The title track of Music didn't really inspire much of a frenzy when it first hit Napster and the radio air waves. If I recall correctly, nobody particularly liked it. The kids of Total Request Live never voted for it, it wasn't on heavy radio rotation, it wasn't cracking the Billboard charts. I heard it for the first time in July, thought it sounded like bad Venga Boys and forgot all about it. Well, tried to at least. The opening beats of the song--the duh duh thwack duh duh thwack--just lodged in my brain and I couldn't shake them. Well, apparently, neither could anybody else. With each successive listen, people suddenly caught onto Music and its giddy chorus about the "bourgeoisie" and the "rebel" and almost two months after it first hit airwaves, it rocketed to number one on the Billboard charts. And it won't come down. And why should it? Every time you listen to it, it's discovery squared.

Thankfully, there's more Music. Listen to the CD once and you'll be intrigued--confused , but intrigued. Listen to it again, you'll start to hear the beats. A third time and it's over. You're hooked.

Madonna collaborates with French electronic producer Mirwais on the new record--and he's much edgier than William Orbit, her Ray of Light producer, who's more commercial, more wedded to the harmonious melding of synthesizer and voice. Mirwais isn't a big believer in coherence--he wants sounds you've never heard before, Music with a capital M. But it's not completely unfamiliar. Listen and you'll hear the cool, chilly beats of Erotica, mixed with the warm melodies of Bedtime Stories, tinged with the gurgles and blips of Ray of Light; all stirred together into a rich, layered cocktail of such electronic bliss that it's positively space age. If they're listening to anything on Mars, it's got to be something like this.

My favorite song on the CD is Impressive Instant simply because it's the most explosive dance track Madonna has ever produced. Remember that giddy scream at the end of "Ray of Light"? "Instant" is four minutes of that kind of energy--a cosmic frenzy that interweaves melodies and distorts Madonna's voice so unrecognizably that the song seems to fracture in four at one point. If "Impressive Instant" could be written out on a page as poetry, it would look something like this: