On December 5 1993, the final single from Madonna’s Erotica album, Bye Bye Baby, debuted at 31 on the Australian Singles Chart.
The single included the following versions of Bye Bye Baby:
On May 11 1993, the music video for Fever premiered on MTV. The video was directed by Stéphane Sednaoui.
On April 20 1992, Madonna signed a deal with Time Warner to set up her own multimedia entertainment company called Maverick.
The 7-year arrangement (with an option to extend to 11 years) allowed Madonna to run Maverick with her then long-time manager, Freddy DeMann, and have its headquarters based in Los Angeles.
Madonna was advanced as much as $60 million for the deal that included music publishing, television, film, merchandising and book-publishing.
David Geffen said this of the deal:
“Madonna’s deal is certainly extraordinary, but I think she’s a great talent with a great will, and if she wants to do something she’ll do it. She works very hard, takes big risks and stays at the cutting edge of what’s happening.”
Charles Koppelman, the chief operating officer of EMI Records North America, had this to day:
“If anyone is going to get a deal of this magnitude, she is the kind of artist to give it to, she’s the exception: someone who taps into artists and musical genres before the rest of the world does. In other deals where artists get their own labels, such perks are usually window dressing to satisfy their egos. Madonna’s different. I would bet on her to make something more of it.”
The first two projects released under Maverick included Madonna’s own Erotica album and her coffee table SEX book, in October of 1992.
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 January 6 1993, Madonna’s Erotica album was certified double-platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) for sales of 2 million units in the USA.
What is your favourite track from Erotica?
On November 25 1993, Madonna’s Bye Bye Baby debuted at #39 on the Swiss Hit Parade chart, and after three weeks it rose to a peak of number 28, before dropping off the chart.
The Bye Bye Baby single cover was shot by Herb Ritts. This post includes outtakes from that photoshoot.
On November 7 1992, Madonna’s Erotica hit #2 on Billboard’s Top 200 Albums Chart in the USA.
Arion Berger of Rolling Stone magazine gave Erotica 4 out of 5 stars and said:
It took Madonna ten years, but she finally made the record everyone has accused her of making all along. Chilly, deliberate, relentlessly posturing. Erotica is a post-AIDS album about romance — it doesn’t so much evoke sex as provide a fetishistic abstraction of it. 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. Moving claustrophobically within the schematic confines of dominance and submission, Erotica plays out its fantasies with astringent aloofness, unhumid and uninviting. 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. It succeeds in a way the innocent post-punk diva of Madonna and the thoughtful songwriter of Like a Prayer could not have imagined. Its cold, remote sound systematically undoes every one of the singer’s intimate promises.
Clinical 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. Madonna, along with coproducers 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. 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.
Against 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. But the sensibility of Erotica is miles removed from the warm come-ons of Justify, 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. The song demands the passivity of a listener, not a sexual partner. It’s insistently self-absorbed — Vogue with a dirty mouth, where all the real action’s on the dance floor.
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. With the exception of the riveting Bad Girl, in which the singer teases out shades of ambiguity in the mind of a girl who’d rather mess herself up than end a relationship she’s too neurotic to handle, the characters remain faceless. It’s as if Madonna recognizes the discomfort we feel when sensing the human character of a woman whose function is purely sexual. A sex symbol herself, she coolly removes the threat of her own personality.
Pure disco moments like the whirligig Deeper and Deeper don’t need emotional resonance to make them race. But the record sustains its icy tone throughout the yearning ballads (Rain, Waiting) and confessional moods (Secret Garden). Relieved of Madonna’s celebrity baggage, they’re abstract nearly to the point of nonexistence — ideas of love songs posing as the real thing. Even when Madonna draws from her own life, she’s all reaction, no feeling: The snippy Thief of Hearts takes swipes at a man stealer but not out of love or loyalty toward the purloined boyfriend, who isn’t even mentioned.
By depersonalizing herself to a mocking extreme, the Madonna of Erotica is sexy in only the most objectified terms, just as the album is only in the most literal sense what it claims to be. Like erotica, Erotica is a tool rather than an experience. Its stridency at once refutes and justifies what her detractors have always said: Every persona is a fake, the self-actualized amazon of Express Yourself no less than the breathless baby doll of Material Girl. Erotica continually subverts this posing to expose its function as pop playacting. The narrator of Bye Bye Baby ostensibly dumps the creep who’s been mistreating her, but Madonna’s infantile vocal and flat delivery are anything but assertive — she could be a drag queen toying with a pop hit of the past. Erotica is everything Madonna has been denounced for being — meticulous, calculated, domineering and artificial. It accepts those charges and answers with a brilliant record to prove them.
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