23 years ago...

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, RAY OF LIGHT!

:love: :love:

it was used for a microsoft windows commercial :amazed: :clap2:


btw side note, my music faves aren't competition to your kween Nancy :love:

https://www.popsike.com/pix/20170320/222446391212.jpg

https://images.eil.com/large_image/M...EST-204469.jpg

This ice chest was originally sent to a few influential radio stations in advance of the first single, "Frozen", debut, and remains to this day as one of Madonna's most exclusive and legendary rarities!.

What an exciting and wonderful way of debuting your new single.

http://www.officialcharts.com/chart-...-rules-__8622/

http://www.officialcharts.com/media/...6&mode=stretch

20 years ago this month, Madonna released with her seventh studio album Ray Of Light.

The record, which was helmed by acclaimed producer William Orbit, received widespread praise upon its release and is considered by many as her best and most adventurous album.

In 2015, on the album's 17th birthday, we spoke to Orbit about working on the record.

“It was a long time ago – can you believe it’s been 17 years?” Orbit told Official Charts. “I played all the guitars on that album, which was one of the first times I really showed that I knew how to get a guitar going. It was great to get behind an amp for once because it’s not something I do all the time.”

The album, which was released in March 1998, spent two weeks at Number 1 on the Official Albums Chart and to date has spent 137 weeks in the Top 100 (view its full chart run here). Its sales to date (including album equivalent streams) stands at 1.73 million. “I’m very proud of my work on that record - I think it still holds up today,” Orbit continued. “It still gets mentioned a lot, which always amazes me, even considering the fact it’s Madonna. I mean, you don’t just knock one of those kinds of albums out every year, do you?”

Reflecting on their four and a half months experimenting on sounds together in the studio, the producer said: “I’m not even sure the current environment would allow it now in the pop field. Something has happened to pop music at the moment. Back then, there was no fear. Now, everybody is terrified of doing something different and the music industry is stuck in a rut.”

Orbit believes there were “a lot of parallels between Ray Of Light" and the recent Queen Forever album he co-produced, explaining: "I recently watched back some of Queen’s videos, which were very cutting edge at the time, and there’s a definite parallel between what they were doing there and the mindset me and Madonna had when making Ray Of Light. We got in studio, broke all the rules and didn’t really think about the consequences.”

14 years later, the pair reunited on Madonna’s MDNA album. Orbit is credited on six tracks, but the process, he says, was almost the complete opposite to that of Ray Of Light. “All I’ll say is that MDNA was a very, very different process in all respects to that which we’d employed on Ray Of Light – from artistically, to time management, to technical approach. I’ll let you be the judge of the result, but it was a very different beast to Ray Of Light.”

Did the experience put him off working on pop music for good? “I wouldn’t mind having the chance to go in and lock out the bean counters for a bit and do something different. Right now it feels like the whole music industry is sitting in a corner and rocking itself into a coma. The pop world has become a bit toxic.

"That said, you can’t take the pop out of me. I like risk, and – like with Ray Of Light – when someone wants to make an artistic statement and be bold and experimental, that’s when it’s exciting. That's really what's it's all about.

Madonna’s ‘Ray Of Light’ Defined Pop Perfection 20 Years Ago

[I]There are many articles celebrating the 20th anniversary of Madonna’s classic Ray of Light this week. Matthew Rettenmund of Logo noted that the album not only sold 16 million copies worldwide, but won several Grammys. Lucy O’Brien of The Quietus compared the album to Pink Floyd‘s Dark Side of the Moon. Everybody talks about how Ray of Light reinvented Madonna’s career, but they don’t talk about how it also became a curse for the Queen of Pop.

It’s hard to put in words just how much the album Ray of Light redefined Madonna’s career. As a small example, this author can point to the 1997-1998 school year, when teaching middle school. In November of 1997, this author’s students saw an issue of Vanity Fair, released one year earlier, on the teacher’s desk. Madonna was on the cover promoting Evita. The students described Madonna as “old,” “over,” “a slut,” a “has-been,” and many other terms that are (unfortunately) used to describe Madonna today.

As soon as Ray of Light was released four months later, Madonna was one of their favorites. When given a poetry assignment on analyzing a current pop song, at least four chose “Frozen,” a song that reached No. 2 on the charts. Another chose “Ray of Light,” the title track and a future No. 5 hit. Madonna was officially “cool” again as she joined Mariah Carey, LeAnn Rimes, and Puff Daddy (he would later become P Diddy) as the favorite artist among teenagers. More importantly, Madonna realigned with her Gen-X fans who felt alienated by the singer after the release of her 1992 album Erotica (now considered a classic) and book Sex.

This isn’t to say that Madonna wasn’t successful in the mid-1990’s. Despite suffering the biggest media backlash against any celebrity in history, she still scored with “Take a Bow,” which was No. 1 for seven weeks in 1995. Evita wasn’t a runaway hit in 1996, but produced respectable box office numbers, critical acclaim, and a Golden Globe for Madonna. But she was no longer considered groundbreaking. Madonna, who was now embraced far more on VH1 than MTV, was on her way to becoming a legacy adult contemporary act. However, that instantly changed with Ray of Light.

Ray of Light combined art and commercialism in a way that barely any pop album was able to do before. Madonna flirted with the combination on 1989’s Like a Prayer, but she fully realized it with Ray of Light in 1998.

“Drowned World/Substitute for Love,” which kicks off the album, takes the listener under the ocean to hear a tale about the drawbacks of fame, right before the listener is taken for a glide on “Swim,” a song about the cruelties of the world, which was written the day after Madonna’s good friend Gianni Versace was murdered.

The title track comes next and instantly blows the listener away. It combines Madonna’s post-Evita vocal range with her newly found happiness at being a mother. It has become a staple in Madonna’s career as well as one of the most successful dance singles of all-time. Perhaps “Ray of Light” should have followed (rather than preceded) “Candy Perfume Girl,” which is, perhaps, the only heavy metal/electronica song in Madonna’s entire catalog. It’s the only “WTF” song on the album, but at least it’s followed by “Skin,” an orgasmic number that might have received backlash if released just two years earlier, when Madonna was still being heavily slut-shamed for her antics from the early 1990s.

The next track, “Nothing Really Matters,” combines Madonna’s 1980s dance appeal with her new 1990s electronica sound. “Sky Fits Heaven” is another dance blast, but was probably never released as a single since it sounds too much like “Ray of Light.” The album’s eighth track, “Shanti/Ashtangi,” is a brilliant and bubbly song inspired by Madonna’s fascination with Hinduism. It’s unfortunate that the song would be dismissed as “cultural appropriation” if released today.

The ninth track, “Frozen,” was the first single released from the project, and it was one of the riskiest songs a pop artist released in the 1990s. But it definitely paid off, even if the dance remixes are more encompassing than the single. The rest of the album, which includes the popular single “The Power of Goodbye,” was aimed towards Madonna’s new VH1 audience. The final track, “Mer Girl,” has Madonna reciting poetry about a scary dream in which she visits her mother’s grave. It is arguably the most artistic song of her career and leaves you with chills and smiles at the same time.

Ray of Light is a fantastic body of work that instantly became a template for other artists to follow. I only wish there had been some sort of remastered edition for the anniversary.

10/10

I remember Ray of Light well

Groundbreaking


:clap1:

Yes, It certainly was. Still can't believe 20 years have passed since it's release. :hee:

Madonna sporting a gorgeous new look on instagram. Something is happening.

https://image.ibb.co/fN6gLx/llll.jpg

VINTAGE Articles (1998)

From the Warner Bros. press release:

Earth. Water. Fire. Air. Madonna.

There is an elemental aura to the music of Madonna's transcendent new Warner Bros. Records release, an alchemy of sounds and images, an interplay of dreams and visions. Here is a world captured in a drop of water, a face in the heart of a flame, a soul set free on a Ray Of Light.

Her first collection of new songs since 1994's Bedtime Stories, Ray Of Light, featuring the stunning new single Frozen, marks a musical departure astonishing even for this quintessentially chimerical artist. Working closely with an elite cadre of inspired collaborators, most notably globally-acclaimed producer and remix magician William Orbit, Madonna has created a sound that blends and borrows from the best of the ambient and electronic music revolution and fuses it with her own unerring pop sensibility. The result is nothing less than song transformed into pure light.

Alternately elusive and explicit, playful and profound, risky and welcoming, Ray Of Light is, finally, the most audacious, atmospheric and sheerly awesome song cycle in the artist's epochal recorded output. From the unflinching honesty of Drowned World/Substitute For Love to the fabulous frivolity of Candy Perfume Girl; from the sultry whisper of Skin to the nurturing bliss of Little Star; and from the exotic ecstasy of Shanti/Ashtangi to the harrowing beauty of Mer Girl, Ray Of Light, reveals a woman in the throes of a life-changing transformation, both artistically and personally.

"I always think in musical terms," she asserts, "and this time I knew I wanted to go after a sound that was different from anything I'd done before, to reach a different emotional and spiritual plane. I've been going through a metamorphosis over the past few years. I started studying the Kabbalah, which is a Jewish mystical interpretation of the Old Testament. I also found myself becoming very interested in Hinduism and yoga, and for the first time in a long time, I was able to step outside myself and see the world from a different perspective."

