(#583: 14 March 1998, 2 weeks)
Track listing: Drowned World-Substitute For Love/Swim/Ray Of Light/Candy Perfume Girl/Skin/Nothing Really Matters/Sky Fits Heaven/Shanti-Ashtangi/Frozen/The Power Of Good-Bye/To Have And Not To Hold/Little Star/Mer Girl
(Author's Note: This piece was written by Lena and edited and formatted by me - M.C.)
"For the first time you [lift your heart to God with stirrings of love], you will find only a darkness, and as it were a cloud of unknowing [...] Whatever you do, this darkness and the cloud are between you and your God, and hold you back from seeing him clearly by the light of understanding in your reason and from experiencing him in the sweetness of love in your feelings. [...] And so prepare to remain in this darkness as long as you can, always begging for him you love; for if you are ever to feel or see him...it must always be in this cloud and this darkness."
(The Cloud of Unknowing, Chapter Three)
There are few times that I can look at with a real sense of easy/unease than the first half of 1998. It is as if it was a very, very long story coming to an end, all loose ends being tied up, questions answered…but still, still, there was something lurking in the background, unknowable, hinting at a future to come which was going to be profoundly different. 1998, in other words, was the last real ‘normal’ year of the century, before the 1999 panic over the end of the century. The cloud of unknowing was where everyone was, whether they liked it or not.
When I listened to Ray of Light I was strongly reminded of two things, things which are no longer around. One is the Omega Centre Bookstore in Toronto, the other the Body Shop fragrance Oceanus. If you were me you would go to the Omega to experience a waft of incense, some New Age burbly music and head straight for whatever was of interest. And they had nearly everything you might want to help you get away from ‘male white corporate oppression’ (thank you Kim Gordon) could want. Tarot cards, books on numerology and astrology, books on how to channel and meditate, wicca, etc. I think they sold crystal balls as well, crystals themselves of course. And those most fashionable of things, books on yoga, Hinduism, Buddhism and (though I did not look for them) the Kabbalah.
I mention all these as Madonna has clearly been, at this time, into these last three quite heavily and it is as if this album was to be listened to while also reading some ancient instructions or scripture. Something leading to wisdom, something leading to understanding. It is a ‘wellness’ album in many ways, but not as restful or calming as that implies.
Oceanus was my perfume at the time, going well color-wise with my chunky bright blue sweater. It was unisex; it was like being by the sea, again like standing next to a rather lily-smelling infinity, with the salt tang in the air as well. It urged you to go out and do things, to explore. It was not particularly ‘sensual’ let alone sexual, but it could take you, if you let it, OUT of yourself….implying the endlessness of the ocean itself, of a certain borderless world, that pacific state of pure joy.
Madonna looks out with some impatience from the cover, as if to say, here is the blue turquoise of the water and the inevitable sandy beach, these timeless things, and me. I think she looks a bit wary too, the photos of her inside looking happy are kind of forced, the ones where she is blocking the gaze of the camera with her hand, realer somehow. And then the music starts, quietly….
…I am going to be *cough* polite here and not talk about Madonna’s early 90s period*. It was, as the term these days seems to be, “wild” and perhaps this was intentional. "Drowned World/Substitute For Love" has Madonna rejecting her past, almost as if (though she never uses the term) she has been born again. It is that burbly New Age music again, eventually growing into a beat but somehow (and the whole album is like this) kind of muffled, as if there is a wall of…water?....between you and her. And considering she and William Orbit produced Ray of Light, she must have wanted it to sound all a bit subdued. It is like the solemnity of a ritual; not everything here is going to make sense, but it feels right for this moment and the logic of album is inexorable.
I am not sure who the "Substitute for Love" person is (her newborn daughter? The Higher Wisdom? The Big Guy/Gal Upstairs?) but clearly, she has swapped a lot of her life – fancy things, having ‘fun’, flings that don’t mean anything – because this new thing eclipses them all. Who needs love when you have yoga, Buddhism and the Kabbalah? But she ends the song by singing, "This is my religion." Madonna is building her own faith on these things, but the Catholicism she grew up with is always there, too.
So then, that's her mission statement: I am done with my past, this is who I am now, upon these rocks and mantras** and patterns I build my faith. "Swim" makes the sloughing off of sins, bad habits and the current chaos into a groovy throwing away of clothes while on the roof of a hotel. I am SO DONE that I am going to purify myself in the ocean, She sighs at the end as the music swims calmly by like fish, as if this is all very easy or very tiring or both. Well Madonna doesn't want - I read about this in a biography of her - me to dwell too much on the roots of these songs, so I won't; but I will say that it is much easier to say you are casting off your old self than to do it....
