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Released: September 19, 2000
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NYTimes Review - By JON PARELES
THE notion of an objective, natural reality, separate from human
intervention, was damaged beyond repair in the 20th century. It was besieged
on all sides by art, philosophy and technology: by Cubism and
post-modernism, by film and sound recording, by television and synthesizers,
by video games and plastic surgery, by all the gizmos of the computer era.
Any separation between natural and artificial has grown fuzzy and, in
practice, irrelevant. Now, everyone lives on the cusp of the physical and
the virtual.
That's the running joke, though some might call it a subtext, on Madonna's
new album, "Music" (Maverick/Warner Brothers 2-47598), her latest foray into
electronica. The cowgirl hat Madonna wears in the video clip for "Music" is
an emblem of outdoorsy nature, but nothing on the album not an acoustic
guitar, not Madonna's voice arrives without an obvious electronic tweak
or
two. She flaunts the synthetic without a hint of insincerity.
On her 1998 album "Ray of Light," Madonna pondered meaning and purpose, love
and fate, with her voice enveloped in William Orbit's protean, shimmering
productions. "Music" brings Madonna back down to earth. The album is a batch
of songs, not a grand statement; it moves from giddy dance-floor highs to
pretentious lows. In her lyrics, Madonna, who is 42, returns to her past
staples of dance, romance and female self-determination, along with some
attempts at mature reflection. Most of the music ^× even when written with
Mr. Orbit ^× trades the resonant, liquid backdrops of "Ray of Light" for
sparse settings that seem to be rationing how many sounds they use. It's as
if Madonna has replaced a de Kooning painting with a Mondrian.
Mr. Orbit is still invaluable. Emphasizing staccato rhythm instead of lush
chords this time, he collaborated on two uptempo songs that jump off the
album: "Runaway Lover," a disco update with an exuberant tangle of keyboard
lines ricocheting in stereo, and "Amazing," a lovelorn rocker that puts
tremolo guitars and a 1960's garage-rock beat behind one of Madonna's most
heartfelt vocal performances.
Madonna's main new collaborator is Mirwais, a producer, musician and
programmer from Paris whose last name is Ahmadazaï. He was in the bands Taxi
Girl and Juliette before turning to dance music. Now, along with Air (from
Paris) and To Rococo Rot (from Berlin), he is part of a wave of European
producer-programmers who have rediscovered both the buzzy, wiggly sounds of
old analog synthesizers and the idea that less can be more. They build
tracks with a few keyboard settings, a pithy drumbeat and little pockets of
space; Air often adds a dissociated, electronically filtered voice. Where
some electronica aspires to cinematic grandeur, these minimalists prefer to
stack up deadpan musical one-liners.
Mirwais is as droll as any of them. He has an ear for the nasal early
synthesizers and tinny drum sounds Kraftwerk used in the 1970's, for the
blunt drumbeats of old-school hip- hop and for the bright blips of
early-1980's electro dance music, all of which now sound pleasantly dated.
But he detours off memory lane, unwilling to let the retro sounds ease into
nostalgia. Atop familiar beats, he creates slyly anachronistic combinations,
as he does in the title song of "Music," which sets up dizzying syncopation
around one unchanging chord.
On Mirwais's own album, "Production," he applies titles like "Definitive
Beat" and "Digital Science" to what start out as rudimentary rhythm tracks.
He makes a sustained sound hover above them or starts a high syncopated
blip; then he warps the basic beat by filtering it into a shadow of its
original self, or he makes it stutter and leapfrog itself. Using relatively
simple techniques, he gets results that are both witty and startling.
Through her career, Madonna has used what business experts call the "fast
follower" strategy, quickly picking up other people's good ideas and
reshaping them in friendlier, more commercial form. She has pulled more than
one style out of the dance underground by slipping it underneath
straightforward pop songs. Although there are a few vocals on Mirwais's solo
album, Madonna brings pop instincts to their collaborations, providing
genuine melodies and serviceable lyrics.
And Mirwais, for his part, keeps twisting the musical context. "Don't Tell
Me," an obsessive love song, uses a fingerpicked guitar, and Madonna sings a
passable Bonnie Raitt imitation. But the song doesn't stay folky; the guitar
lick reveals itself as a sample that gets lopped off at the end for
unexpected jolts of silence, Madonna's voice is multiplied and the guitar is
flanked by a Morse-code blip bouncing off a low wah-wah note.
Mirwais and Madonna also play hide-and-seek with her voice. Most pop-dance
divas and their producers still trade on the contrast of human versus
mechanical that was established by Donna Summer and Giorgio Moroder in the
1970's. As the machines tick out repetitive parts, the singer provides
unpredictability and passion, a personality that listeners can identify
with. While male groups from Kraftwerk to Zapp to the Jonzun Crew have made
trademarks out of inhuman, distorted voices, until recently women have
usually gotten a naturalistic treatment, even if their vocals are snipped
into samples for dance tracks.
Cher's "Believe" and Christina Aguilera's "Genie in a Bottle" both used some
of the same electronic fillips as Madonna does on "Music." But Mirwais and
Madonna push the cybervocals further. In "Impressive Instant," a bouncy
electro outer- space travelogue, Madonna is filtered, repitched, compressed,
echoed and edited into sudden leaps; she slips in and out of the
hallucinatory electronics with whimsical ease.
"Nobody's Perfect," a shrewd mixture of apology ("I feel so sad/ What I did
wasn't right") and self- justification ("What did you expect/ I'm doing my
best"), could have been a rueful ballad sung to the acoustic guitar that
appears briefly in the middle of the song. Instead, drums snicker and
Madonna's voice is run through a vocoder to become distant and disembodied,
as if this particular sentiment was a prerecorded response.
Madonna gets heavy-handed in "I Deserve It," a guitar-strumming ballad so
solemn it verges on self-parody. And the album ends with self- righteous
dirges, "Gone" ("Why should I be sad/ For what I never had") and "Paradise,"
which includes tearful spoken-word passages in both English and French. Yet
even in the dud songs, Madonna doesn't return to the unquestioning pomp of
typical diva anthems. Antigravity synthesizer lines waft overhead and whir
quietly around her; electronics veil and reveal her voice. The pop- song
structures are stable, but they've moved into a sonic realm where anything
can happen.
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