Madonna’s Ray Of Light is one of the most iconic reinventions of all time and one of the most everything.

I hope that, by the end of this, you will think of your home album and you will miss listening to it. Home is wherever your music is.

A record is out and if I’m fascinated by it, I listen to it on repeat and an idea, usually, arises and runs through my mind, waiting for me to put it on paper. An Instagram post via Steven Klein on Madonna’s upcoming album, Madame X (Madonna’s 14th album), made me print screen it, obviously, but then I, immediately, thought of what Ray Of Light (Madonna’s 7th album) has meant to me. The idea has just arisen. Inhale. There’s her Music, too, hm.

Drowned World/Substitute For Love

The effect Ray Of Light, the 1998 album produced by William Orbit (a name I remembered forever because I liked the way it sounded), has always had on me is fascinating, still, to me. It’s the effect of both escapism and familiar feeling art has on one.

Ray of Light was one of the first CDs I bought myself for myself and the memory of myself, barely into my teenage years, holding the CD in my hands, on the way home from the store, and looking forward to listening to it, as loud or low as I wanted, on my brother’s stereo, in his room, when he (or anyone in the house, in fact) was not around, has stuck with me, incessantly. The CD came in the most beautiful case. It was the same plastic one we know from nowadays (if only people didn’t throw it – the plastic – all over the world), yet the little book CDs used to feature, when I was a child, was always the cherry on top. With beautifully styled pictures to be discovered physically, not just digitally. Whenever lyrics were inside, I felt like Christmas was coming.

Or, you know, like being right under le Tour Eiffel when it lights up at dusk.

Every song on this album is like a little piece of myself. Nowadays, I can’t, even, listen to it all the time, because there are just too many emotions involved at once. I do it every once in a while, though, when I want to feel like home. Writing this alone turns me into the emotional… fan(?) of emotions that I am. Using emotions to think is fun.

I still buy CDs, by the way. A close friend of mine asked me, a while ago, What? Who does that now? Why would you and where would you listen to CDs anyway? Genuinely, I told him: In my car. The last CD I bought on amazon.com and had delivered to my brother’s house, for his birthday, was Justice‘s most recent CD, Woman Worldwide. He, also, listens to it in the car and it might even happen when he drives his girls to school, in the morning.

Ka-ching!

Swim

Then, one day, back when I was a teenager at home, it must have been on a Saturday morning, when the whole family was cleaning up the house and the music was loud, that – ka-ching-ching! – Ray Of Light happened to be in the stereo and, slowly, but surely, my brother seemed to have started to enjoy it and I was so happy!

An extra reason to appreciate Ray Of Light even more.

To Have And Not To Hold

I still have the CD. Seeing the case in my car, hearing songs from it, on the radio, or dancing to them, in a club, bring sparkles of joy inside of me and I am singing, for sure. On the inside. Or on the outside, depending on the level of fun. Atmosphere.

However, there’s a couple of songs I can, only, listen to in intimacy. They bring me home wherever I am.

Music is Madonna’s 8th album and it’s pretty close to what Ray Of Light means to me. It featured Don’t Tell Me and its video got me into the low rise flared jeans big time. I didn’t want to ever get out of the low rise flared jeans.

And this is how clothes are so much more than just fashion. It’s the goose that’s decoding the style, hence, the goosebumps all over the place.

Skin

Ray Of Light‘s cover was shot by Mario Testino. Madonna started working on the album after giving birth to her first child, Lourdes Leon, who happens to star in one of the coolest latest fashion commercials for Miu Miu and the How Lourdes Leon, The Latest Miu Miu Girl, Became Fashion’s Quietest It Girl article on wmagazine.com is only a confirmation of the fact that Lola must have listened to Ray Of Light, involuntarily, a lot.

One more cool fashion commercial to add to the list of Is This Kind Of Fashion Commercials Coming Back?

Candy Perfume Girl

Growing up and listening to Take A Bow, Justify My Love (Lenny Kravitz is among the writers of it and the voice you can hear in the background), Beautiful Stranger and Music is a different story. Life. Exhale.

Wak-wak…