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THE REVIEW
Summer 1996. The girl enters the room, closes the door behind her and stops to look at herself in the mirror. It's an intimate yet everyday gesture, seemingly normal, yet something in her is changing. Not just her body, which has been hosting two lives for five months; all of a sudden, she realized that everything she has done so far—the frantic rush to appear on the front page, the urge to become a star—was nothing but a silly game.
So she decides to take singing lessons and go to yoga, she begins to study the Jewish Kabbalah and lets herself be carried away by that ray of light that has opened new scenarios in her life. For almost two weeks, she locks herself in her friend Rick Nowels' house for four hours a day, him at the piano and her looking for inspiration. The sessions produce seven tracks, excellent starting material, but she feels something is still missing.
The following spring, one of her record label managers puts her in touch with William Orbit, a keen and experienced electronic music composer, who working on the demos manages to translate into sound the emotions she feels inside. They work hard for almost another five months, then, in late autumn, they deliver all the material composed in the recording sessions to the producer, the eclectic Marius De Vries, for mixing.
Preceded by the single Frozen, and brought to global success by tracks like The Power of Goodbye, Nothing Really Matters, and the title track itself, Ray of Light—which sees the light in February 1998 and will sell over twenty million copies worldwide—is an innovative and experimental electronic-spiritual journey, which mixes, in the thirteen tracks that compose it, ambient music and techno music, trip hop and drum and bass, rock and disco.
Above all, the funereal and apocalyptic Swim, spontaneously written by the artist after hearing the news on the radio of the death of her friend Gianni Versace: "Kids are killing kids / while the students rape their teachers / Comets are crossing the sky / while churches burn their preachers."
Simply, Madonna's best album.
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Summary by Bot
Madonna's Ray of Light marks a turning point, blending electronic and spiritual themes into groundbreaking music. After personal transformation and dedicated creative sessions with William Orbit, the album resulted in a pathbreaking sound mixing ambient, techno, trip hop, and more. Tracks like Frozen and The Power of Goodbye achieved global success, and the album sold over 20 million copies worldwide. It remains Madonna's best work according to the review.
Madonna
Madonna (born Madonna Louise Ciccone, August 16, 1958) is an American singer, songwriter, actress and cultural icon who rose to prominence in the 1980s and has had a multi-decade career marked by stylistic reinventions.55 Reviews
Other reviews
By lovi
Madonna will never make an album like this again!
This album moves me, and that’s not a small thing for me.
By pluto1992
"There are few songs that give you chills (at least for me), and 'Ray of Light' is one of them."
"Quicker than a ray of light, I’m flying... Quicker than a ray of light, she’s flying."
By pluto1992
It remains, in fact, one of the best pop albums in history, considered by VH1 among the 10 best albums ever.
When I first listened to 'Ray of Light,' this feeling (of ridiculousness in maturing artists) disappeared.
By Darius
Ray Of Light represents, or should represent, the Summa of her artistic journey.
This album is a dedication to all those fanatical Madonna detractors who intend to deny the goodness of her art because of its extremely commercial and poppish side.
