FEATURE:
Impressive Instant
most important albums Madonna ever released. In 1998, she released Ray of Light. That was perhaps the most successful and acclaimed albums of her career. It was this reinvention that few expected. Two years after that, when Music was released, there were so many eyes on her. Her first album of the twenty-first century. A simple title, it was hard to tell what was in store when listening to her eighth studio album. Released on 18th September, 2000, I want to look inside Music ahead of its twenty-fifth anniversary. Whereas Madonna was the leading Pop artist of the 1980s and would inspire artists that followed, by 2000, there was a new crop of artists that were on vogue. Those that she had influenced. Even though this was a new Madonna album, there was still more focus on younger and newer artists like Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera. Music’s title track was released on 21st August, 2000. It was an intriguing sign into what the album would sound like. Electronic sounds still at the fore, though a slightly different sound compared to Ray of Light. Madonna’s collaborations with Mirwais Ahmadzaï and William Orbit resulted in a more experimental album. The second single, Don’t Tell Me, bringing in Country influences. Music went to number in multiple countries, including the U.S. and U.K. It is one of Madonna’s best albums. I will end with reviews of Music and some album ranking lists that show Music high up the order.
Before getting there, there are features about Music that are worth bringing in. I wonder if any new ones will be published ahead of the twenty-fifth anniversary. In 2020, Albumism marked twenty years of Music. Madonna could have repeated what she did with Ray of Light. Instead, she brought in new collaborators and, with it, a new canvas to work from. The results are extraordinary:
“The scripting for Music started in September 1999 and stretched into the incipient half of 2000. Guiding the sessions for the project was Madonna’s desire to maintain the album-oriented cohesion emblematic of Bedtime Stories (1994) and Ray of Light (1998). As she had on those two anterior efforts, a partial “changing of the guard” was enacted, but William Orbit—Madonna’s chief partner on Ray of Light—remained. Together, they drafted “Runaway Lover” and “Amazing,” two selections that revisited the vibrant psychedelics and polite digital accents of “Beautiful Stranger” and “American Pie.”
The expected infusion of new blood was demarcated by additional collaborations with writer-producers Guy Sigsworth, Damian LeGassick, Mark Stent, Talvin Singh and Joe Henry—Madonna’s brother-in-law—all of whom aided in further rounding out the record. However, stationed to primary production and co-writing duties in tandem with Madonna for six sides on Music was Mirwais Ahmadzaï. Their paths crossed at the onset of the album’s birth, à la Madonna’s manager Guy Oseary, when the French song constructionist submitted a demo tape to her Maverick Records imprint for consideration. While Ahmadzaï didn’t end up onboarding at Maverick, his avant-gardist approach sparked an instant connection between both parties.
Opposite to the warming techniques employed for the electronica found on Ray of Light, Music fostered Madonna’s interest in juxtaposing organic and inorganic sounds. Whether it is the serrated, electro-hop edge of the title piece, the amber-hued acoustica of “I Deserve It,” or the string-laden “Paradise (Not For Me)”, Music is an eclectic study of electro-funk, folktronica and chamber pop finery—amongst other sonic textures.
Focusing on the guitar work on “I Deserve It,” the instrument became a lively foil to the twitchy production gadgetry that buzzed on that entry as well as “Nobody’s Perfect” and “Don’t Tell Me.” Although not necessarily in the league of Orbit, Sigsworth or any of the other seasoned guitarists at work on Music, Madonna taught herself to play the acoustic variation of the instrument—this was yet another layer of compositional complexity added to the LP.
Madonna further pursued exploring the aesthetic space between the natural and the artificial as a singer on Music. The limited, artful use of the vocoder—notably on “Impressive Instant” and “Nobody’s Perfect”—is beautifully contrasted against Madonna’s unadorned vocals on “What It Feels Like for a Girl” and “Gone.” The former selection is a stirring examination of girlhood anxieties—crowned with a striking Charlotte Gainsbourg quote from the 1993 film The Cement Garden—that signposts one of two topical arcs that inform the collection: introspection and levity.