Ably assisting Madonna in translating that perspective into music is William Orbit. Known previously to the artist for his remixes on selected tracks for her Erotica album, Orbit also has the well-earned reputation as a preeminent musical innovator on such projects as Massive Attack and his own Strange Cargo releases. "I'd been listening to his music and felt it was a close reflection of where I wanted to go -- a perfect backdrop to the lyrics I'd been writing. I thought there could be an interesting juxtaposition, combining William's very trippy, trancey sound with very lush orchestral arrangements and lyrics that were reaching for something new and unexpected."

Work on Ray Of Light began in earnest in the spring of last year, "I spent about four months traveling around," Madonna continues. "I was in New York, LA, Miami, England, just writing with different people, trying out lots of new ideas."

And, as it turned out, renewing some old creative connections. Along with such cowriters as Rick Nowels and Susannah Melvoin, Madonna turned to a trusted collaborator, Patrick Leonard, who had a hand in some of the biggest and most enduring hits of her career. "I wanted to work with Patrick on specific tracks, like Frozen," she explains, "because, as a classically trained musician, he brought a whole other element to the mix, particularly his string arrangements." Leonard co-produced other Ray Of Light standouts Sky Fits Heaven, The Power Of Good-Bye and To Have And Not To Hold, completing a studio team that also included famed arranger and producer Marius De Vries.

With the key players and musical elements in place, Madonna and Orbit settled in for some serious studio time. "He's a complete madman genius," she smiles. "I'd come to him with an idea of where I wanted to go musically, hum melodies or read lyrics and then leave him alone in the laboratory. Sometimes he'd go in the direction I wanted and sometimes he'd swerve off somewhere else entirely. We'd end up with trance tracks that were eight minutes long and then keep adding and subtracting until we had real verses and choruses. We really put our noses to the grindstone... and it was a process that was longer than I'm used to, but I was after something special and I didn't want to settle for anything less."

The extraordinary accomplishment of Ray Of Light emerged after the music and movie marathon that made Evita the entertainment event of 1996, and Madonna the leading lady of the decade. "Doing Evita was a wonderful and challenging experience," she explains, "but when it was over I was seriously inspired to do my own thing. For two years I'd been expressing someone else's passion, and being away from my own stuff for that long gave me a chance to store up a lot of information and experience."

The most significant of those experiences, of course, came with the birth of Madonna's daughter Lourdes, in late 1996.

"Obviously that was a big catalyst for me. It took me on a search for answers to questions I'd never asked myself before. What was I going to say to my daughter about what's really important in life? What was I going to teach her about the world and our purpose for being here? As a result, I took a long look at my own life over the past few years and began to see how much of it was dominated by my career. What am I going to do next? What's my next project? Suddenly all that didn't seem quite as important."

While career considerations took second place to motherhood, for Madonna, creativity has always come as naturally as breathing. "I'm always writing in my journal," she reveals, "collecting thoughts and ideas, and during this period certain things began to stick in my mind, like the whole idea of karma... that what you put in is what you get out and that everything you do comes back to you. We're responsible for the chaos in our lives, just as we're responsible for the creativity."

And it's this consummate artist's flourishing creativity that ignites Ray Of Light. "I think people respond to emotion and passion and truth," she concludes. "That's what I've tried to embody in this record." And, like fire, earth, water and air, they are the elements from which Madonna has created a new world."

https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/4pwAA...fs/s-l1600.jpg

SEXY MOTHER (Q Magazine, February 1998)

"Wow, free tea!"giggles Madonna, dunking her own bag as the flustered room service waiter exits without proffering the bill. "Well, we'd better make the most of it."

This is Madonna, but not quite as we know her. She is 39. Her hands are knuckly and useful, as they appeared in close up on the cover of Like a Prayer. Her orange hair has the straggly, expensively unwashed look favoured by Alanis Morissette, Fiona Apple, et al. Her attire, loose fitting drapes - orange again - exposing about five inches of trim abdomen, wouldn't look out of place lolloping up and down Oxford St. irritating a tambourine and handing out pamphlets. The famaed upperlip beauty spot has disappeared, perhaps surgically. Ther eis a startling sense of unfamiliarity about her - that is, until she begins to move. When she moves, suddenly she is quite definitely Madonna.

As she tucks into the tea, we remark upon the absence of security, entourage even. "I drive myself in LA,"she puffs. "It's the one of the reasons I like living here." Emboldened, we proffer the pudding (the writer had gone on previosly about getting a Christmas pudding over through the US customs from UK) "I love Christmas pudding,"she coos, maybe just being polite. Whatever, polite is good. Polite is frankly, a relief.

Is Los Angeles a necessary evil? The place in the world where you feel least bothered?

M: Unfortunately. It's the dullest town, therefore there isn't much going on, therefore there aren't a lot of paparazzi hanging about. It's the one place I totally get left alone in. There's so many people who work in the industry here, it's not shocking to see famous people about, going shopping.

You've been in London a lot over the last copule of years. Does it swing?

I've been there recently, and for ten days it was incredible. I thought after the Princess Diana thing it would be so great and that I was going to be left alone so I rented a house in Chelsea. Then I found out that it wasn't that they were leaving me alone, they just didn't know where I was. And when they found out and the fans found out, then... then it was a nightmare. Then I wished I was in a hotel, because at least in a hotel you're so high that you can't hear them on the streeet. I would love to live in London but I don't think I could handle the whole press thing. It's pretty intense. It's more intense even than New York, where the attention kinda comes and goes. In London it's every day.

There was a Brief feeling after the death of Princess DI that it would stop. That it would change. Did you believe it would change?

Yeah. Do I think it has? No. Not at all.

Coming out of filming Evita straight into that - the tragic ironies must have been overwhelming. An iconic woman vocally mistrusted by pockets of the society she lived in, and yet inspiring this enourmous popular...

M: Fandom! Following! Yes, there are a lot of interesting parallels. On thte one hand there seemed to be so many people against Princess Diana, outraged by her behaviour and constantly needling her, but when she died, how astonishing was that, the revelation of how truly loved she was by some? Which just goes to show you that meanness is a lot louder than kindness. You know what I mean? Because there really were a lot of people that loved her and supported her. It's just thtat the people who didn't screamed the loudest. So that's what you kinda got swept up in if you were reading the presss and stuff.

It caused a big debate about the British character. After being told for years, not least by Americans, that we were tight-arsed and very bad at...

M: Expressing yourselves. Yes. Well, I mean no. I don't think that at all. I know some really unhinged English people. But London's great now - I'm good friends w/ Stella McCartney.

The first words on the record are "I traded fame f or love/ without a second thought" You seem very ambivalent about fame and its cost. You're not sure whether it's been worth it or not.

The ambivilance is true. I'm not going to sit here and say, Oh God, being famous is the worst thing thtat ever happened to me, but on thehh other hand,, it's a real cross to bear, the real thorn in my side. I wouldn't trade my life for anything - i've been blessed with so much, I've had so many privileges - but being famous, it's like the agony and the ecstacy. You get to meet people and have experiences that no one else gets to have. On thte other hand,, you don't have anonymity. What I am very clear about is the place it's had in my life and certainly \, at the beginning of my career, what it sort of took the place of. At the end of the day, though, I'm not gonna stomp all over it and say., This is ****, but I think i have a much better perspective on it all than I've ever had. I realise and I've been realising this for years, that the approval, the headlines of being swept up and being popular and loved by people in universal ways is absolutely no substiute for truly being loved. But if you have to have a subsitute, it's about the best there is.

There's the line,"Had so many lovers/ Who settled for the thrill of basking in my spotlight." Was thtat a depressing realisation? Did they really have much of a choice?

Well it's not to say that they were only attracted to me for that, but I realise that that was a big part of it. Power is a great aphrodisiac and celebrity is a great aphrodisiac.

Do you feel disappointed in those people?

No. Not at all.

You once said rejection is the great aphrodisiac.

That too, haha!!

You need a lot of aphrodisiacs.

M: I think everyone does. I'm speaking for everybody. I maen, rejection- doesn't everybody want the thing they can't have? For fleeting moments of madness, that's all you want, and then you wake up, pull yourself together and yoo move on with your life.

Is the conviction that you'll never findi a ... well, a soul mate, a haunting one?

It has been. When you think about what I do and the kind of life I lead and the fact that I'm famous, I don't think it's a lifestyle that's very attractive to people, unless they like the iddea of attracting attention, unless they're really superficial. You find yourself in a strange position. I come with a lot of baggage and it takes a strong, courages person to have a relationshiop w/ me. I have those moments when it seems impossible. The moments of thinking, Oh Forget it.

The song NOTHING REALLY MATTERS must be about LOURDES. Are you trying to say that this is the first love of your life that has no side to it?

It has no side. She doesn't know about me being famous. She hasn't got a clue. And it's completely unconditional love, which I've never known because I grew up without a mother. I mean I did have my father, but I think thtat the love that you get from a mother is quite different. It's had a huge impact on me, as I suppose it has on everyone ewho has children. Bbut definitely, when you have children you have to step outside of yourselsf. You can't sit around feeling sorry for yourself or feeling like you're a victim in any way, shape or form. You really look at life efrom a totally differnt perspective.

