Madonna Music CD

Live Recording

Producers: Mirwais Ahmadzai, William Orbit, Guy Sigworth, Mark "Spike" Stent, Talvin Singh.
Recorded at Sarm East and Sarm West, London, England; Guerilla Beach, Los Angeles, California; The Hit Factory, New York, New York.
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.
Personnel: Madonna (vocals); Guy Sigsworth (guitar, keyboards, programming); Steve Sidelnyk (drums); Sean Spuehler (programming).
Audio Mixer: Mark "Spike" Stent.
Recording information: Air Lundhurst Studios, England; Guerilla Beach, Los Angeles, CA; Sarm East And Sarm West, London, England; The Hit Factory, New York, NY.
Photographer: Jean Baptiste Mondino.
Filled with vocoders, stylish neo-electro beats, dalliances with trip-hop, and, occasionally, eerie synthesized atmospherics, Music blows by in a kaleidoscopic rush of color, technique, style, and substance. It has so many layers that it's easily as self-aware and earnest as Ray of Light, where her studiousness complemented a record heavy on spirituality and reflection. Here, she mines that territory occasionally, especially as the record winds toward its conclusion, but she applies her new tricks toward celebrations of music itself. That's not only true of the full-throttle dance numbers but also for ballads like "I Deserve It" and "Nobody's Perfect," where the sentiments are couched in electronic effects and lolling, rolling beats. Ultimately, that results in the least introspective or revealing record Madonna has made since Like a Prayer, yet that doesn't mean she doesn't invest herself in the record. Working with a stable of producers, she has created an album that is her most explicitly musical and restlessly creative since, well, Like a Prayer. She may have sacrificed some cohesion for that willful creativity but it's hard to begrudge her that, since so much of the album works. If, apart from the haunting closer "Gone," the Orbit collaborations fail to equal Ray of Light or "Beautiful Stranger," they're still sleekly admirable, and they're offset by the terrific Guy Sigsworth/Mark "Spike" Stent midtempo cut "What It Feels Like for a Girl" and Madonna's thriving partnership with Mirwais. This team is responsible for the heart of the record, with such stunners as the intricate, sensual, folk-psych "Don't Tell Me," the eerily seductive "Paradise (Not for Me)," and the thumping title track, which sounds funkier, denser, sexier with each spin. Whenever she works with Mirwais, Music truly comes alive with the spark and style. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine
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 theRolling Stone (1/4/01, p.106) - Ranked #3 in Rolling Stone's Top 10 Albums of 2000.
Rolling Stone (10/12/00, p.86) - 4 stars out of 5 - "...Dirty, casually urgent....[It's] her most radical sonics yet....intimate, futurist pop..."
Spin (1/01, p.73) - Ranked #18 in Spin's "Top 20 Albums of the Year [2000]".
Spin (10/00, p.173) - 7 out of 10 - "...It's the first Madonna record in years that feels as effortless as the dance-pop of her Ciccone youth..."
Entertainment Weekly (9/24/00, pp.72-3) - "...[She's] encased in a jet-stream, hard-disco beat and continually contorting her voice....MUSIC burps and thumps harder than RAY OF LIGHT, and it allows her moments of playful humor absent from that predecessor..." - Rating: B
Q (1/01, p.93) - Included in Q's "50 Best Albums of 2000".
Q (10/00, pp.108-9) - 4 stars out of 5 - "...A brave, radical and punchy album....thrilling non-stop Eurocentric disco....this is Madonna without a safety net."
Uncut (10/00, p.86) - 3.5 stars out of 5 - "...Nursery rhyme melodies hang off twinkling, cut-glass keyboard lines..."
Mixmag (10/00, p.179) - 3 out of 5 - "...It's full of Mirwais' trademark production gimmicks: stuttering vocal edits, tortured analog synth howls and oceans of vocoder....Yet the album's finest moment is the ruthlessly simple guitar-and-voice ballad 'I Deserve It'..."
Vibe (11/00, p.173) - 4 discs out of 5 - "...A masterpiece of brilliantly arranged keyboards, futuristic drums and electronica dressings....it's a weird and fresh-sounding mix..."
Melody Maker (9/26/00, pp.50-1) - 4 stars out of 5 - "...A collection of her slickest and sexiest sounds since 'Justify My Love'....impressive..."
Mojo (Publisher) (10/00, p.102) - "...Still doing what she does best - giving a lick of pop genius to the unlikely genre of experimental dance music."
NME (Magazine) (12/30/00, p.79) - Ranked #47 in NME's "Top 50 Albums Of The Year".
NME (Magazine) (9/16/00, p.35) - 8 out of 10 - "...A bionic record, a triumph of advanced mechanics and the faultless design of a consumate superstar..."