The Queen of Pop’s catalog of singles and remixes is generating much love on the digitalspectrum and the latest to hit the scene is one of MADONNA’s most interesting tracks from her hit album Music and us all asking again “What It Feels Like For a Girl” — no really?! Do you know?
Silky smooth. The opening lyrics to the song are enough to immediately grab your attention if the opening spoken dialogue didn’t already pique your interest. Madonna’s follow-up to her groundbreaking, award-winning ode to electronica Ray of Light was regarded as the artist’s most interesting work since 1989’s Like a Prayer which is her most introspective; when Music emerged it was an apparent amalgamation of the “Material Girl” as a dance artist and innovator or technological sounds evolving into the new millennium’s most innovative pop star — a “Mercurial Girl” if you’d so have it.
The wildly critical success of Ray of Light put an inscrutable hot spotlight on Madonna — one that had hardly ever dimmed in the entirety of her trailblazing career as one of the popular culture’s most provocative personalities. Even in a decade that had started moving into a youth explosion that manufactured mechanized boy bands and gave us Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera, Madonna continued to make waves. She continued to carve her own path and became far more exploratory in her musical choices and sonic expressions; she took risks and experimented.
Her determination at proving that electronica was a far from soulless musical expression garnered her significant recognition among her peers, but Madonna has never been one to just settle. As the world hurtled toward the new millennium and fears of Y2K worked themselves through the consciousness, Madonna who had planned to go on tour in the final months of 1999, decided to instead pull the reigns in. Other work including films and soundtrack singles, a new husband, and a new baby, distracted her into producing her eighth studio album.
The album project, a collaboration including French musician Mirwais Ahmadzaï and Guy Sigsworth would be pitched as a dance and disco-infused pop confection with to most epitomes title: Music. Among one of the demos that Madonna had started to construct for the setlist was “What It Feels Like For a Girl”. Reportedly, the song was written halfway through her pregnancy with some Rocco, and as she attempted to keep the secret from the press. Madonna was attracted to Guy Sigsworth’s work with ambient rhythms and shared the track with him.