How is she coming along?

She kisses everything. She kisses dogs, she kisses strange people on the playground. She says "dog" a lot, and "No". She's very good at saying no.

You seemed to name eher in the hope that she'd be some sort of healing influence.

Absolutely. A healing influence on my life. Lourdes was a place that my mother had a connection to. People were always sending her holy water from there. She always wanted to go there but never did.

Madonna, as we have come to think we know her, puts up barriers even as she sultrily beckons. Remarkably, Ray of Light blows all t hat out of the water. MerGirl endds the album, but was oneo of the 1st things recorded for it, a one-take vocal whispered quietly while William Orbit's portentous track bubbles delicately about her. Madonna mourns her mother and depicts herself fleeing headlong from her past. "I ran to the cemetery,"she intones."and held my breath. And about your death." Bingo, and at last, real intimacy.

"She stepped out of the vocal booth, and everybody was rooted to the spot,"recalls Orbit. "It was just one of those moments. REally spooky."

Q: Have you done analysis?

M: Yes.

DO you still do it?

Yes.

Do you find it more or less helpful than before?

I go back and forth. Sometimes I think there's nothing new I'm going to figure out. Or that we're retreading the same old territory and i'll get fed up. And then a lighgt bulb bwill turn on about something and i'll have an epiphany. I don't always go. I just go when I think i need to.

Is it not tremendously expensive?

It is in this town. Lawyers and shrinks. I'm'' in the wrong business.

What's your earliest memory?

(what seems an interminable pause - 29 seconds) I've got loads of memorieees from childhood, but I'm not sure which came first... Falling asleep between my parents in a bed... Stepping in a can of paint when my father was painting the fence... Sticking my finger in a cigarette lighter to see if it really was was hot like my father told me.

Is that what you've been doing ever since - sticking your hand into a flame to see if it's hot?

(truefully) Yes...But I have a very vivid memory of that, I remember my father kept on saying, Look that's really hot. See how red it is? So don't put your finger in it. I was thinking, But how do I know if it's really hot if I don't put my finger in it? So I did and I got absolutely no sympathy. Nothing's changed, ha ha!

What's the most hurtful thing that's ever been written about you?

Oh God. I'm sure there's plenty of things that I don't know about. (long pause, she places her arms awkwardly between knees) I suppose the worst thing was people accusing me of having a baby for attention. That was pretty ridiculous. I phase it out.

There was the speculation that Carlos Leon had been chosen as some sort of spunk donor.

M: (coldly) Rather than my lover, yes. Thought hat was probably more hurtful to him than to me. They're keen, with me, to ignore the possibilitly that it might have something to do witih lovve or feeling and make it all seeeem planned or manipulated or calculated, which is a notion that a lot of people seem to have about me. But falling in love or rhaving a baby, I'd have thought that was one of the more basic human things that anyone can relate to, and some people didn't even want to let me have that. But that's okay because I have my beautiful baby and they don't.

And Carlos hasn't been paid off to stay away?

Absolutely not. He's with her right now. She's absolutely daddy's little girl.

Are you ever embarassed by old album covers?

They're a map of my life. But I do lok at old photographs of myself and think, Someone should have arrested me, someone should have stopped me from doing my hair that way.

What was your cruellest fashion error?

All errors are cruel. They're all great and they're all crap. Everyone's down on the 80s right now, but I thought the 80s was fabulous and I'm sure Boy George would agree w/ me.

It was quite an unpretentious decade, in the sense that its pretensions were completely transparent. To hear some people tlak, all it was was plastic music for a cocaine addled generation.

M: (cracks up) Oh yeah! And what's going on now? Nothing's changed. Right now everyon'es into the 70s, revisiting the 70s whether it's in muusic or movies and fashion. When we get further away from the 80s, we'll do the same thing. It'll be celebrated and analysed and perhaps appreciated.

You were drumming in the Breakfast Club in 79, in New York. Did you used to go to Studio 54?

Oooh, that's centuries ago, but what a cool era, what a cool club. The people there.. I came in at the end of it so i missed Andy Warhol, Sterling Saint-Jacques, Liza Minnelli. For me, the Danceteria and the Mudd Clbu were coming into their own.

There's a sense in a lot of your music of the dancefloor being a magical place.

The dancefloor was quite a magical place for me. I started doff wanting to be a dancer, so that had a lot to do with it. The freedom that I always feel when I'm dancing, that feeling of inhabiting your body, letting yourself go, expressing yourself through music. I always have thought of it as a magical place..even if you're not taking ecstacy.

Though people will take ecstacy to Ray of Light.

But ecstacy's been around for a hundred years. It was around when I was going to clubs. What's the big deal?

No. It's still a big deal. In Britain, ecstacy didn't really happen until 1987, 88, and it changed everything.

M: (regards Q as if studying Primitive Man) You guys are still taking ecstacy! Not special K? Cos ketamine is the big drug over here now. You're in the K Hole, swimming out of your body, and don't imagine you're gonna get up in the morning. I think the whole record would sound great on drugs. It'll makeyou feel like you're in the K Hole. It whips you into a frenzy. I took some mixes to Liquid in Miami and the DJs were just going mad for it. You can definitely imagine what it would be like to be high and listening to it. But I have to get there on my own. (Cod-angelic) I have a child now, I can't do that sort of thing.

The In Bed W. Madonna film turned out to be the definitive piece of negative publicity, but no one had gambled like that before. There seemed to be no fear rof appearing...

M: Unattractive?

Q: Seflish...

M: Narcissitic...

Q: ...and all those things. You didn't care who saw it.

M: But what's the point of making a documenetary if you're not going to show those sides? Then it wouldn't be a documentary, right? Let's face it, the life of a ... of a, whatever you wanna call me... on the road you've got to see all of that. It's a real slice of life. It's of an era, of a time, and it's true of the insanity of performing and the insanity of travelling with this bunch of dysfunctional people. Even in a movie, how can you be sympathetic towards a fictional character if u don't see their warts?

That's an awful lot of warts, though.

I don't think there were that many. I look at that movie and I think, My God how petulant was I? And Oh God, what a brat! But I'm not horrified by it. That's where I was and I've grown up a lot since.

Who are the Madonna fans now?

I haven't a clue.

What are the best Madonna records?

Like a Prayer is pretty much up there. And I really like Bedtime Stories. I don't think a lot of people "Got" that record.

It was better than Erotica. You hobbled yourself there, trying to make a concept album.

Absolutetly. I bit off more than I could chew. BS had better songs though the feel was similar. (affects the chat show simper) But this record is my favourite record of all.

Madonna's current favouritet words are "mystic" and "spiritual". From the hare krishna garb to her current listening - dominated by Talvin Singh's Anokha club compilation Soundz of the Asian Underground - she is looking East, w ith a beats-enhanced Sanskrit prayer, Shanti/Ashtangi, taking pride of place on Ray of Light. Like the title track, and the churning, underwater Skin, it wouuldn't sound out of place booming out of bulging speakers at London's Little Goa, Return to the Source. Instructively, she intends to perform a smattering of club dates in the States and Europe later this year.

IS it best with religion to spread your bets?

Absolutely. I do believe that all paths lead to God. It's a sham ethat we end up having religious wars because so many of the messages are the same. The whole idea of karma and "do unto others" it's all the same, it really is.

Q: There's a prevalence of water images on this record: Swim, Mer Girl, Drowned World.

M: Well water is a very healing element, as you know.

Q: Er...

M: Well there's water in birth and dthere's water in baptism and dwhen you go into the bath or the ocean there's a feeling of cleansing, a feeling of starting all over again. Bbbeing new, being healed. That's sort of what's going on in my life and I'm exploring that element in my songwriting.

Swim's all about redemption but why are you so concerned with it? Have you been that bad?

Well it's not just about me. It's imploring others to seek redemption too. Because it's definitely a response to what's going on in the world as well.

What, specifically?

(with heavy sarcasm) You mean besides Galliano's next collection? Well, let's see. Lots of things concern me. I suppose the main thing is people's obsession with negativity. People are so bitter and envious of other people doing well. People used to talk t o one another and be a lot more resourceful and creative. Bbut television and computers, the instant society we live in, has taken that ability away from most people. There are too many people resigned to their lot in life.

Why are you thinking this way now?

Well, maybe the same horrible horrors have always been happening in the world. Maybe I'm just paying more attention. It jusuut seems to me that there's more extreme behaviour as we approach the year 2000. People seem to be divided into two camps - between people that are searching for something to anchor them spiritually, people who are trying to evolve their own consciousness and figure out the bigger meaning for life, rather than, OK, I'm here to make lots of money and have a good time and that's it. On the other hand, I feel like I'm always reading about teenagers killing themselves or parents killing their children.

Have you ever known black despair?

Puh-lease! I'm the Queen of Despair! Read the lyrics to my songs! I felt despair many times in my life, but I have very good survival mechanisms. No matter how bad it gets there's' something that stops me seeing life as completely hopelesss. I still indulge myself in lots of melancholy.

How do you get over that?

Sometimes I write. I spend time with people that I know will get me out of it. My daughter, or friends that will tell me what a wanker I'm being.

