Frozen

Madonna and Patrick Leonard wrote it and produced it with William Orbit, and it was on the tape of thirteen tracks Orbit sent her. She drew on Bertolucci's film The Sheltering Sky and wanted a Moroccan, orchestral, super-romantic feel, and Leonard supplied a composition with a tribal feel. Their demo ran past ten minutes. Craig Armstrong arranged the strings, and it was recorded at Larrabee North in North Hollywood. It is in F minor at 102 beats per minute. Madonna said the lyric deals with retaliation, revenge, hate and regret, and that it is not really about her ex-boyfriend Carlos.

It was the lead single, released on 23 January 1998. In the UK it debuted at number one, a first for her, and it reached number two on the Hot 100 on the issue dated 4 April 1998, her sixth single to peak there, passing Elvis Presley and the Carpenters. It also topped the charts in Finland, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Scotland and Spain.

Video, live and a court case

Chris Cunningham directed the video at Cuddeback Lake in the Mojave Desert on 7 to 11 January 1998, shot by Darius Khondji, with a black dress by Jean Paul Gaultier. It won Best Special Effects at the 1998 MTV Video Music Awards. She sang the song at the Sanremo Music Festival in Italy in February 1998.

In 2005 a Belgian court ruled that its opening four-bar theme was plagiarized from Ma vie fout le camp by Salvatore Acquaviva and forbade sales in Belgium. In February 2014 a Belgian court ruled that Madonna had not plagiarized. A trap remix by Sickick went viral on TikTok in 2021 and was officially released on 3 December 2021.