FEATURE:
Childhood Treasures: Albums That Impacted Me
Madonna – Ray of Light
___________
AS Madonna…
celebrates her birthday on Monday (16th), the final feature I am writing about her to mark that concerns an album of hers that impacted me during childhood. This was a late-childhood love; an album that was released on 22nd February, 1998 – I was fourteen on that day. Ray of Light is Madonna’s seventh studio album. I think her work in the 1990s is up there with what she put out in the 1980s. Erotica of 1992 and 1994’s Bedtime Stories are two very different albums. Both are terrific and contain some of her best songs. Maybe Bedtime Stories was not the critical success she had hoped. Coming back four years later with this reinvention was a big surprise. I guess having producers like William Orbit on board helped take her music to new places. Mixing Electronic, Dance and Hip-Hop, this is a Madonna album like no other! Unusually, the first single from the album was Frozen. I really love the track and was hooked by this track that was dark yet hypnotic. Written with her old writing partner, Patrick Leonard (with production by Madonna, Leonard and William Orbit), it is the ninth track on the album. Many might have assumed the more upbeat and energetic title track would have been the lead single. Frozen got to number-one in the U.K. after its release on 23rd February (I am going by Wikipedia’s dates, so am not sure whether the first single came out a day after the album). I bought the single first and, I think, got the album the following weekend.
This was a period where I was going into my local town to buy albums and singles. I was a big Madonna fan then (and still am), so I was eager to check out this new single. After being hooked and loving it, I got the album. Still at high school, this was an album many people were talking about. Instantly, songs like Ray of Light, Nothing Really Matters, The Power of Good-Bye and Drowned World / Substitute for Love got under my skin. This is an album where you can go from the hyperspeed sway of Ray of Light, have something more introspective and emotional as The Power of Good-Bye and the beautiful Mer Girl. Shanti / Ashtangi is a step into Indian music and mantra. It is a direction that Madonna didn’t exploit and explore too much after that. Although she did get some stick for her supposed bond with Eastern music and Kabbalah, this was her embracing different styles and cultures. There are so many different sounds and genes fused on Ray of Light. It is an album that has so much going on! Sky Fits Heaven is one of my favourite songs. It has a Club beat, and manages to be quite sparse and minimal but really powerful and packed. To me, the defining song of the album might well be the title track. It was the first real burst of light and colour on the album (as the third track). Written by Madonna and William Orbit, the album has been credited for bringing Electronica music into global pop culture.
I loved Ray of Light when I heard it in 1998. It opened my ears to new sounds and possibilities. I thought I knew Madonna and what she was about then. Although one can hear some sharper, darker and more Electronic elements on Erotica and Bedtime Stories, Ray of Light was much more realised and adventurous. It sounds so complete and authentic! This is not a Pop artist dabbling in something to get commercial appeal. Here was an artist doing what she always did: evolving between albums and curious to see where she could head. Because of that, albums like Ray of Light sound so fresh and original. Today, you can pop on the record and get so much from it. I can tell, when Ray of Light arrived, that critics loved it. Many view Ray of Light as Madonna’s defining album. It is an album very special to me, as Madonna was one of the first artist I really bonded with. I am going to finish with a review for the album. This is Entertainment Weekly’s take on Ray of Light:
“Is Care Of The Soul sharing space with baby-care manuals on Madonna’s bookshelf? Ray of Light (Warner Bros.), Ms. Ciccone’s first pop album in nearly four years, is rife with references to the earth and ”the stars in the sky,” angels and heaven, not to mention unexpectedly respectful references to God and ”the Gospel.” In one song, she’s ”waiting for the time when earth shall be as one”; in another, enunciating in a voice made firm and clear by those Evita lessons, she gamely attempts to make a pop hook out of a yoga chant.
If these nods to spiritual reawakening seem suspiciously chic, you haven’t heard the other half of it. Working with British producer William Orbit, Madonna has dipped her latest collection of songs in a light batter of electronica. Throughout Ray of Light, the hissy, staccato pulsations of ambient techno and drum-and-bass flit in and around her like celestial seasonings. Computers burp and bray in the background, or imitate streaking asteroids or submerging submarines.
The blending of these philosophical and musical kernels would be unbearably trend conscious (even by Madonna’s own standards) if it weren’t for a simple fact: Ray of Light is some of the most alluring and captivating music she’s ever crafted. Should comparisons be made, they’re neither to straight techno discs by the Chemical Brothers or Underworld, nor to stilted attempts at the music by U2 or David Bowie, but to Paul Simon’s Graceland. On that milestone, Simon let South African pop buoy and revitalize his music. In much the same way, Madonna looks for — and finds — a middle ground between her now-old-school approach and the new club music. She dresses her music up with her electronic love.
Strictly speaking, Ray of Light isn’t 100 percent pure techno. After all, it features traditionally structured pop melodies, and the music reflects Orbit’s less-than-edgy background in ambient-based mood music. Only once, on the sirenlike techno-glitter-ball of the title track, does the album kick into beats-per-minute frenzy. Instead, what Madonna and Orbit have done — and brilliantly at that — is to use electronica components as sonic window dressing. Hard-step beats and synth washes make the romantic-physical yearnings (and hooks) of ”Skin” and ”Nothing Really Matters” even tauter; the juxtaposition of fuzzy beats and soundtrack-score strings lends ”’Drowned World’ aka ‘My Substitute for Love”’ and ”Frozen” a wuthering-beats melodrama that’s often breathtaking. Throbbing yet meditative, Ray of Light is an adult’s version of dance music, with the dark timbres of Madonna’s nearing-40 voice its resolute center”.
Over twenty-three years after its release, I am still discovering new things from Ray of Light. An album that would be in my top-ten, I was blown away when it came out. It was a real revelation for a fourteen-year-old. Although Madonna has released sensational albums since 1998 (Confessions on a Dance Floor of 2005 might be the best album since then), I don’t think she has reached the peaks of Ray of Light. It is a sensational work. It is a childhood album that impacted me hard. Ray of Light is an album that…
WILL always mean so much.