Can you imagine how dark it must have been for Michael Hutchence?

I know, I thought about that too. I don't know what the real stotry is. It's just so tragic, so tragic, I can't imagine getting to that place. I've tried to imagine, but I can't. It's like trying to imagine what death is, you can't. If you have child I would think, no matter what, you could try and hang on for them. But I don't know, I wasn't in his shoes.

Two weeks later, a london flat, and Sheffield Wednesday are murdering Newcastle on Match of the Day. The phone rings. "It's Madonna,"barks Madonna. A rain break in shooting for the video of Frozen, one of Ray of Light's lowering ballads (bearing the unmistakable primary-coloured imprint of Madonna's longtime co-songwriter Pat Leonard and an enormous gothici string score courtesy arranger du jour Craig Armstrong), has occasioned the call. Along with Nothing Really Matters and Power of Goodbye, Frozen is Madonna fans' Madonna, testament to her "reining in" of William Orbit's more tangential instincts. "He'll tell you I'm a task master,"predicts Madonna. "that I like to crack the whip."

For his part, Orbit is impressed by his new boss's musical control-taking and recording wisdom. "She kept on telling me,Don't gild the lily. And the other thing she'd say,"he adds ruefully,"just as I was ready to crawl home exhausted was,' You can sleep when you're dead.' "

"In the studio she's'' totally sleeves-rolled-up. You think of her as a performer, a pop icon, this force of entertainment. You don't perceive Madonna as a great producer, that's' exactly what she is."

What Madonna describes as the more "tripped out, ambient ****" from the Orbit sessions will emerge on a future "remix odyssey" record, putatively titled Veronicia Electronica.

Q: Are you pissed off by the assumption that your producers do most of the work? Or copme to that, that Maverick is a plaything that you have little day to day involvement with?

M: I don't think about it very much. You know, the people that know, know, and that's' all that matters. The Prodigy know, and everyone who comes to my label knows and everyone who works on my records knows what's going on. The people that make assumptions like that are being chauvinistic. (smirks) I'm quite used to people saying things that aren't entirely accurate.

Your singing used to be criticised as Squeaky. No one coucld say that about this record.

I found my voice in doing Evita, because I had to study extensively with a vocal coach. And I found range, and parts of my voice that I never knew I had. I'd only been using *this* much of it. It's a good find, by the way.

Do you still drum? Do u see a kit set up in a studio and think i'll have a go?

I have secret desires to. I've accidentally walked in on a band playing like a Holiday Inn or something and thought, I can play better drums than that. One of these days. If I go on tour and we're doing rehearsals, you can believe I'll be sitting behind the drums when everyone's gone and there's someone sweeping the floor.

Is it a reflection of the way you've changed or the way that everyone else has changed, that no one's horrified by you anymore? Madonna reveals part of own body stock, that wouldn't make many headlines these days.

(grins) I don't think there's anything left to reveal, is there?

Maybe not but yuo don't have to. You won.

I guess I won. If in the middle of all of that chaos some positive message got out, then I won. But it's not terribly much fun, being a rebel or being a pioneer, I have to say, because you become a target for everyone's fears. You have to be incredibly resilient and there were times when I wished that I hadn't been so outspoken, because it was so exhausting to constantly have to defend myself. Looking back on it, it was a great education for me and iti was very liberating for me, because when you're not popular in any se nse of the word and everyone seems to have turned on you, you kind of have a freedom to do whatever you want, whenever you want, because you don't have to please anyone. Let's face it, all the stuff I've been going on about for years, people have learned to accept it. Nowadays, it doesn't sound so outrageous, that's how we are, every decade we become more open to ideas. Homosexuality is no longer a debate in pop culture, but even ten years ago it was considered terribly outrageous. We've come a long way. But I've changed too, so it's both.

So you believe in progress, despite the evidence?

M: (huffily) Of course I believe in progress. Thats why we're here - to transform ourselves and other people. Iti's the nature of our species to progress.

You seem to be pretty happy with where you are. Are there any ambitions that still niggle at you?

I'd like to learn how to paint. I love painting and I'm always in awe of people that can do it. People say I should just do it, but I think, No because what If i suck? I'd be so disappointed.

"Madonna's on this journey,"relects Orbit,"and if you're smart you'll get on board for the ride. But it doesn't matter if you do or you don't because she's going to get there anyway."

And in case you were wondering, she ate the Christmas pudding.

http://www.madonnatribe.com/i_50/033.jpg

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com...309162ad7a.jpg

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com...f30f54e6ef.jpg

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com...24223bb439.jpg

https://squaremadonna.files.wordpres...04/08-04-3.jpg

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com...9cca5a74ad.jpg

Madonna’s Indian Summer

When I was a little girl, I had to work in my father’s vegetable garden every summer. My father has a work ethic that makes mine look nonexistent, so the school’s-out-for-summer stuff does not exist in my family. Basically, I was either put to work at my house, weeding and spraying insecticide, or we had to go to my grandparents’ house in Pennsylvania, where we’d fix up the house and the yard all summer. When I got older and started to figure out what I wanted to do, I spent a summer going to a local college and taking dance classes – anything to keep from mowing the lawn. But, really, aside from that, I do not associate summer with fun and free time, not as a child.

So maybe that’s why when I think of my favorite summer songs, the ones I think of are attached to angst-ridden memories. Actually, I like the summer better than the winter. For one thing, I like the heat better than the cold – I still don’t have air conditioning. I hate air conditioning. Because I don’t like to be tricked. I want to know exactly how hot it is, and I’d rather just adapt to the heat, because that’s what we’re supposed to do. I also think summer is a superior season because you can see everybody’s outfits. You can’t make fashion statements when it’s cold out, and you never know what anyone’s wearing. And it’s just a lot easier to see people in the summer, so they can’t trick you, either.

Both of my stories take place in New York – and I think New York is the best place to be in the summer, even if the heat and humidity make everybody grouchy. It may be more civilized in California, because it always gets cool at night, but it’s so boring to be there. It’s always summer in L.A., so no one appreciates it. When summertime comes in New York, everybody seems to be celebrating for three months; it feels like the city comes to life.

When I think about what a summer song is, at first I think of something celebratory and up – but that’s not really quite it, because I’ve dug some pretty incredible summer songs that weren’t. But it definitely has to have a phat groove. It’s not about Enya in the summertime, you know what I mean? For example, “Don’t You Want Me,” by the Human League, reminds me of the early days of Danceteria, in New York. I lived on the Lower East Side, at Fourth and B, in a tenement apartment – without air conditioning. I didn’t have a record deal yet, but my demos were hot off the press, and I used to go to Danceteria every weekend, trying to meet the DJ or an A&R person to give my tape to. I’d spend all night on the dance floor in some hideous outfit while all the pretty, skinny, fashionable girls threw their drinks on me. But when that song came on, I forgot my humiliation. I didn’t care that I was soaking wet and didn’t have any friends.

Prince’s “When Doves Cry” was another song I used to escape into when it first came out. By then I did have a record contract, and I had moved to a nice loft on Broome and West Broadway. But there was still no elevator, so I had to walk up six flights of steps to get to my loft. I rode my bike everywhere, with a Walkman and headphones on, and one hot summer day I came in and I just couldn’t carry my bike up those stairs one more time. I was hating my family and my life at the time, and I just collapsed in the stairwell with that song playing in my headphones, crying my heart out and feeling incredibly sorry for myself.

You may have noticed that both of these stories are about music as a vehicle for transcending misery (the story of my life). I do think that music is the most spiritually evolved art form. And it is absolutely the most universal: It doesn’t matter where you come from or who you are or how well-educated you are or how cool you are – how rich, how poor, how anything. It’s primal, and it’s visceral, and it’s a cure for the summertime blues. It’s about coming to life.

Adapt to the heat.

Madonna

https://i.pinimg.com/736x/e5/8a/d7/e...die-ratten.jpg

Promo poster for ROL.

https://images.eil.com/large_image/M...GHT-589503.jpg

https://todayinmadonnahistory.files....promo-1600.png

https://i.imgur.com/BcREIlr.png

Ultrasound: Inside Madonna (Making of the Ray of Light album)

Guy O'Seary (Madonna's manager) wrote this about "Ray Of Light's" 20th aniiversary recently...

https://image.ibb.co/hc3Lnc/Capture.jpg


....but it looks like Madonna's not happy with him for bringing in teams of songwriters and producers for the last two album's and she want's to take back creative control.


https://image.ibb.co/nsu70x/IMG_nk2t...57084620c9.jpg


Here's a look at the credits from her last two albums. The older ones simply had her and a songwriter and producer; but MDNA and Rebel Heart had half of the Earth's population on them, and was clearly the reason why they're not as half as good as the previous ones.


Rebel Heart:
http://forums.madonnanation.com/uplo...f34095cb14.png

MDNA:
https://image.ibb.co/dAp4DH/LLL.png


NOW compared all those credits to when she worked on Ray Of Light, Music, and Confessions On A Dancefloor:


Ray of Light:
https://image.ibb.co/i7J9fx/RAY.png

Music:
https://image.ibb.co/gi6sYH/MUSIC.png

Confessions On A Dancefloor:
https://image.ibb.co/kYSALx/COBFESSONS.png


It looks like she wasn't keen on working with Starrah (and others), so work for the new album has grinded to a halt, so she's obviously doing it HER WAY now.

