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MUSIC won the 2001 Grammy Award for Best Recording Package. The album was nominated for the 2001 Grammy Award for Best Pop Vocal Album. "Music" was nominated for the 2001 Grammy Award in the categories of Record Of The Year and Best Female Pop Vocal Performance. With MUSIC, Madonna expands upon the electronic advances made on her previous album, RAY OF LIGHT. RAY producer William Orbit is back on board, joined by French artiste electronique Mirwais Ahmadzai. Both men aid Madonna in pursuing ever more sophisticated electronic soundscapes. The accent here is squarely on club-oriented dance music, as propulsive electronic beats and percolating synthesizers power such pure-pop confections as the title tune and "Runaway Lover." Even Madonna's voice undergoes a fair amount of electronic modification, as on the moody "Nobody's Perfect" which bears a hook that hinges on the same vocoder effect that endeared millions to Cher's "Believe." There's another side to MUSIC, though. While Orbit and Ahmadzai maintain the sonic thread of loops and samples throughout the album, several songs leave the party atmosphere behind in favor of a more melancholy, balladic approach. "I Deserve It," "Gone," and "Don't Tell Me" are pushed along by drum loops, but are based around acoustic guitar, and it's easy to imagine them being performed effectively with nothing more than guitar and voice. While MUSIC pushes Madonna into the future, it allows her to arrive in her new surroundings with the full emotional range of her vision intact. Source: MTV.com Additional Notes: The Australian Version of "Music" contains both "American Pie" and "Cyberraga" Also available: Music - Special Edition 2 CD-Set. Regular album plus Bonus Disc with the following tracks:
:: Review 1 :: Why are new Madonna albums so exciting? Why does everyone get so worked up? Is it because we can't wait to see what she's gonna do next? Is it because we can't wait to see what she's gonna look like next? Or is it because Napster helped you get half the tracks three months ago and now you want to hear what the rest of the album sounds like? In the case of Music, only the latter seems to apply, because everyone already knows that the sound of Music (sorry, couldn't resist) emanates from the combined efforts of French disco/house master Mirwais Ahmadzi and genius collaborator William Orbit. And we all know what she looks like, because we've been treated to the Revolting Cocks-style western horror that is Music's cover art for some time now. (As an aside, this is by far the ugliest and ill-thought-out album cover this writer has seen in a long time.) But wait a minute: Madonna's an international pop icon, right? So that means there are literally millions of Madonna fans who don't know Mirwais from a martini, have never heard a single record on the Source label, have never been dancing at Le Queen. These fans don't care whether the underground is accurately represented. They don't care if the hardcore house essence of Mirwais' music has been smoothed out by Maddy's pop sensibilities. These are the fans who don't slavishly buy everything the lady releases, but at least pay attention when a new album hits the shelves. And those people – if they didn't get totally confused by the genius that was Ray Of Light – are the people who will be blown away by Music. Because Music is an absolutely amazing mainstream pop album. Far more mature (as if it needed to be said) than the legions of teen pop stars she inspired, more responsible than the violence of mainstream hip-hop or metal (God, who thought we'd ever call Madonna responsible?), and more exciting than any mainstream album you've heard since Ray Of Light, Madonna has finally made her place as the forward-looking pop diva. Comfortable enough in her celebrity to explore both her personality and her musicality, Music continues the trajectory begun on Ray Of Light by fusing the lush, throbbing electronica soundscapes that Orbit provided for that album with the four-on-the-floor futurism of Ahmadzi's style. Of course, Music doesn't hold up too well under super-close scrutiny – especially by a music critic. But it's not supposed to. And, despite occasional and minor missteps (OK, ""What It Feels Like For A Girl"" is a real clunker and the vocal effects on ""Nobody's Perfect"" aren't effective, just affected), it's an incredibly engaging and thoroughly interesting album. The infectious textures of ""Music"" (a single that nobody except Madonna could get away with); the schizophrenic future-folk of ""Gone,"" the raise-the-roof groove of ""Runaway Lover"" (otherwise known as ""Ray Of Light 2000""); the disjointed exotica poetry of ""Paradise (Not For Me)."" Everything here comes together to show that with Music, Madonna has apparently permanently stopped releasing records to accessorize her image. Instead, she's made her second great album. Not bad for nearly 20 years in the game. Source: MTV.com, Jason Ferguson, February 23, 2001 :: Review 2 :: Just when we've put Madonna in another box -- one labeled "Introspective Celebrity Mom Who Doesn't Want to Be an Icon Anymore but Can't Help Herself" -- the forty-two-year-old reverts to pleasure girl on the punk-funk dance floor, partying with the break dancers, the queers, the addicts and insomniacs. It's been eighteen woozy years since Madonna dropped "Everybody"; with "Music," the lead track off her thirteenth album, she looks back at that up-for-grabs, early-Eighties era, when the only freaks who could program electro beats for the street were Germans, B boys or near-transvestites. "Music makes the people come together," she cries, as if her life and ours still depended on it. Unlike Ray of Light's pristine inner-ear landscapes, Music is dirty, casually urgent, as if Madonna walked into the studio, got on the mike and let the machines bump. Check the improvisational, silly surge of "Impressive Instant," which first roars like a rock rocket ship, then purrs while a digitally tweaked Ms. Ciccone squeaks, "I like to singy singy singy/Like a bird on a wingy wingy wingy." Music embodies that moment when destiny shoots us into the unknown. You thought Madonna was calculating, but here she's never been more instinctive. "This guy was meant for me," she prays in the ballad "I Deserve It," dropping her guard, clearly portraying Guy Ritchie, her newborn's father. She isn't painting a fairy-tale romance: "Amazing" palpitates with passionate ambivalence, while "Nobody's Perfect" admits and aurally embodies major fuck-ups. But she's still devoted to love. Music does all this with Madonna's most radical sonics yet. William Orbit makes "Amazing" live up to its title by conjuring an even sassier spin on the gurgling grooviness of "Beautiful Stranger." And the six cuts co-produced with French synth weirdo Mirwais madly reference the past while achieving intimate, futurist pop. Her closely miked voice, recorded with minimal sweetening, abandons her recent Evita-schooled operatics for a spontaneous yelp that circles back to her club-belter beginnings. "What It Feels Like for a Girl" clinches it with a feminist anthem that's as musically gentle as it is lyrically barbed. "When you're trying hard to be your best," she croons as the voice of social authority, "could you be a little less?" The inability to do just that is what makes her matter yet again; there's still more to Madonna. Source: Rolling Stone, Barry Walters, October 2000 |
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