by Lucy O'Brien
RAY OF LIGHT was released in March 1998 to widespread critical acclaim. Rolling Stone called it “brilliant,” while Slant magazine in the United States dubbed it “one of the great pop masterpieces of the 90s. Madonna hasn’t been this emotionally candid since Like a Prayer,” and U.S. entertainment channel E! bestowed an impressive accolade with its mark of A-. The only note of caution also came from Rolling Stone, with Rob Sheffield’s comment that William Orbit “doesn’t know enough tricks to fill a whole CD, so he repeats himself something fierce.” This didn’t deter people from buying the album. Since its release, it has sold an estimated 17 million copies. It won four Grammy Awards, including Best Pop Album and Best Dance Recording. Finally, it won over the undecided. This was the record that brought on board “serious” music buyers, the music press demographic of twenty-to thirty-five-year-old male readers. With Ray of Light, Madonna achieved the thing that had eluded her since Like a Prayer—full artistic credibility. “I’ve been in the music business sixteen years and this is my first Grammy (well, actually I’ve won four tonight),” Madonna said, blinking furiously, in her acceptance speech at the 1998 awards show. “It was worth the wait.”
The record also signaled greater success for her in Europe. In the United Kingdom, for instance, the album went to number one and was registered six times platinum, while in the United States it peaked at number two and sold four times platinum. Maybe this gave weight to Madonna’s decision to relocate to London. For her, Ray of Light was more than a comeback; it was a resurrection. Approaching forty, she had finally, it seemed, grown up. Gone was the arch, glittering blonde of Erotica; now she reemerged with burnished golden ringlets, subtle makeup, and a flowing, Eastern-tinged look. Mario Testino’s album cover artwork was shot through with radiant blue, from her shiny satin shirt to the aquamarine background. The emphasis was on Madonna as natural and unaffected, her head thrown back in laughter, her wild hair streaming behind her. This record encapsulated her growing maturity. She was doing well in her career, and she had a beautiful baby daughter. The only thing missing was a lover to share her life with.
BY THE summer of 1998 she and Andy Bird were drifting apart. Although the Warwickshire-born man was ambitious, it seemed he could never quite follow through with his plans. Madonna often paid his way and rented an apartment for him when he came to Los Angeles. Although she enjoyed mothering him for a while, she had her reservations about him. With his black clothes and motorcycle boots held together by tape, he never really fitted into her London smart set. As they were breaking up, Madonna went through an emotional crisis when she found out she was pregnant. She desperately wanted another baby, but only in a secure relationship. While she agonized about whether to keep the child, the decision was apparently made for her when she suffered a miscarriage.
This experience threw Madonna’s personal life into sharp relief. Her priority now was to find a suitable husband, someone who was equal to her, who had his own career, but who also wanted to have a family. For years, this had proved elusive—partly because Madonna was too focused on her work to give serious attention to a man, but also she hadn’t been emotionally ready. Unresolved pain from her childhood had left her reluctant to commit, and it seemed to friends that she was adept at sabotaging relationships that mattered. “There were whole chunks of my life where I was so lonely…and wondered if it was ever going to be possible for me to have a relationship that was going to last. I did wonder if it was possible to find a man who could handle me, as well as a man I could handle,” Madonna said. “But then, just when I wasn’t looking, I found one.”
Just a few months after the release of Ray of Light, Madonna met her match. “You know when people say ‘he turned my head’? My head didn’t just turn—my head spun around on my body!” she exclaimed. When she met Guy Ritchie at that summer lunch party at Sting’s Lake House in Wiltshire, she met someone very like herself: driven, determined, and adept at reinvention. The son of an advertising man and a model, Guy was a bright but restless child. His parents divorced when he was five, and his mother married Sir Michael Leighton, the holder of a three-hundred-year-old baronetcy. Although Guy spent holidays in Loton Park, the Leighton family estate near Shrewsbury, most of his growing up was in a series of boarding schools. A severe dyslexic, he ended up at Stanbridge Earls, a school for children with special needs in Romsey, Hampshire. It is a pleasant, enlightened school set in acres of countryside, but Stanbridge Earls couldn’t contain him. Expelled at the age of fifteen for playing truant and bringing girls into his room, Guy left his expensive education with just one qualification in film studies. Years later, he claimed that he was expelled for taking drugs, but his father countered, “Guy says those things on occasion. I think it’s rather modern to say it. He likes to pretend he’s been a bit of a scallywag, but I don’t actually think he was.”
