[Nancy.]

Tori Amos:

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Nelly Furtado:

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Nelly was also Madonna's unapologetic b!tch on the RH tour...
(skip to 2:37)

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[Nancy.]

LOVE Dita Von Teese...

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More from Dita here at 01:54

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Zac Efron:

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George Michael and Kylie Minogue at Madonna's MDNA tour in 2012:

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Robyn at the MDNA tour:

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Paris Hilton:

[Nancy.]

Dua Lipa:

https://www.vogue.com/article/dua-li...erry-fka-twigs

Madonna Since I was very young, I’ve seen Madonna’s music videos on TV; I’ve seen her live performances on YouTube. She’s been such an influential artist for so many generations. It’s always very exciting to see how adventurous she has been onstage—what her persona is, with all the dances and the outfit changes. The Jean Paul Gaultier bustier, that’s my favorite! It didn’t matter what anyone said as long as she felt confident and comfortable, and that’s [something] to aspire to. Be feminine, be sexy, be confident. There’s so much strength behind that.

[Nancy.]

Katy Perry:

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Katy at the Rebel Heart tour:

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[Nancy.]

Tina Turner:

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Madonna, Tina and Courtney Love:

[Nancy.]

Lionel Richie:

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Nicki Minaj:

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Taylor Swift:

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Sam Smith:

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[Pete.]

Where’s the like a prayer album love

[Nancy.]

Originally Posted by Pete.

Where’s the like a prayer album love

It's her best album... but I haven't listened to it for ages. (Heard it so many times)

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Picture Disc




Cassette:

[Nancy.]

The initial pressing of "Like a Prayer" on CD, cassette and vinyl was scented with patchouli to give it the essence of church incense. "She wanted to create a flavor of the '60s and the church. She wanted to create a sensual feeling you could hear and smell," a spokesperson for Warner Bros. Records said at the time.



(My original pressings still smell of Patchouli)

It also included an insert offering "The Facts About AIDS," with safe sex guidelines.

AIDS insert:

[Nicky91]

Taylor Swift saying something positive about Madonna, oooh

[Nancy.]

Yes, she usually makes shady comments towards other female artists, so I was surprised by that. She must really love Madonna.

Back to LAP.
Here's the iconic video's...

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[Nicky91]

Originally Posted by Nancy.

Yes, she usually makes shady comments towards other female artists, so I was surprised by that. She must really love Madonna.

perhaps Taylor is a little calculating that if she would make nasty comments towards Madonna, some fans might be put off by her

sorry but i don't fall for her sudden miss nice girl act


and i feel so glad not being a Taylor fan, i hate stuck up brats

[Nancy.]

Billboard:
https://www.billboard.com/articles/r...y-track-review

To celebrate its anniversary on March 21, here's our track-by-track look back at Madonna's classic studio album, 1989's "Like A Prayer."

By early 1989, the world had come to know Madonna as a dance-pop provocateur with quirky-sexy style. She was the biggest female celebrity on the planet, and yet for all her fame, few realized just how much pain and self-doubt this soon-to-be-divorced 30-year-old lapsed Catholic from Detroit was carting around. With “Like a Prayer,” that would all change.

Recorded amid the dissolution of her marriage to actor Sean Penn, “Like a Prayer” was Madonna’s most introspective and eclectic album to date. Unlike the three that came before, it blended classic psychedelic rock with then-current synth-pop sounds. And now, a quarter-century after its March 21, 1989 release, it doesn’t sound a bit dated. Lyrically, it’s about growing up, moving on from bad romance, and getting right with God and family. At least two of the songs center on the death of Madonna’s mother, a childhood trauma that had a strong part in making the singer who she is.

Before “Like a Prayer” was even released, Madonna made it clear this wouldn’t be just another album. Three weeks before the release, she debuted the video for the title track, the first of five top 20 Hot 100 singles spawned from the album. Featuring depictions of murder, interracial love, and cross burnings, the clip juxtaposed notions of religious and sexual ecstasy, leaving some folks puzzled and just about everyone talking. Catholics denounced her; Pepsi dropped ads featuring her (and ended plans to sponsor her tour). Fans, of course, ate it up.

