FEATURE:
Bad Girl
Madonna’s Erotica at Thirty
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THERE is a lot to…
IN THIS PHOTO: Madonna shot for the Deeper and Deeper single cover in 1992
unpick, unpack, and uncover when it comes to Madonna’s Erotica. Her fifth studio album, it was released on 20th October, 1992. I am doing a few features ahead of its thirtieth anniversary. Following the acclaimed and hugely successful Like a Prayer album of 1989, Erotica was a completely different sound and album. A concept album about sex and romance, incorporating her alter ego Mistress Dita (inspired by actress Dita Parlo), there is something bolder, more open, riskier, and more sexual on Erotica. She was taking her music to a new level. Erotica was released alongside her infamous Sex book. I think Madonna had this confidence and need to push her music and image even further. A mistress of reinvention, I love Erotica and this stage of her career. Many critics saw the album as too risqué and cold at the same time. In future features, I am going to look at particular songs. I will also look at the Sex book, in addition to the legacy of Erotica. I will come to a positive reviews for an album that set the blueprint for Pop that followed – including artists such as Christina Aguilera and Britney Spears. For its twenty-fifth anniversary in 2017, Billboard ran an oral history of one of the most controversial albums of the ‘90s. They spoke to some key figures involved with the album. It is a compelling read, but I have selected a few sections that interested me.
“Erotica occupies a watershed place in the pop pantheon, setting the blueprint for singers to get raw while eschewing exploitation for decades to come. For its 25th anniversary, Billboard spoke to the players involved in Madonna’s most creatively daring release. Here’s what producer-writer Andre Betts, backup singer Donna De Lory, producer-writer Shep Pettibone, co-writer Tony Shimkin and Living Colour bassist Doug Wimbish recall of the writing and recording of Erotica, the insane release party for the LP and book, and the collective societal pearl-clutching that followed.
The seeds of Erotica trace back to 1990’s The Immaculate Collection, which included two new songs: “Rescue Me” from Shep Pettibone and his assistant Tony Shimkin, and “Justify My Love” from Andre Betts and Lenny Kravitz. The gospel-house of the former hit No. 9 on the Billboard Hot 100, while the hip-hop-inflected latter – which scandalized the world with its leather-clad, ambisexual music video — reached No. 1. For Erotica, Madonna reteamed with Pettibone and Shimkin for 10 tracks, and Betts for four.
Tony Shimkin: After doing The Immaculate Collection and “Rescue Me,” she let us know she was working on a new album and wanted us to be involved in the writing. Seeing I was a musician and writer and Shep [Pettibone] was more of a DJ and remixer, we collaborated on the writing of the tracks for the Erotica album. We went up to meet with her in Chicago, post-“Vogue,” when she was filming A League of Their Own. So we met with her and started to get to work on some music, and sent it to her as we were working our way through it. She would come into New York and have a book full of lyrics and melody ideas and we started working together in Shep’s home studio. I believe the first time she was in New York for an extended period, we were working on “Deeper and Deeper” and “Erotica” and “Bye Bye Baby.” She’s very driven. There’s was never a period of feeling it out — it was diving in headfirst.
Doug Wimbish: I remember Madonna when she used to go to the Roxy before she got really put on. I’d see her at the Roxy when Afrika Bambaataa was down there or [Grandmaster] Flash, and she was down there jamming out. And not just being a spectator, but being engaged in the scene. Madonna’s association with the dance music and the gay scene and the hip-hop scene merging in the downtown clubs in New York City, and her coming from Michigan, she got it…. And she knew Dre had something special. A song like “Where Life Begins” is right up his alley. She had a relationship with Dre for his rawness and realness. You gotta be around someone in this business who tells you, “No, I’m not digging that, that’s why.” And also keep the window open to listen. I think that’s what Dre did.
The first single and title track, “Erotica,” set the tone for her album and the Sex book (a Middle Eastern-flavored version entitled “Erotic” was included on a CD with copies of Sex). But unlike many of the other tracks on Erotica, “Erotica” underwent numerous radical changes during the album sessions.
