On January 30 1993, the second single from Madonna’s Erotica album, Deeper and Deeper, hit #7 on the Billboard Hot 100 in the USA.
Slant Magazine ranked Deeper and Deeper at number 33 on their list of 100 Best Singles of the 1990s:
“Among Madonna’s finest achievements, the angsty pop anthem Deeper and Deeper is both an acute distillation of Erotica ’s smut-glam decadence and the singer’s lifelong blond ambition.”
On December 8 1992, Deeper and Deeper was released by Maverick Records as the second single from Erotica. The song was written by Madonna, Shep Pettibone & Anthony Shimkin and was produced by Madonna & Pettibone.
“Someone said that romance was dead
And I believed it instead of remembering
What my mama told me
Let my father mold me
Then you tried to hold me
You remind me what they said
This feeling inside
I can’t explain
But my love is alive
And I’m never gonna hide it again”
On October 26 1993, Madonna performed at the Juan Ramon Loubriel Stadium, in Bayamon, Puerto Rico and caused a stir when she wiped a Puerto Rican flag on her crotch in front of 26,000 fans. The Puerto Rican House of Representatives charged Madonna with desecration of the flag and passed a resolution to condemn her.
The following (poor quality) video shows Madonna wiping her crotch with the flag:
There are no good photos of the event, so we decided to celebrate with some awesome photos of Deeper and Deeper from The Girlie Show.
On October 20 1992, Madonna’s fifth studio album, Erotica was released by Maverick Records.
Music critic Sal Cinquemani commented on the album’s impact:
By 1992, Madonna was an icon—untouchable, literally and figuratively—and Erotica was the first time the artist’s music took on a decidedly combative, even threatening tone, and most people didn’t want to hear it. Erotica’s irrefutable un-sexiness 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. No one else in the mainstream at that time dared to talk about sex, love, and death with such frankness and fearlessness.