Take your time, Madge!!!

Here she is standing by what she said to her manager about songwriting camps etc...

https://image.ibb.co/hRD0Lx/Capture.jpg

Good for you, M :clap1:

Madonna Steps Away From The ‘Songwriting Camps’

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entr...b0699553ccb0da

I’d much rather hear something she was proud of than a radio-friendly three minutes and thirty-three seconds song that came out of a meeting of 25 songwriters

In February 2015, Madonna fell on her arse. You saw it. I saw it. It was splashed over every magazine, newspaper and gossip site for days afterwards. Everyone had an opinion on it, whether you were laughing it up, dying of embarrassment or just feeling downhearted to see a woman once heralded as the saviour of pop music dragged to the floor live on television. Suffice to say, it was a moment the whole world was talking about.

Four years earlier, in a slightly brighter moment for Madonna, she had been hand-picked to perform at the Super Bowl half-time show. The performance was a triumph and a landmark moment in her career, which also wound up making a few headlines when M.I.A. flipped the bird live on pre-watershed television, with millions of American families watching at home. Again, a moment the world was talking about.

What the world regrettably wasn’t talking about were the singles Madonna was promoting on both of these occasions, ‘Give Me All Your Luvin’ in 2011 and ‘Living For Love’ in 2015.

Despite being attached to two of the most undisputable water-cooler moments of the 21st Century, ‘Living For Love’ wound up debuting at number 26 here in the UK. As a lifelong Madonna fan, it pained me to admit that she was probably never going to have another hit single in her lifetime.

But also, I soon realised this might be a good thing. After all, in times of difficulty, Madonna has always delivered her most intriguing and celebrated work, whether it was following the confusing and at-times-messy ‘Bedtime Stories’ era with ‘Ray Of Light’ or bouncing back from the public bashing she got for her ‘American Life’ album with ‘Confessions On A Dance Floor’, which cemented her place as the Queen of Pop.

These hopes were fuelled even more when, in an unexpected move, Madonna announced in summer 2017 that she and her children would be moving to Portugal.

Suddenly, I had visions of a new, earthier Madonna settling down in a new country and adapting to a whole new culture and lifestyle, before returning to the music scene to try something new and experimental with the best untapped pop resources Portugal had to offer.

I was anticipating her new album would offer a sharp take on Trump’s America, from the point of view of a woman approaching 60, who had always spoken her mind, infused with some Portuguese folk samples and maybe a few waiting/hesitating rhyming couplets thrown in for good measure.

It was all looking rather promising, especially given that Madonna’s last three studio albums, ‘Hard Candy’, ‘MDNA’ and ‘Rebel Heart’, have all had, to some degree, the flavour of someone chasing a hit rather than setting any kind of agenda.

Unfortunately, this dream looked less likely to be realised at the end of last year, when Madonna said she was ready to get back in the studio and ditch the “soccer mom in Portugal” in favour of the pop icon “coming back” for the crown. I hadn’t realised they weren’t the same person.

This brings us nicely up to the present day. Things had all gone a bit quiet on the “new Madonna” album front, until Madonna’s manager, Guy Oseary, posted a special message on his Instagram page last week, commemorating 20 years since the release of ‘Ray Of Light’. Two days later, Madonna herself showed up in the comments, and she did not sound happy.

“Remember when I made records with other artists from beginning to end and I was allowed to be a visionary and not have to go to songwriting camps where no one can sit still for more than 15 minutes…”

Now, I’m not saying that anyone is above a “songwriting camp”. Some of my favourite hit singles of the last few years have come together when writers being paid by the hour put their heads together in a bid to collectively answer the question: “How do we get middle America to stream this over and over again?”

But the idea of Madonna, now well into her fourth decade in the music industry, trying to put some of her new-found Portuguese wisdom over the top of a beat that has already been turned down by Selena Gomez and Camila Cabello is not a scenario that brings me a great deal of comfort.

This is not what I want for one of the most important, influential and game-changing artists of the past 100 years, particularly someone who has so many times pushed the envelope, set the trend and is about to celebrate her sixtieth birthday.

Instead, whoever it is that is making Madonna (against her will, seemingly) sit through these “songwriting camps” with a group of people for whom ‘4 Minutes’ is considered “vintage Madge” should listen up. The world is not interested in Madonna’s take on ‘Havana’ or Madonna’s take on ‘Shape Of You’ or Madonna’s take on ‘Despacito’. Young people don’t want it, casual listeners don’t want it, and Madonna’s fans certainly don’t want it.

Maybe, safe in the knowledge that no amount of Julia Michaels, Ed Sheeran or even Sia co-writes are going to give Madonna a hit in the streaming era (and that no matter what, a full Madonna album and world tour are always going to make money), you should take a look at her pretty spotless track record and leave her to her own devices this time around.

Let her roam around Portugal, meet with some underground musicians, raid her daughters’ music collections, see what’s out there that people haven’t heard yet. Could it all wind up being an unlistenable racket? Very possibly. But as someone who’s been listening to Madonna as long as I’ve been aware of recorded music, I can say with confidence I’d much rather hear something she was proud of and could stand by, than a radio-friendly three minutes and thirty-three seconds song that came out of a meeting of 25 songwriters who would rather be working with Meghan Trainor or Shawn Mendes.

And who knows? When those Spotify users get a whiff of authenticity and actual enjoyment from the result, Madonna could shock us all once again... and end the 2010s with an actual hit.

Exactly this time 20 years ago, MTV was running their Ultra Madonna Weekend marathon.

Specials included:

Madonna Videography (1998, 4 hours) - NEW!
Ultra Sound: Inside Madonna (The Making Of Ray Of Light) (1998, 30 minutes) - NEW!
All-Time Top 10: Madonna Performances (1 hour)

They also showed 1998 edits of these classic specials (a few minutes trimmed for commercial break times, which had expanded since they first aired).

Breakfast With Madonna (1990, 30 minutes) - with a new intro from Kurt Loder
Dinner With Madonna (1991, 30 minutes) - with a new intro from Kurt Loder
No Bull! The Making Of "Take a Bow" (1994, 1 hour)
Madonna's "Bedtime Story" Pajama Party (1995, 1 hour)

https://i.imgur.com/jHKxNV1.png

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-soUEd2ww_t...view%2B400.jpg

http://static.celebuzz.com/uploads/2...he-years-6.jpg

And Still I Rise – A meeting with Madonna : The Last Pop Giant On Earth

On a Sunday afternoon in October Madonna leaves her apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side and stands in the street. It is unseasonably warm – T-shirt weather in fall – and she has, she thinks, never been happier than the day before when she celebrated her daughter’s second birthday by holding a party at which a group of teenage Insian girls performed traditional dance. She approves of dance as an element in her daughter’s development; it encourages her to be creative, expressive, free. Anyway, to cut a long story short, she has lent her car to the indian girls to get them to the airport. She wants them to be taken care of.

Which is why she is standing in the street trying to hail a cab. The minutes tick by and she looks at her watch. She doesn’t like being late for appointments, she’s insistent on that: act professionally, do your job, even the bits you don’t especially like. Cabs come by, but only with passengers in the back. Even if you’re Madonna, and everyone knows your face as well as you do yourself, sometimes a beacon of yellow light just doesn’t come over the horizon. Imagine! The Most Famous Woman In The World, The Last Pop Giant On Earth, forlornly standing at the kerb waiting for her luck to change. The minutes tick by and, goddamit, there’s no cab in sight. The warm weather means there are a lot of people on the street and – Ohmygod! Isn’t that Madonna?! – her famous person’s disguise of black sunglasses wears thin. She’s rumbled. In the quarter-hour she’s on the street she is accosted by maybe 20 people. She loses count. Still no cab. She’d like to run. She’s been running all her life, these days mostly from what she calls her ‘demons’.

For years she ran from a middle-class, Middle-American upbringing in search of fame, chased it relentlessly and now, aged 40, she can’t get away, it defines her, possesses her. But she hatches plots and schemes to escape its clutches, to operate in a private space, finds way to work some much needed freedom. She is, if nothing else, her own woman.

The cavalry arrives. She jumps in and the car takes her off downtown. Maybe the driver recognizes her, maybe he doesn’t, this woman who has engineered herself so intensely through constant purposeful intervention. But it hardly matters, she is a person that we all think we know so intimately, so excessively – nakedly even – that we think that maybe there;s nothing else to know, no need for further familiarity. Madonna knows better than this, she knows that we hardly know her at all.

‘I ran to the lakes / And up to the hill / I ran and I ran / I’m looking there still / And I smelt her burning flesh… / Her decay / I ran and I ran / I’m still running today’ from ‘Mer Girl’ by Madonna

Madonna: For me [the] running is running from the idea of death, facing my own demons, facing my mother’s death and dealing with… whatever. People get obsessed by the idea of fame and being acknowledged by people and having approval and all these things for any number of mostly unhealthy reasons. So if you do start to better yourself you have to figure that one out – why? What is it that I’m looking for ultimately? What is it that I want? Why am I here? And so the running is a symbolic running really, from the truth of not wanting to face myself. Running from fear, running from being alone, running from being abandoned. All of these things.