Controversy aside, “Like a Prayer” is among Madonna’s finest moments, and over the next 10 tracks, its namesake album never lets up. It’s funky, poignant, and even a little kooky. And while Madonna is the quintessential singles artist, this chart-topping LP stands as one of her most fully realized collection of songs. Read on for our classic track-by-track review.

“Like a Prayer”
What a way to start an album. First, distorted guitars and a heavy thud. From there, a pop-gospel workout that’s as enigmatic as it is invigorating. It’s “Thriller” meets Catholic mysticism, and "Like A Prayer" works just as well without its vivid video. No wonder it shot to No. 1 on the Hot 100 a month after its release.

“Express Yourself”
The party moves from the church to Madonna’s posh high-rise, where she looks at her jewels and satin sheets and decides she’d rather have a man who’s in touch with his feelings. It’s her brassy, funky version of “Can’t Buy Me Love,” and it climbed all the way to No. 2 on the Hot 100.

“Love Song”
This collab between Madonna and Prince is the ‘80s-pop equivalent of Wonder Woman teaming up with Batman. Given the star power, the track feels a touch slight, and as Prince’s signature scratchy disco guitar breaks through Madonna’s synths, the divergent musical sensibilities make like the lovers in the lyrics—they don’t quite connect.

“Till Death Do Us Part”
As her tumultuous marriage to actor Sean Penn comes to an end, Madonna reflects on the well-publicized fights—“He starts to scream / the vases fly”—and emotional distance that doomed the couple. The skittering guitar or keyboard part creates a frazzled feel that contrasts nicely with Madonna’s assured vocals.

“Promise to Try”
Seemingly a straightforward song about the death of Madonna’s mother, this piano ballad is actually rather complex. She’s singing to her devastated five-year-old self, and in addition to offering some advice for coping—“Don’t you forget her face”—she asks for forgiveness. She knows she’s made mistakes, and she fears she’s let her mother and herself down.

“Cherish”
A welcome reprieve after “Promise to Try,” the album’s third single is a frolicking pop confection about true love. The only conceivable reason this thing didn't quite make it to No. 1: America likes its Madonna a little edgier.

“Dear Jessie”
This playful psych-pop fantasia could have come from Prince’s “Around the World In a Day” album, though the Purple One had nothing to do with it. Madonna wrote and produced it with Patrick Leonard, whose young daughter was the inspiration. Listening back, it’s obvious Madonna was destined for motherhood.

“Oh Father”
A companion of sorts to “Promise to Try,” this song about Madonna’s strained relationship with her father leaves little to the imagination. As a child, she felt betrayed by his decision to remarry, and in a 1989 sit-down with Interview magazine, she traced her rebellious, independent spirit back to the sinking feeling her lone surviving parent had been “taken away” by her stepmother. Though it’s hardly a feel-good track, it resonated with listeners and reached No. 20.

“Keep It Together”
As the preceding eight tracks attest, Madonna had some familial issues. But on this mid-tempo synth-funk tune, she offers an olive branch to her estranged father and siblings, insisting that blood “is thicker than any circumstance.” A No. 8 hit in March 1990, “Keep It Together” is a tense groover.

“Spanish Eyes”
This Latin-flavored guitar ballad is either about AIDS or gang violence, and the ambiguity—a topic of debate among fans to this day—shows just how far Madonna had come since “Everybody” and “Borderline.”

“Act of Contrition”
Having spent the previous 10 tracks digging into some pretty deep emotions, Madonna takes a minute to decompress. Amid wailing guitars and backwards tape loops, she empties the contents of her head, and in the hilarious coda, she’s not sure if she’s confessing her sins and reserving a place in heaven or booking a room at a trendy hotel. “What do you mean it’s not in the computer?” she asks, ending the record in true Madonna fashion, with a big old wink.

[Nancy.]

Pitchfork:
https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums...like-a-prayer/

Madonna’s spectacular fourth album revealed just how grand, artistic, and personal a pop star could be at the very height of her fame.

Read the reviews of Madonna’s blockbuster 1989 album Like a Prayer and you’ll see a lot of confession-related imagery—not because of how her career had been steeped in Catholicism, but because of the narratives surrounding the superstar as she geared up to release her fourth album. She tried to act on screen in Who’s That Girl and on stage in David Mamet’s Speed-the-Plow; she turned 30; her tabloid-dominating marriage to bad-boy actor Sean Penn had ended. “Was this to be her atonement?” brayed the subtext.

