs that were too experimental to make the album. "It would be like the play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead...
Unlike some of Madonna's previous hot and sexy albums, this one is resolutely frigid--if you licked this album your tongue would stick to it. The music and Madonna's vocals are, on the surface, direct and unemotional. However, the contrast between the chilly surface and the confessional nature of many of the lyrics creates a tension, even a passion. The sound of a numb Madonna trying to reconnect to her own emotions has poignancy akin to the Tin Man searching for a heart, or Spock struggling to come to terms with his human half. Orbit says that...