Guy’s initial ambition as a teenager was to be a gamekeeper, or, like his grandfather and great-grandfather before him, to go into the army. His grandfather Stewart was a family hero, a major in the Sea-forth Highlanders, decorated in World War I and killed at Dunkirk. Although Guy abandoned such ideas when he moved to London and got a job in a Soho film company making promos, he brought that taste for military strategy into his filmmaking. He worked hard, wrote well, and took risks. He hung out with his private-school cronies on a stretch of road in Fulham called “The Beach,” mixed with savvy working-class guys from the East End, and tried hard to get funding for his film scripts. Full of bravado as a young man, he used to drive his Triumph sports car “like a lunatic,” and once got his face cut for getting on the wrong side of some unsavory people. Struck by stories of London gangland, he affected a Cockney accent, and imagined himself living a life more dangerous than the one he had been used to at Loton Park. For someone who was distantly related to the late princess of Wales, the chirpy Cockney was quite a reinvention.
After making a short film called Hard Case, in 1995, Guy managed to get money from a variety of backers, including Sting’s wife, Trudie Styler, to make his first full-length feature film, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. Set amid rival gangs in London’s criminal underworld, the film is shot with fast edits, musical flourish, and an array of directorial tricks. It incorporates themes that would crop up time and again in later work—guns, games, and homophobic gags. Though ruthlessly violent, Lock, Stock was essentially lighthearted, and it became a commercial success. “For the first time since I left school I know what I’m doing,” he said. With its references to Performance and The Italian Job, Lock, Stock earned Guy a reputation as the English Quentin Tarantino. His characters were more stylized, however, and he didn’t have the latter’s cinematic range. Guy had yet to really develop his oeuvre; this would come later, with his film Revolver.
Shortly after Lock, Stock was in the can, he went down to Sting’s house in the country. “I was very pally with Trudie at this point, because we’d just made the film,” he told Interview magazine. “On my way to the train station, I called and said, ‘So who else is coming for lunch?’ She said, ‘Just a couple of people.’ And I said, ‘Well, who?’ And she said, ‘Madonna.’ I’ve gotta tell you, it did knock my socks off a bit.” The pair of them hit it off immediately. Both appreciated words and wit, and both loved film. “She’s very dry. Very funny,” he said.
At the time, he was planning work on Snatch, a crime caper about illegal betting and bare-knuckle boxing that was to star Brad Pitt. Ten years younger than Madonna, with a charming smile and a hint of aggression, Guy was his own man, with his own career. He seemed like the perfect partner. In the same way that Madonna’s world is hyper-female, with her Hollywood glamour and addiction to high fashion, so Guy’s style is hyper-male. His version of masculinity is all about strategizing and game-playing. His films are full of riddles and word tricks, and the women are as diamond-hard as the dudes. At the epicenter of each movie is the gun, whether it’s a revolver, rifle, or a huge Kalashnikov. A gun gives the illusion of control over one’s envir
onment. To a small boy packed off to boarding school after his parents’ breakup, this was irresistible. As a teenager, he was a good clay-pigeon shot, and later on, he cultivated an interest in shooting real birds. Like Madonna’s first husband, Sean Penn, Guy took from guns a sense of power in a world that was beyond his control. Madonna has called Guy her “soul mate.” Maybe they both recognized a childhood pain and the need to cover it up to survive.