These were ideal conditions for listeners to use an album by pop’s most notorious—and most famous—woman as diary pages, but to at least one interviewer, Madonna bristled at the concept. “People don’t see that you can take some of your experiences from real life and use part of them in your art,” Madonna told Vogue in May 1989. “They try to make everything an absolute truth.” Yet elsewhere, she also noted that Like a Prayer was in part about her taking greater control of her narrative. “My first couple of albums I would say came from the little girl in me, who is interested only in having people like me, in being entertaining and charming and frivolous and sweet,” Madonna told Interview in May 1989. “And this new one is the adult side of me, which is concerned with being brutally honest.”

While Madonna was no shrinking violet during the first chunk of the ’80s—the decade of Madonna wannabes, MTV Video Music Awards-ready wedding dresses, and “controversial” her officially recognized prefix—Like a Prayer does showcase her growth as a pop artist, from the gnarled guitar that opens its title track all the way through its warped-tape closer “Act of Contrition.” She takes more chances lyrically and musically, and while they don’t always work, they do give a glimpse at her restlessness and increased willingness to take musical chances, whether she’s bringing in Prince or letting her voice’s imperfections into songs or taking on heavy, personal-life-adjacent topics.

“Like a Prayer,” with its lyrics of redemption derived from spiritual surrender or some sort of sex act (or a combination of the two) and roof-raising gospel choir, shimmies and saunters, Madonna using its lite-funk building blocks to anchor a giddy sing-along. “Express Yourself” is led by one of Madonna’s most bravado vocals, ready-made for lustily singing along with in a mirror or on a tense solo elevator ride. Though it’s worth noting that the version on Like a Prayer sounds anemic compared to the utterly superior Shep Pettibone single remix, which foregrounds the cowbell and makes the bouncing-ball bassline a go-on-girl counterpoint to Madonna’s message.

“Till Death Do Us Part,” on first blush, comes off like a breakup-themed update of earlier Madonna synth-pop offerings, like True Blue’s “Jimmy Jimmy,” or Like A Virgin’s “Angel.” She sings of feeling bereft over chiming synths and popping guitars—“When you laugh it cuts me just like a knife/I’m not your friend, I’m just your little wife,” she sighs. But the glittery vibes and hopped-up tempo take on a sinister edge in later verses, sounding more glassy-eyed as Madonna’s world-weary alter ego narrates the dissolving love and as the disturbing imagery—fading bruises, growing hate, flying vases—piles up. The final verse, which describes the circular nature of abusive relationships and which punctuates the titular phrase with the sound of shattered-glass, only adds to the song’s despair. Its follow-up “Promise to Try”—a slowly building ballad directed toward a young girl who’s struggling with the death of her mother—is mournful, the loneliness it describes sitting uncomfortably close to the cycle depicted in “Till Death.”

The windswept textures of “Oh Father”—loping pianos, drooping strings—give Madonna’s voice room to move. It swoops and swerves in a childlike voice as she sings of an ambivalent father-daughter relationship. Madonna’s mezzo, which wobbled on low notes and sometimes felt stretched in its upper registers, was often tsk-tsked by her critics, but her vulnerable vocal on “Oh Father” also shows why her music was so beloved; even if she’s singing of characters, as she claimed to Vogue, her gasps and shivers gave voice to the complex dynamic so many children have with their parents—whether biological, by marriage, adoptive, or spiritual.

That was, in part, an outgrowth of Madonna performing in the studio with her backing musicians. “We had every intention of going back and fixing the vocals, but then we’d listen to them and say, ‘Why? They’re fine,’” she told Interview. “They were a lot more emotional and spontaneous when I did them with the musicians… There are weird sounds that your throat makes when you sing: p’s are popped, and s’s are hissed, things like that. Just strange sounds that come out of your throat, and I didn’t fix them. I didn’t see why I should. Because I think those sounds are emotions too.”

