Hit Parade: The Veronica Electronica Edition

Summary

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Hit Parade: The Veronica Electronica Edition

Podcast: Hit Parade | Music History and Music Trivia
Host: Chris Molanphy (Slate)
Date: March 29, 2018

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Overview:

This episode of Hit Parade dives into Madonna’s transformative 1998 album, Ray of Light, exploring her unlikely and triumphant pivot to electronica at the end of the ‘90s. Host Chris Molanphy traces Madonna’s artistic trajectory from 1980s dance-pop icon to 1990s provocateur and industry power player, culminating in the chart and cultural impact of Ray of Light. Through rich chart history, personal anecdotes, and industry context, Molanphy examines how Madonna reinvigorated her career, helped push electronic music into the pop mainstream, and cemented her enduring influence.

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Key Themes and Discussion Points

1. Madonna’s Career State Pre-Ray of Light (00:00–05:21)

• Chart Longevity & Early Success
  Madonna’s chart dominance since 1983, with a streak of 17 consecutive Top 10 hits—still unmatched in the Hot 100’s history.

  “Starting with 1984’s ‘Borderline,’ she strung together 17 consecutive top 10 hits—a record that still stands.” (10:03)

• Shifting Image & Sound in the Early ‘90s
  By the 1990s, Madonna became more controversial, focusing on projects like the Erotica album and Sex book that challenged sexual norms and faced public backlash (15:05–21:13).
  • Chart performance shifted toward adult contemporary hits and ballads as pop radio grew colder toward her sexual provocations.
• Cultural Double Standards
  Madonna recalls the media vitriol she received compared to men like Prince for sexual boldness:

  “I said, wait a minute. Isn’t Prince running around with fishnets and high heels…? Yes, he was, but he was a man. This was the first time I truly understood that women really did not have the same freedom as men.” — Madonna (21:13)

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2. Pop Music’s Evolution and Maverick Records (22:13–34:38)

• The Era’s New Female Voices & Changing Mainstream
  The mid-‘90s saw a surge of new bold female artists (e.g., Alanis Morissette, Hole, PJ Harvey) while Madonna’s own hits (“Take a Bow,” “I’ll Remember”) skewed softer and more adult contemporary (29:45).
• Maverick Records and Alt-Rock/Electronica
  Madonna’s co-founded label Maverick signs and markets high-selling but critically debated acts like Candlebox and Alanis Morissette, as well as British electronica group The Prodigy.

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3. The Rise and Hype of Electronica (and Trip Hop) (34:38–46:47)

• Trip Hop Influences
  Madonna experiments with trip hop and ambient sounds, collaborating with British producers (Nellee Hooper, Massive Attack, Björk) on deep club singles like “Bedtime Story” (32:21–34:38).
• Major Label Gold Rush
  The music industry coins “electronica” as a bid to chase a new trend (38:43), banking on acts like The Prodigy, Chemical Brothers, Daft Punk, but with only modest radio success.
  • Maverick scores a U.S. #1 album with The Prodigy’s The Fat of the Land but no true crossover pop radio “hit” emerges from electronica alone (42:07).

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4. Madonna’s Pivot: Motherhood, Movie Stardom, and Reinvention (46:47–52:54)

• Evita and Vocal Maturation
  Madonna takes on the demanding role of Eva Perón in Evita (1996), which pushes her voice and earns her critical respect, a Golden Globe, and raises her profile as she enters motherhood—birth of daughter Lourdes (46:47).
• At a Crossroads
  By 1997, with pop trending toward younger and more teen-oriented acts, Madonna must decide her next artistic direction. (49:31–52:54)

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5. Creating Ray of Light: Process and Influences (52:54–59:34)

• William Orbit Collaboration
  Madonna selects William Orbit, noted for ambient electronic work, as primary producer. Their approach combines live instruments, sampled sounds, and careful track-building (52:54).
• Notable Samples & Songwriting
  The title track “Ray of Light” sources lyrics and melody from a 1970s British folk song, adapted and transformed into a frenetic, ecstatic vocal performance (54:48).
• Artistic Intention
  Madonna wants to infuse “emotion back into this music that had originally begun as dance floor reveries, even if that meant much of the music was not all that danceable” (57:40).

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6. Album Impact: Chart Triumphs, Critical Acclaim, and Cultural Shift (59:34–65:29)

• Critical Reception & Hit Singles
  Ray of Light is immediately heralded—charting at #2 in the US, producing multiple hits (“Frozen” #2, “Ray of Light” #5, “Power of Goodbye” #11).
  • Critics praise the album as “the most intense pop album ever made by a 39-year-old” (Rob Sheffield; 59:46).
  • Lindsey Zoladz: “A record about the anxieties of existing in a female body… one of the rawest pop albums about motherhood.” (59:46)
• Madonna’s Influence on the Mainstreaming of Electronica
  The success of Ray of Light opens doors for electro-pop crossover: Cher’s “Believe” and Fatboy Slim’s hits rise soon after (61:45).
• Sales & Awards
  Ray of Light becomes Madonna’s bestselling ‘90s album in the US (quadruple platinum), selling 16 million worldwide. It wins multiple MTV Video Music Awards and Madonna’s first Grammy for a recording (65:29).

