FEATURE:
Take a Bow
Looking Ahead to the Thirtieth Anniversary of Madonna’s Bedtime Stories
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ONE of the…
IN THIS PHOTO: Madonna at The Ritz, Paris in 1994/PHOTO CREDIT: Andy Early
most important albums in her career I think, Bedtime Stories was Madonna’s follow-up to 1992 Erotica. In 1992, Madonna put out Erotica, the coffee table book Sex, and starred in the erotic thriller, Body of Evidence. There was a lot of negativity and flack from critics and some fans. Thinking Madonna was pushing it too far, many wrote off her career. Of course, she has sustained and released tremendous albums since. It was a hard move following Erotica. It is an album that should be celebrated. Critics being prudish and needlessly sensitive. If you look at how that album inspired so many Pop artists of the 1990s and 2000s. Confident, liberated and provocative, it would not receive the same kind of criticism now. Erotica empowered and resonated with a host of women in music that we see to this day. Even so, there was a sense of compromise or apology with Bedtime Stories, Madonna was still pushing the envelope, yet it was a warmer and less sexualised album compared to Erotica. Released on 25th October, 1994, I wanted to cast ahead to the thirtieth anniversary of perhaps her most underrated album. It was a big commercial success. Hitting the top three in the U.S. and U.K., there was still this reservation from critics. Some awarded it kudos and high praise, yet many reviews were middling. Undeniable standout songs such as Take a Bow and Human Nature sat alongside some deeper cuts critics did not get on board with. There is such a fascinating blend of moods through Madonna’s sixth studio album. From mature, smooth and sensual songs such as Secret and emotional hits like Take a Bow through to the edgier Human Nature and Bedtime Story (which was co-written by Björk). Four years after Bedtime Stories, Madonna would release Ray of Light. Perhaps her greatest album, it showed that you could not write her off, put her down or predict where she would go next! I do think that the heat she got in 1992 was vastly unfair. If a male artist/band put out Erotica and Sex then they would not get the same treatment. In fact, they would probably be celebrated!
I am going to publish another feature closer to 25th October. Saluting an album that has never got huge respect and appreciation. You can never please critics! Luckily, Ray of Light silenced doubters and confirmed that Madonna is one of the most resilient and gifted artists ever. I will end with a couple of reviews for Bedtime Stories. I am going to open with a 2014 feature from Billboard where producer Babyface and Donna De Lory provided their thoughts on Bedtime Stories twenty years after its release:
“Twenty years ago this month, Madonna released her sixth studio album, Bedtime Stories, a classic that came out at a strange crossroads in her career.
While Madonna certainly didn’t lack for fame in 1994, the button-pushing Erotica album had soured many critics and fans. For the first time in a decade of superstardom, people weren’t shocked by her antics anymore — even worse, they often seemed exhausted by her.
Artistically speaking, she’d spent the last four years challenging and subverting America’s sexual puritanism. But after releasing an entire book called Sex featuring nude pictures of herself and other celebrities, there didn’t seem to be anywhere else to go in that realm.
It didn’t help that she’d detonated 14 F-bombs on a March 1994 episode of The Late Show With David Letterman, an infamous appearance that racked up FCC complaints and distanced her from Middle America. Evita was two years away and the overt sexuality of Erotica was growing stale — so when Bedtime Stories hit, Madonna’s career was at a strange point.
To that end, Bedtime Stories is lyrically and musically a much warmer album. She sacrifices some bawdy entendres (compare Erotica‘s “Where Life Begins” to Bedtime‘s “Inside of Me”) and focuses on autobiographical matter.
Instead of Erotica‘s chilly, pounding dance pop, Bedtime puts Madonna in softer sonic territory. There’s the singer-songwriter-y “Secret,” the avant pop of “Bedtime Story” (co-written by Bjork), the new jack swing jam “I’d Rather Be Your Lover” (featuring Meshell Ndegeocello rapping), the Herbie Hancock-sampling ballad “Sanctuary” and the lush, orchestral R&B of “Take a Bow.”
