"Ray of Light" Album art
I've written about Madonna before but this praise bears repeating. Madonna established herself with her staple mainstream pop sound and boundary-pushing societal messages in the '80s. In the '90s she came back with an entirely new, mature sound and the deeper, more thoughtful lyrics of an evolving artist.
I keep coming back to this album not just because it's amazing in of itself but because it's the perfect example (along with period pieces by Bjork, U2 and Garbage) of the classic 90s sound. Now I'm not talking about the staple '90s alt rock sound - which is also superb - but music that seems to encapsulate the post modern feel of the decade, a kind of spirit and a flow of unbridled creativity that I hope to extends into the new millennium.
The album itself is more pensive than Madonna's earlier and later bubble-gum pop (although her later song "Die Another Day" seems to revisit this album's philosophical, religious, spiritual and symbolic richness.).
The sound of songs like "Frozen" and "Swim" is representative of the cognitive dissonance of the '90s - and eclectic mix of chill beats, electronic embellishments, references to India and Middle East and eclectic experimentalism. The '90s was all about pushing the boundaries of the mind and coming to terms with a world coming of age.
The crown jewel of the album and only real up-tempo song of the album has been a favorite of mine since I first heard in third grade. "Ray of Light" as well as it's iconic time-lapse music video below, embody the wanderlust and hustle and bustle of a typical day in hyper-modern post-modern urban cities all over the world.
The song's title can refer to light in a technological sense - such as in the case of fiber optics which brought the world into the Information Age - or in a universal religious sense - for example, in Christianity, Jesus is referred to as the light of the world.
In the video, and within the poetry of the lyrics, Madonna acts like as the song's "Zephyr in the sky" "speeding" through "a universe gone quickly" in an age of fast food and high-speed internet. Like the mythological Zephyr, the Greek god of west wind, she tries to embody the winds of changes blowing across the world.
Like a little goddess ("She's got herself a little piece of heaven"), an imperfect deity both owning the universe ("She's got herself a universe") and symbolizing the universe itself (microcosm vs. macrocosm), she tries to "remember where it all began" while being aware of "the call of thunder [which] threatens everyone" - the supposed end of the world. As the world's muse, her thought encapsulates the history of the world.
At the same time she seems mortal, perhaps subject to reincarnation on earth or a god or avatar reborn time after time in the heavens or a god born on earth only to ascend to heaven. In the video, she appears as a spiritual all-knowing being in the sky and narrates from within reality before acquiring or returning to a physical body by nighttime. At the end of the day in the video she appears to die, perhaps to be born again for the world's benefit like the sun in ancient pagan religions.
The song doesn't espouse any particular religion but a powerful universal spirituality. The singer of song seems to reach for the divine either through the heavens around Earth or from out of the an individual person's mortal coil.
The song is a modern-day mythology. The narrator is or becomes the world's spirit, its zeitgeist, moving "quicker than a speed of light." Her "little piece of heaven" is the peace and happiness of enlightenment. She flies "through the endless years" which pass before her, "waiting for the time when Earth shall be as one."
- Ryu
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