  Madonna (at Grammys): “First and foremost, I must thank William Orbit. Without his vision and his brilliance, this album would not be.” (65:29)

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7. Legacy: The “Veronica Electronica” Effect and EDM’s Explosion (65:44–70:58)

• Madonna’s Continuing Reinvention
  Post-Ray of Light, Madonna collaborates with electronic producers, maintains her hit-making streak (e.g., “Music”), and adapts quickly to shifting pop trends.
• Long-term Impact on EDM and Pop
  The episode closes by drawing a line from Madonna and the ‘electronica’ moment through to the eventual explosion of EDM in the late 2000s, shaping pop for Rihanna, Britney Spears, and especially Lady Gaga.
• Madonna’s Enduring Place
  Even years later, all Madonna’s albums debut in the Top 2, she remains a global draw, and Ray of Light remains a keystone of both her “personal and global” artistry.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Madonna’s longevity:

  “Going into 1998, Madonna was entering her 16th year as a recording artist—already extraordinary longevity for a woman whose career grew out of New York clubs in the early '80s…” (00:00)

• On the industry double-standard:

  "Isn't Prince running around with fishnets and high heels and lipstick with his butt hanging out? Yes, he was, but he was a man. This was the first time I understood women really did not have the same freedom as men." — Madonna (21:13)

• On Ray of Light’s reception:

  “It was a pivot point for her career, ensuring her continued relevance and hit-making ability into the 21st century.” (02:44) “It was uniformly strong, heartfelt and on trend.” (57:40)

• On musical intention:

  “Her goal with Ray of Light was to put the emotion back in this music that had originally begun as dance floor reveries, even if that meant much of the music was not all that danceable.” (57:40)

• At the Grammys:

  “First and foremost, I must thank William Orbit. Without his vision and his brilliance, this album would not be.” — Madonna (65:29)

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Key Timestamps

• 00:00–05:21 — Madonna’s ‘90s career, rise, and “Frozen” chart debut
• 15:05–21:13 — “Erotica,” Sex book backlash, and gender double standards
• 29:45–34:38 — Madonna as AC balladeer; rise of bold female rock voices
• 38:43–46:47 — Electronica hype, The Prodigy, and Maverick’s diversification
• 49:31–52:54 — Post-Evita crossroads, motherhood, and considering new directions
• 52:54–57:40 — Working with William Orbit, song creation, making Ray of Light
• 59:34–65:29 — Album release, critical acclaim, singles’ chart impact, awards
• 65:44–70:58 — Madonna’s legacy post-Ray of Light, EDM in the 2000s, closing thoughts

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Conclusion

This “Veronica Electronica Edition” presents Ray of Light not just as a late-career reinvention from Madonna, but as a crucial pivot in both her legacy and broader pop history. Through a mix of chart analysis, music history, and personal narrative, Chris Molanphy shows how Madonna, just shy of 40, steered away from the comfort zone, embraced electronica on her own terms, and reshaped what dance-pop could mean at the turn of the millennium—empowering herself and future generations of artists in the process.

Transcript

[Chris Melanfy]

You're listening ad free on Amazon Music. Welcome to Hit Parade, a podcast of pop chart history from Slate Magazine about the hits from coast to coast. I'm Chris Melanfy, chart analyst, pop critic and writer of Slate's why Is this Song Number One? Series on today's show. Twenty years ago this month, Madonna debuted on Billboard's album chart with her first studio album in four years, the the trippy yet maternal Ray of Light. As that seemingly contradictory description indicates, Ray of Light was the culmination of multiple threads in the life of Madonna Louise CICCONIN Going into 1998, Madonna was entering her 16th year as a recording artist already extraordinary longevity for a woman whose career grew out of New York clubs in the early 80s and a post disco brand of electric dance pop. By the 90s, Madonna had also become a mogul, the co founder and flagship artist of Maverick, a recording and media company distributed by Warner Bros. It grew into much more than a so called vanity label. Maverick wound up issuing some of the top rock and pop of the decade.

[Guest or Music Clip]

It's Like Rain.

[Chris Melanfy]

For all her six success and the influence she wielded in the music industry, by the mid to late 90s, it was an open question whether Madonna wanted to be just a pop star anymore. She was increasingly focused on her acting career. And her biggest hit songs in the first half of the decade had mostly been mid tempo pop and stately ballads, most of them bigger hits on adult contemporary radio.

[Guest or Music Clip]

Think about the Night is over, this masquerade is getting older, Lights are lower, curtains down.

[Chris Melanfy]

What makes Ray of Light faster Fascinating and the reason I'm devoting this episode to this 20 year old album is it shouldn't have worked. Or at least it easily could have not worked. Not because Madonna was necessarily past her prime, but Ray of Light and Madonna succeeded where other more hyped artists of the 90s had fallen short. After spending the decade sitting out grunge riot girl and gangster rap, Madonna took a different overhyped 90s Tre and made it a chart success. Like Donna Summer did a generation before. With I Feel Love, Madonna made cutting edge electronic music viable pop. And she did it just a few months shy of her 40th birthday. At a time when pop was getting younger, Madonna pivoted to a sound that was both mature and cutting edge. It was a pivot point for her career, ensuring her continued relevance and hit making ability into the 21st century. And it all began with a most unusual single, A dark, moody track that announced that this would be a different Madonna. It was not her first experiment with ambient electronic music. But it would become her first to scale the Hot 100, even despite its literally chilly title. And that's where your hit parade marches today, the week ending March 21, 1998, when the Ray of Light album debuted on the Billboard album chart at number two. The same week, Madonna debuted on the Hot 100 with an instant top 10 hit. The album's first single, Frozen.

[Guest or Music Clip]

Give Yourself to Me.

[Chris Melanfy]

Frozen debuted in Billboard that week in March 1998, all the way up at number eight. Thanks to a month of fast growing airplay before the retail single dropped, within two weeks it would reach its hot 100 peak of number two. The only thing standing between Madonna and the top spot was the three week number one smash by Jodeci Singer's Case and Jojo with their lush Chicago like ballad All My Life. Both Frozen and Ray of Light would wind up peaking at number two on their respective charts. On the album chart, Ray of Light was held back from the number one spot by the year's dominant stage, the 10 million selling Celine Dion freighted soundtrack to the blockbuster movie Titanic. Indeed, a lot of the music on the charts in the second half of the 90s sounded lush and overripe, an overcorrection perhaps for the first half of the decade, which was marked by several austere musical trends, from grunge to gangsta. Of course, Madonna had been ahead of the curve, as she so often was right from the start of the decade. She was doing austere and dour even before that aesthetic caught on. In fact, the seeds of what would eventually become Ray of Light were already sewn by the end of 1990.

