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 sexual prudery that included the film Body Of Evidence (another bomb) and her Sex coffee table book, many pearl-clutching prudes (then and now) wag their fingers at Erotica and declare that Madonna had gone "too far", but the reality is that Madonna's dark, grim, explicit and exploitive view of sexuality expressed across all three projects was actually perfectly aligned with the times.  This was after all the era of Fatal Attraction and Basic Instinct, where AIDS had no cure (or even any particularly effective treatment) and Madonna’s world was one of weekly casualty reports involving acquaintances both old and new.

Clinical.  And that was the point.

Explicit sexual imagery was already well-established in hip hop, and Prince had pushed the sexual envelope far beyond anything on Erotica over a decade before, with songs like his incest-celebrating “Sister”.  What made Erotica unique wasn’t the content, but the fact a woman was producing it, arguably the biggest star in the world.  That certainly hadn’t been done before.

The record opens with the title cut, an even more hip hop, house inflected cut than “Justify”, with Madonna croaking and cooing an homage to S&M.  “Hanky Panky” was played for laughs a couple of years before, but here she’s serious.  The video meanwhile functioned as a commercial for her Sex bestseller, all debauched glamour and curiously unarousing sexaul poses taken from that book’s photoshoots, like the Madonna of “Vogue” gone to seed.  There really isn’t a trace of the Madonna of “Like A Virgin” left here - this is entirely a creation of the ‘90s, and perfectly in the edgy groove of the times.  “Erocitc” maybe isn’t as shockingly experimental as “Justify”, but it is perhaps more striking as it shows the shift in style wasn’t a one-off - she’s really left the past behind.

The club-centric cover of “Fever” just emphasizes it.  Peggy Lee was famously ticked that Madge had covered it - ‘till Madonna shipped over a bouquet of roses - but this cool, throbbing homage to being horny is a just about perfect updating of the track for the times.  True, it’s an artifact of 1992, but it’s an immaculate one.  Director Stephane Sednaoui’s video was a disappointment though, serving to demonstrate that his one trick was already getting old (fortunately, he got some new tricks as the decade wore on).

The album keeps the groove pumping with “Bye Bye Baby”, a bitchy updating of “Keep It Together’ that almost sounds like a remixed outtake from I’m Breathless, with its coy babydoll vocals and retro melody.  And when Madonna does finally return to somewhat more traditional dance, it’s with the ‘70s retro “Deeper And Deeper”, all innuendo and swirl.  The video was deliciously retro and Studio 54 perverted as well, steeped in Warhol and decadence, an homage to an era young Madonna just caught the aftermath of, now fast receding in the culture’s rearview mirror.  Yet it felt strangely relevant too, in part because of the passing of so many figures from that time due to AIDS.  And of course Madonna essentially plays Edie Sedgwick in the video, another denizen of the Manhattan, Warhol Factory scene gone too soon.  There’s a palpable sense of loss hanging over the entire album.

Madonna as Edie Sedgwick

Erotica chills down next with the trippy “Where Life Begins”, a slow pulsing, six minute ode to cunnilingus and one of the record’s few references to the Madonna of old (that pumping keyboard in the background of the chorus, which recalls mid-period ‘80s Madonna tunes like “Causing A Commotion”).  The record keeps the cool, rainy day - or in this case dark evening - vibe going with “Bad Girl”, a great examination of how you can get stalled in a bad place with bad habits due to unfulfilled longing.  Of all the tracks on the record, I think this lyric calls out as the truest, most insightful cut to this day.  

Bad girl, drunk by six

Kissing someone else's lips

Smoked too many cigarettes today

I'm not happy when I act this way

Like much of Erotica, it examines the honest, and therefore often dark side of sex and romance.  Critics at the time complained that much of Erotica and Madonna’s Sex book felt clinical, that it was graphic but unarousing. This wasn’t a flaw, it was the point.  Erotica doesn’t celebrate sexual attraction: Erotica examines it.  The David Fincher-directed, Christopher Walken-starring video - which borrowed heavily from Wings Of Desire - is one of her best, and still holds up a quarter century later.

This video is vastly superior to her Body Of Evidence film...

Speaking of examining sexual attraction, “Waiting” is a great example of that, picking thru a failed romance, with Madonna again croaking and cooing over tripping beats as on the title cut.  I’ve always wondered if this was written for Warren Beatty:

I knew it from the start that you would desert me

You're going to break my heart

Baby, please don't hurt me

She gets in a great last bitchy hit herself, though:

Uh, next time you want pussy, huh

Just look in the mirror baby

CDs were no longer coming with plain silk-screened labels,
and Erotica has one of the era's best, understated label designs

“Thief Of Hearts” continues the same theme, this time targeting a man-stealing rival.  It’s a bit highschool, but catchy enough and in keeping with the record’s overarching theme.  “Words” meanwhile has interesting Middle Eastern inflections - several years before those started to commonly turn up on the pop charts - and completes a triptych of sequential tracks dealing with Madonna as a victim of romance.  Musically “Words” isn’t a million miles away from her work on Ray Of Light at the end of the decade.