The emotions on Like a Prayer aren’t all fraught. “Cherish” is a feather-light declaration of devotion that calls back to Cali-pop outfit the Association while updating Madonna’s earlier exercise in retroism “True Blue”; “Dear Jessie” engages in the reaching toward sounding “Beatles-esque” that was in vogue at the time, pairing fussy strings and tick-tock percussion with images of pink elephants and flying leprechauns. “Love Song,” meanwhile, is a synth-funk chiffon co-written by none other than Prince, one of Madonna’s few pop equals at the time. The two of them feel locked in an erotically charged session of truth or dare, each challenging the other to stretch their voices higher while the drum machines churn. Prince also played, initially uncredited, on “Like a Prayer,” the sauntering pop-funk track “Keep It Together,” and the album-closing “Act of Contrition,” a two-minute maelstrom that combines Prince’s guitar heroics, backward-masked bits from the title track, heavy beats, and its title inspiration, the Catholic prayer of… confession.

So maybe Madonna’s protests that Like a Prayer wasn’t autobiographical were a bit of a ruse—or just another way to keep the minds of America’s pop-watchers thinking about her music as she gave them an album where she was less afraid to show her flaws, more willing to try on new personas that had bits of her selves attached. After all, as she told The New York Times in 1989, “What I do is total commercialism, but it’s also art.” Like a Prayer straddles those two ideals with gusto, with even its less satisfying moments adding to the heat given off by the MTV era’s brightest star.

[Nicky91]

nice information


btw just sent a pm with some songs from a current romanian superstar who also has lots of underrated hits, her voice is so soft so beautiful, i prefer soft voices to the overscreaming ones

[Nancy.]

Huffington Post:

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry...b099c777b9dd42

Why Madonna’s ‘Like A Prayer’ Is The Most Important Album Ever Made By A Female Artist

29 years ago, Madonna released what is not only her best album to date, but also what could be the most important release ever by a female artist. That’s not to say that Like a Prayer is the best album ever by a female artist, but it’s pretty close. After six years of being considered pop fluff and a disco dolly, Madonna was finally taken seriously by most music critics in 1989. Still, Like a Prayer deserved even more than bewildering critical acclaim.

If Madonna and misogyny weren’t practically synonyms, Like a Prayer would have not only won several Grammys in 1990 (it didn’t even earn any major nominations), but it would be widely praised for its songwriting and production 28 years later. If a man delivered the same type of vocals Madonna did on Like a Prayer, critics would note that his voice isn’t technically perfect, but distinct, melodic, and full of emotion. When it comes to Madonna, who certainly could never hit the notes of Aretha Franklin or Whitney Houston, it’s just easier for people to say that she “can’t sing.”

For people (especially millennials) to understand how important Like a Prayer is to culture and music, they have to comprehend the repressive environment Madonna’s album arrived to in March of 1989. The late 1980s was ruled by the religious right, who believed AIDS was a curse God gave to the gay community. Women who were outspoken or wore revealing clothes were referred to as sluts, *****s, bit**es, etc. Police brutality among African Americans was still widely accepted without much of a backlash. And interracial dating was still considered a taboo.

With all of this in mind, let’s analyze why Like a Prayer is such a milestone of an album.

The “Like a Prayer” Video

The “Like a Prayer” video has provocative imagery that caused the religious right to wet its pants. However, none of the imagery, which is used for pure symbolism, is blasphemous. Most importantly, “Like a Prayer” is a video that shows the viewer racism, sexism, and police brutality. It urges them to think and overcome it — this is something that wasn’t considered “cool” in 1989. The idea of a “Black Jesus” was also considered blasphemous to some, especially the religious right.

The aftermath of “Like a Prayer” was groundbreaking in that Madonna beat the religious right at their own attempted game of censorship. Their efforts caused Pepsi to drop Madonna as a spokesperson, but they completely failed at hurting Madonna’s success or censoring the video. The “Like a Prayer” single and video hit No. 1 and remain widely loved classics almost 30 years later. Madonna paved the way for other artists to not only challenge the religious right, but win.

“Like a Prayer” Song

Even if you aren’t convinced that the “Like a Prayer” video is an artistic masterpiece, the song “Like a Prayer” has stood on its own. Not only has Rolling Stone and Billboard praised it as one of the best pop songs of all time, but the song has become a spiritual classic, even for those who aren’t fans of Madonna.
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“Like a Prayer” became the highlight of Live 8 in 2005, and it was also one of the highlights of the 2010 Hope for Haiti concert. It was also prominently featured in Madonna’s 2012 Super Bowl Halftime show. Any live performance of the song is sure to whip the audience into a frenzy.