[Guest or Music Clip]

I want to kiss you in Paris. Oh, I hope your hands are wrong.

[Chris Melanfy]

That's a remix of Madonna's 1990 single Justify My Love. And the remixer was a British man born and raised in the Shoreditch district of London named William Orbit. Orbit was among the producers and DJs contributing to the ambient music scene at the turn of the 1990s. Since 1987, orbit had been issuing ambient techno albums under a series he called Strange Cargo, and they were appreciated by fans of scenes ranging from New Age to club music. Madonna and Orbit wouldn't work together for another seven years. Orbit's remix of Justify My Love, a kind of progressive house, as they called it then, was well received in clubs, but not commonly heard on the radio. Of course, Orbit's remix wasn't really necessary to make this song hip hop. When the original version of Justify My Love landed in the late fall of 1990, it was already pretty advanced for pop fare. In fact, Top 40 radio pretty much only played it because it was Madonna. I'm going to paraphrase something now I said in our second podcast episode, which was about the Beatles. Dear Hit Parade listener, I don't imagine I need to tell you who Madonna is. Catholic girl from Michigan, popularizer of mesh shirts and fingerless gloves and about a dozen other fashion trends. Ex wife of Sean Penn and, oh yeah, the woman who more or less restored dance and club music to the radio after the disco implosion of the early 1980s. Justify My Love is the sound of Madonna at the tail end of her imperial period, the zenith of her career, where she could get away with far more than the average pop star. She had been getting away with a lot since her breakout seven years earlier. Were you the least bit scared to do that?

[Madonna]

Not really. I think I've always had a lot.

[Guest or Music Clip]

Of confidence in myself.

[Chris Melanfy]

We are. We are. A couple of weeks into the new year, what do you hope will happen not only in 1984 but for the rest of your professional life? What are your dreams?

[Madonna]

What's left to rule the world?

[Chris Melanfy]

There you go, ladies and gentlemen, this is Madonna. Madonna entered the Billboard charts overconfident. That confidence was rewarded quickly. She was a hitmaker, virtually from the jump. Her first single, everybody, reached the top three on Billboard's Club Play chart by 1983. By 1984, when she performed her single Holiday on Dick Clark's American Bandstand, it was already a top 20 hit on the Hot 100. And when she scored her first ever top 10 hit just five months later, Madonna began one of the the most amazing streaks in Billboard chart history. Not unlike another famous Italian American baseball great, Joe DiMaggio, who in 1941 set a still unbeaten streak of 56 straight games with a base hit. In the 1980s, Madonna was a model of consistency. Starting with 1984's Borderline, she strung together 17 consecutive top 10 hits, a record that still stands, by the way. In the digital era, when both radio singles and album cuts can chart on the Hot 100, the conditions may never exist for Madonna's streak to be broken. This list of Madonna's top 10 hits, 16 of them actually top five hits, reads like an 80s hit parade. From Lucky star to Like a Virgin, Material Girl to open your heart. Like a prayer to Cherish. Madonna's versatility did have its limits when, in 1989, she followed up the number two hit, Cherish, with the deeply personal ballad o Father. It stalled on the Hot 100. The Haunting Elegy to Madonna's mother, who died when she was a child, peaked at number 20, finally ending Madonna's five year streak of top 10 smashes. Now, freed from the need to maintain a chart streak in the 90s, Madonna would follow her muse even more freely and go deeper and darker. Even before oh Father. The template for Madonna's next decade was set by another hit from the Like a Prayer album.

[Guest or Music Clip]

Baby, then you know your love is real.

[Chris Melanfy]

That's Express yourself, a number two hit from the summer of 1989. Except that's the album version. When you heard Express Yourself on the radio or MTV that summer, chances are it sounded more like this.

[Guest or Music Clip]

Come on girls, you believe in love Cause I got something to say about it and it goes something like this. Don't go back and back.

[Chris Melanfy]

The Shep Pettibone remix of Express Yourself was introduced in the song's lavish music video, a memorable homage to the sci fi silent film classic Metropolis, directed by future Oscar nominated filmmaker David Fincher. Shep Pettibone's radical rethink of Express caught on at top 40 radio, becoming the widely accepted hit version of the song. It also signaled Madonna's growing allegiance to house music and club culture. One year later, Madonna and Pettibone would team again for an original single that borrowed the structure of the Express remix and became one of Madonna's most iconic no. 1 hits, the Deep house classic Vogue.

[Guest or Music Clip]

Let your body prove to the music.

[Chris Melanfy]

Which brings us back to 1990 and just a few months later, Justify My Love. It was the darkest and most radical single of Madonna's career to date.

[Guest or Music Clip]

Burning for you to Justify my power.

[Chris Melanfy]

