Madonna's Erotica was panned amid a scandal, then hailed as revolutionary
When Madonna released Erotica in October 1992, alongside her provocative photo book Sex, the uproar over the book swamped the music and reviews were split. Decades on, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame counts it among the most revolutionary albums ever made, and critics hear its influence in later female artists.
The album was the first product of Maverick, the entertainment company Madonna formed with Time Warner in April 1992. The deal gave her a $60 million advance and a 20 percent royalty on music, a rate matched at the time only by Michael Jackson's Sony contract. She pitched Maverick as a cross between the Bauhaus and Andy Warhol's Factory, a home for the writers, photographers and directors she wanted to keep around her.
Work began when producer Shep Pettibone, her partner on Vogue, mailed a three-track demo to Chicago, where she was filming A League of Their Own. She liked all three, and from October 1991 they worked in New York, Pettibone building tracks while she arrived with a notebook of lyrics and melodies. Sessions were sporadic because she kept leaving to shoot Sex with Steven Meisel. At first she disliked the polished results; she wanted grit, as if the record had been made in a Harlem alley. A second producer, Andre Betts, helped supply that street edge.
The title track went through four versions. The breakthrough came when Pettibone saw the book, with its dominatrix alter ego Mistress Dita, and urged her to use those stories; she came back and sang it bone-dry, and the song turned darker and more direct. Moods deepened elsewhere too. For a friend, Martin Burgoyne, who had died of AIDS, Pettibone wrote chords and she finished the lyrics of In This Life in fifteen minutes, and on Deeper and Deeper she insisted on a flamenco guitar he did not want.
Blending hip-hop, house and techno, the record dealt with sex and romance in the age of HIV, along with homophobia. It topped charts in Australia, Brazil, Finland and France and has sold more than six million copies, while the Girlie Show tour carried it across four continents in 1993.
Source: Erotica (album)