Express Yourself
This decade, “Express Yourself” is mostly known as the song that inspired (maybe a little too much) Lady Gaga’s self-empowerment LGBT anthem “Born This Way.” However, as Gay Times Magazine notes, “Express Yourself” has become an empowering anthem for the LGBT community as well. However, in the late 1980s, the song was mostly known as a female empowerment anthem. “Don’t go for second best baby” became a catch phrase for strong women who were sick of being treated like second class citizens from men and other women who still subscribed to the patriarchy.

AIDS Activism

The pamphlet on AIDS Madonna included with each copy of Like a Prayer alone proves that the notion of Madonna being a bad role model and having a bad influence on Generation X (especially women and teenagers) just isn’t true. Madonna educated many about AIDS and safe sex at a time when schools, the media, and religious institutions stayed away from the topic. A move like this in 1989 could have hurt a showbiz career, but Madonna survived and thrived by doing the right thing and, possibly, helping to save lives at the same time.

Pop Music Meets Art

A Rolling Stone review by J.D. Considine from April of 1989 correctly noted that Like a Prayer was “as close to art as pop music gets.” The album touched on topics such as childhood innocence, childhood loss, child abuse, spousal abuse, women’s rights, and spirituality. It mixed all of these themes together to not only make the listener think and dance, but ask questions as well — some of which were risky to ask in 1989. Like a Prayer proved that an artist can mix style and substance in order to break societal and musical barriers. 28 years later, many pop artists, including Madonna herself, are trying to hit all the correct spots Like a Prayer hit, but they just don’t have the same effect.

[Nicky91]

what a legend she truly is

[Nancy.]

Originally Posted by Nicky91

what a legend she truly is

[Nancy.]

The lead single, "Frozen" from her award winning "Ray of Light" album is 20 years old today!

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[Nancy.]

Ultrasound: The making of the "Frozen" video...

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[Nancy.]

20 years ago on this exact day...

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[Withano]

Came on this thread just to see who literally still cares about Madonna

[Nancy.]

20TH ANNIVERSAY OF RAY OF LIGHT TOMORROW!

What an album.

[Nancy.]

Madonna’s Ray Of Light 20 Years On

http://thequietus.com/articles/24053...ew-anniversary

In February 1998 Madonna’s new album was literally a ray of light in stodgy UK charts made moribund by the Britpop comedown (Oasis’ Be Here Now, Stereophonics et al), and industry hits like the Titanic soundtrack. In the US it wasn’t much better, with Celine Dion and Garth Brooks at the top. The only other women on the album chart were Spice Girls, All Saints and Aqua, so unsurprisingly Madonna saw off the competition with aplomb. With its icy electronica and pulsing beats, Ray Of Light appeared as the pick-me-up for rave generation. It marked Madonna’s maturity as an artist, brought the MOJO demographic on board, and signalled to the world that a so-called pop bimbo can break down the barriers of that pop/rock divide.

However, it hadn’t been an easy journey, and despite its sunny title the album is a voyage into the darkness and terror of grief. Like Dark Side Of The Moon, it is an elegiac study of ego, mental disintegration and the fear of death. Pink Floyd’s epic drew on ‘70s psychoanalysis, R D Laing and the divided self, while Ray Of Light captures the 90s zeitgeist with its references to Kabbalah and the subconscious. Dark Side uses the sun and moon as symbols of life and death, while Ray Of Light revolves around the duality of sea and sky. Both albums require the listener to go the whole journey to get the full effect.

The album came at a crucial time for Madonna. After the high octane success of the 1980s, her 1990s were testing and difficult. Slut-shamed over her Sex book and the Erotica album, Madonna engaged in angry attention-seeking exercises like saying “****” 13 times on Late Show with David Letterman. She had lost confidence, and the tentative R&B of 1994’s Bedtime Stories felt like marking time. Veering off into musical theatre with the Evita project took her into safe MOR territory, but, ironically, rather than turning her into a 1980s pop has-been, those strenuous theatrical songs sung with a full orchestra gave her voice depth and tone. By then Madonna was in her late 30s and re-evaluating life, casting around for answers in study of Yogic philosophy. The birth of her daughter Lourdes in 1996 knocked out some of that infamous ego, so that when she returned to the studio in 1997 for the Ray Of Light sessions she had discovered a more intense, personal voice than the so-called “Minnie Mouse on helium” of earlier years.