Justify was a new single included on Madonna's greatest hits album, the Immaculate Collection. It was the most dissonant track Madonna had ever issued as a single, and while she never curses in the song, its lyrics sound lascivious, a kind of spoken word sex rap with lines like, you put this in me. It was asking a lot for Top 40 radio to play it. But by late 1990, anything Madonna released was poised to dominate the charts at a time when even a no. 1 single might not go gold. Justify My Love went platinum, fueled in part by the song's racy video. The arty black and white mini movie directed by Jean Baptiste Mondino, finds Madonna staggering down a hotel hallway and witnessing various lewd, barely clothed sex acts as she passes each hotel room and eventually engaging in fantasies of her own. Remarkably, it was so explicit, MTV was compelled to ban it, so turning lemons into very profitable lemonade. Madonna released the clip as the first ever video single, a VHS cassette containing only the Justify My Love clip, and it sold like brown paper contraband. The Casingle CD single and 12 inch of justify all sold well too, guaranteeing the song's rise to one. Having been fully rewarded for her daring, this was the moment Madonna decided to finally and fully let her freak flag fly. She'd been leading up to this moment for a while, inserting S and M themes into such music videos as Open youn Heart and into the lyrics of such lighter, frothier hits as the Dick Tracy soundtrack single Hanky Panky. By 1992, these singles and videos would look like Disney product. That was the year Madonna came back with the 12 punch of erotica and sex, the former an album Madonna's first to require a parental advisory sticker, The latter a book literally sold in bookstores in a wrapper often stocked behind the counter. Erotica and Sex, album and Book were the first releases of Madonna's aforementioned label multimedia venture Maverick. Sex was a coffee table book packed with uninhibited photographs, including arty montages, nude images, depictions of sexual fantasies, and as the press panted Madonna in flagrante delicto with other celebrities. It was perhaps the highest profile act of sex positive feminism in history to date, issued right at the peak of the AIDS crisis. As for the album, Erotica was not only the most sexually bold album of Madonna's career to date and also long its running time clocking in at a peak CD length of 75 minutes. It was also Madonna's loudest embrace of club culture, often eschewing radio friendly pop for what were then deep house beats. The album, and especially the book received harsh criticism and Madonna was pilloried in the mainstream media. Mind you, this is what an imperial period is for four it is cultural capital that ideally you spend in the marketplace of art and ideas by doing something daring. Madonna spent her 80s capital in the early 90s on projects guaranteed to turn off a segment of the public and indeed Erotica broke Madonna's streak of chart topping studio albums after Like a Virgin in 1985, True Blue in 1986 and Like a Prayer in 1989 all spent months at number one on the Billboard album chart. Erotica topped out at number two for a single week and it was out of the album chart top 10 in just four weeks. The album did go double platinum and it generated several hits including the top 10 Club Centric Classic Deeper and Deeper. I offer the background of Justify My Love, Erotica and the Sex Book to provide context for what framed Madonna's career. For the rest of the 1990s, she hardly went underground. No one who continues selling millions of CDs, topping the charts and starring in movies can be said to be in hiding. But for the first time in her career, Madonna felt truly censured. She put up a brave and even defiant front at the time. A couple of years later, on a single from her Bedtime Stories album called Human Nature, she directly addressed her critics moralism. At a Billboard Women in Music awards ceremony in 2016, Madonna accepted the magazine's Woman of the Year prize, and in a long, very blunt acceptance speech, she took the audience back nearly a quarter century to the moment of her peak pariah status. In her speech, more than a year before the MeToo movement, the steely Madonna allowed herself to a rare moment of public vulnerability.

[Madonna]

I made my erotica album and my sex book was released. I remember being the headline of every newspaper and magazine, and everything I read about myself was damning. I was called a whore and a witch. One headline compared me to Satan. I said, wait a minute. Isn't Prince running around with fishnets and high heels and lipstick with his butt hanging out? Yes, he was, but he was a man. This was the first time I truly understood that women really did not have the same freedom as men. I remember feeling paralyzed. It took me a while to pull myself together and get on with my creative life, to get on with my life.

[Chris Melanfy]

While Madonna moved past paralysis and got on with her life in the 90s, the sound of pop was evolving. It wasn't just the darkest forms of grunge and gangsta rap. The center of pop was shifting toward a softer but still bold form of sexual agency. Informed by hip hop and heard on hits by such rising stars as TLC. And even the gleeful r and b troupe boyz ii men. While hip hop and R and B were taking over as the new center of pop, Madonna was evolving into an adult contemporary stateswoman. In her art, she had not given an inch, but Madonna nonetheless started seeing her work better rewarded on the charts when it was more mainstream friendly. The summer before Erotica, she scored her only number one hit of that year and her last for nearly three years, with the stately ballad this Used to Be My Playground, a single from the movie she co starred in that summer, A League of Their Own.

[Guest or Music Clip]

This used to be my playground.

[Madonna]

This used to be.

[Chris Melanfy]

Even before the promotional cycle for Erotica was over, another graceful ballad, Rain, was a sizable hit it righted the ship for Madonna on the charts. After an earlier Erotica track, the lurid saloon ballad Bad Girl became her first single to miss the top 30 since the start of her career. Rain peaked at number 14 in September 1993, nearly a year after the album was released. Just for comparison, the same week Rain was peaking just shy of the top 10. Lodged in the Hot 100's top top five was Madonna's superstar peer Janet Jackson with if an excellent single that was sexually frank, it seemed as if other pop acts, even other women, could more easily be ribbled than Madonna. The rock side of the radio dial 2 was seeing a new wave of bolder performers. Nirvana and Pearl Jam may have been the leading edge of the new rock, but in their wake came a flotilla of alternative bands proffering pushier, sharper edged material which was now accepted in the mainstream. From new bands like Rage against the Machine to bands that had been knocking around college radio since the 80s, now suddenly selling platinum like Soul Asylum. However, not every success story from the height of the alt rock sweepstakes enjoyed both platinum sales and hipster cred. Consider the Seattle band Candle Boy. Essentially an 80s hard rock band in 90s grunge rock clothing, Candlebox were the Nickelback of their era, scorned by scenesters who saw the band as bandwagon jumpers with limited connection to the punk and indie at the heart of first wave Seattle music and pilloried by rock critics for their top 40 friendly alt pop. But Candlebox also sold truckloads of albums and their record label was Maverick Records. When Candleboxes self titled debut album went triple platinum at the end of 1994, it became the fledgling Maverick label's biggest hit to date, actually outselling label co founder Madonna's double platinum Erotica. And what was Madonna herself doing in 1994? She was leaning in to this new balladeer role. She scored her biggest hit of that year with a one off single from the forgettable Brendan Fraser Joe Pesci movie With Honors, a pulsating nostalgic ballad called I'll Remember. Maverick released the With Honor soundtrack and while the album was about as big a flop as the movie, Madonna's With Honor single single reached number two in May of 1994 and went gold. The maxi single of I'll Remember included remixes by a number of producers including again William Orbit, his third Madonna single. After remixing the songs Justify My Love and Erotica later that year, Madonna finally followed up the Erotica album with Bedtime Stories, billed at the time as a pivot toward new jack, swing and R B stories found Madonna working for the first time with such collaborators as TLC producer Dallas Austin. But once again, the album's biggest hit was its most traditional, elegant ballad, co produced and co written with Kenneth Babyface Edmonds, producer of smashes for everyone from Whitney Houston to Boyz II Men. Take a Bow wound up being the longest charting hit of Madonna's career. Yes, longer than Holiday or Crazy for your or Vogue. Take a bow spent 30 weeks on the Hot 120, seven of them lodged in the top 40, and its seven weeks at number one in in early 1995 outlasted her career high watermark of six weeks set by Like a Virgin in 1984 and 85. Fortified by massive airplay at adult contemporary radio including nine weeks at number one on the AC chart, Take a Bow in 1995 was omnipresent.

