Coming off the artistic -
if not the commercial - high of Erotica, Bedtime Stories is a
real mixed bag. It's straight up '90s R&B for the most part, all
hip-hop, Dallas Austin inflected product. There's art here, but
it's screaming to get out from underneath the oppressive packaging.
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| Speaking of packaging, they curiously opted for the upside-down image of Madonna...but didn't adjust the font color for the titles, making them impossible to read. Nice teal CD tray, tho... |
Now, if you like '90s
R&B then you're probably going to enjoy the product, because this is a
really good example of it in my opinion. Madonna it must be said delivers
some of her best vocals yet on tracks like "Secret" and the title
cut, and some of the melodies here are really good (again "Secret"
and especially "Take A Bow" - a surprise monster hit that essentially
reestablished her superstardom). The singles are an interesting mix of
the obvious (but good), like "Secret" and "Take A Bow", and
the surprising, like "Human Nature" and the title cut, which didn't
fare anywhere near as well on the charts but demonstrated incredible range.
Unfortunately, I don't think
most of the album cuts are terribly interesting, even if they're drenched with
then-tasteful, now-dated retro '70s production flourishes.
"Survival" opens with a great credo from Madge, essentially a kiss
off to her critics delivered over a pulsing, urban contemporary beat. She may have backed off a bit from the overt
sexuality of Erotica, but she'd doubled down on the R&B and hip-hop
appropriations. It works pretty well here, and I'm surprised
"Survival" wasn't tagged as a single.
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| Harking back to her street image circa '83, but with an oh-so-trendy nose piercing very much of 1994. |
"Secret" is the
more effective of the pair of slow burners that open the record, though - it's
another surprise they were placed back-to-back like this.
"Survival" actually sounds lighter but its subject matter is
darker. "Secret" sounds much
darker, and strikes me as more authentically urban and genuinely soulful,
although lyrically it's the lighter of the pair. It was accompanied by a
video that seemed very hip and edgy at the time, but now strikes me as maybe a
bit of uncomfortable cultural appropriation.
On the other hand, the intentions seem good, and I love the
"twist" regarding the "secret". It certainly
effectively relaunched Madonna and made the record seem much more about music
than publicity stunts.
"I'd Rather Be Your
Lover" could have almost crawled right off of Erotica. At
4:39 I think it's overlong - although the length is appropriate for the style
of music - but it's still probably my favorite album cut on the record and
probably deserved an edit and a single release. Honestly, I'd have
brought in Meshell Ndegeocello earlier in the song and had her accompany
Madonna more throughout the whole thing, as kind of a chorus. "Don't Stop" is bouncier than
anything on Erotica - more like this record's opening cut
"Survival" - and it's catchy at first but so slight and underwritten
it can't sustain 4:38. The songs here are all about a minute shorter each
than the tracks on Erotica on average, but there's so much less to them
- and the mood they spin is so much less intense - that they invariably feel
longer and duller than their predecessors.
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| Insane Icelandic Elf |
"Inside Of Me"
is a good example of this phenomena. I like the production on this one at
first, and her sexy breathy vocals are great - it's sorta like an urban, sexy
Bjork tune, with its twinkling synths and somewhat off-kilter lyric - but it's
ultimately not experimental enough or crazy enough to be as interesting as the
work of Iceland's wackiest export.
"Human Nature"
is another track that carries on in the tradition of Erotica, and one of
the record's best. A surprise single release, it wasn't a huge hit but
featured a killer Bob Fosse tribute video that - while not quite as good as
Paula Abdul's "Cold Hearted" in that regard - was wonderfully
raunchy, rude, funny and mesmerizing. This is actually a great f-off tune,
up there with cuts like "You're So Vain" or, well, half of Annie
Lennox's catalog. I don't know who she
was flaming with this one, but they needed a whole swimming pool full of burn
ointment after she was finished with them. "I'm not your bitch, don't
hang your shit on me," still makes me laugh.
"Forbidden
Love" and "Love Tried To Welcome Me" are well produced and
inoffensive. Her vocals are nice, the instruments are great, and I like
'em well enough while I'm listening to them, but I don't recall ever seeking
out either song in the near quarter century since they were released.