Despite this, the romance took a while to get off the ground. Guy was still seeing the model Tania Strecker, so when Madonna came to London, she had to meet him in secret. This was infuriating for Strecker. Madonna and Guy had passionate trysts in a tiny but well-appointed film-production apartment in Wardour Street. While he filmed Snatch on location in the United Kingdom, she shot the whimsical, half-baked comedy The Next Best Thing with Rupert Everett in Los Angeles. In the film, she plays a yoga teacher, desperate to find a man and have a baby. In real life, Madonna had the man within her sights, and she pursued him with admirable determination, but as long as she lived in Los Angeles, he was reluctant to commit. As far as Guy was concerned, his films were about London characters and subcultures, and although he had some tempting offers for big features, he didn’t want to be “emasculated” by the Hollywood studio system. “It’s about finding that edge and staying on it,” he declared. Guy was also a little intimidated by Madonna’s success, obliquely referring to her in an interview as having “a work ethic that crashes mine. It makes me feel like I’m not doing enough…that I’ve got so much to learn.” As obstinate as Madonna, he refused to compromise. Eventually, she was the one to back down and relocate to England. That, she claimed, is when their relationship took off.
BY THE beginning of 2000, she found herself pregnant. There was no question in her mind about whether to keep the baby, but the timing was difficult. At that point, she and Guy were still having an on-again, off-again affair, and although he was excited at the prospect of fatherhood, at first he was ambivalent about settling down. Plus Madonna had just started work on her next album. Buoyed up by the success of Ray of Light, she was eager to get back into the studio. She was well-disposed toward Orbit, but by the year 2000, his sound was pretty ubiquitous. It even underlay pop-lite songs, like “Pure Shores,” the number one hit for U.K. girl group All Saints. Although she was happy to keep him on board for a few tracks, Madonna knew she needed a distinctive sound to stand out in a market now dominated by young, fresh fillies like Christina Aguilera and Britney Spears. She was introduced to the Paris-based electronic artist Mirwais Ahmadzaï by the photographer (and Kylie Minogue’s ex-boyfriend) Stephane Sednaoui. The latter had made an erotic video for Mirwais’s single “Disco Science,” a crunchy house track built around a sample from the opening to the classic Breeders’ song “Cannonball.”
Madonna liked Mirwais’s pitch-shifting, his pulverizing rhythms, and his way with acid bass. “I truly believe this man is a genius,” she told Billboard magazine’s Larry Flick. “I listen to his stuff and think, This is the future of sound.” The Swiss-born, half-Afghani Mirwais shared her delight in genre-hopping. “Each new scene is a system,” he said. “And I don’t want to be part of just one scene. I want to do something different.” Like Madonna’s, his background was rooted in 70s disco and New Wave. He was lead guitarist for one of France’s key alternative 80s bands, Taxi Girl. Sounding like a cross between The Stooges, Kraftwerk, and Giorgio Moroder, they were a major influence on latter-day mischief-makers like Daft Punk and Air. “With Taxi Girl we were involved in drugs; we were so desperate and we were twenty years old,” he said. Seeing music as political, he didn’t want to just sell records, he wanted to “change the culture.” Mirwais would have agreed with French theorist Jacques Attali that “music is prophecy…. It makes audible the new world that will gradually become visible.” Mirwais’s worldview was melancholic, politicized, and intellectual, and it was almost a point of principle for him to take musical risks. That is what made his collaboration with the commercially aware Madonna so edgy and futuristic.
Mirwais maintains that working with her was an “accident” rather than the dream of a lifetime. That is why he was able to keep a level head and concentrate on getting out of her the best music he could. “The challenge was to make something current appear,” he said, “something hidden in her personality. Everybody knows her as a chameleon, or a businesswoman. I wanted to show her potential as a musician.” Mirwais had already recorded his debut album when he met Madonna. Its bold title—Production—was a deconstruction in itself. While Orbit fashioned ambient soundscapes for Madonna’s voice, Mirwais cut them up, filled them with glitches, and sent the beats spinning. Her Music album was the inevitable meeting of two arch postmodern minds. Recording sessions began at SARM studios in West London in September 1999. By then, Madonna had been having a relationship with Guy for over a year, and her mind was jittery. She had led a very domestic life while Lola was a baby, but now that her daughter was in preschool, the world was opening up again. “I feel like…an animal that’s ready to be sprung out of a cage…. I miss performing, and dancing, and being on the road, that kind of energy,” Madonna told The Face. She wanted to make a party record, and, overwhelmed by her feelings for Guy, she also wanted to make a statement about love.