[Guest or Music Clip]

Over this Masquerade is getting older.

[Chris Melanfy]

As great as this chart triumph was for Madonna, it pushed her solidly into Celine Dion territory, signaling yet again that the public liked Madonna best in this period when she was was just a little less edgy. And anyway, on the radio in 1994 and 95 there was plenty of edge to go around. Half a decade after the riot Grrrl movement formally launched in Olympia, Washington, a female rock renaissance was in full swing on the charts. Such fearless, even coarse rockers as Liz Phair and PJ Harvey were going gold and Courtney Love, who mourned the loss of husband Kurt Cobain in 1994, by 1995 saw her band Hole become a platinum success in its own right. These artists were among the boldest of rock's mid-90s wave, but a second wave of more pop aligned but still outspoken women were coming down the pike. We talked about Alanis Morissette in our fifth Hit Parade episode about the great war against the single. Radio smashes like youe Oughta Know and Hand in My Pocket were withheld from single release spring, spurring fans to buy millions of copies of her Grammy winning 1995 Album of the year, Jagged Little Pill. And the label profiting from that diamond selling album, you guessed it, Maverick Records. It's one of the fun paradoxes of Madonna's story in the 90s at a time when the public was signaling that they no longer wanted her on the front lines of music's cutting edge. She and her colleague Guy Osiri were profiting handsomely on pop friendly versions of rock's more extreme and independent movements. As for Madonna herself and Indie Sounds in 1995, buried on the back half of Bedtime Stories was a minor single that pointed to her new direction.

[Guest or Music Clip]

What's the meaning? Don't function anymore.

[Chris Melanfy]

Bedtime Story was the third single from the album of virtually the same name, and on the pop charts it looked like a flop. Following up the number one smash Take A Bow, Bedtime Story missed the pop top 40, peaking at number 42 in the spring of 1995. It was a no. 1 club hit, not unusual for Madonna, but what was remarkable was its ambient sound and its team of producers and songwriters. In the first half of the decade, British producer Nellie Hooper had helped forge the brooding, spacey Bristol sound, first with nuvo R and B act Soul to Soul, and more importantly with the influential trip hop pioneer's Massive Attack. By 1993 and 94, who Cooper brought his eclectic sonic signature and deep knowledge of UK club culture to the debut solo music by Icelandic indie pop innovator Bjorn. When Madonna hired Hooper to bring his Bristol cross club music bonafides to her Bedtime Stories album, he brought her the Bedtime Story single, co written by him with Bjork and their frequent collaborator Marius de Vries. The song's trippy refrain, let's get unconscious baby have the strong vibe of Bjork's loopy poetry.

[Guest or Music Clip]

Words are using s especially sentences they don't stand for anything how could they explain how I feel?

[Chris Melanfy]

Though it was largely a non entity at pop radio, Bedtime's story was absolutely on trend for the rise of trip hop among discerning audiences and even on the British and American charts. Sour Times by Portishead, another Bristol band affiliated with Massive attack, reached number 13 on the British pop chart and on Billboard's modern rock chart it reached number five and even received airplay on some American top 40 stations. Sour times was perhaps the pop friendliest example of trip hop, but Portishead were not the mini genre's only acclaimed act. In 1995, fellow Massive Attack alumnus Adrian Tricky Thaws released the album Maxineque, which generated multiple top 40 hits in the UK. Before the end of the year. Madonna herself was dabbling in trip hop on another single that, like Bedtime Story, was a small hit but a sign of her future direction. I Want you was a song by Marvin Gaye, the title track of his 1976 album of the same name, and a no. 1 R&B no. 15 pop hit. In her 1995 remake of the song, Madonna went right to the source of the Bristol trip hop sound. Massive Attack themselves were brought in by producer Nelly Hooper and co credited as artists on the track the Irony. The Madonna album album that I Want yout appeared on called Something to Remember, was a holiday season collection of Madonna's ballads compiled to remind mainstream audiences of her years of romantic songs. Following the success of I'll Remember and Take a Bow, by the start of 1996 the growth of club affiliated styles like trip hop had started to spread to other dance affiliated microgenres. Just before the start of the year, spin magazine named Moby's 1995 album Everything is Wrong a magnum opus of ambient techno. Their album of the year ahead of such grunge and alt rock acts as Pearl Jam, Green Day and Rancid. And a 199512 inch single by a robotic French pair calling themselves Daft Punk spawned a major label bidding war in 1996. The press shy Paris duo would perform DJ sets wearing full face obscuring robot masks. Why were big labels five years after grunge suddenly rushing to outbid each other for acts whose tools were computers and turntables? How would the major label promotional system makes sense of an array of dance oriented club and ambient microgenres like trip hop, jungle techno and bigbeat? The answer was a new term, one the artists found as suspicious and made up as grunge. The music industry around 1996 lumped it under the new name electronica. In an early 1997 article for New York magazine entitled Recycling the Future, critic Chris Norris summed up the phenomenon with record sales slumping and alternative rock presumed over, the music industry is famously desperate for a new movement to replace its languishing grunge problem. If all goes according to Marketing Plan, 1997 will be the year electronica replaces grunge as linguistic plague, MTV buzz ad soundtrack and Runway garb. In short, it was an attempt to manufacture a new new rock. As for the music's media profile, while some acts like Daft Punk used their facelessness as a gimmick, what the industry needed were lively frontmen, the Cobain and Vetters of the movement to give the budding electronica scene some personality. And before 1996 was over, they found one. The Prodigy were the brainchild of keyboardist and songwriter Liam Howlett. Their 1994 breakbeat heavy album Music for the Jilted Generation had topped the UK charts and scraped the bottom rungs of the US charts, peaking in Billboard at number 198. However, by the time of their 1996 single Firestarter, Howlett was decidedly not the face of the group. A heavily mohawked and pierced man named Keith Flint, who started in the group as a dancer, took lead vocals on the track and instantly became a visually striking MTV star. Jilted Generation had been issued globally on the British Mute label. But after Firestarter topped the charts in the UK in the spring of 1996, it set off a feeding frenzy among US labels who saw in the Prodigy, and especially Flint, the kind of rebel cred that could sell electronica to rock fans in America. The winning US label ha one guess, Gaio, Siri, Madonna and Maverick struck again.