"Welcome" especially is about two minutes too long.
"Sanctuary" on
the other hand feels a bit more like a technoized refugee from Erotica -
in fact, strip the pumping beat back a bit and it would slide right onto Ray
Of Light unnoticed - and it's certainly more interesting than its
immediate predecessors. Again, with its whispered vocal and unusual
lyric, it sounds a bit like Madge was listening to Bjork and decided to take a
stab at that Eskimo pixie crap herself. Well, I'll give her an E for
effort...
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| This is the new, softer, non-controversial Madonna. And don’t you forget it! |
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| Traveling... |
After dragging thru the
middle, the album picks up dramatically at the end. If you were wondering
if Bjork had inspired some of the trippier work on Bedtime Stories wonder
no more, because the title cut was written by Iceland's finest and is in fact
one of her best works. This thing totally doesn't fit in on the album at
all, which is fantastic because by this point Bedtime Stories
has gotten kinda tedious. What a fantastic, kinetic techno rush this
track is - Madonna must have asked for something like Bjork's incredible
"Violently Happy" and she got it. The video was an outrageously
expensive, incredibly surreal and deeply disturbing computer generated tour de
force, by far the single best thing to come from this project. Some of
the CGI is a bit dated today, but watching it tonight I was shocked by how
wonderfully bizarre and inventive much of the imagery remains to this day. This was definitely our first glimpse at the Ethereal
Girl that Madonna would subsequently transform herself into for '97's Ray
Of Light (after a brief detour through Argentina...).
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| Señorita |
Ultimately though, Bedtime
Stories the album is all about churning out product, and that's the
note it ends on, with maybe the perfect '90s lite R&B ballad, the beautiful
little machine "Take A Bow" which hits all the right marks like an
Olympic medaling figure skater. It's no "Live To Tell" but it's
impossible to dislike - a beautiful melody, perfect production that's of its
time but not badly dated, a lovely vocal performance from Madge, and an
incredibly effective video that's all poses and sets and costumes, but
perfectly choreographed and staged and designed ones. After this parked
itself at the top of the charts in the US for a whopping seven weeks nobody
could accuse her career of being in decline anymore, which gave her a lot of
freedom for her next album. To her
credit, she took it.
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| Admittedly, there was some freaky imagery associated with this album toward the end. Surprisingly, it was this - not the far more conventional "Take A Bow" - that really pointed the way forward for Madonna. |
At the time, Bedtime
Stories seemed like Madonna simply transitioning into the R&B dominated
pop market of the '90s, mostly seamlessly. Thanks to "Take A
Bow" it was a huge commercial success, and got good reviews - maybe better
than it deserved. I liked it alright for awhile, but stopped listening to
it by '95 or so and have seldom felt compelled to spin it much since. I
think the biggest problem with it is it's a transitional album - its best cuts
either sound like (and are bested by) most of the preceding Erotica or
subsequent release Ray Of Light. And then you have the record's
thousand pound gorilla "Take A Bow", which really is more of a piece
with her non-album monster ballads like "This Used To Be MyPlayground", "I'll Remember" and "You'll See".
"Take A Bow" could have lived anywhere or nowhere, and while it isn't
out of place on Bedtime Stories, it certainly doesn't seem to flow from
any of it. The cuts that could only have come from this record -
like "Survival", "Don't Stop", and the run of dull in the
second half - are mostly the weakest cuts on Bedtime Stories. As a
result, it's hard for me to think of this album as anything other than a
pleasant stopover between far more interesting destinations.
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| I'll never explain again. |
The single was
climbing the charts slowly in the US, but this performance lit it - and the
album, which had flopped a bit - on fire. It would go on to become one of
her biggest hits, and indeed one of the biggest hits of the decade. Surprisingly, I think she sounds better than
he does in this performance.
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In case you missed 'em, here are overviews of Madonna, Like A Virgin, True Blue, Who's That Girl / You Can Dance, Like A Prayer, I'm Breathless, The Immaculate Collection, and Erotica.
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