Music

1	Music 3:44
2	Impressive Instant 3:37
3	Runaway Lover 4:47
4	I Deserve It 4:23
5	Amazing 3:43
6	Nobody's Perfect 4:58
7	Don't Tell Me 4:40
8	What It Feels Like for a Girl 4:43
9	Paradise (Not for Me) 6:33
10	Gone 3:25

Barnes & Noble

"Do you like to boogie woogie?" inquires Madonna on the title track of her eagerly awaited ninth studio release, Music. Picking up where the Eastern spirituality-centric Ray of Light left off in 1998, Music takes Top 40 listeners on a musical odyssey through Europe's underground electronic music scene. Madonna collaborates with Ray of Light producer William Orbit on two tracks -- the whirling, synth-looped "Runaway Lover" and the twist-inspiring "Amazing" -- but it is French DJ Mirwais Ahmadzai who brings Music its stripped-down, techno-funk feel with hints of folk and country thrown in for good measure. Lyrically, this ten-track pop opus finds Madonna as charmingly self-absorbed as ever -- waxing poetic about living a life without regrets on the acoustic guitar-flavored "I Deserve It" and on the vocoder-voice altered "Nobody's Perfect." But just when you thought you had her pegged as an unrepentant diva, Lady M pulls the breathtakingly earnest "What It Feels Like for a Girl" (a dedication to her daughter) out of her Fendi bag. Throughout her career, Madonna has introduced mainstream audiences to underground trends, and Music merely adds to her pop-culture legacy. This time around, however, she's not challenging us to free our minds. At a time when the pop music climate has been polluted with overdone vocals, mechanical dance routines, and materialistic hip-hop (a trend Madonna pokes fun at in the video for the club-thumping title track), the Divine Ms. M remembers what first won our attention and once again makes us an offer we can't refuse -- an irresistible invitation to the dance floor. Tracy E. Hopkins

All Music Guide

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