Two decades parted from its launch, Music is one of four records in a stratum to denote an imperial period for Madonna (creatively) which spanned from 1994 to 2003. I remarked about the staying power of this effort in my book Record Redux: Madonna, “Music proclaimed that Madonna could party, contemplate and sustain her visionary proclivities all on one album.” Music is a singular example that anything was possible for Madonna when she fixed her sights solely upon her craft—only the sky was the limit of her reach in those days”.
I am moving to a feature from Stereogum from 2000. They heralded an album that contained “Thudding big-room electro-house, aggressive vocal manipulation, ecstatic lyrical meaninglessness, acoustic guitars chopped up and refracted into unrecognizable shapes, joyous hedonism, robot voices, the half-ironic embrace of cowboy kitsch”:
“Madonna again worked with William Orbit, who produced most of the least-interesting songs from Music. But the main force behind the album’s sound was Mirwais, a 40-year-old French producer who’d once been in a new wave band called Taxi Girl. Mirwais’ sound — sleek, robotic, rooted in house and disco, clean to the point where it was almost harsh — owed a whole lot to the French filter-house of the late ’90s, Daft Punk in particular. But then, Daft Punk probably owed something to Taxi Girl, so maybe it all comes out in the wash. Guy Oseary, the co-founder of Madonna’s Maverick label, had given Madonna a Mirwais CD, thinking that maybe Mirwais would be a good signing for the label. Instead, Madonna instantly decided that Mirwais would be the ideal collaborator.
At first, things didn’t work out quite so smoothly. Mirwais spoke no English, and his manager had to translate for him at the recording sessions, which drove Madonna nuts. Eventually, though, things clicked. Early in her career, Madonna had been a product of early-’80s club culture. Working with Mirwais, she recaptured some of that euphoric frivolity. Her lyrics on the clubbiest Music tracks can sometimes verge on gibberish: “Do you like to boogie-woogie?,” “I like to singy-singy-singy like a bird on a wingy-wingy-wingy.” But that meaninglessness worked for her. She sounded like she was having fun.
Mirwais put Madonna’s voice over mechanized thumps and fed it through voice-warping filters, giving her a cyborg sheen. On some level, this gleaming artificiality may have been a reaction to Cher, who’d had a global late-career smash with “Believe” a year and a half earlier. Cher had sung over Euro-house thump and used the brand-new Auto-Tune plug-in to make herself sound practically alien. But Cher was still working within a pretty standard ’90s dance-pop framework. Madonna’s hard, blocky sonics were fresher and cleaner, and they gave her a weird resonance in an era of dominant teen-pop stars like Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera. (Kylie Minogue, Madonna’s fellow ’80s survivor, pulled off something similar on her Fever album a year later.)
On the Music album cover and on tour, Madonna wore campy cowgirl gear, getting as far as she could from the gothy earth-mother looks she was rocking in the Ray Of Light era. It all feels like a conscious effort to strip away any lingering shreds of ’90s-style sincerity. Smart move. Very few of Madonna’s peers — maybe Kylie Minogue, possibly Janet Jackson — were able to handle the new-century zeitgeist that intuitively.
It didn’t last. Music was a smash — a triple platinum album that debuted at #1 and launched two top-10 singles and a lucrative global tour. But by the time she made her next album, the forced and grating 2003 flop American Life, Madonna was playing catch-up to electroclash. Madonna has had hits in the past 20 years, but most of those hits have been attempts to pander to the tastes of the moment, not to drive those tastes. Still, give Madonna credit. In the summer of 2000, 17 years into her pop-star career, a 42-year-old Madonna could talk about “the future of sound.” And she could be right.
I am keen to come to this review from Pitchfork from 2023. They assessed this huge record that brought people together. I think that it is one of Madonna’s best albums, though it is also one of the most underrated. If you have not heard this album in a while then I would recommend you play it in full:
“Music is a wonky, maximalist record—a far cry from the sleek and limpid techno of Ray of Light. For the first time in her career, Madonna told Tatler, she had given herself license to relax: “OK, you don’t have to win any races.” The absence of internal pressure opened space to experiment and get downright strange. Mirwais filled the songs on Music with bizarre, avant-garde touches: On “Music,” Madonna’s vocal is frequently stacked out of time, as if the song is playing over itself; a vocodered voice asking “Do you like to boogie-woogie?” is as present as Madonna herself. “I like to singy-singy-singy/Like a bird on a wingy-wingy-wingy,” she trills deliriously on “Impressive Instant.” Unlike the records she made before or after, Music is absent concept; it feels guided by first thought, and is often intentionally ridiculous in a way few (or no) other Madonna records are.