But softer sounds didn’t necessarily mean muted lyrics. “Human Nature” finds Madonna taking on her critics more directly than ever with a logical, defiant attack on slut-shaming. And while album opener “Survival” is a cozy R&B-pop song, it was similarly unrepentant in attitude.
The inviting R&B sound of Bedtime Stories is due in part to co-producer Dallas Austin, who longtime Madonna backup singer Donna de Lory describes as “part of her tribe at that time.” Also on board were co-producers Nellee Hooper, Dave “Jam” Hall (hot off Mary J. Blige‘s debut, What’s the 411?) and, of course, Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds.
While Edmonds had recently worked with TLC and Toni Braxton, he tells Billboard it was one of his own hits that brought him to Madonna’s attention.
“Madonna was a fan of a song I did, ‘When Can I See You.’ Because of that, she was interested in working with me,” Edmonds recalls. “She came to me for lush ballads, so that’s where we went.”
Babyface would collaborate with Madonna on three songs — two of which, “Forbidden Love” and “Take a Bow,” ended up on the album. Although the latter became Madonna’s long-running No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, Edmonds says he wasn’t gunning for chart-toppers when they met.
“I wasn’t so much thinking about the charts,” Edmonds recalls. “I think I was more in awe of the fact that I was working with Madonna. It was initially surreal, but then you get to know the person a little bit, and you calm down and then it’s just work. And work is fun.”
When Edmonds played Madonna the bare bones of a song that would become “Take a Bow,” she immediately took to it. “It was just a beat and the chords. From there we collaborated and built it up,” he says. “I was living in Beverly Hills and I created a little studio in my house, so she came over there to write.”
As for “Forbidden Love,” Edmonds recalls that track came together with similar speed. “She heard the basic track and it all started coming out, melodies and everything… It was a much easier process than I thought it would be.”
Donna De Lory, however, wasn’t surprised at how easily Bedtime Stories came together when she and fellow backup vocalist Niki Haris were called in to provide harmonies on “Survival,” co-written by Austin. At that point, she’d been performing with Madonna for seven years.
“The minute you walked in [the studio], she was giving you the lyric sheet,” De Lory tells Billboard. “That was the atmosphere — we’re not here to just hang out. It’s fun, but we’re here to work and get this done.”
And what Madonna sets out to do, Madonna invariably succeeds at. De Lory recalls the sessions for “Survival” took just a “couple of hours” and there were no retakes.
Similar to Babyface, De Lory describes working with Madonna as a creative partnership, even if she was the one setting the tone. “Once she got her ideas out, she was open to your ideas. You didn’t want to go in with her and right off the bat say, ‘Well, I hear this,’ because she was so specific and articulate. She already had the sound in her head. But after she’d spoken, we’d put our two cents in. We always had ideas, like, ‘Can we answer this line with an extra “survival” [in the background]?'”.
I am going to move to a feature from Albumism. They marked twenty-five years of Bedtime Stories. Though they maintain the album was met with positive reviews, I think it is hard to see that from the reviews available. There was a note of disappointment with many of them. Regardless, Bedtime Stories got more love than Erotica. Rather than it being a compromise to critics and this U-turn from her previous position and sound, it was a natural evolution for Madonna:
“But, it was Erotica—and its companion book Sex—that nearly leveled Madonna. A loose concept LP concerned with taboo sexual mores and emotional masochism collapsed under its own misshapen weight; worse, the songs simply weren’t there on the whole. By placing “the event” ahead of a proper commitment to the thematic task of the album itself, Madonna made herself an easy target to be dismissed as a shrewd media manipulator versus the adept singer and songwriter she is. Insulated by the pop culture hysteria she’d generated for a decade, the critical blowback from Erotica/Sex unceremoniously burst that bubble—it was likely a sobering experience.