[Guest or Music Clip]

On the one infected with the animatronic.

[Chris Melanfy]

Maverick Records issued firestarter in the US in the early winter of 1997. With MTV hype reaching fever pitch, Firestarter crashed onto alt rock radio playlists and even wound up scraping the pop top 40, reaching number 30 on the Hot 100 in March. The following summer, when the Prodigy finally put out their Maverick debut album, the Fat of the Land, after all those months of hype, it debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 album chart. It proved there was a market for breakbeats and electronics crossed with rock. Here was the problem. The Prodigy were essentially the only serious success of electronica's first wave. The industry tried with other electronic acts, given their rock cred. British production team, the Chemical Brothers, received a heavy dose of hype. In the winter of 1997. Setting sun peaked at a lowly number 80 on the Hot 100. Three months later, the Chemical Brothers album Dig youg Own Hole shipped at the gold sales level and did manage to debut in Billboard's top 20. Modern rock radio gave Block Rock and Beats a few spins. By the end of 1997, no act from the fledgling electronica scene, if it even was a scene, had scored a major radio hit. Other than the Prodigy's modestly charting single follow up, albums by Tricky and Moby had underperformed. And while Daft punk like Moby, would one day become a gold and even platinum selling act, in 1997, their debut album, Homework, peaked on the bottom rungs of the album chart. And even their catchiest singles, like around the World, fell well short of the top 40, Even as the recording industry was busy trying to confect a successor genre to grunge. In 1997, the American public spoke, and this is what they wanted to hear. The population the renaissance of the late 90s kicked off in earnest in the early months of 1997 with a pair of exploding number one singles, the Spice Girls, exuberant Wannabe and a brother trio from Tulsa, Oklahoma. Who called themselves handsome Spice Girls album Spice wound up the top selling US Album of the year. And while Hanson had difficulty following up their chart topping mbop, they kicked off a wave of boy band pop that would take over the charts in the final years of the decade. America's hit parade was about to make a big pivot. Even more than usual, it was going younger. And what was elder stateswoman Madonna doing during this two year period of the teen pop explosion and the electronica boomlet? Besides profiting from sales of maverick act the Prodigy? Of course she was busy, but not with an album with a baby and a movie.

[Guest or Music Clip]

Don't Cry For Me Argentina the truth is I never left you all through my wild days My mad existence I kept my promise don't keep your distance.

[Chris Melanfy]

Directed by British filmmaker Alan Parker, Evita, a movie of the theatrical musical about the life of Eva Perron that a generation ago had made Broadway stars of Patti LuPone and Mandy Patinkin, was Madonna's highest profile film role ever. As if this wasn't enough pressure during the making of the film, Madonna became pregnant with her first child. Conceived with her then boyfriend Carlos Leon, a dancer and trainer from Havana, Madonna gave birth to Lourdes Maria Ciccone Leone In October of 1996, just weeks before the release of Iviza. The original theatrical musical was of course the handiwork of UK superstar producer playwrights Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice. The estranged pair even reunited to pen a new song, you Must Love Me expressly for the movie and for Madonna. Starring in the title role as Eva Peron. One the Regal star was born to play. Madonna won some of the most respectful reviews of her acting career and and thanks in part to the new song, her work garnered the movie some actual statuettes. Madonna won the Golden Globe for best Actress in a musical or comedy and while her acting did not get nominated at the 1997 Academy Awards, she did perform youm Must Love Me on the telecast and helped secure the Oscar for Best Original Song which went to songwriters Lloyd Weber and Rice. As for the charts, Evita was a very strong selling soundtrack, peaking at number two in the winter of 1997 and selling more than 2 million copies. You must Love Me, though it was out of step with the sound of top 40 radio, peaked at a decent number 18, fueled by sales to devoted Madonna fans. It was not a major radio hit. Neither was Madonna's recording of the musical signature song Don't Cry For Me Argentina. That is until Warner Music had the clever idea to issue a Latin dance remix of the track. That version peaked at number seven in.

[Guest or Music Clip]

Marches and sevens with you.