Shep Pettibone: “Erotica” was four different songs throughout the process. She loved the groove. She would sing it one way, background vocals harmonies and all, then decide to erase everything and start over again. Every version was very good. Shame she made me erase stuff.
Erotica wasn’t all libido and leather, though. The reflective, regretful “Bad Girl” is one of her most affecting lyrics, and “In This Life” is Madge at her most existential. Meanwhile, songs like “Bye Bye Baby” and “Why’s It So Hard” find her experimenting with filtered vocals and reggae, respectively, and on her cover of Peggy Lee’s “Fever,” she marries chilly club music to a torch song of yesteryear. Taken together, the album shows Madonna’s growing willingness to expand her horizons in terms of subject matter and studio techniques.
Shimkin: “Why’s It So Hard” is really funny, because it was midpoint writing the record, and we were all a little burnt out. Everybody went on vacation, and Shep happened to go to Jamaica and I happened to go scuba diving in the Cayman Islands, and both places are heavily reggae-based culture. That’s what we came back having listened to, so we decided out of nowhere to do a reggae track. And then my vocals appeared on it. Going to see the Girlie Show live and see my vocals lip synced and coming over the loudspeakers at Madison Square Garden was surreal for me.
De Lory: The song “In This Life” was very serious. It was just nice to go into the studio and share our own voices on that, which we could all relate to with what was going on, losing friends to AIDS.
Shimkin: “In This Life” had a really deep personal attachment to her, and [it has an] uncluttered nature to allow her vulnerability to come through. Obviously [“Bad Girl” was] a highly personal lyric. There’s a raw element and simplicity that lends itself to a vulnerable vocal and lyric that she puts through. You really hear the emotion in her voice”.
I am going to keep it quite general and brief at the moment. I think I will do another three features about the album, because it remains misunderstood and underrated by some. Completely evolved from the catchy and light Pop of her very early career, this is the sound of the Queen of Pop stepping into the 1990s with one of her best albums! Even though some have slated it or felt it is unengaging, Erotica has so many standout songs. Rain, Bad Girl, Erotica, Deeper and Deeper and Bye Bye Baby are fantastic! In their review, SLANT said this of the fantastic and revelatory Erotica:
“Speaking of little red corvettes, Madonna waxes erotic on the perks and pleasures of oral sex on “Where Life Begins,” the album’s most overtly sexual track but also the only one to reference safe sex: “I’m glad you brought your raincoat/I think it’s beginning to rain.” Both “Where Life Begins” and “Waiting,” which draw heavily from Motown, were produced by Andre Betts, who cut his teeth as associate producer of “Justify My Love.” But Erotica’s chief producer was Shep Pettibone, who remixed Madonna’s singles for half a decade before graduating to studio collaborator with the seminal dance hit “Vogue” in 1990. “Deeper and Deeper,” with its juxtaposition of swirling disco synths, of-the-moment Philly house beats, and the aforementioned flamenco guitar (insisted on by Madonna, according to Pettibone, who objected), is both a product of its time and a timeless Madge classic. (The track even borrows a lyric from “Vogue,” as if she’d come anywhere close to running out of ideas by 1992.)
Madonna’s rarely acknowledged harmonies glide atop the frosty beats, thunder-claps of percussion, and skyward drone of the sonorous “Rain,” while her speaking voice cuts through the inventive but busy beats of “Words” even as her singing is subsumed. Madonna could have more successfully achieved the gritty, raw sound she wanted had she completely handed the reins over to Betts; time hasn’t been kind to Pettibone’s often-suffocating productions, while Betts’s jazzy piano parts and hip-hop beats still sound fresh.