And she is working with William Orbit because yes, ladies and gentlemen, she wants to be new, MODERN, cool and so on. She wants to rave, and so refashions a song from 1971 by folk duo Curtiss Maldoon called “Sepheryn” which is folky and kind of spacey. Madonna and Orbit sped it up quite a bit and made it into a rave, a fun time to be had by all. I have no idea what "Ray of Light" is about besides feeling…at one with the universe? She even yelps and screams at the end, and now that she has a trained voice and knows how to sing, she can really yelp and sustain her voice to keep up with the frenetic beat. The closest thing I heard to this at the time was the CBC radio Stereolab concert from '99 and Laetitia Sadier was whooping and yelling at the end of a song, and it sounded to me as if...a baby was being born. And Madonna (this is key to the album) is a new mom herself. All kinds of things are being (re)born now....
And now to the funky mystery slink of "Candy Perfume Girl" which is sensuous and of course I would like a song with perfume in the title! Hypnotic, sinister - alluring is the word used so much in perfume advertising, and things get kind of confusing and big and more and more disorienting as the song goes on....magic poison...hmmm....the way she sings "delicious fires" as if this is what she wants too, if only she could find it....
"Skin" is a real breakthrough of sorts - not just her admitting that she has said 'stupid things' before but a real sense of her being....overwhelmed?...by this Other. The music speeds by smoothly, like what 'the future' is supposed to sound like. It is an internal monologue, a song of pauses and magnifications and sensations. Here she is wanting to be kissed and touched, the music racing along with her insistent "Kiss me I'm dying...dying and 'I'm not like this all the time!'. This ache and longing continue later....
"Nothing Really Matters" is her once again saying she is now a different person because 'love is all we need' and um it shuffles along. "Something is ending and something begins" is fairly obvious a statement, but this is an album which...puts this idea to a test. This is the most 'normal' 'disco' 'traditional' Madonna song here, practically begging for a remix or two (Madonna picked William Orbit because she liked his remixes of her songs).
Again, I am not sure about "Sky Fits Heaven" completely BUT it is upbeat, optimistic and again practically sounds so 1998 it's got a date stamp on it. This is very much, to reiterate, an album made and released in a specific time, when electronica and drum ‘n ’bass (this song seems like a mash-up of both) that is a once-in-a-lifetime event. Madonna is just part of this big flow of time, following her heart, mindful that this won’t last forever. And then it squeaks and squelches to an end, the signs along the road which whoosh by, leading to...
Okay, so the yoga song is here. It seems almost pointless to really say much other than her pronunciation was not that good at first and she had to go to the BBC World Service to learn how to sing the lyrics correctly. This truly is peak Omega Centre 'I just got into yoga and I am very serious about it, I have a designer mat and everything'. I have no doubt Madonna is sincere, and I know some people out there appreciated "Shanti/Ashtangi" but I also know it upset people that she would be a cultural appropriator for profit. To which I guess she would say, IT'S ART, DARLINGS, and go into her next pose....
Here beginneth the WHY DO I LOVE IMPOSSIBLE MEN section:
“For He can well be loved, but he cannot be thought. By love he can be grasped and held, but by thought, neither grasped nor held. And therefore, though it may be good at times to think specifically of the kindness and excellence of God, and though this may be a light and a part of contemplation, all the same, in the work of contemplation itself, it must be cast down and covered with a cloud of forgetting. And you must step above it stoutly but deftly, with a devout and delightful stirring of love, and struggle to pierce that darkness above you; and beat on that thick cloud of unknowing with a sharp dart of longing love, and do not give up, whatever happens."
(The Cloud of Unknowing, ibid.)
“Frozen” is a legend, a told-many-times story, Madonna has been on this for so long – “Open Your Heart” is the ancestor. Does she know what love is? Of course she does. Is it possible for her to run and run and catch up with this Other, however? She sings it hoping, longing, sad, plaintive...across what seems like desert, sand, nothingness....it was inspired by The English Patient*** and has that musical sense of being both western and eastern, though not in a way that say, oh, Jeff Buckley was trying to merge the two in his own music.
Again, she insists on there being a key to the Other’s heart, and oh yeah I have to dip into my own esoteric knowledge and mention that the symbol of the key in astrology is for the minor planet Chiron, known as the wounded healer, a centaur who has to give up his immortality in order to be healed, and was put in the stars as the constellation Centaurus by his half-brother Zeus. So, Madonna going on about the key is about her wanting to heal someone (Chiron was a great healer himself) and the Other not willing to break down and make that sacrifice.
The Cloud of Unknowing doesn’t want her to give up, but she does…This little symphony continues with her singing 'Your heart is not open' and thus she goes, singing offhandedly "I wanna go higher." I yearn to say goodbye? There's no greater power OH HEY NOW WAIT A MINUTE… this rather swish break-up song is almost a joke in the context of what is to come. No greater power than the power of goodbye? WHAT with the what now? All this sadness and letting go of things, but can you really let go of things and say odd things like “Creation comes when you learn to say no”? What if saying no, rejecting things and running away…don’t work?
