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Madonna · S5 E6
Justify My Love
Banned from MTV, sold as a VHS single, went platinum: the video that changed how the music industry thinks about controversy
A movie theater in Los Angeles, January 1993. Body of Evidence premieres to an audience that came expecting controversy and leaves feeling nothing at all.
"I'll Remember" (1994). In the middle of the worst period of her career, Madonna records a ballad for the film With Honors and watches it climb to number two on the Billboard Hot 100. No provocation, no controversy, no Mistress Dita. Just a voice and a melody that remind everyone she can still do this whenever she wants.
The Fall
Body of Evidence is a courtroom thriller where Madonna plays a woman accused of using sex to murder her older lover. It earns some of the harshest reviews in film history, with critics competing to write the cruelest one-liner. For the first time in a decade, the name "Madonna" is being used as a punchline.
“I'm tough, I'm ambitious, and I know exactly what I want. If that makes me a bitch, okay.”
— Madonna, in interviews throughout the early 1990s
The Backlash Years
I'll Remember, Madonna (1994)
"I'll Remember" is the kind of song Madonna's critics claimed she couldn't make. Written with Patrick Leonard, her most trusted collaborator, it is a pure mid-tempo ballad with no provocation, no character, no concept. Just a vocal and a lyric about holding onto what matters after everything else falls away. It reached number two on the Billboard Hot 100 without any controversy, which in 1994 was the most surprising thing Madonna could possibly do.
TAP TO REVEAL: Was Madonna's infamous Letterman appearance actually a meltdown?
Waiting
From Erotica (1992). The album track that says everything about where Madonna's head was at during the backlash. "Waiting" is a quiet, mid-tempo meditation on patience and desire, buried between the louder provocations that got all the attention. While the world was screaming about the Sex book, this song was sitting on the album, asking everyone to slow down and listen.
Waiting, Madonna (1992)
Read the lyrics while you listen. Strip away the controversy and the tabloid headlines, and this is what is left: a woman asking for patience, for understanding, for time. It is the most human moment on an album the world was too distracted to hear properly.
Which Madonna tour sold out arenas worldwide during the 1993 backlash, proving her live audience never left?
In a Los Angeles studio, Madonna sits down with producers Babyface and Dallas Austin and begins recording an album that sounds nothing like Erotica. The record is called Bedtime Stories, and it is the first step in the most patient reinvention of her career.
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