On September 19 1990, Madonna’s Hanky Panky was certified gold (for shipment of 500,000 units) in the USA.
During an interview with Rolling Stone, Madonna talked about getting a good “spanky”:
The spanking thing started because I believed that my character in Dick Tracy liked to get smacked around and that’s why she hung around with people like Al Pacino’s character. Warren Beatty asked me to write some songs, one of them, the Hanky Panky song, was about that. I say in the song ‘Nothing like a good spanky’, and in the middle I say, ‘Ooh, my bottom hurts just thinking about it’. When it came out everybody started asking, ‘Do you like to get spanked?’ and I said: ‘Yeah. Yeah, I do’.
Hanky Panky-along with American Life and Bitch I’m Madonna, the nadir and low point of Madonna’s recording career!
I wish she had sung “Hanky Panky” in Dick Tracy. I remember going to see Dick Tracy at the movie theater and expecting her to perform it at some point, and being a little disappointed that she didn’t.
Yeah I’ve always wondered what the full story was behind the non-Sondheim songs that appeared on I’m Breathless. Were they written with the intent to be used in the film but Warren decided not to use them? Or was it her plan all along to record additional tracks that were “inspired by the film” but not intended to be used in the film, and to release them together with the Sondheim songs? I know she didn’t write and record the additional non-Sondheim songs until after the movie had already been filmed, so if the intent was to include them, they couldn’t be used in any of the performance scenes in the nightclub. I’m guessing that Warren asked her to write a song called Back In Business considering the fact that a different non-Madonna song called Back In Business was used in the film. Perhaps in the end he simply felt that it would be best to only have Madonna singing during the nightclub scenes.