Isn’t the only reason you’re now confronting these kind of existential questions because you’re successful and materially fulfilled?

Madonna: But the things I’m thinking about are deep and profound. [They’re] not easy things to think about. In fact it’s quite the reverse. What I was thinking about and doing was much simpler, you know? To really, really try to figure things out, to go deep and examine myself and really say ‘OK, why am I here? Why is anyone here? What is my purpose?’ There’s nothing easy about it.

Why are we here?

Madonna: [laughs] I don’t think that’s something anyone can tell another person. Do you know what I mean? Because everyone is here for a different reason, but I don’t think we’re put on this earth just to work hard, earn a lot of money and die.

What is the purpose of Madonna Louise Veronica Ciccone and her costumed, carnival pop life? This is a question she is currently in the process (as she is most likely to describe it) of trying to fathom, 16 years on from her first success in the New York clubs and a belt that read ‘Boy Toy’. To be sure Madonna is alone. There’s no one else left. The pantheon of Eighties pop stars who could rock a stadium from Rome to Rio has been sacked, its false idols collapsed or worn down by time. Madonna, the first woman to fill a stadium, knows this, although she tries not to think about it too much, tries to keep moving, and has been vindicated – 1998 has been a good year for her. She has released an album, Ray Of Light, which was enthusiastically received by press and public alike, the single ‘Ray Of Light’ swept the board at the MTV Video Music Awards, and she received a Lifetime Achievement Award from music channel VH1, although she picks awards up for just getting out of bed these days. Ray Of Light, which has now sold over eight million copies worldwide, saw her team up with English producer William Orbit to create fluid soundscapes that provide a lush backdrop and rhythmic mantra to what is lyrically a rawer, more vulnerable Madonna. ‘I hadn’t worked with her before,’ says Orbit. ‘But Ray Of Light was clearly very personal. She was really laying it bare.’

The opening line of the album ‘I traded fame for love’ suggests that she now has a more intricate relationship with her fame than ever before, although to speak of fame to Madonna is like asking someone who has lived with a condition for so long to see themselves anew. When asked about it she slips into the impersonal, as if fame were a universal experience, something we have all undergone.

‘Fame does a funny thing to you,’ she says. ‘Everyone thinks that they know you. Perfect strangers coming up to you and asking very personal things and touching you and taking liberties and asking you for thing. And if you weren’t famous then people would have too good manners to actually do those kind of things. Even though everyone’s paying attention to you, actually they don’t know you at all, which you feel just kind of exaggerates everything.’

Maybe this is modesty, shying away from the funereal toll of the subjective pronoun through defence. maybe it’s more than that – a separation of the person who brushes her teeth and has a daily disco with her daughter from the pop Frankenstein that she has created. Maybe it’s the way a middle-class girl from Michigan who took New York before conquering the world copes by putting some distance between the person she still is (or at least the person she feels she is) and the person she always wanted to be. Like many, she thought that fame would make her complete, furnish her as whole. What she discovered was that performing on a stage in front of 100,000 hysterical people can be as lonely as anything you can imagine.

She has been driven at speed through the Place de l’Alma underpass in Paris where Diana’s car crashed, has been pursued by paparazzi through the gloomy expense. There were mutterings when she was staying in London last March that photographers tried to flush her out of her hotel by setting off a fire alarm, nevertheless she concedes that the press, particularly in London, has given her a bit more room since Diana’s death and dismisses any suggestion that the video to her single ‘Substitute For Love’ , in which she is hounded by photographers in London, is in any way a reference to Diana’s death. ‘I was kind of confused and bewildered that people were drawing those kind of comparisons because that’s my life. I get chased by paparazzi to, and why people said I was trying to imitate her I don’t know. It really was like a night in the life of me.’

I ask her how it feels, now that Diana is dead, to be the most recognizable female face on the planet.

‘Really?’ she says. It’s odd that she appears not to have thought about this before, to have prepared a stock answer for a not unsurprising question. She stares into space for a few seconds as if trying yo think of someone else more famous. Really famous. Madonna famous. ‘It just seems so absurd,’ she says, eventually and not unkindly. ‘Anyway, it’s pretty strange thing to sit and think about: “I’m the most famous woman in the world.”‘

Maybe not; not if you’re Madonna. Fame is the defining aspect of her life – more than her music, or style, or movies she will be remembered for being one of the most relentlessly self-realized people of the century. Along with Monroe and Ali, Madonna will be remembered for defining the times by inventing and changing and promoting herself and ambition and, in so doing providing us with a way of understanding ourselves and remembering what we used to dance to, who we used to be.

Do you think about your own death?

Madonna: All the time.

Why?

Madonna: Why not?

Because it’s morbid and might depress you.

Madonna: It depends on how you look at it. If you start practising yoga the whole idea is that you learn detachment and ultimately this is preparation for your death, and so you can’t help but thinking about death. There are actual positions in yoga that activate a feeling in you that supposedly – and this is based in ancient Vedic text – is very similar to the fear that you experience when you’re facing your death. And the idea is to bring yourself closer and closer to that feeling and actually make yourself really comfortable with it.

So the idea is not to fear death…

Madonna: Yeah, exactly. Which I still do. But I’m more comfortable with the idea of thinking about it. I mean, I grew up… [this seems a little difficult for her, she halts slightly]… I grew up incredibly fearful of death and obsessed with it because my mother died when I was so young, so I was very fixated on the idea.

How would you like to die?

Madonna: Really. I’d like to die ready.

Famously, Madonna smells nice. She first appears from the gloom of the concrete-and-steel hotel lobby, her face glowing pale. She wears a black ribbed jumper, loose trousers, black-wedged Spice Girls shoes. She is petite – even the Most Famous Woman In The World is smaller than you thought! – frailer even, although the body is athletic, all business. The shoulders are square, the walk, rangy and loose-hipped. The walk of an athlete. We sit down and mmmmm! – doesn’t she smell good? We sit in a circular room lined with padded faux leather. Perched on a stool Madonna leans against the wall. The lights are dimmed and the air conditioning is on too high. The room is separated from the rest of the lobby by a velvet rope. (Madonna spends more time than she would perhaps like in private nooks and dens and fuselages that you and I will never see.)

The face is fragile. It’s not conventionally beautiful, but unexpectedly beautiful, like a painting that starts to reveal itself the more you look at it. She looks at you sometimes, and although you’ve seen the face a thousand – no, many more – times before there is much about it that you haven’t taken in. The greenness of her eyes, for instance, which contrast dramatically with her pale face. She looks better with dark- or honey-coloured hair than she did in her peroxide days when it seemed she would do anything to shoehorn herself into the vestiges of *****-me pop stardom.

She knows that all the things that you have read about her are mostly false. What is true is that Ray Of Light affirms the belief that she’s at her best when she’s riding the prevailing cultural mood, when she is in harmony rather than discordant, truculent troubled, as she seemed to be at the start of this decade when she reached a personal law after releasing Erotica, publishing Sex, and suffering poor reviews for the Movie Body Of Evidence during 1992. She is not the kind of person to let things creep up slowly upon her, so we must deduce that Sex was an attempt of a kind to engage us in some kind of discourse.

‘I see a lot of things I did in my Sex book now in advertising and I think, well, I was happy to get the **** kicked out of me so that you guys could have this freedom.’ she says, laughing long and hard.

There was a part of you that wanted to provoke?

‘Yeah, absolutely’

Why? Because you wanted to change things? Because you felt that America needed it?

‘Because I was dealing with my own demons.’ she says. ‘Because I couldn’t deal with the fact that people were constantly saying, “Oh, she’s sext and she’s this and that, but she doesn’t have any talent.” And it really irked me that you couldn’t be a, you know, sexually provocative creature and intelligent at the same time. So I went to the extreme and pushed the envelope to kind of prove to myself more than anything that that was bull****.’

And you think that you achieved that?

‘Yeah. Uh huh.’

Do you feel like you’ve changed things for women?

‘Yeah. I sort of lived out a lot of things that they wanted to do,’ she says. ‘ You have to go through a process. I sort of grew up in public. I went through a whole period of saying, “***** you, I will wear what I want to wear and act in a way I want to act and I will grab my crotch if I want to and I will say ***** on TV and I will do all the things that men are allowed to do and you’re just going to have to deal with it.” And that was me trying to figure things out, because ultimately a lot of women are very different, and you don’t have to act like a slovenly pig [laughs] to get respect. But you do have to go through things. I grew up in a very repressed home, in a very strict kind of Puritan family environment and, in a way, America is that way too. So, you know, you have to get to the other side and everyone has to go through their form of rebellion to figure out that they didn’t actually have to do so much kicking and flailing.’

Do you think that you provoke such a string reaction because America doesn’t like the idea of a woman being sexually liberated?

‘Or anyone being liberated. I mean look at what they’ve done to President Clinton. [She takes on a stern English voice] We do not have sex in America.’

Not with interns.

‘Not with cigars.’

