thinking about "ray of light" as i often tend to do
The Ray Of Light album was the first Madonna album that came out after I started caring about and remembering music. I had already been listening to '80s Madonna since I was a kid—True Blue was one of the only albums I had on cassette, I would often stare at that striking Herb Ritts photo in wonder—and I knew quite a bit of the iconography and lore of her career, even whiffs of the early '90s sex stuff that was definitely gatekept from my household. But I didn't know anything about electronic music, and I didn't know that being a 40-year-old pop star wasn't normal.
("Believe" by Cher came out a few months after "Ray Of Light," and at eight, I maintained enough innocence to wonder why everyone thought it was such a big deal for her to have a hit...she'd been famous for 30 years, was she supposed to just stop being famous??)
We were an Oprah household. We went to Mass every Sunday but Oprah was probably the true God in our home. She was the original influencer, calibrating a perfect mix of aesthetic, intellectual, spiritual and consumer leadership. My mom bought things on Oprah's Favorite Things list, she read Oprah's Book Club books. We even read O, the Oprah magazine, with Oprah on the cover every month. And we watched the episode when Madonna performed "Ray Of Light" when it aired - 4pm on a Friday in May.
Music performances were not super usual on Oprah and they had an extra frisson to them. Even the way Oprah said her name—MADONNAAAA—meant something. Oprah was more famous than most of the people who went on her show, but not Madonna. This was the first time she performed the song on television and in retrospect it's incredible that she popped off for this audience, which naturally skewed older and more washed than TRL. Middle aged moms should rave too, she said. The microphone was on and the crowd was going nuts.
Ray Of Light was Madonna's alt-spiritual era. She was dabbling in all kinds of mystic shit, Kabbalah and Hinduism and Buddhism and yoga before all the regular people started doing yoga. A good fit for Oprah, who was fond of vaguer but still potent ideas of finding meaning in existence: Living Your Best Life, the eventual Super Soul Sunday. This era had its critiques at the time, some of them legit, but it feels so playful and earnest in retrospect. You don't really get pop stars gunning for spiritual representation on this level, just blandly thanking God at the Grammys. 9/11 and Bush's leadership curdled religion in American pop culture perhaps forever—the overculture has been left to country singers and Justin Bieber, it might never be mainstream to look for God in any of the nonstandard ways again.
I'm trying to remember when "Ray Of Light" went from a song I thought was good, to one of my favorite songs of all time. I think it happened gradually and then suddenly, "suddenly" being of course 2020 and Covid. A big Madonna phase happened during that year. First I got attached to "Vogue," specifically the opening line look around, everywhere you turn there's heartache, the way she sang a depressing line so brightly and defiantly. And "Ray Of Light" sounded like freedom, like getting blasted in the club so hard that you start to Understand Things. I missed that—no amount of DJ set party zooms could replace that all-encompassing energy.
I don't want to reduce this song and this Madonna era down to motherhood. In fact Ray Of Light is so good because she takes something specific like having a child and blows it up to universal relatability. (Not everyone gives birth, but everyone is certainly born.) But she started working on this record when she was like 7 months postpartum, and I can't help it, I hear the New Baby in this song. The And I feel like I just got home reminds me of the moment my child was born, when the OB plopped her, slimy and warm, on my chest. Actually she basically threw her on my chest—it was kind of aggressive, like catching a fish at the Pike Place Fish Market. That feeling, the near instant reversal of incubating someone who was now on the outside of me, how exciting and terrifying it was to start something new, and how sad it was to know my daughter was now in the world as her own being, a separate person from me—that is "Ray of Light" to me now.
This song would be nothing without William Orbit, of course. He understood what the end of the century sounded like. It's important to make a statement that you believe in the future, in whatever way you can. Otherwise people quickly forget that it's our job to keep living!
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