Ray Of Light was created in old school prog rock fashion – with mainly one producer, over a period of months, in an intensively collaborative process. “She produced me producing her,” said William Orbit. Recorded in a modest studio in an unfashionable part of LA, the album was intentionally un-industry. Early sessions with Babyface were shelved, and Madonna’s longtime producer arranger Pat Leonard was sidelined in favour of an awkward English eccentric whose hardware kept breaking down. Although Orbit’s perceived amateurism made her nervous, Madonna knew from his dancefloor remix of 1990’s ‘Justify My Love’ that he could create the futuristic tone she craved. With Bass-O-Matic’s Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Bass (named after a Pink Floyd album), and the rave anthem ‘In The Realm Of The Senses’, Orbit had already declared an interest. Kabbalah and new motherhood opened Madonna’s mind, but it was the alchemy between her and Orbit – his trippy underground vibe and her willingness to experiment, that triggered her transformation of consciousness. With Ray Of Light they created the sonic space and musical textures for the sparse poetry that’s embedded in her songwriting. Previous hit-driven albums, with the exception of moments on Like A Prayer and Erotica, hadn’t allowed room for that potential to emerge. For the first time she could express herself in-depth.

Madonna did her background reading – everything from JG Ballard to Anne Sexton to Shakespeare’s sonnets were inspirations here – and did lengthy songwriting sessions with Leonard and Rick Nowells (“her lyric writing was poetic and intelligent,” the latter says, “she knows how to channel a song”) before she set foot in the studio. Once there, little Lourdes was installed in a playroom, and Madonna focused on the tracks that would eventually piece together a story. “I traded fame for love/ Some things cannot be bought… Now I find/ I’ve changed my mind,” she sang on opening track ‘Drowned World/Subsitute for Love’. The apocalyptic dreamscape of JG Ballard’s Drowned Worlds sets the tone. From there she moves into ‘Swim’, a low-slung electro song where Madonna delves into the religious themes of her pop past as the Sin-eater, carrying “these sins on my back”. ‘Ray of Light’ then provides a giddy moment of reawakening, with Orbit pushing her to sing a semitone higher than her comfort zone in order to stretch out that sense of hedonist abandon. This is the song, with its accompanying Jonas Akerlund video – all speeding lights, winking urbanscapes and fast motion skies – that relaunched her career, that married techno beats to cranked-up oscillators and wall-of-sound pop, and begged the question, did Madonna neck a zesty pinger?

The ecstatic moment melts into the addiction, obsession and dirty bass distortion of ‘Candy Perfume Girl’. Boy, girl, boy, girl, it’s all candy, it doesn’t matter. Aimless distraction gives way to the ghostly anime of ‘Skin’, a truly chilling track with Madonna’s voice gliding over the top of feverish psychedelic chaos, trying to catch something she can’t reach. In the same way that Pink Floyd’s ‘On The Run’ used a proto acid house pulse and electronic effects to create a feeling of unsettled angst, so Orbit’s pulverising techno suggests a dissolution of self. By the sweeping chorus of ‘Nothing Really Matters’ Madonna has found a way to slough off the feral, fame-hungry mindset that drove her to the top of the 1980s music industry, but which no longer serves her. “I lived so selfishly/ I was the only one/ …I realised that no one wins,” she sings in a moment of revelation. A sanskrit chant links into the desolate suffering of ‘Frozen’, Madonna’s big ballad ‘Us And Them’ moment. All of them pile in – from Orbit and Marius De Vries’s shifting dynamics and glacial production, to Leonard’s aching arrangements, to Chris Cunningham’s manga-inspired video depicting her as a witch goddess swooping through desert plains – perfectly capturing the sadness that kept her heart locked down.