She is famous for having sex. With men, with women, with herself. She has sex with the famous, and people become famous for having sex with her, but the fact remains that she cannot have sex with anyone more famous than her. Not anymore. Mostly she cannot meet anyone who has not seen her naked. She practices yoga for two hours a day and doesn’t eat lunch but returns phone calls instead. She has revealed herself to us intimately in a book and in the movies, but rarely in interviews. To read interviews with Madonna is to encounter a set of different women, all of them smart and talented, but some waspish, other compliant; some warm, other distant. She is bored easily and likes to be active. Madonna likes to do things and some of these things get her into trouble of a kind. At times she has offered us hope and a belief in the power of self-creation and at others she reminds us that getting what you want, arriving at a place of your own conception, can offer as bleak a vista as any.

She is wary of being misunderstood, even though she talks eloquently and at length and favours explanation over occlusion. She changes her opinions just like normal folk, and maybe just because she might have heard a question before. She uses a lot of British vernacular, including the word ‘bollocks’, and is the only American who can say the word ‘wanker’ without making a fool of herself. She looks like a woman of 40, which is just fine, because this is her age and she is The Last Pop Giant On Earth. She has never known the zero-degree freeze of failure.

But she does know what it is to feel alone, to feel pain. And having a child has both alleviated and exacerbated this. We talk about mortality and she says: ‘I was thinking about that the other day. I was carrying my daughter to bed, and I just thought some day she’s going to be a very old woman and someone’s going to be carrying her. And the thought just devastated me.’

Listening to taped of our conversation over the following weeks I am struck by the number of time she yolks intimacy and death.

She has a reputation for control, or wanting to control, although I suspect that much of this is down to the fact that she is powerful woman and women are not allowed to be powerful unless they are also perceived to be manipulative. Men often fear her. She had not be sanctified like a Diana, Jackie or a Marilyn., but then she is no victim and is big enough to make her own errors, of which there has been more than one. Clearly there are parts of her life, namely her work, over which she still insists on exerting almost total mastery, but there are other areas where she feels freer. We talk about the song ‘The Power Of Good Bye’.

‘It’s about not wasting so much energy,’ she says. ‘It’s really about accepting [things] and the freedom that it gives you. I did waste a lot of time trying to hold on things and control things. The song is also about facing death because ending a relationship is a kind of death – that’s why it’s so hard to break up with people. If you become emotionally intertwined with someone else it is a kind of small death in a way.

‘So, you know, it all leads to the same place – fear of the unknown, fear of letting go, facing your own death. All of that is connected to the idea that life does go on and the reason that people don’t want to let go of people or things is because they see everything as finite. But, in fact, I don’t believe that is true. And if you can embrace that then saying goodbye to things can be very empowering.’

In her answers he uses the language of self-help a great deal, talking of ’empowerment’, ‘the growing process’, and ‘the next place’. She is clear that music is central to her own ‘development’ and throws her guard up sharply when it’s suggested that the fickle nature of pop music might not be a place for a grown woman.

‘Am I a grown woman?’ she asks.

You’ve turned 40, so society would say you’ve grown up.

‘So? That’s bourgeois society. I’m not interested in that.’

So you’re going to continue to do everything on your own terms.

‘Why not? I mean the thing is I do think that what I do is art. And does an artist, does the creative, you know, mind turn off at 40? Did Picasso stop painting at 40, youknowadimean?’

Are you still going to be having number one records when you’re 50? 60?

‘I don’t know. But, you see, that’s not how I define myself.’

Have you lived the best life you could have had?

‘Yes,’ she says without equivocation, without a doubt.

Her life, its actions and meaning has been the subject of much conjecture that she will never know or care about. From trashy cobbled-together supermarket biographies to a volume dedicated solely to dreams about her, there is much to read if you wish to experience the full gamut of opinion. The internet makes scary reading. (‘Hey Madonna whats up [sic]… I’m not some freako that wants to stick a dildo up your ass or something. I’m a little Asian girl that would love to chill with you some time,’ is just one gem.) Of little greater worth is the furious debate conducted by feminist academics as to the effect she had had upon womankind…

Once, her life was private.

Madonna was born in Bay City, Michigan, the eldest of eight children. Her father, Tony, was an engineer at Chrysler, her mother, whose name she was given, a housewife. Later the family was to move south to Pontiac where she shared a room with two sisters. As a girl Madonna spent her summers working in her father’s vegetable garden weeding and spraying insecticide, or she was sent to her grandparents’ house in Pennsylvania where she would be expected to work on the house and garden. The regime was rooted in instilling a work ethic: church before school, housework that was assigned by her dad’s chore chart, and no TV. (This, incidentally, is her top tip for successful parenthood: no TV.) Madonna was expected to defrost the freezer, wash the dishes, baby sit, vacuum. She was a voracious reader and loved the stories her mother told her about a garden involving vegetables and a rabbit.

The family was devoutly Catholic. On Good Friday her mother would place a purple cloth over all the religious pictures and statues in the house. This was before she fell ill with breast cancer, which would take her life when Madonna was six. Like many children who lose parent, Madonna expected her mother to return. But nobody talked about it. For years it seemed that way. Three years later her father married again, this time to the family housekeeper whom Madonna never acknowledged as a mother.

She learned to dance to get out of the piano lessons that her father insisted the children took. ‘I loathed sitting still,’ she says. ‘[Dancing] gave me a sense of belonging. I was very derailed by my mother’s death and I never really felt I fitted in very much at school and things like that. When I started to dance it meant that I was good at something. It made me feel special, so it helped my confidence.’

Like many provincial teenagers she knew that she would leave for the big city as quickly as she could. She says that she knew she wanted to leave Michigan from the age of five. She lasted one term at her home-state university on a dance scholarship. Her heart wasn’t in it. Even though she’d never visited, there was really only one place for her: New York, the true home of the ambitious.

She arrived, in her late teens, at La Guardia airport and took a taxi to Times Square. She had no money or connections and lived hand to mouth, eventually settling in a tenement on the Lower East Side at 4th and Avenue B. Every weekend she went clubbing in search of A&R personnel and DJs who might be able to assist her career. She recalls dancing to ‘Don’t You Want Me’ by the Human League at New York’s famous Danceteria club.

‘I didn’t know what I was going to become,’ she says when asked if it ever crossed her mind that she might fail, ‘but I knew that I was good at what I did. When I came to New York I wanted to be a dancer and I had an enormous amount of confidence in that area.’ Her voice hardens a little. ‘I didn’t have any choice because I wasn’t going back to Michigan. So, for me, there was just no way that I was leaving. I was just going to stay in New York and learn how to survive. How that manifested itself I didn’t know.’

Enamoured by New York nightlife, she met people who could help her career and befriended influential DJ Mark Kamins who, after being impressed by a cassette of her music, produced the singles ‘Everybody’ and ‘Burning Up’ which brought Madonna her first success in the dance charts. On the strength of this she was signed to Sire records and released ‘Holiday’ which was produced by Jellybean Benitez and hit the top spot in the US dance charts before crossing over to become a worldwide hit in 1983. When she first arrived in the public realm, she seemed like nothing more than a cute little pop missile of the month. This was not the case. At 25, she was an adult, which perhaps partly explains the longevity of her career: she had fought, struggled and experienced much before tasting success. This was no overnight thing, no teen sensation.

With her first royalty cheque she bought a synthesizer and a bike which she had to carry up all six flights to her new apartment, a loft on Broome and West Broadway. Deep down she also carried much resentment about her family, was often unhappy and relied greatly on music, which she had written was ‘a vehicle for transcending misery (the story of my life)’ to get her through thin times. Prince’s ‘When Doves Cry’ meant a great deal to her. Yet, within five years, she had made two of the definitive pop albums of the decade – True Blue in 1986, and Like A Prayer in 1989 – creating a world of opposites and attraction, the plus and minis, the virgin and *****, which sparked a change of electricity that ran up and down the spine of pop culture. She understood the power of image on a way that only Michael jackson had done before, starring in elaborate theatrical videos that introduced her to a global market via TV. In 1989 her video for ‘Like a Prayer’ was censured by the Vatican, but no matter, she was off and running, working like a bastard, touring, recording, acting. This is the story of her life: she believes that the important things must be earned, must be learned.

She has never stopped and talks about needing to make another album, going back on the road again. Her work has been her passion even though she has realized she might never get the recognition from her father that she once craved.

His favorite female artist is Celine Dion.

Still, she has dreams. She says she dreams about all kinds of things, works out her demons (that phrase again) dreaming about her past, dreaming about her daughter. She dreams of those who make a strong impression on her and dreamed of Sharon Stone, of Courtney Love. recently she went to see some musicians playing ancient instruments. One of them played a device that was shaped like a gourd, with three strings on it. beneath there were 32 minute strings which resonated when a bow was drawn across it. ‘He was sitting in the lotus position and I was completely fascinated by him,’ she says. ‘There was something that looked really fragile about him, like he was going to kick the bucket any moment, but also something really magical and powerful. He seemed otherworldly to me. He was completely detached from everyone in the room and all the other musicians.’

That night Madonna had a dream. She dreamt that the man could fly. ‘I want you to fly,’ she said to him. ‘I know you can fly, and I want you to show me.’

The man was irritated by the request. He didn’t want to have to prove his powers. he wanted Madonna to have faith. But Madonna wanted to see him do it and she got her way. The man lifted off the ground hovering above her, flying around.