Mirwais, more than any producer Madonna had worked with before, was interested in the voice as an instrument to be manipulated and remolded. On “Impressive Instant” and “Paradise (Not for Me),” his vocoder makes Madonna sound like an alien diva, alternately nasal and mischievous and disturbingly disembodied. She had heard Mirwais’ Auto-Tune work—he claims his 2000 solo cut “Naïve Song” was the “1st electro track with Auto-Tune FX on vocals”—and asked to use the effect on Music; the resulting ballad, “Nobody’s Perfect,” is ghostly and forlorn, its self-lacerating lyrics made more piercing by the vocal processing. At the time, Auto-Tune was best known as the “Cher effect” and synonymous with euphoric dance pop. Its inverted application on “Nobody’s Perfect” presaged Radiohead’s use of the technique on 2001’s Amnesiac and the wounded android pop ballads of the 2010s. But Mirwais also recognized when to hold back, and on the steadfast and optimistic “I Deserve It,” the vocals are totally dry. Madonna has never been a particularly soul-baring lyricist, and Mirwais’ detail-oriented production allowed for clean emotional delineation between each song: one alienated and upsetting, the other expressing personal affirmation.
Other songs feel like the perfect synthesis of dozens of disparate strands of ’90s pop. “Don’t Tell Me,” the album’s most indelible song and one of Madonna’s best-ever singles, plays like Sheryl Crow’s “Strong Enough” as remixed by Timbaland. A guitar part loops and rewinds, occasionally halting to give way to a grand, glacial string break, à la Moby’s Play. (Madonna had hoped to work with Moby on what would become Music, but plans never came to fruition.) “Don’t Tell Me” began as a demo by Joe Henry, a cult singer-songwriter married to Madonna’s sister Melanie. Henry had written the song “in 25 minutes” in order to test the gear in his new studio; when he played the demo for his wife, she told him she could hear Madonna singing it. Madonna overhauled the track completely, turning it from a noirish, Tom Waits-style tango into something rhythmic, defiant, and contemporary. Although she barely changed Henry’s original lyrics, they play like commentary on her reception in popular culture at the turn of the century. From the moment she turned 40, the media had hungered for signs of Madonna’s imminent irrelevance, but in the song’s simple terms, she refuted any idea that she should be going into middle age quietly: “Don’t tell me to stop/Tell the rain not to drop/Tell the wind not to blow.”
She was rebellious as ever, but the shift that had occurred on Ray of Light wasn’t just a pose: Madonna was a more benevolent figure now than she had been in the early part of her career. Although she occasionally rolled her eyes at the mention of Britney, she saw her younger self reflected in the new generation of female pop stars, and recognized an opportunity to support them. While promoting Music, she sometimes wore T-shirts that read “Britney Spears” in rhinestones, and used interviews to decry Spears’ treatment in the media. While recording, Madonna said, she’d thought about her own place in the world, at one point realizing that, as she put it to Interview, “Smart, sassy girls who accomplish a lot and have their own cash and are independent are really frightening to men. I felt like ‘Why didn’t somebody tell me? Why didn’t somebody warn me?’”
Music codifies that warning. Although much of the record is about love and hedonism, another thread runs through songs such as “Amazing” and “Runaway Lover”: the idea that women will often be left high and dry by men, and by the world at large. The apotheosis of this theme arrives during “What It Feels Like for a Girl,” Music’s emotional climax. Produced by Guy Sigsworth, “What It Feels Like for a Girl” is something like Madonna’s take on a Dido ballad, with plush synths wrapped around the album’s purest, most traditional hook. It is a beautiful yet slightly baffling song: For every lyric that’s cutting and totally earnest (“When you open up your mouth to speak/Could you be a little weak?”) there’s a mention of “tight blue jeans” or “lips as sweet as candy.” Then again, it’s not a song of empowerment so much as a plea. Madonna wrote it while in the process of moving to London and hiding her pregnancy, fed up with the fact that she was the one having to make accommodations in her relationship. The lyrics are universal, but still hard to separate from the memory of the brazen, armored pop star who debuted in 1982, so consciously invulnerable to the standards of the world around her.