The opening title track is a resurrection of the disco girl. Like Prince in his prime, Madonna can sometimes pull out a single that stops you in your tracks. “Vogue” was one; “Justify My Love” another. And “Music” has that same genre-defining quality: robotic, tinny, trashy, and audacious. The beats are fractured, minimal, and loud, the lyrics deliciously tongue-in-cheek. She resurrects the Madonna imperative: Dance. Party. Surrender. You are slaves to the music. In a way, she had come full circle to the Danceteria, an element in the video, where she appears as a ghetto-fabulous female in a feather boa and Stetson, all diamonds and bling, going to lap-dancing bars and traveling in the back of a luxury limousine driven by comedian Ali G.
A series of young nubile girls had been auditioned for the roles of her girlfriends, but they were too stiff and posed. In the end, Madonna called up old clubbing pals Debbie Mazar and Niki Haris, and they sat carousing in the back with her, giving the video its sassy, flowing energy. “I was at home when Madonna called me. She said, ‘I need my girlfriend, not these fake girlfriends trying to be my girlfriends. Throw on some clothes and come down,’” recalls Niki. “We laughed all day.”
The video was made by Jonas Akerlund, a Swedish director who once played in an early-80s death-metal band called Bathory, and who had a vivid, anarchic style. He came to Madonna’s attention in 1996, when he did the “Smack My Bitch Up” video for Maverick hardcore techno-band the Prodigy. The song had already been slammed by the National Organization for Women (NOW) as having “dangerous and offensive” lyrics, and the video was just as provocative. Filmed from the point of view of someone going clubbing, ingesting large amounts of drugs and alcohol, getting into fistfights, and picking up a prostitute, the trick ending reveals that the subject is a woman. (So that’s all right then.) Because of this video, Wal-Mart and Kmart pulled The Prodigy’s album The Fat of the Land off their shelves. Appreciating Akerlund’s graphic imagery, and the stir it created, Madonna made him director of her “Ray of Light” video. Shot with lasers and lurid colors, the groundbreaking video was crucial to her late 90s “comeback.” Then his glittering promo for “Music” restored Madonna to her throne as reigning queen of dance culture.
The song works because it is the real thing; it is sung by someone with a history. When Madonna urges the groovers to dance, and chants “Yeah,” they follow. “It’s not experimental, but it’s not completely easy,” Mirwais said about the song. “It’s a small victory for underground music.”
With the next track, “Impressive Instant,” she leads them into a heady mix of acid techno and pop trance. Hers is an abstract world of nonsense lyrics, disco balls, and glitz. The mood is still up-tempo for the William Orbit–produced “Runaway Lover,”
a vigorous parry to Guy, the man who’s turning her world upside down. He’s taking the wind out of her sails, confounding her with his maddening mix of coolness and devotion. This is a theme she develops with the other Orbit-produced track, the spine-tingling “Amazing.” “They’re all I-love-you-but-fuck-you songs,” Madonna explained. The latter is about “loving someone that you wished you didn’t love. Because you know that you’re doomed, but you can’t stop yourself, because it’s amazing.”
With “I Deserve It,” the key love song on the album, we are introduced to an extraordinary new texture. If Music had all been electronic funk, it would have dated. But what lifts it into the first division is the unexpected moments of acoustic folk rock, where everything drops out and all we hear is warm, Neil Young–style guitar, and Madonna’s melodic voice. “It’s a love song, but there’s something lonely about it,” she said, “…the juxtaposition of the acoustic guitar and then that synth siren sound—to me that strange combination makes it a little bit uncomfortable.” Here Mirwais shows the other side of his musical persona, the man who played for ten years in melancholy acoustic band Juliette et Les Independents.