Is everything profound actually by its nature also very cheesy? Is it possible to be profound without offering some form of universal platitude? If something is profound doesn't that mean that it touches something so deeply human that we would all recognize it? Maybe it's where creative genius lives.
I ask because every year there comes a season where I listen to Madonna's “Ray Of Light” obsessionally. Her seventh album came out in 1998, and it is now 25 years-old, and for 25 years I have not stopped having a relationship with it. I have an evolving, hugely sentimental attachment to this album, and I am still excited by the fact that I am not as old as Madonna was when she made it, but I'm getting close. “Ray Of Light” has been critically lauded, both then, and now. However, many who wrote about did so while challenged by the “spiritual” elements; the mysticism, the Sanskrit, the yoga. I doubt if it had been David Bowie anyone would have spent so much time analyzing a red Kabbalah bracelet around her wrist, but such constant scrutiny and analysis is the prize for being a woman at the epicenter of pop culture. If you break the album down, and pull out certain mantra-like lines, or new-hippie-mom-finds-enlightenment lyrics, they do seem like the types of daily quotes you might receive in an Abraham-Hicks newsletter. (“Isn't everyone just traveling down their own road/Watching the signs as they go?” she sings on 'Sky Fits Heaven'; and I'm thinking “Nothing takes the past away/Like the future” on 'Nothing Really Matters'). But delivered and packaged in the sound that Madonna created on “Ray Of Light”, they feel anything but throwaway. They have the capacity to arrest you if the sunset catches just right as you're listening to them. Cheesy, right? But oh so profound.
“Ray Of Light” is, I would argue, Madonna's last honest album. Or her last human album. It's high pop art. But she really is a person on it. It was a record made in a dingy part of Los Angeles with a then underground British producer – William Orbit – who was a gamble for Madonna, and a weird maverick all of his own. And I reckon Madonna was in a really odd place. There is no interview in which she says that she's having a crisis of confidence, but how could she not be? She was about to turn 40 (ie, long dead in pop years – for a female). She had left her '80s pop successes far behind, and spent the first half of the '90s being slut-shamed for going too far with her sex positive output via her “Erotica” album (my third favorite Madonna album), and her 'Sex' book, which was full of shots of Madonna engaging in BDSM etc (a casual coffee table addition). She pivoted as far away from that as possible by joining arms with Andrew Lloyd Webber and becoming Evita for the silver screen (serious thespian vibes), and she released an album of ballads (and by the way, 'You'll See' still stands up, and I will die on this hill). In her private life, she gave birth to her first child. A girl. Lourdes.
Madonna often markets herself as the great re-inventor. And just as regularly as she claims this to be the case it is then put upon Madonna that she is a control freak. As one of the most famous women ever, she is also one of the most criticized, dissected and punished. Have I made that point enough yet? Anyway, I do suspect that Madonna wore her armor when she promoted this album. (Although she absolutely ripped that armor off in the making of it). I don't think “Ray Of Light” was about reinvention. It was the album you make when you've hit rock bottom, when you don't know who you are any more, when your life has changed beyond your control, when you're at the whim of something greater than you, and you're trying to find a voice in that shitshow. Madonna was aware of how cruel the music industry is to women, and especially women who age (notice how male pop stars never retire – have you seen Robbie Williams recently?). “Ray Of Light” is a middle finger up in defiance of that.
She decided to write about it as it was happening, as if to say: try me. Except she did it to a bed of wide-screened electronica and trance music. Although often moody, the strange immersive sound still softens the anger, fear and anxiety of her words, and turned her neurosis about living in her skin into some kind of odd, and transcendent religious awakening. Something beyond, or outside of the body. Like she was at a rave in celebration of the death of her former self, marking the line in the sand. There's an unbridled joy in that, and you hear it in her earnest views and thoughts that propel her poetry on this album. The amount of digital components and computers, and the lack of human players, makes Madonna's voice isolated, lonely even. It's Madonna pushing back against the machine.
Most people consider Madonna's career to be one of two halves. Pre- and post- “Ray Of Light”, and sonically that would be accurate. With her lead single 'Frozen', Madonna unveiled this new iteration of her career. It's a gothic ballad about a callous, cold lover that's brought to life by shattering electronic beats and, I guess, Madonna's own introduction of hum-singing a chorus (truly nobody has done this in the same fashion before or after) like a witch casting a spell. However, it's the first track on the album – 'Drowned World/Substitute For Love' – that really sets the tone for the record.
“I traded fame for love, without a second thought.
It all became a silly game, some things cannot be bought.”
Madonna admits to chasing down a dream of fame only to arrive at the party and realize she wants to choose something else entirely. When she sings “I've changed my mind”, she's wielding her own power, one step ahead of anyone who dare to name or quantify her success for her. She doesn't seem to care that half the album, between 'Candy Perfume Girl', 'Skin', 'Sky Fits Heaven', even 'Shanti/Ashtangi' are big beat electronic tracks that would never have – and did not – make for obvious singles, but instead provide all this luxurious space, brooding gloom, and bursts of effervescent glow that give “Ray Of Light” its sense of voyage. It's a whole universe that demands an hour of your time, and rewards you with its hidden surprises, and musings on how to heal, how to grow, how to survive.
Madonna vogue-ing as a geisha in a tiny room for the 'Nothing Really Matters' video is one of the reasons the '90s will always be the best decade, but the song itself is perhaps the artist at her most introspective against tumbling pianos and a jigsaw of jagged synths and layered vocals. Not far behind it is 'The Power Of Good-bye', allegedly inspired by her relationship with Sean Penn, which strips everything back, instead building into a huge clearing, like she's diving off the rocky cliff of a toxic relationship into an ocean of acceptance and peace.
“You were my lesson I had to learn.
I was your fortress you had to burn.”
The myth goes that Madonna wrote the last song – 'Mer Girl' – after she got home from a run. She wrote it about her mother, who died from breast cancer just after she turned 30. For a pop star, it's both extraordinarily raw and horrifying as Madonna imagines climbing into her dead mother's grave, not long after her own daughter was born.
“And the earth took me in her arms
Leaves covered my face
Ants marched across my back
Black sky opened up, blinding me.”
In the song, a stark digital odyssey, she's running and searching for answers, looking for herself, while sounding completely calm in the wake of it. In fact, Madonna has never sounded calmer. She's completely serene. “I ran and I ran/I'm still running away.” And with that lyric, “Ray Of Light” ends. It ends with Madonna still in flight. An artist caught in a transition between death and rebirth, heartache and motherhood, youth and maturity, controversy and acclaim, success and greatness. If that's cheesy, it's also rather profound. Here's to another 25 years.
I was assistant manager at a Sam Goody store when this album came out. Too old for the job and kind of directionless. I already liked Madonna in an embarrassed, secret sort of way. Not a super fan but I loved some of her ballads, Vogue, and the whole Sex era. Then this . . . Blew my mind! I agree it’s a very human album. The music was intoxicating, the sound just scratched an itch deep inside, and the lyrics were beautiful and relatable. I had my first child soon after and during that time I thought of how becoming a mother had so clearly opened something up in Madonna. I’ll be playing this today!