Yet, there was a silver lining to the difficulties she endured with Erotica in that they helped her gain perspective and grow to realize that she wanted the public to recognize her as an artist. This outlook gave Madonna a newfound focus going into Bedtime Stories. Sessions for her sixth studio set began with Shep Pettibone, Madonna’s principal producer and compeer for Erotica. One of the initial compositions Madonna and Pettibone started work on was its eventual first single, “Secret,” but they ultimately and amicably parted ways, as she wanted to take the urban-pop vibe of that anterior album in a new direction. Madonna returned to finish “Secret” with Dallas Austin, an up-and-coming voice in the contemporary soul genre who had produced sides for Monica, Grace Jones and Joi, among others.
Austin’s work with Joi on her debut The Pendulum Vibe (issued in June 1994) had been of note to Madonna and led to her fast recruitment of Austin for one of two collaborative cliques on Bedtime Stories. That first clique included (but wasn’t limited to) an astonishing array of talent: Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds, Dave “Jam” Hall and bassist/vocalist/Maverick signee Meshell Ndegeocello. Repurposing the coarser R&B-pop sonics she had laid out on Erotica, Madonna fashions them to be seductively intimate and groove-oriented for Bedtime Stories. From the bluesy, acoustic funk of “Secret,” to the breezy jam “Don’t Stop” and around to the silky shuffle of “Inside of Me,” these songs and most of the LP are sculpted from a mix of expert live instrumentation and impressive studio production.
Almost all of the aggressive beat and groove combinations that defined Erotica are absent with the exceptions of “I’d Rather Be Your Lover”—a side that deliciously weds Ndegeocello’s bass playing (and rap) to Madonna’s smoky mezzo-soprano—and “Human Nature.” The latter track, a stinging rebuke toward Madonna’s Erotica/Sex naysayers, would have been better served up as a B-side as its petulant script threatened to fracture the more demure, introspective air Madonna embodied on Bedtime Stories. Thankfully, the surrounding song stock buffers and neutralizes its antagonistic energy. Musically though, “Human Nature” is an interesting piece with it being erected around the Main Source hip-hop banger “What You Need”—Main Source themselves had loaned a portion of their cut from the jazz musician Walter Maynard Ferguson’s selection “Spinning Wheel.” “Human Nature” represents one of Bedtime Stories’ multiple arrangements that contain clever sample traces or interpolations, along with “I’d Rather Be Your Lover” (Lou Donaldson), “Inside of Me” (Aaliyah, The Gap Band, Gutter Snypes), “Forbidden Love” (Grant Green), and “Sanctuary” (Herbie Hancock).
Lyrically, Bedtime Stories showcases Madonna’s keen pen that captures the elusive emotional space between strength and vulnerability through love songs or semi-autobiographical entries. “Survival,” “Love Tried to Welcome Me” and “Sanctuary” are undeniable canonical highlights.
Spotlighting “Sanctuary,” Madonna and Austin were the primary assemblers for the downbeat ambient track that slips beautifully into the palatial electronica of “Bedtime Story.” It is here that the second clique Madonna partnered with on Bedtime Stories announces itself. Written by Marius de Vries, Björk and Nellee Hooper, the latter Massive Attack associate and Madonna co-produce this mesmeric slice of existentialist electro-pop that prognosticates what was to come with her next long player (1998’s Ray Of Light) in four years’ time. That Madonna manages to keep “Bedtime Story” in line with the ruling R&B arc of the record is an impressive feat and evidence of her skill toward applying a consistent tone for an album despite any supposedly dueling sounds”
Erotica was attacked because of its sexual nature. Madonna always judged because of her sexuality and provocative nature. It was misogyny and sexism that she faced throughout her career! She still has to answer to critics to this day! I want to drop in almost the entirety of this VICE feature from 2014, as it argues brilliantly how Bedtime Stories is Madonna’s most important album:
“That’s why her album Bedtime Stories, even as it celebrates its 20th anniversary, is still her most important work. For months leading up to its release, it was marketed as an apology for her sexual behavior, and critics hoped it would be her return to innocence. Instead, she offered a lyrical #sorrynotsorry and a response to the problem of female musicians being scrutinized for their sexuality rather than their music. As a result of the public’s moral concerns, it has become Madonna’s most quietly important album, setting the tone for how artists deal with critiques of their sex life.
