Erotica

33⅓ Main Series #176

by Michael Dango

Everyone wanted Madonna's 1992 album Erotica to be a scandal. In the midst of a culture war, conservatives wanted it to be proof of the decline of family values. The target of conservative loathing, gay men reeling from the AIDS epidemic wanted it to be a celebration of a sexual culture that had rapidly slipped away. And Madonna herself wanted to sell scandal, which is why she released Erotica in the same season as her erotic thriller Body of Evidence and her pornographic coffee-table book simply titled Sex .

But Erotica is more sentimental than pornographic. This ambivalence over sex is what makes the album crucial both for understanding its time and for navigating culture a generation later. As queer politics were transitioning from sexual liberation to civil rights like same-sex marriage, Madonna tried to do both. Her songs proved formative for works of queer theory, which emerged in the academy at the same time as the album. And Erotica was-and is-central to a developing consciousness about cultural appropriation. In this book, Michael Dango considers Erotica and its legacy by drawing both on the intellectual traditions at the center of today's hysteria over critical race theory and “don't say gay” and on his own experiences as a gay man too young to know the original carnage of AIDS and too old to grow up assuming he could get married. Madonna offered up Erotica as a key entry in the 1990s culture wars. Her album speaks all the more urgently to the culture wars of today

Genres: Music, Nonfiction, The United States Of America, Essays

144 pages, Paperback

First published September 7, 2023

Reviews

[Angela · Rating 2 out of 5]

Erotica deserves better. Not enough focus on the actual music, which was the problem at the album’s release too. I knew it wasn’t to be taken seriously when he called Madonna’s backing singers ‘Niki Haris and Donna LeRoy’ – put some respect on Donna De Lory’s name!

[Zack Ashkar · Rating 2 out of 5]

some good points here and there but very much all over the place. felt as though the author talked more about outside topics than the actual erotica album itself. and, when the author did mention erotica, a lot of it felt taken out of context especially when he was talking about the track “deeper and deeper” (he states that she purposely doesn’t say “i’m falling deeper and deeper” to avoid using first person in the song but if one actually listens to the song she literally sings “i fall deeper and deeper the further i go..”) which took away some of my trust and sense of authority in him about this album.

i did get to learn a lot about queer theory from this book which is one aspect of it i loved. and, aside from the random rant and jabs at lady gaga at the end, i do appreciate and emphasize his sentiment about queer politics becoming water downed and assimilating into heteronormative standards (“‘in the past’ can sometimes be more radical than what is in the present”).

[Keen Reader · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5 Stars!

Oh I remember the media generated hysteria when she released that “Sex” book back in 1992. And of course then there was the desperately derivative “Body of Evidence” (1993) movie, these two alongside the “Erotica” album made for a titillating trilogy. “Erotica” is definitely not Madge’s best album. It’s not even her best of the 90s, but it’s still an album with some lovely singles and strong tracks in between the filler. Made up of 13 songs but coming in at over 70 minutes, the one thing this probably needed more than anything else was stricter quality control. Almost every song is just a bit too long, with only two coming in under the five minute mark.

Dango seems hyper-vigilant to the slightest perceived infringement on anything remotely resembling cultural appropriation and feels the need to tell us almost everyone’s race and sexual persuasion when quoting them. He makes some fair points around Madonna’s cultural appropriation, but things can start to get very tricky, very quickly when you cry out appropriation! at the slightest sound of a flamenco guitar or soul sample, you can soon descend into outright rampant paranoia.

Madonna seemingly forever with one eye on queer dance community, and always with another on black, urban street culture, a kind of reverse MJ, even admitting in one interview that she always wanted to be black when she was growing up etc. This album took elements of occasional disco beats married with piano driven house, and then added lyrics and songs about AIDS, S&M, cunnilingus and er rain to produce a decent yet flawed and inconsistent album.

I have no idea what the author was trying to really say here and the problem is it seems that neither does he. This veers off all over the place, forever struggling to steer in one direction and instead it just seems to stumble and stagger down one blind alley after another without reaching much in the way of salient points or meaningful conclusions. This was a disappointment and a missed opportunity.