On Music, along with Ray of Light and Music’s maligned, arguably misunderstood follow-up American Life, Madonna was at her most analytical and most reflective. She has never written a memoir; these three records do as good a job as any book would, exploring her relationship with her parents, her children, and American culture at large. On “Gone,” Music’s final track, she seemingly makes a pact for the future: “Selling out is not my thing,” she sings. “Turn to stone/Lose my faith/I’ll be gone before it happens.” It was a promise she couldn’t keep. Twenty-three years later, she’s only rarely reached the same artistic heights (2005’s Confessions on a Dance Floor being a notable exception) and was never again as commercially successful: Music sold 4 million copies in its first 10 days of release, and its title track became Madonna’s final Hot 100 No. 1 to date. As the definitive end of an imperial phase, though, Music stands as a document of Madonna’s artistry at its wildest and most free”.
I shall end by quoting from album ranking features and where Music was placed. SPIN placed Music in their feature from last year (“Madonna reunited with William Orbit for three songs on Music that continue in the vein of Ray of Light, but the more intriguing and commercially successful half of the album came from Mirwais. His halting, glitchy aesthetic was like a shock to the system when “Music” hit the American charts, and deep cuts like “Impressive Instant” take that sound to even weirder and more entertaining extremes. “It’s the first Madonna record in years that feels as effortless as the dance-pop of her Ciccone youth,” Alex Pappademas wrote in the SPIN review of Music”). Music came in ninth in a 2015 feature from Billboard. (“That doesn’t mean that Music was hard to get into, though: the title track remains a chart-topping triumph that united the bourgeoisie and the rebel, “Impressive Instant” sounds like Madonna mashed up with a lost cut from Daft Punk’s Homework album, and “Don’t Tell Me” — with its looped guitar lick and subtle vocal take — is one of Madge’s most under-appreciated singles ever. Time has been good to Music, an album where Madonna expanded her worldview while remaining true to her core”). In 2023, writers from The Guardian debated as to which Madonna album was best.
Chal Ravens campaigned for Music (“Madonna approached the new millennium with her usual spirit of reinvention: “Hey Mr DJ, put a record on.” Ray of Light producer William Orbit was enlisted for early sessions, but his euphoric trance-pop had by then trickled down to lesser stars like Mel C. Madonna needed something new. She found it on a demo by French unknown Mirwais Ahmadzaï. Drafted in for six songs, his micro-chopped grooves (Impressive Instant) and sad robofunk (Nobody’s Perfect) could have only come from the land of Daft Punk and Air. He also had the bold idea to cut the reverb on Madonna’s vocals – central to the airiness of Ray of Light – and the resulting dryness lends Music an unusual intimacy. It all gels to perfection on Don’t Tell Me, where finger-picked guitar and compressed vocals intertwine with post-Björk strings and a hydraulic hip-hop bassline: cyber-country on the brink of a new millennium. And while Madonna’s politics have been patchy at times, Music contains one of her most enduring explorations of gender in the dreamy What It Feels Like for a Girl. Somehow she managed to follow up the best Madonna album with, perhaps, the best Madonna album”). Turning twenty-five on 18th September, the majestic and magnificent Music still has this freshness. You can hear the artists of today who are inspired by it. If it is not ranked in the top five Madonna albums, that is not to say Music is inferior. In fact, it has dated much better than many of her albums. This 2000 release was a massive commercial success and won a lot of positive reviews. I hope that it gets some new love on its twenty-fifth anniversary. I was seventeen when Music came out. I admired the album the minute I heard it. An assuredly forward-thinking and captivating album from…
THE queen of Pop.