For a long time, I considered Madonna to be the most overrated pop artist on the scene. A thoroughly mediocre singer producing hyper-commercial music, usually with extremely daft lyrics, all tied up in a massive image and marketing campaign. Much like David Bowie, Madonna has created so many personas that it’s impossible to say which one is the ‘authentic’ Madonna. Presumably, there is no such thing as ‘authentic’ music. Madonna – and this is something I’ve learnt to ackowledge in recent years – has long set trends and, in doing so, pushed pop music in ever-changing directions, always striving to be ‘new’ and, in some way, ‘sensational’. The Madonna phenomenon has always had a strong visual and psychological element, and for a long time her personas also reflected the prevailing zeitgeist. In the late 1990s, trip-hop and electronic music were all the rage. Acts such as Portishead, Massive Attack, Björk and Radiohead dominated pop music with a surprisingly uncommercial sound. William Orbit was a leading producer of the era who epitomised this new sound. And it was precisely this Orbit who, as producer and co-writer alongside Madonna, crafted the sound of *Ray of Light*. Musically, this was a quantum leap for Madonna, who had previously tended to operate in shallow, crowd-pleasing territory. Suddenly she sounded mature, rhythmically structured and excitingly modernist (lyrically, however, Madonna largely stuck to her mediocre pop lyrics or grand ambiguity). “Ray of Light” is by far Madonna’s best album, perhaps because it doesn’t sound like Madonna at all, but rather like an album by a sort of ‘US-American Björk’ If you ignore the thin lyrics about heartbreak and the joys of motherhood, “Ray of Light” is still a pretty good album that’s worth listening to every now and then. Not truly avant-garde, but a very successful contribution to a fascinating phase in pop music (which was soon to be superseded by boy bands and girl groups).