[Marco · Rating 2 out of 5]

I mean, idk… the 33 1/3 series as a whole suffers from their various writers using up wayyyy too much space on exhaustive contextual taxonomies of their own academic interests, rather than actually examining the album itself. I know, I know, I know; art (albums especially) does not exist in a vacuum, and placing something in context means everything to cultural studies, yada yada yada, this that and the third, etc., etc. But girls, c’mon, we got 150 pages AT MOST here! There simply is not time for it. The result here specifically feels not only dated in its insistence of 2010s idpol, but overall condescending towards Madonna and her collaborators. Idk.

[Nile! · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book does a great job of discussing the cultural context surrounding Erotica — but alas, it does so to the exclusion of the album itself. Of the album’s 14 tracks, only five receive substantive discussion: “Deeper & Deeper,” “Rain,” “Did You Do It,” “Why’s It So Hard” and “In This Life.” The last 10 pages provide an interesting but superficial overview of some of the remaining tracks.

Also missing is any mention of 4/5 of the album’s music videos: only “Rain” receives discussion. Put another way, the book has more to say about the ‘50s musical “Singin’ in the Rain” than about all the videos from this album combined. (This omission is especially odd because several of the videos are relevant to the angles the author discusses: the Warhol influences and queer representation of “Deeper & Deeper,” the tragedy of a promiscuous businesswoman in “Bad Girl.”) Obviously, in a 123-page book, there’s not space to discuss everything, but given the number of barely-relevant tangents the volume finds space for — Henry James, bathhouses, and Richard Serra’s “Tilted Arc” sculpture among them — I question the prioritization of topics.

The book also suffers from multiple factual errors, such as mixing up the gender of the victim in the “Like a Prayer” video, mis-naming one of Madonna’s backing singers, and claiming gay marriage was “decriminalized” in 2016 (it was 2015, and it was legalized, not decriminalized — there’s a meaningful difference!). In short, I came away having learned a bit about critical studies and queer theory, but shockingly little about Erotica.

[Brian McCurdy · Rating 2 out of 5]

This missed the mark for me. There was far too little discussion of the actual songs (other than a five-page section on the throwaway bonus track "Did You Do It?") and little insight into either the recording process or Madonna's mindset, which are staples of the 33 1/3 series.

Dango's points about cultural appropriation are appreciated, particularly about sampling songs without understanding the original context. However, I think the book could have used more context on the environment of Erotica's sampling—namely that the early '90s were a Wild West environment when everybody was sampling an old piece of music and that back then, most people just didn't think as much about cultural appropriation as they do today.

I thought some of the conclusions the author drew were a stretch. On page 72, Mando writes, "In Madonna's thought process, if Black women are oversexualized, Asian women are undersexualized and in need of more sexual liberation. She is the one to liberate them." I didn't think this was supported by the quotes presented as evidence, and I think you'd need to go on more than a few selective quotes to judge someone's worldview.

I don't expect uncritical devotion, but one pleasure of the 33 1/3 series for me is finishing a book with a renewed appreciation for the album and again wanting to experience the joy of devouring it. I didn't get that here.

[Nathan · Rating 2 out of 5]

The good thing about this book is that Dango sets it up from the beginning, so you know this will have more to do with commentary rather than the actual album, Erotica...I just didn't know how far he would go. Sure, there's a great deal of import placed upon Madonna's appropriation throughout the years, as well as her role in debates about art vs commodity...but I would have loved it to be tied to the album. It's more like the album is a photograph for the commentary, treated as a singular entity, not as a collection of artistic endeavors. Only get maybe 6 pages about other songs on the record...so it's not really about Madonna's Erotica at all.

[Ryan · Rating 3 out of 5]

A little different approach than I'm used to with this series. This entry is very academic, dissecting Madonna's early-90's sexual trifecta - Erotica, Sex, and Body of Evidence - from a queer and gender studies vantage point, with a deep analysis about cultural appropriation. There was definitely some interesting stuff here, but with these books I enjoy a more personal reading of what the albums really mean to the writer, which was mostly lacking here.

[Pierre Maes · Rating 1 out of 5]

SOOOOOOOOOOOO bad ! ....

Should concentrate NOW on another U.S. (only) subject = the GREAT ORANGE, a.k.a. POTUS Donald !

[jazzwilson · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5

[Gavin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Meanders too much for my taste. I think he cast too wide a net when trying to come up with topics.