Look (or listen) but don’t touch sexuality isn’t the only peep-show aspect of this album Erotica strives for anonymity the way True Blue strove for intimacy. It’s insistently self-absorbed - Vogue with a dirty mouth, where all the real action’s on the dance floor. The song demands the passivity of a listener, not a sexual partner. But the sensibility of Erotica is miles removed from the warm come-ons of Justify My Love, which got its heat from privacy and romance - the singer’s exhortations to “tell me your dreams.” The Madonna of Erotica is in no way interested in your dreams she’s after compliance, and not merely physical compliance either. Erotica is Madonna’s show (the music leaves no room for audience participation), and her production teases and then denies with the grim control of a dominatrix.Īgainst maraca beats and a shimmying horn riff, Erotica introduces Madonna as “Mistress Dita,” whose husky invocations of “do as I say” promise a smorgasbord of sexual experimentation, like the one portrayed in the video for Justify My Love. Madonna, along with co-producers Andre Betts and Shep Pettibone, tamps down every opportunity to let loose - moments ripe for a crescendo, a soaring instrumental break, a chance for the listener to dance along, are over the instant they are heard. Its cold, remote sound systematically undoes every one of the singer’s intimate promises.Ĭlinical enough on its own terms when compared with the lushness and romanticism of Madonna’s past grooves, Erotica is stunningly reined in even when it achieves disco greatness, it’s never heady.
It succeeds in a way the innocent post-punk diva of Madonna and the thoughtful songwriter of Like a Prayer could not have imagined. The production choices suggest not a celebration of the physical but a critique of commercial representations of sex - whether Paul Verhoeven’s, Bruce Weber’s or Madonna’s - that by definition should not be mistaken for the real thing. Moving claustrophobically within the schematic confines of dominance and submission, Erotica plays out its fantasies with astringent aloofness, unhumid and uninviting.
She may have intended to rattle America with hot talk about oral gratification and role switching, but sensuality is the last thing on the album’s mind. Erotica is a post-AIDS album about romance - it doesn’t so much evoke sex as provide a fetishistic abstraction of it. Chilly, deliberate, relentlessly posturing. It took Madonna ten years, but she finally made the record everyone has accused her of making all along. On November 26 1992, Rolling Stone magazine published their review of Madonna’s Erotica album, written by Arion Berger: The mixes don’t stray too far from the original’s winning recipe, but, with nearly 45 minutes worth of dance beats, one can hardly say this single doesn’t satisfy. The fifth and sixth versions are dub mixes, while the seventh is little more than a few extra minutes of bonus dub beats, which, in the long run, wind up being somewhat indistinguishable from one another. The fourth mix is a basically the extended album version, which, in the breakdown, substitutes piano for the Spanish guitars. This single begins with an edit of the album mix, followed by two stripped-down house mixes (featuring a sample from Vogue where “Greta Garbo, Greta Garbo” is repeated throughout the song). The single includes seven versions, which are all club mixes of a song that was a club hit to begin with. The song, in its regular album form, is a dance epic. Jose Promis (AllMusic) had this to say about the single:ĭeeper and Deeper was the second single released from Madonna’s Erotica album.
Deeper & Deeper was Madonna’s 14th number-one hit on the chart. On January 30 1993, Madonna’s Deeper & Deeper hit number-one on the Billboard Hot Dance/Club chart in the USA.
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