In 1992, Madonna released Erotica, a techno concept album and ode to bondage, alongside the coffee table book Sex, a softcore pornographic photo catalog of her and her pals. The concurrent releases created enormous and long-running backlash, resulting in multiple countries banning the album from radio airplay and the Vatican banning Madonna from entering. Madonna was already well established as an icon, but her frank lyrics on S&M and published photographs of analingus incited the harshest public outrage in her career. Bedtime Stories was slated to be her one last chance at redemption, and Warner Brothers agreed to produce it under the auspices of a less provocative image.
Both the label and her publicist Liz Rosenberg did everything they could to reverse the damage from Madonna’s last projects. They had her release the soundtrack single “I’ll Remember” to bring her a family-friendly hit and further increase speculation that Bedtime Stories would convey her apology. The album’s promo video promises that there will be “no sexual references on the album” and even panders with Madonna saying “it’s a whole new me! I’m going to be a good girl, I swear.”
Madonna-shaming was a two-part construct: First she was scorned for her sexuality, and then she was eclipsed by it. Since it cited her sex appeal as her sole commodity, the promo video had everyone wondering what she was going to sing about if the topic wasn’t sex. Speculation leading up to Bedtime Stories focused on her exit plan for becoming irrelevant, whether she planned on future facelifts, and what she would offer as a middle-aged version of herself.
“When you’re a celebrity, you’re allowed to have one personality trait. Which is ridiculous,” Madonna told the Detroit News in 1993. When Bedtime Stories was finally released on October 25, she addressed both aspects of the shaming process. Despite the promises in her promo, she continued to acknowledge her sexual desires, although she also experimented with the sound and subject matter. Beginning with “Survival,” a song she co-wrote with Dallas Austin, Madonna doesn’t hesitate to address the backlash and sings “I’ll never be an angel / I’ll never be a saint it’s true / I’m too busy surviving.” The lyrics continue to convey a loosely drawn narrative of the punishment she endured from the media and her feelings leading up to the release, and the songs are carried mostly by R&B melodies produced by Austin, Nellee Hooper, and Babyface.
The definitive single on the album is an explicit rebuke of the backlash. In “Human Nature,” she confirms that wasn’t sorry and that she’s not anyone’s bitch, and she paired the song perfectly with a video that toys with bondage like an Erotica throwback. Right when she is about to drop the mic she whispers, “would it sound better if I were a man?”
Madonna asserted her lack of apology on the grounds that she had not said or did anything unusual; it was simply unusual for a woman to say it. In an interview with the LA Times, she defended Bedtime Stories by saying “I’m being punished for being a single female, for having power and being rich and saying the things I say, being a sexual creature—actually, not being any different from anyone else, but just talking about it. If I were a man, I wouldn’t have had any of these problems. Nobody talks about Prince’s sex life.”
Beyond offering Madonna’s final word on the scandal of her sexuality, the album pivots to address the misconception that her sexual persona limited her versatility as an artist. The narrative in Bedtime Stories immediately turns introspective, relating “I know how to laugh / but I don’t know happiness.” While the album borrows mostly from R&B and new jack swing, it becomes more experimental with the Bjork-penned title track, accompanied with a video that could not have explored the collective unconscious better if Carl Jung directed it. The video for “Bedtime Story” is the first instance of what would become Madonna’s long history of culture-plucking spiritual inquiry, and to this day is stored in a collection at the Museum of Modern Art. As a pair, “Human Nature” and “Bedtime Story” prove that Madonna owned her sexuality and would not be eclipsed by it. While the former fully embraces the decisions she made with previous albums, the latter dismantles the “slut” narrative that her overt sexuality discredits her depth as a performer. Surely people would see this as a feminist masterpiece, no?