[Chris Melanfy]

Coming off of Evita, Madonna was at the ultimate career crossroads. She'd finally earned the respect as an actress she'd long craved. The fact that the film was a Lloyd Webber Rice musical had also proved a healthy challenge to Madonna's voice. Months of training and performing the Broadway caliber songs had increased her range and refined her vocal technique. Madonna was never going to be a power diva at the level of Celine Dion or Mariah Carey, but she was now equipped with the strongest chops of her career. But Celine and Mariah were not her only competition as she pondered returning to the studio in 1997. While she was taking her time out, the radio had swung back toward pure pop. In theory, that was good for her. But the charts veered hard right toward teenage artists. And this was half a decade after America had already told Madonna they liked her best, not as a provocateur, but as a ballad crooning adult. All this backdrop is essential to understanding what a miracle it was when Madonna and her collaborators came up with Ray of Light. Again. It so easily could have not worked. An album by a 39 year old embracing her maturity but attempting to sound fresh. Trance and trip hop were the young sounds Madonna felt closest to, especially after her fruitful experiments on singles with Nelly, Hooper and Massive Attack. But none of Madonna's prior electronic singles had made much of a dent on the pop charts. And electronica was already proving more hype than hit even mega platinum. Superstars who were trying on the style were falling flat. U2, who in 1991 had successfully adapted to the sound of rave music on Achtung Baby, tripped themselves up trying to adapt to electronica. Their ironically titled 97 album pop debuted at no. 1 but was off the charts months before Christmas, the shortest charting studio album of the band's career to date. So if Madonna was going to commit fully to electronica, she had to get it right. For her return to album making, Madonna and Gaio Siri reached out to the producer who had remixed a handful of her singles over the past seven, William Orbit. In the intervening time, Orbit had continued not only remixing, but also as an artist, generating new installments in his Strange Cargo series of ambient album she Cries.

[Guest or Music Clip]

Again Three Times Again.

[Chris Melanfy]

Given his prior ambient experiments and his history remix mixing tracks like Justify My Love and I'll Remember, Orbit was an ideal choice for Madonna's next album. They wound up spending four and a half months in the studio, the longest Madonna had ever worked on an album the process was painstaking, as Madonna and Orbit built tracks out of a mix of live instruments like guitar, computer generated sounds and obscure samples. Orbit brought Madonna songs he had dabbled with on other projects, including a pair he had co written with Susanna Melvoin, sister of Wendy Melvoin of the Revolution, a moody track called Swim, and a cautionary tale about drugs called Candy Perfume Girl.

[Guest or Music Clip]

You candy perfume girl and you can Candy Perfume Girl.

[Chris Melanfy]

Perhaps the most obscure source material Orbit brought to the studio was this one, a song that came out when he and Madonna were teenagers.

[Guest or Music Clip]

Zipper in the sky at night I wonder do your tears of morning sing Deep beneath the sun Goddess of the universe come quickly for the call of thunder threatens everyone. And I feel like I've used.

[Chris Melanfy]

Those familiar sounding lyrics formed the backbone of the title track of Ray of Light. The track is called se by Curtis Muldoon, an early 70s British folk duo who were ultimately given songwriting credit on the track. On one of his strange Cargo albums, Orbit worked with Christine Leitch, a niece of David Atkins, AKA Dave Curtis of Curtis Muldoon. Christine Leech borrowed her uncle's track and turned it into the Orbit collaboration Zephyr in the Sky. The instrumental track was Orbit's, and Leitch sang Curtis Muldoon's lyrics on top, leaving their first verse virtually untouched. Madonna then rearranged the track, turning the Ray of Light line into the song's titular refrain and amping up the vocal delivery. The addled, almost shouted but captivating singing was one of Madonna's boldest ever vocal performances. The full length version of Ray of light, more than 10 minutes long and ultimately unreleased, was intended to be included on a future remix album, a planned follow up to Ray of Light that Orbit and Madonna cheekily titled Veronica Electronica. The collection never made it past the planning stage, but when that title leaked to the press, Veronica Electronica became Madonna's new unofficial, snarky nickname. It was yet another indication that the media could have had it out for Madonna, as they did in 1992, around the time of Sex and Erotica. But the music on Ray of Light shut down the Doubters. It was uniformly strong, heartfelt and on trend. In interviews during the lead up to the album's release, Madonna revealed that while she loved club and electronic music, she found much of electronica clinical and remote. Her goal with Ray of Light was to put the emotion back in this music that had originally begun as dance floor reveries, even if that meant much of the music was not all that danceable.

[Guest or Music Clip]

There's no greater power than the Power of Goodbye.

[Chris Melanfy]

One of the album's most moving tracks was dedicated to her infant daughter. Little Star was a gentle, ethereal ballad that made full use of Orbit's electronic touches but remained fully grounded in Madonna's maternal sentiments.

[Guest or Music Clip]

May the angels protect you Sadness forget you Little star There's no reason to weep Lay your head down to sleep.

[Chris Melanfy]

Of course, Madonna did not fail to include a banger or two in addition to the rave worthy title track. Nothing really Matters was a four on the floor club jam designed for thumping discos. But the album closed with possibly the darkest, most visceral and strangely beautiful lyrics of her career, a gentle tone poem called Mer Girl, a reflection on birth and death. Madonna wrote it after visiting her own mother's gravesite.

[Guest or Music Clip]

I ran past the churches in the crooked old mailbox, past the apple orchards.

[Chris Melanfy]

When the album dropped on March 3, 1998, it was hailed as a triumph, an album of raw passion and cutting edge music from an artist who'd taken more than her share of lumps. And it remains so. In the months since we began work on this episode of Hit Parade, numerous critics have come out with appreciations of Ray of Light. On the occasion of its 20th anniversary in the Ringer, Lindsey Zoladz calls it, quote, a record about the anxieties of existing in a female body, one of the rawest pop albums about motherhood that I can think think of. In his commemoration, Rob Sheffield writes, quote, ray of Light is easily the most intense pop album ever made by a 39 year old. Madonna spends these songs celebrating her newborn daughter, mourning her long lost mother and reckoning with her messed up adult self. Ray of Light wasn't only acclaimed, it was hit, generating bestselling and influential. Three months after Frozen hit number two on the Hot 100, Ray of Light hurtled onto the chart all the way up at number five, its peak by the fall. The torch song the Power of Goodbye came just shy of the top 10, peaking at number 11 in November. Obviously these singles were at root all pop songs, but their production and sonic elements were rooted in the work of William Orbit and the Trip Hop producers Madonna had been working with previously, and they were higher charting than any artist from the electronica boomlet to date. In fact, their combination of romantic lyrics and digital effects may have opened the marketplace late that year to an electro pop song by another music legend that proved even bigger.