Regardless of the producer, however, Erotica is sonically seamless, and almost every song is about a minute too long—an orgy that seemingly never ends. And then there’s “Did You Do It?,” which, aside from the supremely over-the-top but ridiculously fun “Thief of Hearts,” is the pockmark on Madonna’s otherwise flawless, 35-year-old posterior. It’s the houseguest who stayed the night and who looks much less desirable in the light of day. She could burn her sheets and sanitize the bedroom, she could write it out of her memory, issuing a “clean” version of the whole story without a parental advisory sticker—and she did, because Madonna wanting to get her pussy eaten isn’t as offensive as a rapper talking about actually having done it. But the stink remains anyway. “Did you do it?” She knows she did, but she really just wants to get wifed and have a baby, feminism be damned.
Which brings us to, perhaps, Erotica’s most personal, revealing moment, the unexpected jazz-house closer “Secret Garden,” another Betts production. Most critics and fans are split between two camps: those who think Like a Prayer is Madonna’s greatest album and those who believe Ray of Light is. (I happen to belong to the former.) And then there are those who claim Erotica is her best effort. Had Betts produced more tracks like “Secret Garden,” it may very well have been. Way ahead of its time, the track sets Madonna’s yen for a child to shuffling drum n’ bass, atmospheric synths, and a distant saxophone beckoning like an alley cat. Ever the control freak, and with motherhood still a few years away, she tries to dismiss her ticking biological desire: “I just wish I knew the color of my hair.” It’s unexpectedly the album’s sexiest song.
Erotica’s irrefutable unsexiness probably says more about the sex=death mentality of the early ‘90s than any other musical document of its time. This is not Madonna at her creative zenith. This is Madonna at her most important, at her most relevant. Pettibone’s beats might be time-stamped with the sound of a genre that ruled a decade of one-hitters before being replaced by commercialized hip-hop, and Madonna’s voice might sound nasal and remote, but no one else in the mainstream at that time dared to talk about sex, love, and death with such frankness and fearlessness, and, intentional or not (probably not), the fact that she sounds like she has a cold only adds to the claustrophobic stuffiness of the record. The drums of “In This Life” tick away like Stephen Hawking’s Doomsday Clock, which, coupled with tension-building keyboard intervals inspired by Gershwin’s blues lullaby “Prelude No. 2,” creates a sense of dis-ease rarely found in a pop ballad.
Whatever words one chooses to label the album with—cold, artificial, self-absorbed, anonymous—Madonna embraces those qualities and makes it part of the message. “Why’s it so hard to love one another?” she asks on the reggae-hued “Why’s It So Hard?,” knowing the answer lies within the dark fact that a society that won’t even allow two people to love each other freely can’t possibly be expected to love and care for perfect strangers unconditionally. Sexually liberated, for sure, but Madonna is a liberal in every other sense of the word too, and you didn’t have to hear her shout, “Vote for Clinton!” as she was being whisked past the cameras at the album release party to know that. It could be argued that Madonna lost her rebel relevance right around the time Reagan’s regime ended; the waning of her popularity certainly coincided with the arrival of Bill Clinton’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy. But looking back from the vantage point of an administration far more sinister than Reagan’s, it’s clear that Madonna, her messages, and her music are more relevant now than ever”.
I wanted to get a bit of an early start on a hugely important album from Madonna. Erotica has this enormous and vital legacy when it comes to inspiring other artists. It was also influential in terms of Madonna’s reinventions and development as an artist. Even though 1994’s Bedtime Stories was a move back towards more R&B, Pop and soulful songs, 1998’s Ray of Light was another huge revolution in terms of sound and direction. I feel Erotica deserves so much respect and credit. Reaching number two in the U.S. and U.K., I have some more fond retrospection for this album. I think a lot of the mixed reaction to Erotica might have something to do with Sex and the fact that Madonna was grabbing headlines. Some viewed her as too controversial and provocative. Erotica was not given adequate time and investigation by many. On 20th October, we mark thirty years of a remarkable album. If you have not heard the album or only listened to the singles, then go and spend some time with it and go…
DEEPER and deeper.