IN THIS PHOTO: Madonna in New York, September 1994/PHOTO CREDIT: Bettina Rheims
Still, critics didn’t get it. The New York Times’ Jon Pareles waxed nostalgic for when “Madonna thrived in the 1980s on being sensational and suggestive against a tame mainstream backdrop,” calling her more recent work “vulgar instead of shocking.” Critical reception continued to focus on the scandal of her attitude rather than the actual record. “Madonna’s career has never really been about music; it’s been about titillation, about image, about publicity,” began one TIME review, which wasn’t unique in its premise. Any mention of the album’s experimental sound or numerous collaborations were overshadowed by her promiscuous image and once again left cheapened. Bedtime Stories as an album was not the clear apology the public demanded, and its emotional depth was largely ignored. At best, it was thought of as Madonna’s return to a safer expression of sexuality.
The record found commercial success with the release of “Secret,” and “Take a Bow,” but the two most important songs never broke into the Top 40, a problem Madonna hadn’t faced in nearly ten years. Today, Bedtime Stories is not the first album that comes to mind in Madonna’s legacy. It is, however, the most relevant to many of the cultural conversations that are still happening. Had she acquiesced to the public’s call for apology, it could have set a dangerous standard for how the public can decree an artist’s silence, and it would have allowed the categories for female singers to remain in place. Critical anticipation of the album predicted either a penitent pop star or a one-dimensional sexpot. She defeated both categories, and left the critics to ponder if sexuality and solidity are as mutually exclusive as they had hope”.
I am going to end with two reviews. I will finish with a December 1994 review from Rolling Stone. To show some of the negativity and misunderstanding around Bedtime Stories, below is a review from Pitchfork. Published in 2017, there is this feeling that Bedtime Stories is inessential. I disagree with that. This is one of her most consistent and fascinating albums:
“Bedtime Stories, the confused, the misunderstood. The early ’90s found Madonna at peak levels of media saturation. Inescapable! Seven years of hits compiled on The Immaculate Collection, Madonna featured on virtually every award show, Dick Tracy paraphernalia in the McDonald’s Happy Meal. I saw her name on a religious pamphlet: “We Christians must reject the mainstream acceptance of the ethics and morals of Marx and Madonna.” I saw her in The Far Side, her Gaultier-ensconced breasts puncturing an inflatable life raft in a cheap sexist gag. She was less a musician and more a holy ghost. Bedtime Stories was the first Madonna album that felt like a non-event, an asterisk to her omnipresence, another hot day in a heat wave.
And as such, this album has been difficult to assess as an art object. Madonna was, in 1992-1994, an artist under siege. Sex, her soft-core porn coffee table book, had been called obscene; it has been subsequently been reassessed as a smart and entertaining post-feminist grand jeté. Her previous album Erotica, with its diversity and effective New Jack Swing tourism, was received generally well and is now considered among many of her acolytes to be her masterpiece. But Bedtime Stories is, if we must go full Pepsi Challenge with Erotica, a blurry non-event of an album.
Closing track and hit single “Take a Bow” is a kind song, lush in production and sentiment, and deservedly hung around the charts longer than any other of her singles. Babyface’s appearance here, at the height of his own artistry, is frankly lovely. It is for many fans, myself included, Madonna at her most sensitive and brave.
Bedtime Stories’ final single, “Human Nature,” in contrast, did poorly on the charts, and yet is one of her most effective grooves, with her anti-slut-shaming slogan, “I’m not your bitch, don’t hang your shit on me” thwocking its way through Jean-Baptiste Mondino’s amazing video. It is handily one of Madonna’s best songs.
Conversely, the album’s most successful worldwide single, “Secret,” beloved by many, just meanders—even upon its release I recall my young ears being distracted by the single edit’s monotony when it appeared on radio playlists. On the album proper, the track drags interminably over five-plus minutes. Listening again now, it sounds like a lesser version of subsequent album Ray of Light’s “Frozen,” the dry crumbs of “Secret”’s acoustic guitar tracks waiting to be muted and replaced with William Orbit’s thrilling, tensile production.
