Madonna

It's fairly understandable that, in the age of talent shows, where applause is won through high notes and virtuosic vocal runs, and pop music is all glitter and no substance, Madonna has stopped being a mainstream phenomenon. Fair enough, and frankly, there's little to worry about there. What strikes this writer as odd is that Madonna has never really managed to win over the critics, save for a handful of exceptions. Many don't even know that in 2008, when the American popstar was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, the celebratory concert for the occasion - while outside the venue the usual detractors held up signs reading "Madonna doesn't rock" - was headlined by someone who had quite literally helped write the history of rock music in person: Iggy Pop. Iggy & The Stooges even performed live a Madonna song from 10 years earlier: "Ray Of Light". Sure, having the Stooges cover your songs can be, for a musician, one of those moments that make a whole career worthwhile. And it's quite telling that the Iguana himself stated, in the documentary "Gimme Danger" that Jim Jarmusch dedicated to him, that he doesn't much care about being classified as this or that, but rather about "wanting to be". That applies pretty well to Madonna too, who throughout her whole career has never given a damn about labels, leaping from one version of herself to another and dodging every classification.

Never as much as with the 1998 album "Ray Of Light", however, did Madonna seem truly on the verge of winning over the critics. But it didn't last long, because today, almost thirty years on, that feat still seems to be met with utter indifference. And that's unfair, because "Ray Of Light" wasn't just one of Miss Ciccone's best albums, but also one of the decade's last great phenomena, proving that a record built on refined production, poised between techno and trip-hop, could still be a smash hit at the box office.

Already noteworthy for Mario Testino's Pre-Raphaelite-style cover art, the finest since the days of "True Blue" (with Herb Ritts' memorable shot), "Ray Of Light" shines right from the first single, "Frozen", which probably stunned even many of her most die-hard detractors. Those were the years of Massive Attack, Bjork and Prodigy. In fact, Madonna had worked with Massive Attack when recording "I Want You", and Björk had written the title track of her album "Bedtime Stories" for her. The previous year, 1997, Madonna had been blown away by Prodigy and their landmark "The Fat Of The Land". Word went round that she wanted to hire them as producers. Prodigy, however, nipped any possible collaboration in the bud through a series of statements to the press. Nowadays, with Metallica performing with Lady Gaga, the Rolling Stones playing alongside Ed Sheeran, and Paul McCartney performing for Rihanna, things might have turned out differently, but back then certain barriers still held firm.

Madonna, however, found another way to finally get a firm grip on the '90s. She had already tried repeatedly at the start of the decade with the singles "Vogue" and "Justify My Love": things seemed to be looking good, but they hadn't developed as hoped. "Erotica", despite its high quality, hadn't received the success it deserved, perhaps partly because the promotion focused too heavily on media provocation. Then came the time of "Evita", which, however, was just the remake of an old musical. Meanwhile, Madonna had managed to produce the debut album of Alanis Morissette, a record-breaking sales success for a debuting artist, but it wasn't an album she'd written and performed herself. Every now and then, here and there, a hit single would still pop up, but a full album capable of making a real impact was missing, one that would remind the world she was still number one. And so, finally, Madonna managed to seize hold of the 90's right as they were fading out, returning to sales levels that hadn't been seen for an album of new material since the end of the previous decade with "Like A Prayer".

"Ray Of Light" was even the first album by the "Like A Virgin" singer to win a Grammy Award (a feat later repeated in 2005 with "Confessions On A Dancefloor").

But what was the secret behind the most sophisticated work in Miss Ciccone's discography? First and foremost, the perfect synergy she struck up with William Orbit. Madonna discovered the British producer – at the time still relatively unknown to the wider public – by listening to several of his tracks, including his remixes of some of her own hits, such as "Justify My Love" and "I'll Remember". In the end, it would be Madonna herself who turned Orbit into a producer acclaimed the world over.

Either way, the chemistry between the two works wonderfully: William gives the songs – already written by Madonna together with Patrick Leonard and Rick Nowels – a cutting-edge sonic architecture, blending trip-hop, techno and retro or Eastern-tinged suggestions. "She's never boasted about her musical abilities, but she's a mature songwriter," the producer would later explain, adding: "She writes very solid melodic material." Nowels too would join the chorus of praise: "She knows how to channel ideas and put a song together. She doesn't just improvise melodies. She understands what a verse and a chorus need to be, where to place a bridge, how to make the melodies work."