Although Madonna’s sound is usually demarcated by simple verse/chorus pop logistics, she is also good at unresolved yearning. From as way back as 1984’s ‘Borderline’, she knows how to defer, to anticipate, to wish for, but with no resolution. The songs ‘Learn To Say Goodbye’, with every word carefully annunciated, and ‘To Have And Not To Hold’, with its brooding bossa nova beat, bear this out. She is nearly there, caught in a state of tension. There is a brief flowering of motherly love with ‘Little Star’, a skittering reflection on her baby daughter. But this, eventually, is what gets her in touch with her own mother and the source of her pain.

‘Mer Girl’, the final track on the album, is Madonna’s ‘Brain Damage’, that moment when the lunatics are on the grass. Having travelled through psychological soundscapes, here she is in a nightmare with a hallucinatory black sky, running through the rain with matted hair to a place with “crawling tombstones”. In the same way that Gilmour and Waters worked with the spaces between notes, Orbit’s ghostly glitches and fragmented synths give way to silence, and Madonna’s voice drops to a cracked little-girl whisper: “I smelled her burning flesh/ Her rotting bones/ Her decay.” And it’s that image of her mother, buried alive, that makes Madonna realise what she has been running from all these years. “When she recorded that in the booth, we sat in silence, our hair standing on end,” Orbit said.

Resisting the urge to tie it up with a neat transcendent finale, Madonna finished the album there, without resolution, “still running away.” As in Pink Floyd’s closing ‘Eclipse (“everything under the sun is in tune/ But the sun is eclipsed by the moon”) she acknowledges that even when everything seems all right the dark side will haunt you. That refusal to create a happy ending is what makes Ray Of Light a masterpiece, and why it won four Grammys, and why it is in all those canonical ‘Best Of’ lists. It wasn’t an album made by committee, in five minute blocks by songwriting teams. Like Dark Side Of The Moon’s crisis of post-war masculinity and madness, this was a painful rebirth, calibrated with emotional intelligence and electronic precision. All you create and all you destroy indeed.

[Nancy.]

In honor of the seminal album turning 20, Madonna expert Matthew Rettenmund gave us his official countdown of its best tracks.

When Ray of Light was released on February 22, 1998, Madonna’s image hit the ground and shattered into a flock of blackbirds.
Maverick

Gone was Madonna the preening, winking, fun-loving vamp, replaced with a woman who was aggressively insightful and daring. If Like a Prayer revealed that Madonna had depth all along, the William Orbit-produced Light showed she had breadth: The woman who initially turned to music because it was the medium with which she could grab the most eyeballs the quickest, revealed herself to be more adventurous than ever, drawing from such far-flung sources as ‘70s glam rock, Eastern mysticism, and electronica—and risking her status as the Queen of Pop.

Selling more than 16 million copies worldwide, Ray of Light won the Grammys for Best Pop Album (her first musical Grammy), and the title track nabbed Best Dance Recording and Best Short Form Music Video. (It was also named Video of the Year at the 1998 VMAs.) The album remains singular in her career—and in pop music—and seems increasingly unlikely to be topped by its architect.

In honor of Ray of Light’s 20th anniversary, we asked Madonna expert Matthew Rettenmund (author of Encyclopedia Madonnica) to rank the album’s tracks. His choices will likely inspire joy and fury in equal measure, but picking your favorite Ray of Light song is like picking your favorite boy toy.

“To Have and Not to Hold”
There are arguably no bad songs on Ray of Light, so it boils down to picking the least brilliant. This Rick Nowels co-creation has a pre-Dido lilt and is shimmery-pretty, but there’s that too-easy “moth to a flame” lyric.

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“Swim”
Orbit and Ciccone’s rocky ditty is the second track on the album, hitting us with lyrics about “Children killing children / While the students rape their teachers.” It’s an undeniably catchy number (the lyrics made less disconcerting by the lolling beat), but it feels like a wind-up before a pitch.

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“Candy Perfume Girl”
Madonna was a huge Prince fan, and collaborated here with Prince protégée Wendy Melvoin’s twin, Susannah Melvoin. The song’s impressionistic lyrics hardly get in the way of its punk-rock edge, but a company called Magnetic Poetry accused the icon of using its product—a collection of fridge magnets bearing random words—to compose this minimalist guitar grind.

