Music

"Music" is the sound of Madonna handing herself to Mirwais Ahmadzaï and letting him break her into pieces. The production is deliberately cheap-sounding in the smartest way: crunchy filtered synth stabs, a vocoded and pitch-mangled hook, sudden dropouts and stutters that treat her voice as another sampler pad. Where "Vogue" was lacquered, this is glitchy, French-touch-adjacent electro-funk that keeps interrupting itself, and the interruptions are the pleasure. Lyrically it's almost nothing — "music makes the people come together," a DJ request, a bourgeois-and-rebel joke — and that emptiness is the point after the earnest mysticism of Ray of Light. She sings it playfully, half-drawled, dropping into a low speaking register and then chirping the chorus like someone genuinely delighted rather than instructing anyone. The cultural moment matters: 2000, the turn of the millennium, and a forty-something woman effortlessly setting the template for the electro-pop decade that followed. There's a democratic optimism in it that Madonna rarely allows herself, a belief that the floor flattens hierarchies for the length of a track. Best heard loud in a car with the windows down, or at the exact point in a party when people stop being self-conscious. It's the least profound thing she ever recorded and one of the most purely enjoyable.