iReview | MADONNA’s VERONICA ELECTRONICA

A Pop Music Review

Madonna’s ground-breaking album, which redefined her as an artist and heralded the mainstreaming of electronica, gets a long-overdue redux as the much-anticipated remix album VERONICA ELECTRONICA is finally brought to light.

Madonna looks back to look forward on new remix album.

Madonna has often commented on how she doesn’t look backwards. Rather than revisiting, she’d prefer to reengineer, or reflect on her own career with nods to her previous accomplishments. In 2022, she paid homage to her own four decades as a recording artist, not with a refurbished greatest hits package (her last retrospective greatest hits release was 2009’s Celebration) but by honoring her contribution to dance club culture and releasing the most comprehensive remix package, Finally Enough Love: 50 Number Ones which many relate inspired the record-breaking world tour that followed.

The Queen of Pop’s artistry has always been characterized by reinvention and experimentation. Her risk-taking has ensured her longevity, and her once material affection for grafting herself to pop hits gave way to something far more mercurial through the decades. Looking forward into the 21st Century, Madonna's accomplishments had reached an apex, and by the late 1990s, her curiosity invigorated her momentum, inspiring her to the next level.

She had uncovered parts of herself. Madonna had become a mother. She explored a deeper, mystic dependence of her place and purpose in the universe, and the result was evident.

In 1998, while many in the music industry, several of Madonna’s own contemporaries wrestled with their relevance, as an onslaught of sugary-sweet and overly manufactured confections dominated the radio charts, Madonna took an exit ramp and explored the largely uncharted territory of the musical genre electronica.

Aligning herself with William Orbit, Rick Nowels, and long-time collaborator Patrick Leonard, and tapping into the voice cultivated from her performance in the film adaptation of the Broadway hit Evita, Madonna assembled Ray of Light. The album would take many by surprise with its warmth and depths, relentless pulse, and lyrical explorations. It was unlike anything Madonna had done before, introducing an evolved and unbridled creation that embraced the Era of Futurism.

Veronica Revisited

Ray of Light was a winning success with critics and fans for Madonna, and it marked a new way forward in her musicality. Madonna, “The Futurist,” emerged much more confident and fearless. The pop conventions and restraints that belonged to others who were biting their way into notoriety didn’t adhere to her.  The album’s extrapolation of electronica as a viable genre was innovative and engaging, and in her hands, interesting. During the making of Ray of Light, Madonna often referred to a tangent personality that emerged. She referred to this alter-ego as “Veronica Electronica.”

Even as the album debuted and its singles raced up the charts, rumors started circulating of a companion project, a remix compilation, that would accompany the main album. It may have taken a decade or two, but now that project has finally been realized. Two decades and some later, Veronica Electronica celebrates the success of its parent project and puts a spotlight on the singles, more specifically, the remixes that were igniting the club scene.

The seven remixes on the album are productions from the era's most recognizable producers and deejays, and also included is a demo of a track that didn’t make the final cut. The names gathered together will be familiar to the most diehard Madonna fan and dance devotee. Victor Calderone, the late Paeter Rauhofer, Sasha, BT, and William Orbit all participated in giving original tracks from Ray of Light a lasting spin on the nightlife circuit.

Many a club-goer will recall the first time that they heard the dynamically charged “Sky Fits Heaven” (Victor Calderone Future New Edit) blowing out of the speakers of big rooms in New York City’s most decadent late-night ballrooms. The tribal beats inspired by many of the tracks from Ray of Light took the club culture to another level. “Ray of Light” (Sasha Twilo Mix Edit) was one of those tracks that, no matter what room you were in, the Roxy, the back bar at Splash in the Flatiron District, or the cavernous Twilo after hours, it followed you all night long. It’s no wonder it’s one of Madonna’s own personal faves.

“Gone Gone Gone” (Original Demo Version) is a collaboration with Ray of Light co-producer Rick Nowels that has been often batted around by Madonna enthusiasts. The song’s lyrics are a step down from their other collaboration, “The Power of Good-Bye,” which also appears on the album, and is a more deeply tragic and moving song comparatively. A remix of “The Power of Good-Bye” (Fabien’s Good God Mix Edit) precedes the demo, and is hauntingly much more relevant, even in this more stripped-down beat-heavy extrapolation of the original.

Although to many, the package may be familiar, two decades later, especially to those who were part of the dance/club culture, it doesn’t feel like a rehash, but rather a revisit of an era that marked a significant movement in Madonna's career. The culmination of these tracks, rebranded for today, is a marker for where music was and where it is today. It represents a microcosm of popular culture, and especially how it evolved, turning the tide for the Queen of Pop, who has always looked to the future.

Here is your #FanzEyeView of “Gone, Gone, Gone,” an Original Demo from the Ray of Light era from Madonna’s remix album Veronica Electronica:

VERONICA ELECTRONICA  | by MADONNA | is available now in a special vinyl edition release and as a digital download on iTunes.

The album art is a fitting companion to the original release, and will be also available soon on CD.

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