Madonna thus finds herself surrounded by a thicket of synths, bleeps, loops and samples, putting her honeyed vocals at the service of an entirely new sound. The result is a refined, mature record, streaked with psychedelic shades, right from the dreamy intro of the opener "Substitute For Love". The second track is already a tour de force: "Swim", recorded in tears the day after the murder of Gianni Versace, hits its mark with a searing electric guitar riff and a more driving rhythm.

A perfect fusion of new-age spirituality and sensuality, Zen mysticism and technological pulse, the album reaches absolute peaks with the icy single "Frozen", a fertile hybrid of world music and trip-hop, built on a convoluted, rarefied synthetic arrangement that pairs with Arabic-tinged percussion and a delicate melody. An Eastern-flavoured symphonic poem, magnificently performed by Madonna (so much for anyone who doubts her abilities as a vocalist), for which she once again turned to Patrick Leonard for the writing, already co-author of many of her hits in the Eighties, including the orchestral pop of "Papa Don't Preach", whose sweeping string intro "Frozen" seems to want to inherit, albeit in a less minuet-like and more spiritual, enigmatic key. Equally notable is the other single "The Power Of Goodbye", with its supple stride set within a glittering electronic frame, amid sampled strings and swirling synths, narrating the end of a love story in compassionate tones: "Freedom comes when you learn to let go/ Creation comes when you learn to say no" ("La libertà arriva quando impari a lasciar andare/ La creazione arriva quando impari a dire no").

But even seemingly minor moments prove fully successful, from the hypnotic techno trance of "Candy Perfumed Girl" to the tense, dark atmospheres of "Skin", from the Indian-inflected world music of "Shanti/Ashtangi", almost a reworked version of the Beatles' "Within You Without You", to the innovative electronic bossa nova of "To Have Not To Hold", influenced by listening to Astrud Gilberto (a similarly masterful move, entirely overlooked, will be repeated by Madonna on her 2019 album "Madame X", reinventing fado over a synth-pop base).

The last single would instead be "Nothing Really Matters", the most dance-oriented track on the record, alongside the driving acid house of the title track: another perfectly constructed song, harking back to the years when Madonna had been the queen of the dancefloor. But its author would in fact choose to clip its wings, shifting attention to a new single, "Beautiful Stranger", not included on the album but again made together with Orbit. Clearly, over a year after the release of "Ray Of Light", Madonna was already looking ahead.

The lyrics range between mysticism (the aforementioned "Shanti/Ashtangi" is an adaptation of a text drawn from the "Yoga Taravali" by Shankara Acharya, sung entirely in Sanskrit) and autobiographical matters, with little Lourdes at the centre of the tender lullabies "Little Star" and "Drowned World/Substitute For Love" ("I traded fame for love... Now I find I've changed my mind/ This is my religion", she sings on the latter). As if her new status as a mother had given Madonna a fresh surge of introspection and mysticism. In the hypnotic "Mer Girl", on the other hand, the former Material Girl confronts her relationship with her family, in particular the trauma of losing her mother and of her mother's lifeless body, describing her with the Anglo-French phrase "girl of the sea".

Closer to Bjork than to Donna Summer, and just a step away from new age, the Madonna of "Ray Of Light" reveals herself to be a polished singer-songwriter and a mature woman, grappling with new generational concerns, from motherhood (the album's true key theme) to that restless spiritual quest that would draw her ever closer to Kabbalah.

But the achievement of "Ray Of Light" would not be enough for Madonna to definitively win over the scepticism of critics. So in the years that followed, amid new successes – the lucky return to dance music of the single "Music" and of the entire "Confessions On A Dancefloor" – and more than one misstep, further underscored by a few tasteless public appearances, Miss Ciccone would still find herself having to prove something, despite her impeccable pedigree as a skilled and visionary popstar, decisively influential for entire legions of imitators. And probably not even the million and a half spectators gathered on Copacabana beach for the most imposing concert of her career, an astonishing last stand of unrivalled tenacity, will be enough to make her be reassessed by the media that consider her past her prime, or by the most hardline critics for whom it's as if she never existed. Perhaps this is the price to be paid by those who don't try to be something, but simply to be.

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28/02/2026