[Guest or Music Clip]

Do you believe in life after love?

[Chris Melanfy]

Built out of a Daft Punk like beat and her voice processed through the pitch Correction software AutoTune, Cher's single Believe landed in Europe in the fall of 1998 and proceeded to sweep around the globe. It topped the Hot 100 by March of 1999. That same month, Madonna was on top of Billboard's Club Play chart with Nothing Really Matters. In other words, in the spring of 1999, at a time when the charts were otherwise dominated by Britney Spears and Backstreet Boys, the biggest pop song and biggest dance song in America were by a 52 year old woman and a 40 year old woman, respectively. Cher's Believe wound up the number one song of 1999. Madonna's digital breakthrough probably also helped the rest of the electronica acts as well. By late 1998 and early 99, former House Martins member Norman Cook transformed into A big beat DJ called Fatboy Slim was scoring actual top 40 hits in America.

[Guest or Music Clip]

Through the Hard Times and the Good I have to celebrate you baby I have to praise you like I should.

[Chris Melanfy]

And later, in 1999, Moby finally dropped the album that would make him a star in America and around the world. The gradually multi platinum play. It was a very sleepy sleeper, taking two years from 1999 to 2001 to go double platinum and generate its raft of radio singles. But it is not hard to imagine Madonna softening the ground for his eventual breakthrough. As for Ray of Light, by the end of 1998 it wound up triple platinum in America. By early 2000 it was quadruple platinum, Madonna's best selling studio album of the 1990s. Globally, the album album sold 16 million copies, her third best studio album overall after True Blue and Like a Virgin, and edging out her global sales for Like a Prayer, the last album of her 1980s peak. It also earned Madonna more trips to awards show podiums. At the 1998 MTV Video Music Awards, Madonna and video director Jonas Aucherland were presented with video of the year for Ray of Light. The Moon man was perhaps poignantly presented to Madonna by a Spice Girl, Jerry Hallowell, who then at age 27, called the 40 year old Madonna my idol growing up. In all, Ray of Light took home five MTV awards and a sixth was won by the innovative Chris Cunningham video for Frozen. The following February, at the 41st Annual Grammy Awards, Madonna took home amazingly her first Grammy ever for a recording, having won only one prior statue for a concert video accepting the best pop album prize, Madonna made no effort to look blase. She was thrilled and dragged up her shy British collaborator to accept the gramophone with her.

[Madonna]

First and foremost, I must thank William Orbit. Without his vision and his brilliance. This album would not be. He does speak English. You'd never know it.

[Guest or Music Clip]

Bye.

[Chris Melanfy]

Perhaps most important, over the sales and the accolades, Ray of Light was exactly the career pivot Madonna needed, providing a foundation for another decade and a half of hits. She was already scoring hits in that summer of TRL teen pop, appearing in Mike Myers second Austin Powers movie and scoring a number 19 hit from the movie called Beautiful Stranger. By 2000, she essentially repeated, tweaked and expanded the Ray of Light formula with her follow up album Music, this time working with a different progressive electronic musician, the French producer Miroez Ahmadzai. And at least in terms of chart peak music did Ray of Light One Better, reaching number one on the album chart and its title track becoming Madonna's last to date number one hit on the Hot 100. With 38 career top 10 hits, 21 of which were added after her epic 1980s streak and eight after the release of Ray of Light. Madonna still holds the record for Most career top 10 hits, and her latter day hits were also musically and stylistically eclectic. From the ABBA sampling hung up to the country eluding electricity intro of Don't Tell Me.

[Guest or Music Clip]

To stop.

[Chris Melanfy]

As for electronica, the word already seemed jargony and passing by the early 2000s. As late as 2002, one year after Moby's final hit, rapper Eminem was actually making fun of him on wax, calling him bald and claiming it's over. Nobody listens to techno. But a funny thing happened in the late 2000s. Another catchall term, electronic dance music, or EDM, caught on and became a centrist pop term in its own right. As Michelangelo Matos points out in his authoritative electronic music book, the underground is massive. EDM appealed to scholars and critics, quote, because it had no connotation to specific styles like house or techno, and electronica evoked the late 90s major label gold rush in America. So EDM was perfect. EDM became mainstream pop by the end of the 2000s. Not only were acts like Daft Punk going gold and eventually platinum, they were influencing hip hop, rock and pop as EDM took over the radio dial. Divas from Rihanna to Britney Spears, now herself a veteran, adopted and adapted EDM into pop hits. And the entire career of Lady Gaga is basically unthinkable without the mashup of Madonna's stylistic boldness with the shimmer and thump of edm. As for the Queen of pop herself, her 2016 Billboard Woman of the Year speech reinforced that she is neither leaving the stage nor going gently. All of Madonna's albums of the 2000s and 2000s have debuted at either no. 1 or no. 2 on the charts, and she remains as big a concert draw as any classic rock act. And the centerpiece, now two decades old, that is both global and personal, both hedonistic and heartfelt about a woman who's got herself a young universe and feels like she just got home.

[Guest or Music Clip]

Come on, I don't see you jumping. Of thunder breaking. Just.

[Chris Melanfy]

I hope you enjoyed this episode of Hit Parade. My producer is Chris Barube and we had help this episode from Danielle Hewitt and Dan Berube. The executive producer of Slate Podcasts is Steve Lichta. Check out their roster of [e-mail] podcasts. You can subscribe to Hit Parade wherever you get your podcasts, in addition to to finding it in the Slate Culture Gabfest feed. If you're subscribing on Apple Podcasts, please rate and review us while you're there. It helps other listeners find the show. Thanks for listening and I look forward to leading the Hit Parade back your way. Until then, keep on marching on the one. I'm Chris Mullenfeld.

[Guest or Music Clip]

Sam.