Ray of Light

I was never a Madonna fan... until 1998/2024

I was an 80s teenager. It was a great time for music, when bands with a cool look and sound regularly broke big with a catchy new single. (Many of those bands turned out to be one-hit wonders, but hopefully Flock of Seagulls and Men Without Hats got some financial security along the way.) Like plenty of teenagers before and since, I took a quiet, secret pride in my discerning taste: Michael Jackson or Bruce Springsteen might be setting sales records, but I was listening to Ultravox and ABC cassettes on my Walkman.

Madonna was one of those era-defining artists I didn’t really like. Maybe it was my rampant Anglophilia, or my good-girl persona, but I found her too abrasive, too eager to spark controversy. I could sing along to her most popular singles — they were inescapable in those days — but I never thought of her as a role model. My family didn’t have MTV, but I can only imagine my horror if I’d watched her performance of Like a Virgin with my parents in 1984.

It wasn’t until 1998, fifteen years after her debut, that I heard a Madonna song on the radio that I loved so much it convinced me to buy the whole album.

The song “Ray of Light” was a whirl of dramatic energy, a dance beat overlaid with a voice that tumbled and twirled. This was not the sassy, squeaky Madonna of “Material Girl” or the clipped, formally-enunciating Madonna of “Vogue.” It sounded like she was finally letting loose, doing whatever she wanted, shifting from calm to delirious.

If you were alive and even semi-culturally literate in the 1980s and ‘90s, you were kept up-to-date on Madonna’s personal life. I knew that she’d grown up in working-class Michigan but became a favorite of the New York City nightlife scene; I knew that she’d married a Hollywood movie star while helicopters flew above their outdoor wedding; I knew that she’d all-but-ruined her career by producing/posing for an exhibitionist art project/book called Sex.

I also knew that Madonna had been pregnant during the filming of Evita, a movie-musical I’ve never watched, even though I remember reading that she’d taken voice lessons to get the part.

The Ray of Light album cover showed Madonna with blond-ish, windswept curls and a relaxed semi-smile. She looked like someone who’d been through a lot and come out kinder and gentler.

Fast-forward twenty years. I was working at my local library when a new biography came out, Madonna: A Rebel Life, by Mary Gabriel. I hadn’t listened to Madonna for years and started flipping through the book mostly to see if there was any hot new gossip about her former husbands Sean Penn and Guy Ritchie.

I was surprised by how much I wanted to keep reading. Somehow, Madonna managed to be at the forefront of so many cultural trends I’d taken for granted at the time. Without ever being a fan, I’d imitated her messy-hair-wrapped-in-a-headband look. I’d stacked multiple bracelets around each wrist. I’d worn dangling rhinestone earrings to school and unconsciously imitated her leggings-under-a-full-skirt, early 80s look.

What I’d always thought of a Madonna’s opportunism turned out to be her strength: Gabriel’s book explained how how she used different writers and producers on each album to continually re-define herself, while always taking an active part in that reinvention.

Did you know that Madonna recorded a song with traditional Portuguese/Capo Verde singers? Have you seen her out-dance people half her age? I’d never heard the song “Rebel Heart” before reading the book, but it’s become one of my favorites.

Madonna’s recent, plastic-surgery face makes me cringe, and I don’t think we’d ever be friends. But I respect her and root for her much more than I’ve ever done.