Some Things Cannot Be Bought

Madonna “Drowned World / Substitute for Love”

What do you do when you pour every bit of your life into seeking fame, fortune, artistic achievement, romantic possibilities, and you get all of it but still feel like something essential is missing? “Drowned World/Substitute for Love” is a song about course correcting from this point, of attempting to reorient one’s desires towards deeper connections – family, faith, intimacy, placing an emphasis on giving love over receiving it. This could easily be a song about renouncing one way of being to embrace another path, but it’s more complicated and interesting than that. She openly acknowledges the excitement and pleasures she’s experienced and how much happiness she can feel in the spotlight. She’s not a person who is telling you all of that was totally empty and worthless, she’s telling you she wants all of that and something more. This is a woman who 20 years from writing this song would write another in which she sings the words “finally, enough love” with a bit of a wink to the audience. There is never enough love for Madonna.

“Drowned World/Substitute for Love” was composed with William Orbit, a British musician who by this point in his career had established himself as a sort of musical shape-shifter fluent in various strains of dance music, ambient compositions, and electronic-adjacent folk rock in his production work with Beth Orton and Caroline Lavelle. Those two records in retrospect seem like a dry run for what he did with Madonna on Ray of Light, particularly on this song which despite its atmospheric and extremely late 90s arrangement is an acoustic ballad at its core.

Madonna would perform the song as such 8 years later on her Confessions tour, but while that version is quite lovely it simply doesn’t match the drama of Orbit’s arrangement. The album version moves through moments of zoned-out calm, gentle sentimentality, and pangs of regret before arriving at a more emphatic feelings of rejecting loneliness, redefining desires, reclaiming the self, and finally accepting some measure of peace. It’s an emotional journey that sets the stage for the rest of the Ray of Light record, in which she can digger deeper into some of the themes or simply express joy in connecting with something bigger than herself, or at least in finding some new facet of her identity.

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