Word: realm
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...though she's made questionable choices and reinvented herself a tad too many times, there is no denying her superb talent. Her new album features the most captivating, energetic, innovative music that Madonna has produced. In her quest to mix spirituality and trendy electronica, she has discovered a musical realm that will revitalize her career...
Electronica is Madonna's ideal realm. Her shallow pop seemed to float without foundation in her previous albums. Every time she tried to be "innovative" or "groundbreaking," it all turned into another exercise in pleasing the Top 40 crowd. The songs on Ray of Light are built around producer William Orbit's spectacular backgrounds: synthesizers illuminate the music with pseudo-stars, comets, flowing rivers, and gurgling heavenly blips. "Sky Fits Heaven," for instance, would be a dismally boring song without the lightly pulsating background that perfectly matches the song's lyrics...
Between 1945 and 1955, the number of cars in America doubled from 26 million to 52 million. That boom, along with the highways that supported it, extended the strange and strained realm of suburbia. To absorb this mobility came drive-in theaters, drive-in restaurants, drive-in banks and, most important, the shopping mall--Main Street reconfigured for cars. Society was transfigured: the automobile brought America to a new frontier made up of Tinkertoy communities full of undefined relationships and spaces, with the car itself an extension of living room, playroom, bedroom, with the whole country viewed through the windshield...
...haunted Gibson. He didn't know much about computers--he wrote his breakthrough novel, Neuromancer, on an ancient manual typewriter--but as near as he could tell, everybody who worked much with the machines eventually came to accept, almost as an article of faith, the reality of that imaginary realm. "They develop a belief that there's some kind of actual space behind the screen," he says. "Some place that you can't see but you know is there...
...that's all right. We're in the realm of homage here, not plagiarism. What's not so good is the failure to make something arresting out of the way the dark side and the bright side of our minds interact. Movies like Forbidden Planet, which had neither the technical sophistication nor the skilled actors available to Levinson, worked their metaphors with a sort of leisurely literateness. Here, all meaning is simply lost in the hubbub, drowned out by the modern imperative to deliver a rush of action, however incomprehensible, every few minutes...