She believes that dreams are a way of communicating, that when we sleep we ‘plug into some kind of universal memory bank’, that the physical world is only ‘one per cent of what’s actually going on out there’. She tells a story in which she was staying at a friend’s house and had a dream about having to beat rats off. In the morning she discovered that someone else sleeping in the same house had to leave a retreat because of a rat infestation.

‘I am 100 per cent sure that I was visited by someone in my dreams last night,’ she says.

Who?

‘I don’t want to talk about it. You know when you do an interview, I don’t want to bring up names. But I think that happens all the time.’ She pauses. ‘And now you’re sure I’m completely bonkers.’

Bonkers, no, although her search for spiritual enlightenment had led her, once again, to be put in the pillory, this time for flirting with panacea merchants and gurus who claim to administer parts of the future as well as a number of different organized religions. She has used Catholic iconography, explored Buddhism and is now studying Kabbala, an ancient Jewish mystical tradition.

‘I subscribe to the school of being incredibly well informed before buying into things,’ she says. ‘I’m not just jumping on a bandwagon going, “Vote for that person”. It’s about experience.’

What do you get from Kabbalah?

‘Looking at my life from a different perspective,’ she says. ‘Studying comparative religions in general, the mystical interpretation of any text is going to be interesting and fascinating and going to have some truth that you can relate to. The whole thing about spirituality is that at the end of the day everyone thinks you’re a wanker and you’ve lost your marbles and trivialises it. The fact is that it’s hard to explain. It is very personal. And, you know, you change your mind all the time to. So, that’s the other thing – I don’t want to commit to anything.’

Which has been the case, in greater or smaller measure in other aspects of her life. She has yet to find an enduring love, although has a daughter and the memory of her mother looms large. In 1985 she married actor Sean Penn while 13 news helicopters hovered above them. By 1989 the marriage was over, and although she has referred to Penn as her ‘one true love’ you suspect that still the most overpowering relationship she has had has been with her own fame.

Maybe she will never see her for what she is, never be able to properly make out what is in her heart, so we choose to interpret her as a woman in cast-iron balls, the girl who asked for everything and got it, and by the same token forever prejudiced her relationship with humankind. Or most of it, for occasionally, she meets people who have no idea who she is. A few weeks before she had gone to watch a performance by a group of Indian musicians and singers. She slipped into the room with no fuss and sat and watched the performance. Afterwards they approached her and asked her who she was, what did she do? The man who had invited Madonna told them she liked to sing. ‘Oh, you’re a singer!’ the musician said. ‘That’s wonderful.’

Her voice quietens a little, when she tells the story, although it is laden with pleasure. “They were just relating to me as a human being,’ she says. ‘And I liked it. It was nice.’

Someone else who relates to Madonna as a human being, specifically a mother, is her daughter Lourdes, who was born by Caesarean section weighing 6lb 9oz in October 1969. Named after the most celebrated Christian healing shrine, Lourdes has offered her mother catharsis of a kind. “The great thing about having children,’ she says, ‘is that for the most part it turns us back into human beings.’ Having a daughter has caused her to think about her own mother’s death, to confront pain she has carried around for a lifetime and write about it explicitly in songs like ‘Mer Girl’.

There’s nothing like having a baby to make you face your own… mortality or immortality or however you want to look at it,’ she says.

When the birth was imminent, photographers stalked out every maternity ward in beverly Hills in pursuit of the $350,000 reward offered for the first shot of the baby. With that in mind, can Madonna offer her daughter a life with a semblance of normality?

‘I think it’s going to be gradual,’ she says. ‘She comes and she watches me rehearse for things, and she watches me on stage, and she watches me shooting things, and she watches me on stage, and she watches me shooting things, and I think she’s very clear that what I do for living very expressive, music has a lot to do with it. She sees what’s going on. So when she sees me on stage she just thinks I’m being silly, which I occasionally am being. So it’s not going to come as big shock when she grows up one day and realises thatI’m an icon, as you say.’

What’s been the most surprising thing about motherhood?

‘How much I could love something,’ she says. ‘That’s been the most incredible… You say that you feel it with other people, with lovers and such, but you just can’t imagine it.’

Lovers and such. If Madonna had as many lovers as catalogued in the press then she would be hard pressed to achieve mush else. What we know is that Lourdes’ father is Carlos Leon, as personal trainer who was 29 when the pair met in Central park. There have, reportedly, been other men since the birth of Lourdes, although Leon, who has seven per cent body fat, remains close to both of them.

Then there is the personal fortune of around $200 million and her successful record label Maverick, set up in April 1992 by Madonna’s ex-manager Freddy DeMann and of which she is enormously proud. According to the contract, Madonna must come up with seven albums, each of which receives an advance of $5 million as well as offering a platform for books, movies and other recording artists. Warner Bros has a 50 per cent stake in the company. There were teething problems. Maverick’s first project was Sex, its first music signing, Proper Grounds, disappeared without a trance, and its attempt to sign Hole got a famous finger from Courtney Love. But in 1994 everything changed when Maverick signed Alanis Morissette whose Jagged Little Pill sold in excess of 25 million copies. And when America woke up to the enormous success of The prodigy it was Maverick who secured the rights to distribute them there. With a long, sharp laugh she says that the main thing she has learned from Maverick is ‘what a pain in the ass artists are’.

Surely not.

‘Oh God. All I think about is: “God, if I was as rude to my record company as these people are to us…” It’s unbelievable.’

I ask how Maverick changed her relationship with Warner Bros. ‘They’re still buggers to me,’ she says. ‘They still treat me like… Ugh! Fahgeddit! I don’t want to even go there! Warner Bros still act like I still have to prove myself. After all the records I’ve sold for them, the success of the label, you have no idea. I mean Guy, my partner and I, we scratch our heads every day, we think they should be kissing our asses.’

She says that at the moment she’s happiest when she’s in London, where she is currently looking for a home. She has sold up in LA after a stalker, Robert Dewey Hoskins threatened to slash her throat and twice broke into her estate. The second time he was shot and wounded by one of Madonna’s bodyguards, and was sent down for ten years last March. Currently she is in New York where she lives near Central Park in the duplex where Warren Beatty famously accused her of not wanting to live off-camera. She has no photos of herself but an art collection, including a Picasso, a Leger and a Basquiat, which she has described as her most prized possession (she dated Basquiat and when they split he demanded she return the paintings he’d given her). It’s at this apartment that William Orbit one day appeared fresh off a plane with a bag of cassettes which he tipped out on the floor and rummaged among to find what might become the sound for her new album. There is also a picture of Muhammad Ali inscribed: ‘To Madonna. We Are The Greatest’.

Strange rumours occasionally surface. My favorite featured a visit last year to a pet psychiatrist when Madonna’s Chihuahua, Chiquita, was acting up. The amazing diagnosis was that the animal had become jealous of her daughter. Madonna does not have a favourite piece of newspaper tittle-tattle, finds most of it ‘tiresome’ and is quietly resentful of the suggestions made in some areas of the media that she was an unsuitable parent when it was announced that she was pregnant. ‘That was annoying,’ she says dryly and in a way that makes you understand the extent to which it pained her.

She does not like to be called a pop star, preferring instead the phrase ‘performing artist’. I suggest that despite the acres of newsprint devoted to her and the best efforts of our telephoto democracy she has survived relatively unscathed. She lets loose a big, breathy laugh and hunches a little. ‘Relatively,’ she says, by way of qualification. ‘Well, I am resilient, I’ll give myself that.’

Why are you [still] doing it?

‘Because I have something to say,’ she replies firmly. ‘It’s a growing process for me. An adventure.’

Ray Of Light suggests that Madonna has regained her understanding of the moment. When her last album, Something To Remember, was released in November 1995, she complained that ‘very little attention gets paid to my music’. And while the collection had its attractions it was clear that this kind of brawny balladeering should be left to the caged imaginations of the Celines, Mariahs and Whitneys. In one album we saw what Madonna, God forbid, might become: a twenty-first-century Barbra Streisand.

It’s not a pretty thought, admittedly, but at least it offers some perspective on Madonna’s core talent: Persistently staying in touch, mirroring and exploiting the fault lines of contemporary culture, in essence staying interested, giving us what we want.

You ask the woman whose life is a work in progress, if she has a motto. ‘Champagne for my real friends and real pain for my sham friends,’ she laughs. It’s a line from John Maybury’s biopic of Francis Bacon, Love Is The Devil. It makes her laugh. She says it’s ‘the mutt’s nuts’ which is as good a piece of vernacular as you’re likely to pick up all week. She won’t tell me a joke though, she says she never remembers them. And I don’t tell her a joke. She just won’t get it.

The afternoon has passed and Madonna’s answers are shorter. She is tired of accounting for herself and maybe even a little bored. The voice that we have lived with almost as long as she has, fades with the daylight. She smiles and it occurs to me that while she may sometimes feel lonely, she is never really alone for we measure ourselves against her journey, her extraordinary vault from the humdrum to the universal. And what a life, what a face. She has lived with it and she will surely die with it. But she’s alright with that. She’ll be ready.

Love it when Madonna dresses in multicolour...

https://image.ibb.co/gHee2n/Captre.jpg