Most infamously, we have “Bedtime Story.” Like many other former teenagers falling head over heels for Björk’s first solo album, I recall staring incredulously at the B. Guðmundsdóttir credit when it appeared in Madonna’s liner notes. The song itself is unimaginably disappointing—sterile and static, a less-daring second cousin to “Violently Happy.” Björk’s detached science-textbook approach toward a love-song, which works so well when paired with her own mystic Icelandic aesthetic, doesn’t sit well alongside Madonna’s enthusiastic consumerism. Perhaps the song has some appeal, decades later, now that we’re familiar and tolerant of the sound of Björk-on-autopilot. Perhaps we view it affectionately as a blueprint for her subsequent masterpieces on Ray of Light. Ultimately it remains, to my ears, Madonna’s first truly embarrassing flop.
And most of the rest of the album never really achieves any level of indispensability. Several attempts at New Jack balladry have lovely moody productions married to unremarkable songs or performances. Opening track “Survival,” as carefully constructed as it is, sounds, well, much tidier than Madonna’s contemporaries. The “Inside of Me” sample of Aaliyah’s “Back & Forth”—out the same year—just reminds me as a listener about how 1994 was the year of Toni Braxton, Salt-N-Pepa, and Janet Jackson; far more exciting music than this.
IN THIS PHOTO: Madonna in 1994
The deep cuts on the B-side of Bedtime Stories have their fans. Babyface is here, Massive Attack’s string arranging collaborator Craig Armstrong is here also, with an expensive sounding moment, and there’s a cute Herbie Hancock sample on “Sanctuary.” But these songs, for me, are undone by all having nearly identical melodies and moods to “Secret.” What attempts to be sultry and smooth comes off as beige and un-fascinating; my mind wanders and my time is wasted. When Madonna plays tourist with gay culture, with Broadway, with Hollywood, with UK jungle, she is able to keep things (usually) deferential and still interesting, and often, achieve transcendence. But here, she sounds woefully out-of-her-depth as a songwriter and singer when slinging these square attempts at R&B balladry.
It is a compliment to the artist that only here, over a decade into her career, on her sixth studio album, does she, for the first time, let this listener down. Take “Human Nature” and put in on a golden record, play “Take a Bow” at my funeral, and let the rest of this sleepy album be forgotten; it is, to my ears and memory, Madonna’s first truly inessential moment”.
Let’s finish with a review from Rolling Stone. This was published in 1994. It is a more positive approach compared to what some critics afforded. I hope that Bedtime Stories gets more love and some fresh investigation on its thirtieth anniversary on 25th October. It is a wonderful album from the Queen of Pop. One that I remember coming out in 1994. It has lost none of its brilliance:
“Still, in so doing, Madonna has come up with some awfully compelling sounds. In her retreat from sex to romance, she has enlisted four top R&B producers: Atlanta whiz kid Dallas Austin, Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds, Dave “Jam” Hall and Britisher Nellee Hooper (Soul II Soul), who add lush soul and creamy balladry. With this awesome collection of talent, the record verily shimmers. Bass-heavy grooves push it along when more conventional sentiments threaten to bog it down. Both aspects put it on chart-smart terrain.
A number of songs — “Survival,” “Secret,” “I’d Rather Be Your Lover” (to which Me’Shell NdegéOcello brings a bumping bass line and a jazzy rap) — are infectiously funky. And Madonna does a drive-by on her critics, complete with a keening synth line straight outta Dre, on “Human Nature”: “Did I say something wrong?/Oops, I didn’t know I couldn’t talk about sex (I musta been crazy).”
