VIDEO by Fabien
Baron Erotica GHV2: Greatest 1992 Hits Volume 2 2001 GOLD RIAA Certification Maxi-Singles 9w 1 (2w) Club Play 10w 1 (1w) Sales ?w 4 Airplay ?w 2 18w 3 Hot 100
In 1992 Madonna released Erotica,
the album that would push her sexual antics to the edge of
public tolerance, causing a
public backlash that would hinder her career and the performance of
her music for years to
come. The album's first single, also
titled "Erotica", gave us a video that
was arguably the closest
thing to pornography ever aired on MTV.
Featuring partial nudity,
sado-masochism, lesbian sex,
and depicting some truly bizarre interaction with a hand puppet,
the video was aired only a
handful of times and only after
imagery found in the video
left censors outraged, critics attacking, and the public at large
asking if Madonna had finally
gone too far.
The song itself, daring in its
own right, begins by presenting listeners with Madonna's new,
over-sexed alter-ego,
"Dita": "my name is Dita, I'll be your mistress
tonight". It continues with
some rather explicit lyrics
topped off by a dark, yet infectious dance beat that compliments the
erotic nature of the song
quite well. Despite having radio
unfriendly lyrics, "Erotica" holds the
record for the highest Hot
100 Airplay debut in history, landing on the chart at #2 in its first
week, which would also be its
peak.
As if "Erotica",
the album, song, and video, weren't controversial enough, Madonna also delved
into her first publishing
foray at this time with a book of pornography aptly titled, Sex.
Released in conjunction with
the Erotica album, Sex became an instant sales phenomenon,
selling out its one million
copies in a matter of days. A re-edit of
"Erotica" with slightly
different lyrics, entitled
"Erotic," appeared as a special CD bonus with copies of the Sex
book. With the Erotica album
already under fire, Sex only added to critics’ accusations that
Madonna's sexual antics were nothing more than premeditated marketing ploys and
calculated career moves. Michiko
Kakutani made this accusation in his article “Madonna Writes; Academics Explore
Her Erotic Semiotics”:
It’s just hard to understand why people would want
to shell out $45.95 to see a bunch of grainy photos of Madonna cavorting with men and women who are
wearing things like dog collars, harnesses and nipple rings. No doubt that’s the reason the book is sold sealed
in a Mylar envelope. Madonna having
a knife held to her crotch by a bare-breasted woman with a shaved
head; Madonna shaving a man’s pubic hair; Madonna whipping a man who’s licking her ankle: these
images, photographed by Steven Meisel, seem more likely to strike people as gross, inane or willfully
perverse than provocative or erotic...Whereas Madonna’s videos and shows once celebrated sex as a liberating,
joyful force, this labored, calculated book carries the grimmer message that sex is about power, domination and
pain.
With this blatantly semi-pornographic
turn her career had taken, Madonna was met with allegations that she was
delivering a message that
condoned unsafe, meaningless
sex. She was also given criticism for
subjecting
years, to such explicit
material. In his article, “How to
protect your kids from Madonna”, Ron Taffel discussed how Madonna’s mass-
marketing approach made her a
sex symbol for both parents and their children:
I take exception with commentators who
say Madonna is merely pushing the envelope of acceptable sexuality. I believe she is stuffing the envelope with
images that don’t usually go together...Unfortunately, with her mass-market
approach Madonna also blurs the boundaries between parents and children. Think about it. When was the last time parents and kids
shared the same sex symbol? But that’s
what has happened. As 150,000 copies of Sex were sold to adults in the first
day, Madonna’s message was being delivered to our kids through MTV, videos and CDs.
Madonna, however, refuted
accusations that the explicit subject matter presented in Erotica
and Sex was in any way
aimed toward children. In an interview,
she stated that she “didn’t mean
for any of those things to be
for children---anybody’s children”.
Madonna insists that her
intentions for Erotica
and Sex were positive ones and that she saw no harm in releasing them to
the adult public:
It’s a
fantasy. The whole video is a
fantasy. My book is a fantasy...so I’m
not
actually
saying this is what you should go out and do.
I’m presenting a fantasy,
not something that actually happened in
reality…If you watch the video and
you
get off on it or you find it exciting or whatever, that is absolutely the
safest
form of sex for everyone. (Madonna: Videography)
Despite the mass public
criticism she was receiving, Madonna continued her in-your-face sexual
rebelliousness with yet another release, this
time a movie. Body of Evidence (1993), an erotic
thriller which cast Madonna as a sex-addicted femme fatal, also starred Willem
Defoe and
originally received an NC-17
rating for its semi-pornographic content.
The film was very poorly received at the box office and only heightened
public opposition to Madonna's relentless sexual rebellion. Madonna, nonetheless, continued to defend the
artistic value of her work by saying:
People
are so frightened of my ideas that they try to undermine my actual talent or
any artistic value that may be in any of
my
work and just say---oh, she’s just doing that to shock people or...oh look,
she’s changing her look again---oh she really
knows
how to manipulate the media! But, the
fact is, if that’s all I was good at doing, I don’t think people would be
paying
attention
to me for this long. (Madonna:
Videography)
Although Erotica initially did very well, the album faded
quickly. The release of three
more
American singles, "Deeper And Deeper", "Bad Girl", and "Rain",
did little to boost
public acceptance of an album
consumed by negativity. The fact is,
although the issues
explored in Erotica were perfectly relevant to the time in which
the album was
released, any artistic or social
value found in its songs and videos was overshadowed
by Madonna's over-sexed image, an image the public quite frankly could
not relate to
and
was not ready to tolerate. With a
current worldwide sales estimate of only five
million copies, Erotica is
one of Madonna's least successful studio albums to date.
"Erotica" the single, nonetheless, is now the epitome of the
Queen of Pop's movement
to sexually liberate the world by
directly challenging society's sexual taboos, using
every form of mass media to get her message across. Love it or hate it, "Erotica" will
be forever emblazoned into the
memory of popular culture and Madonna has yet to
apologize for the song's infamous
creation. It was recently included on Madonna's
second album of greatest hits,
GHV2.
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