Concluding this section is the endless back-and-forth of "To Have and Not To Hold" which is what happens when you are attracted to someone who is emotionally unavailable, devastatingly attractive and just not there for you, now or ever. She should know better, she does know better but it's useless. All these songs point to her situation - a lonely and isolated one, which is perhaps why she needs all the wisdom she can get from rituals, yoga, etc (She chants part of the Invocation to Patanjali here, Abahu purusakaram which means “From the hand up to the head he has the shape of a human” which I guess she put in because it scans but also he seems too good to be true?). Age can bring that wisdom, but also a vulnerability that someone like Madonna may be uncomfortable with....Madonna is, in the context of The Cloud of Unknowing, an active, not a contemplative. She is not, cannot settle for life outside the world, hidden away. How could she when she has a baby?
Here endeth the WHY DO I LOVE IMPOSSIBLE MEN section.
What is it like to be a mother? What is it like to give birth? “Little Star” is a fairy-queen blessing of a song, far away from the world of “Show Me” by the Pretenders, where the daughter is a creature from outer space, a sign from the heavens, now living in the cold, hard world on Earth. But here the daughter is a special thing, and the music is...dare I say it a bit generic? William Orbit skitters around in the background, but the mood is far more "Lovin' You" by Minnie Riperton. The broken heart is still there, despite the baby's ability to breathe new life into it; Madonna calmly sings this lullaby as if her baby is the only good, pure thing in the world.
And then the other morning it hit me:
Suddenly I am rocked back, back to my own birth year. Laura Nyro - still a teenager - sings "And when I DIE...And when I'm dead, dead and GONE...there'll be one child born and a world to carry on."
And I remember my mom saying this was her song, and that I was the one child born....and of course hearing it makes me cry.
I didn't know my mom was that ill; she never told me how ill she was.
The same went for Madonna, much much younger than me when her mom waved to her, then disappeared.
"Mer Girl" is girl of the ocean, the sea; but heard aloud, it could be the Girl Mother, Mother-in-the-Girl.
I am the mother of the girl and I miss my mother.
She runs, she races in this dream sequence of a song - a recitation of the run away from home, from everything familiar. We are back to where we unwittingly began, she told us from the start but we were distracted by everything else - the romantic plights, the renunciations, the raves. But this is the Drowned World, the Titanic disaster aftermath. The desperate wanting to go away, the fear that if you go away, you won't be able to come back.
She runs and runs, thinking about her mother's death, and is metaphorically swallowed and then lifted out of the earth itself. "And I smelt her burning flesh/Her rotting bones/Her decay/I ran and I ran/I'm still running today."
"I was looking for me."
This whole album has just been radically upended. Nothing can stop this endless running away - from her house, her man, her baby even - it is as if Ray of Light is a huge prologue leading to the actual, real story underneath everything which is this empty howling relentless grief, a terrible wound at a young age, one she cannot simply say 'goodbye' to as if it were to a heartless beau.
The sort of grief where becoming a contemplative after a while would make good sense. To find yourself (it sounds so simple) and to realize after so many nightmares and crying jags and hopeless pursuings of unavailable men that maybe there's a...pattern here? Or as they would say kindly at the Omega Centre, how can you embrace your wounds as sources of wisdom and growth?
And here we suddenly stop, and in a way Madonna stops here too. Not that we do not come back to her, but soaked to the skin, with matted hair and grieving and running, she has reached the edge of what, in a way, she can do. She will be quite different when we get back to her.
Because this is that - dare I call it this? - rare, liminal time. The moment where everything can, for a moment, be just like when you finally reach the ocean, you breathe deep and relax. Even if you feel grief or are going through it, you need to pause in that unknowing and feel something much bigger than yourself happen. That rich blue green sea appears to me, comes into my life not as an ocean, but as an object, as the watery late '90s continue. Madonna in the meantime has to grasp back and hold on to whatever she has - a ray of light, perhaps?
Next time: the strongest voices from Manchester.
*This is just to say also, Camille Paglia doesn’t mention it but Vanilla Ice was not, could not have been the sexiest man in Miami c. 1992. "But Madonna's confrontational strategy (through its very success) had become stale by the time of her ill-conceived 1992 book, "Sex," which may have sold well but was an artistic disaster, banal in design and juvenile in detail. Gimmicky, sadomasochistic scenarios were old hat and, in any case, hardly expressed the health or vitality of the sex impulse — Madonna's ultimate point. After the protracted censorship battle over Robert Mapplethorpe, who had genuinely inhabited the S&M underworld, Madonna's images seemed shallow, superficial, and unerotic."
**Madonna wanted to call the album Mantra, but realized that maybe this wasn’t the best idea.
***I don’t know if this song is sung from the point of view of Katherine Clifton or Almasy or is simply inspired by looking at Ralph Fiennes and just sighing a lot. It’s okay, Madonna; everyone had a crush on him at the time.
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