But you don’t need her to tell you that she’s “drawn to sadness” or that “loneliness has never been a stranger,” as she sings on the sorrowful “Love Tried to Welcome Me.” The downbeat restraint in her vocals says it, from the tremulously tender “Inside of Me” to the sob in “Happiness lies in your own hand/It took me much too long to understand” from “Secret.”
The record ultimately moves from grief to oblivion with the seductive techno pull of “Sanctuary.” The pulsating drone of the title track (co-written by Björk and Hooper), with its murmured refrain of “Let’s get unconscious, honey,” renounces language for numbness.
Twirled in a gauze of (unrequited) love songs, Bedtime Stories says, “Fuck off, I’m not done yet.” You have to listen hard to hear that, though. Madonna’s message is still “Express yourself, don’t repress yourself.” This time, however, it comes not with a bang but a whisper”.
The Standard ranked Madonna’s Bedtime Stories as her ninth-best (“Certain detractors have always tried hard to depict Madonna as ‘too much’ of something – and by the early Nineties, she was constantly under fire for her provocative pop. A few years earlier, Pepsi famously pulled out of sponsoring her Blonde Ambition tour after Like A Prayer and its sexy take on Catholic iconography attracted the ire of the Vatican. Then came Erotica: a daring and plain sexy album which came accompanied by the explicit photobook SEX. Another predictable bout of pearl-clutching followed. Even Madonna grew weary of the outrage cycle, and decided her next album would head in another direction. “Sex is such a taboo subject and it’s such a distraction that I’d rather not even offer it up,” she told Los Angeles Times”). In 2015, Billboard ranked it sixth (“Express yourself/Don’t repress yourself,” Madonna coos at the top of “Human Nature,” a quick reminder that her Bedtime Stories album — while not as hardcore as 1992’s Erotica — certainly wasn’t a mea culpa for her polarizing previous project. Instead, the 1994 album captured Madonna in transition, swiveling away from explicit sexuality and relying on R&B and balladry before she dove headfirst into dance music four years later. Songs like “Human Nature,” “Secret” and “I’d Rather Be Your Lover” proved more compelling than most of the New Jack music being released in the mid-90s, and “Take A Bow” added a classic slow jam to Madge’s canon”).
It came in fourth in this recent feature (“Criminally underrated! Before going through her discography, I did not know any singles in the album. When it was time to listen to it, I was impressed. Just like the masterpieces that follow in this ranking, Bedtime Stories carries an impecable cohesiveness. It shows an improvement over Hard Candy on Madonna’s ability to blend into R&B. Human Nature is a perfect, catchy “f — you” to the criticism she faced on her Sex book era. Bedtime Story is a beautiful effort that experiments on different sounds and references Mexican surreal painters in the music video. And Take A Bow is a soothing, calm ballad. It may not be as iconic as the rest of the albums in this ranking, but it surely is one of the best”). Gay Times placed it fifth in their feature (“Out of every Madonna album, Bedtime Stories remains the most criminally underrated, and arguably her most important. Human Nature (both the song and the video) is one of her finest singles of all time, giving a solid middle finger to her critics and those who attempt to suppress female sexuality in the aftermath of her controversial Erotica era, while its more experimental moments including Sanctuary and the Björk-penned Bedtime Story are pure bliss to the ears. Placing it above fan favourites like Erotica and Like A Prayer may raise a few eyebrows, but listened to in the current musical landscape, the album’s R&B/Pop sound sounds remarkably current – more so than any other early-to-mid Madonna release. Take A Bow, beautifully backed by a full orchestra, remains a staple in Madonna’s greatest hits, and helped tone down her image for an offended public”). Definitely underrated and overlooked by some, Madonna’s sort-of-apology for her maligned 1992 album, Erotica – though in years since it is seen as one of the most influential albums ever -, Bedtime Stories did tone down her image a bit but offered plenty of new layers. More depth and passion. The same edgy that we are used to. It was not her completely retreating and sanitising herself thankfully! On 25th October, we mark thirty years of Bedtime Stories. It is an album that I think…
IS one of Madonna’s very best.