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Something To Remember / Evita

Don't have much to say about either Madonna project from this era - her ballads collection Something To Remember  or Evita  - other than it was clear Madge was doubling down on the slow, classy, pretty ballads in the wake of the monster success of "Take A Bow".  Commercially I suppose this made sense, up to a point.   But Madonna was never just about ballads, and the disturbing run of them began to make it sound like she'd been taken over by a pod person.  From the planet B'oring. It was nice to get single hits like "This Used To Be My Playground" and "I'll Remember" collected in one place, since they hadn’t appeared on a proper Madonna album before.  When coupled with tasteful , ballady album hits like "Rain", the collection helped to demonstrate that Madonna could, in fact, do justice to ballads (and write 'em, too).   Hello, Mr. Evita Producers! Here's my audition tape! It's sure breezy where love d...
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Erotica

Out of all of Madge's albums,  Erotica  is probably most deserving of an extensive writeup, especially given that it's now passed its 25th anniversary (seems hard to believe).  It’s deserving of attention not just because musically it was quite a departure for Madonna, but also because culturally this is probably when she was the most relevant, and when she became the most controversial.  In fact I can’t think of any celebrity operating at this level of prominence who deliberately chose to become this controversial.  Madonna was bold or crazy depending upon your point of view, but certainly not your typical paycheck cashing celeb. You do still hear hints of the old Madonna on this record, thanks to producer Stephen Bray's involvement most likely, but for the most part this record is Madonna using the success of The Immaculate Collection ’s "Justify My Love" as an escape hatch out of the '80s and into the '90s. Part of a multimedia assault on ...
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Ray Of Light

Madonna sort of fell off my radar as the 90’s wore on. I’d started the decade listening to her quite a bit, enjoying Erotica once I finally bought it, and appreciating the far lighter but uneven Bedtime Stories .  Bedtime Stories is portrayed as something of a commercial comeback, and while “Take A Bow” was a legitimate monster, the album itself only moved a million more copies worldwide than Erotica had.  That’s an even less impressive comeback when you consider we’d entered the age of peak-CD by the time Bedtime Stories was released - Tori Amos moved around 3 million copies of Under The Pink during the same era, for crying out loud. I’m one of those three million, and by the mid-’90s found Amos, Bjork and my growing collection of oldies from Bowie, Joni Mitchell and Dusty Springfield (among others) a heck of a lot more interesting than Madge warbling godawful Andrew Lloyd Webber tripe (even if she was practically born to play a vaguely fascistic climber).  S...
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