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“Shanti/Ashtangi”
Reflecting her embrace of yoga, Madonna and Orbit crafted this Eastern delight, adapted from the work of Adi Shankara. Produced before the current fervor over cultural appropriation, “Shanti/Ashtangi” remains a pure example of Madonna using her platform to expand the hearts and minds of teenagers desperately seeking cruising jams.

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“Little Star”
Written with Nowels during the first year of Lourdes’ life, this adult-contemporary lullaby oozes maternal pride. Twenty years later, her bond with Lola is still unshakeable.

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“Has To Be”
Never heard of it? Fake fan! “Has to Be”—the only song on the album written by Madonna, Orbit and Leonard—appears just on the Japanese import, which is inexplicable because it’s a haunting ballad as vulnerable as anything she’s ever recorded. Perfect on a mixtape with Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Game.”

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“The Power of Good-Bye”
A chilly throbber that grabs you from the opening line, “Your heart is not open / So I must go,” this hit single reached Number 11 in the U.S. and Number 6 in the U.K. It showcases Madonna’s post-Evita vocal control: While some object to the formality of her new phrasing—that hard R, though!—it serves this symphonic no-more-love song well.

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“Nothing Really Matters”
Written with Patrick Leonard, with whom Madge created most of her best songs, “Nothing Really Matters” uncannily incorporates her newfound interest in the profound with her dance-floor origins, melding a high-drama electronic slam with house music all night long. The album’s most cheerful song.
The absolutely bonkers music video by Johan Renck allowed Madonna to both exorcise her obsession with the novel Memoirs of a Geisha (she reportedly imagined starring in the film adaptation) and to force some subversive imagery into young eyes seeking something less challenging.

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“Mer Girl”
One of the most avant-garde songs of Madonna’s career, this intensely emo prose poem set to dissonant blips and beeps plunges into the singer’s psyche as a child whose mother died young. It’s like that Truth or Dare scene in which she lies on her mother’s grave, but if she started digging once there. “I ran and I ran/ I was looking for me” could be the title of her autobiography. Maybe more impressive than enjoyable to some.

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“Skin”
This Madonna-Patrick Leonard scorcher undulates as it ponders her limitations as a communicator, arguing instead for the instant connection of skin-to-skin contact. “I’m not like this all the time,” Madonna warns—and she wasn’t kidding.

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“Sky Fits Heaven”
An urgent, upbeat track written by Madonna with Leonard, “Heaven” unfurls like a nervous heartbeat as she quotes prophets and wise men. Madge effortlessly multi-tasks, imparting wisdom while infecting us with a need to move. The most egregiously underserved track on the album, in that it was never a single anywhere. Listen for the “Bedtime Story” echo.

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“Ray of Light”
Ranking one of Madonna’s signature singles in the context of the album from whence it sprung is tough, but “Ray of Light” is truly special. Reaching Number 5 on the U.S. charts, the song was derived from the 1971 tune “Sepheryn” by Curtiss Muldoon, adapted by Madonna as an orgiastic declaration of freedom and transition. Its primal scream is one of the best moments in the studio.
Her live take on The Oprah Winfrey Show, is unforgettable, as much for Madonna’s A+ vocal as for Oprah’s cute, B- dancing.

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“Drowned World/Substitute for Love”
This slinky, methodical deconstruction of Madonna’s rock-star life denounces fame, star****ers, and sex in favor of family. (It’s one of her favorite things she’s ever written, and easily her best Orbit co-composition on Ray of Light.)
The song climaxes with anger before ending with what seemed at the time like an embrace of a permanent post-siren image. “Drowned World” wasn’t a U.S. single, but the Walter Stern-directed music video, which referenced the recently departed Princess Diana, has to be in the Top 10 of her work in that medium.

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“Frozen”
The best song on Ray of Light? This career-changing hit written with Leonard effectively turned the page on all Madonna had done before, sounding, as it did, like nothing else on the radio. “Frozen” is one of Madonna’s most beautiful tunes, contains some of her most simply insightful lyrics (“You’re frozen / When your heart’s not open”) and spawned a haunting Chris Cunningham-directed music video reintroducing the singer as a black-haired desert diva in triptych, covered in henna, undulating like Martha Graham.
“Give yourself to me,” she implored, and we all did.

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