Heading For The Light

By CHRISTOPHER JOHN FARLEY

Until there's a body count, until there's a tearful post-rehab Barbara Walters interview, until there's vehicular wreckage in a Parisian tunnel, most of us have limited tolerance for celebrities who gripe about the supposed burdens of fame. That Madonna, of all people, of all celebrities, should make the rejection of stardom and materialism the major theme of her new CD, Ray of Light (Maverick/Warner Bros.) should rightly make thinking people pause. Didn't she, from the very start, insist that we love her, demand that we worship her golden calves, her exposed iconic midriff, her conical Jean-Paul Gaultier bras? Didn't she, Marilyn-like, pursue the starring role in Evita, and Hollywood thespianhood in general, with .45-cal. ambition? Wasn't that she on the back cover of her 1992 shock-pop album Erotica sucking on some stranger's foot? Isn't she the original Material Girl?

But this is Madonna '98, at the close of an exhausted millennium, when shock comes hard, when irony is so overdone it can only be used ironically, when everything has come full circle and the Spice Girls can look and sound the way Madonna did 15 years ago and still be hailed as fresh and fun. So you move on. Madonna is the head of the record label--the aptly named Maverick--that released last year's band of the moment, the electronica-charged act the Prodigy (Maverick is part of Time Warner, the company that owns TIME). It makes sense, then, that Ray of Light draws on electronica for sonic inspiration. Madonna '98 is also a new mother (her daughter Lourdes is 17 months old); she has also been studying the Cabala (a form of Jewish mysticism), practicing yoga and learning Sanskrit.

All this is fuel for her new fire. Now the spotlight feels to her like an inferno, and her popularity looks like an abyss. "I traded fame for love," she laments on the CD's opening song, the gently cascading Drowned World/Substitute for Love. On the subdued Nothing Really Matters, she confesses "Looking at my life/It's very clear to me/I lived so selfishly."

Madonna, in the lyrics on this album, finds solace in family and philosophy. "You breathe/New life/Into my broken heart," she sings on Little Star, a swirling lullaby-like song about her daughter. On another track, the chanting Shanti/Ashtangi, Madonna sings in Sanskrit--something that, not too many years ago, would have been about as unthinkable as Hanson today singing in Serbo-Croatian. In translation, a line of Shanti/Ashtangi reads "I worship the gurus' lotus feet/ Awakening the happiness of the self revealed." Madonna in only six years has gone from sucking on feet to using them as catalysts for spiritual revelation.

The album has a liquid feel; melodies and rhythms wash and flow into each other. This, however, is not a current of water but of electricity: the album is propelled by synthesized sounds, electronic drumbeats and artificial noises. Madonna is clearly borrowing heavily from cutting-edge electronica-tinged performers, including Goldie, Bjork and Aphex Twin. William Orbit, Madonna's collaborator on the CD (he co-wrote and co-produced nearly every track) says she might release a second CD featuring the songs that were too experimental to make the album. "It would be like the play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead," says Orbit, who has also worked with Seal and Massive Attack. "You'd see the original album from a slightly different angle."

Unlike some of Madonna's previous hot and sexy albums, this one is resolutely frigid--if you licked this album your tongue would stick to it. The music and Madonna's vocals are, on the surface, direct and unemotional. However, the contrast between the chilly surface and the confessional nature of many of the lyrics creates a tension, even a passion. The sound of a numb Madonna trying to reconnect to her own emotions has poignancy akin to the Tin Man searching for a heart, or Spock struggling to come to terms with his human half. Orbit says that one song, the coolly funky Swim, was recorded on the day Madonna learned of Gianni Versace's murder: "I think that explains why the track has an emotional resonance to it. It was intense to record."

On the CD's last track, the slow, electronic blues song Mer Girl, Madonna sings of searching: "I ran and ran/I was looking for me." She comes across a corpse: "I smelt her burning flesh/ Her rotting bones/Her decay." Madonna has suggested the song could have multiple meanings--it could be about AIDS, it could be about her late mother. In any case, the last moment of this CD is what makes it hit home. We have our body. We can empathize. That corpse at the end of Mer Girl could be Madonna, leaving yet another one of her public selves behind.