Love isn’t all darkness on Erotica, and we get a welcome refreshing pause on the Karen Carpenter-esque “Rain”, one of Madonna’s most beautiful - and well performed - ballads.  The high-tech, Japanese-inflected video is also one of her most achingly beautiful works.  I’d skipped picking up Erotica when it first came out, and didn’t hear “Rain” until I’d tuned into the song mid-verse on the car radio one night.  It was instantly arresting, but I couldn’t figure out who was singing it.  It sounded like Karen Carpenter but the production was far too contemporary, and for a moment I wondered if someone had remixed an unreleased Karen Carpenter track, possibly from her aborted solo record (this was the era of the DNA remix of Suzanne Vega’s “Tom’s Diner” and such, after all).  It wasn’t ‘till halfway thru the chorus I realized this was the new Madonna single.  Well done, Madge!  I grabbed the album the next day…

"Rain" was ironically a ray of sunshine in the overwhelming gloom of Erotica, and while it seems
somewhat forgotten, paved the way for the next stage of her commercial career - megaballad hits

“Why’s It So Hard” is Madonna’s old hippy crawling out, a companion piece to “Love Makes The World Go Round” off Virgin and similar stabs at social commentary.  It feels a bit out of place, and points out probably Erotica’s greatest flaw - like a lot of other albums of the CD era, it’s just too damn long to effectively absorb in one listening.  The dark, oppressive mood makes the album a bit of a slog, although fortunately the sonics are cool and pleasant, crisp but without a hint of the nasal harshness that characterized Like A Prayer.

“In This Life” continues lamenting the condition of the world, although this time with its focus on AIDS it feels more connected thematically with the rest of the album.  It also integrates her balladeering with the spoken-word monologue approach found elsewhere on Erotica.

The record finally lightens up a bit at the end, with the humorous sexual braggadocio of “Did You Do It?” bringing in the ubiquitous guest rappers of the era but wisely relegating the only men that turn up on the record to a boast that falls flat.  The final cut, the beautiful “Secret Garden”, is where Erotica really shines though, all spacy jazz riffs, tripping beats, whispered and cooing vocals and Joni Mitchell keyboard chords.  It actually is erotic, playful, languid, delicate but also discriminating and determined.  Album producer Andre Betts seems to have vanished off the face of the earth after Erotica’s relative commercial flop, but I think he’s responsible for some of the most interesting (if not always completely successful) work Madonna ever produced.

What celebrity hitchhikes nude (sober) anymore
in Miami?

Erotica is probably as close to the avant garde as Madonna ever got (the more successful Ray Of Light - and the less successful Music and American Life - would be the other candidates).  It doesn’t always work as a record, and would probably have benefited greatly from being trimmed by a track or three and having a few cuts shortened by a minute or so.  That having been said, it managed to transition her sound and attitude out of the ‘80s in a way most of her prominent rivals (Price, Michael Jackson, Paula Abdul, etc.) never accomplished, spun off a slew of great videos, and introduced a new, far more self-reflective Madonna, one who we’d be hearing more from as the decade progressed.  The controversies over the Erotica-era’s blatant sexuality gave Madonna something to play off against on the subsequent, far lighter, less edgy Bedtime Stories (although she retained - and even emphasized - the hip-hop influences).  A retreat to commercial norms, it’s commercially a far more successful work, but artistically and as a listen I don’t think it’s held up nearly as well as its predecessor.  

But that’s a discussion for another day.

Erotica is very much a club record, and a pretty avant garde one at that. It was the least-pop album she'd produced up 'till that point. This was the era when hip hop and club music started to invade the top of the pop charts (1992's #1 hits included "I'm Too Sexy" by Right Said Fred, "Jump" by Kriss Kross, and "Baby Got Back" by Sir Mix-A-Lot), so she was right on trend with Erotica, but at least half of her fan base - the former teenage mall girls - weren't fans of that music. At all.  And the sales reflected it.

"The sales are *what* again?  Oh shit!"

I think the "problem" with Erotica was she didn't pick up many fans of hip hop or of the darker club music with the record, while she lost some of the former mall denizens. I liked it alright at the time - she didn't sound ridiculous like Prince did with crap like "My Name Is Prince", and at least she hadn't become a self-parody like Jacko was becoming, all vocal tics and ludicrous costumes - but I don't think I was really impressed by the record until relistening to it about a decade ago. That's when I realized what a brilliant mood piece it really is, what the themes are, and how different it is from the rest of her catalog. It's certainly flawed, but it's also a lot more interesting - even when it flops a bit in spots or overwhelms with its length - than any of her more traditional pop records.

A lot of people made the mistake of writing her off after this, thinking the controversy, the shift in style, her continuing cinematic flops and the declining sales were signs that her career was winding down.  Once again, these people were proven wrong - in fact, some of her biggest commercial success was yet to come.  Love her or hate her, her career had a lot of runway left - in fact, this next phase would see her superstardom persist longer than most of her rivals’ entire period of cultural relevance.

You can't keep a good diva down.  She'll be back.

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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, and The Immaculate Collection.