Erotica, Madonna’s Most Important Album, Turns 30

It isn’t until the third to last track of Erotica that Madonna explicitly invokes the AIDS crisis, still-cresting in the U.S. at the time of the album’s release in October of 1992. But if there’s a song even more representative of the career-defining transgression that is Erotica—in retrospect, Madonna’s most important album—it may well be her mercilessly stern cover of Little Wille John’s jazz standard “Fever,” which was popularized by Peggy Lee in 1958.

Madonna’s version kicks the 75-minute, magnum-sized Erotica into something resembling high gear, dovetailing with the prowling opening title track. Gone are the spare upright bass licks of Lee’s rendition, to say nothing of the singer’s sultrily behind-the-beat delivery. In their place are producer Shep Pettibone’s unyielding house kicks, a swirling dervish of synthesizer swaths, and Madonna’s near-totally inflexible take on the song’s hooks. “What a lovely way to burn”? Forget it. The emphasis here is on the far more ominous “Everybody’s got the fever.”

If the Queen of Pop’s use of what was once among the most aurally suggestive ditties from one generation prior sounds painfully literal, that’s the point. “Fever” runs as metaphorically hot as its sonics are chilly. It’s a song on an album that both lean into the nexus of hedonism and dread that defined an entire culture’s understanding of sexual consequence. Erotica’s body temperature can’t be regulated, and there’s no escape.

It could be the presence of “Vogue” collaborator Pettibone, or the fact that the album’s biggest airplay hit, “Deeper and Deeper,” explicitly recalls that earlier song’s refrain—“You’ve got to just let your body move to the music”—but Erotica also feels like a major corrective on the, if not sins, then let’s say mega-privileges that Madonna indulged when it came to her relationship with the gay community. A community who, for the most part, worshipped her every move.

In many respects, “Vogue”—and its somewhat turbulent reception within the gay community—feels like the Rosetta Stone by which Erotica can be unlocked. “Deeper and Deeper” isn’t “Vogue Pt 2″; it is, in fact, damn near the anti-“Vogue.” The song, which seems to be a simple tune about being unlucky in love, is powered not by Madonna’s inner turmoil, but the tension and release that its instrumentation unleashes on the dance floor. The piano riffs of “Vogue” are comfortable and grounded, while “Deeper and Deeper” emphasizes the dissonance right at the start, with comparatively ugly, augmented minor chords and incisive synth stabs.

With “Vogue,” Madonna found a new wrinkle to being the center of attention: one dressed in “everybody is a star” drag, but also closing with a rollcall of celebrities, alongside which Madonna clearly regards herself. Here, though, the singer who was once told she “can sing most anything” suddenly finds herself questioning her whole upbringing. “Daddy couldn’t be all wrong,” she wails, knowing in her heart that it doesn’t matter one way or the other if he was.

That’s where being self-absorbed pays off in the most titillating manner Madonna ever achieved. The sub-dom dichotomy coexists in the form of a solitary protagonist pretty much throughout the album. “You’ll do it, you’ll take it, you’ll screw it, you’ll fake it,” she taunts on “Thief of Hearts.” “You fucked it up,” she snarls in the outro to “Bye Bye Baby.” “I’ll hit you like a truck,” she promises on “Erotica.” Is there any doubt that the “you” is Madonna’s own inner saboteur?

Even given first-person embodiment in the stark, hopeless “Bad Girl,” the utter mutability of Erotica’s sexual point of view blurs the line from start to finish—again, with “In This Life,” an earnest tribute to two of Madonna’s closest friends who died of AIDS, being the major exception. And, arguably, the coda that is “Secret Garden,” a palate cleanser that finds Madonna wondering, “I wonder when I’ll start to show/I wonder if I’ll ever know/Where my place is/Where my face is.”

Not that the angry mob got that far into the album. The irony is hardly lost on gay listeners in particular that Erotica, the album where Madonna came closest to giving herself over to a queer point of view, was the step too far for straight pop audiences when it was released. (It was Madonna’s first studio album since her debut not to hit the pole position on the charts, or produce a #1 single.) It was the white-hot inflection point from which she needed to shore up a resurgence, a comeback—one she started, in the U.S., with 1994’s even more R&B-oriented Bedtime Stories and completed with Ray of Light’s back-turning omniscient mysticism.

On her 1995 single “Human Nature,” Madonna responded to the reaction surrounding Erotica and its accompanying Sex book with “I’m not sorry” pugilism, sniping, “Oops, I didn’t know I couldn’t talk about sex.” But, of course, she knew. Her awareness of the boundaries being crossed, and the mixed aftermath that sexual fulfillment can often bring, is exactly why Erotica remains her most immediate and most daring effort, one which snuffs out afterglow and imprints itself like a rash on the soul.