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
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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 whos
