Where Sex is dedicated to pure sensation, Erotica touches on more painful and conflicted feelings. A cold breeze blows through the record, and the liberated nightclub scenes within are never totally removed from the wider world without. While a number of songs double down on steaminess, there are just as many concerned with drift, transience, and the pits of being down and out in love. Dance music’s pleasure principle is still present in Shep Pettibone and Andre Betts’ production, but it often feels muted, brittle, and slightly hollowed out. In a review for Rolling Stone, Arion Berger singled out the tension between Madonna’s sultry vocals and the chilliness of the underlying tracks. “[Erotica’s] cold, remote sound systematically undoes every one of the singer’s intimate promises,” she wrote. “Her [music] teases and then denies with the grim control of a dominatrix.”
Though the album shares a kinky aesthetic with Sex, S&M really only appears on the title track, when Madonna saunters onto the beat in the guise of her alter ego “Mistress Dita.” But the greater themes of dominance and submission, having and withholding, carry all through the record. Most of the characters Madonna channels are lost in a purgatory of need. The dancefloor she conjures is populated by hungry ghosts: givers who cannot receive pleasure and receivers who cannot take it. As emcee, Dita sums up the record’s elliptical theory of pleasure and pain in the final moments of the title track. “Only the one that hurts you can make you feel better,” she intones with sexy, shark-eyed menace, “Only the one that inflicts the pain can take it away.”
This idea sounds fine enough when you’re tied to a bedpost, but it makes for a pretty merciless view of adult relationships. More than whips or chains, Erotica’s harshest punishments are meted out in the form of mixed messages, broken promises, and sharp tongue lashings. Over wailing synths and a relentless beat, “Words” explores the gulf between a verbally abusive partner’s sweet nothings and his loaded insults. Language is both his tool of seduction and his method of control, and as her mind (and the beat) swirls to a point of realization, she finally comes to understand how empty his words were all along.
Elsewhere, silence is just as punishing. On “Bad Girl,” Madonna portrays a woman who has slowly grown apart from her partner but doesn’t have the heart to tell him. Instead she papers over the growing chasm between them by acting out in self-destruction. The song features one of Madonna’s all-time best vocal performances, capturing the subtle agonies of her character’s joyless spiral from guilt and loneliness to heartbreak and resignation. David Fincher’s brilliant, noir-inflected music video spells out the subtext of what listeners will already know: This story will not end well.
For an album ostensibly dedicated to sex, fulfillment is relatively hard to come by. Even on “Rain” and “Secret Garden,” which are some of the most rapturously toe-curling on the record, ecstasy is fleeting and intermittent, bookended by periods of fallowness and drought. The mood on these songs is fragile, her voice never rising above their carefully maintained atmospheres. “Rain” in particular is a small masterpiece, a sound bath of new age vapor and high-definition synths that feels like a long-delayed exhale after a lifetime of expectation. Without sustained attention, this spell can very easily come undone. The real issues arise when Madonna undercuts the vibe with paint-by-numbers naughtiness and mood-killing humor. The record reaches a nadir midway through “Where Life Begins,” when she evokes Colonel Sanders to describe cunnilingus as “finger lickin’ good.”
