Erotica

the album that changed the pop music world forever… one of the most controversial and genre-defining albums in pop history.
— Fuse TV

Erotica is Madonna’s fifth studio album. It was released simultaneously with her first editorial publishing, Sex, a coffee table blook containing explicit photographs of softcore pornography and simulations of sexual acts, including sadomasochism. In Erotica, Madonna incorporates her alter ego Dita, talking about sex, romance and warning about AIDS, illness to which she lost some close friends.

Despite receiving generally favorable reviews from the critics, who praised it as her most adventurous album so far and acclaimed her comments on taboos and AIDS, the record was her least successful until then. Due to all the controversy around the book, Erotica peaked at #2 on Billboard 200, being her first album since her debut not to top the chart.

The album sold over 6 million copies worldwide and spawned six singles: “Erotica,” “Deeper and Deeper,” “Bad Girl,” “Fever,” “Rain,” and “Bye Bye Baby”.

Producer Shep Pettibone, in an article to Interview Magazine, talked about the making of the record:

I remember when Madonna and I first started working together on Erotica. We were listening in my home studio to one of the first songs and I turned to her and said ‘It’s great, but it’s no 'Vogue’. She told me that not every song could be ‘Vogue’ – not every cut could emerge as the top-selling record of all time. She was right, but I pressed my case anyway: ‘I guess I’m always trying to out-top myself, the next thing should be bigger than the last.’ Madonna just turned and looked me straight in the eye. She said, ‘Shep, no matter how fierce something is, you can’t ever do the same thing twice’.

Even though it faced backlash at the time — it was considered a career-ending album by many publications of the time — the album is retrospectively acclaimed as one of the most revolutionary of all time. Erotica and Sex are considered to have set the blueprint for women in music, liberating them and paving the way for every single female singer to be able to express her sexuality:

Few women artists, before or since Erotica, have been so outspoken about their fantasies and desires. Madonna made it clear that shame and sexuality are mutually exclusive… In the end, Erotica embraced and espoused pleasure, and kept Madonna at the forefront of pop’s sexual revolution.
— Rock & Roll Hall of Fame

in retrospect it’s her strongest album — produced at the peak of her power and provocativeness … and helped elevate her from mere pop star to an era-defining icon.
— Entertainment Weekly

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 unsexiness 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.
— Slant Magazine

a groundbreaking moment for feminism
— Inquisitr