Express yourself, don't repress yourself

Continuing my trip back through the 1994 album charts.

20/11/94 : Bedtime Stories - Madonna

Our tenth visit with Auntie Madge (bringing her level with The Beatles) and this is one from a period where I (and plenty others) were ignoring her because she'd spent too much time flashing her bits at everyone - I believe she's actually calmed down a bit here, so I'm not approaching it with as much trepidation as I might otherwise have done.

I definitely remembered "Human Nature" and "Take A Bow" and I vaguely remembered "Secret", but I'm afraid I drew a blank on the rest of the album. However, I thought it was all done well enough and very nicely produced, without (on first listen) really being all that engaging - you can definitely hear her heading in the direction of Ray Of Light, but she's not quite got there yet. "Human Nature" is an interesting track because it alone has more hooks than the rest of the album (starting with "express yourself, don't repress yourself") and it addresses her previous raunchiness ("oops, I didn't know I couldn't talk about sex") whilst unfortunately trying to make it all our fault that we didn't want to hear her banging on about banging - which is very Madonna-esque. Overall, it feels like this might be a grower - but it seems more likely you'd listen to it a couple of times and then never revisit it.

We're all the way down at #13 in the charts this week on her fourth week of a twenty six week run, with it having peaked at #2 in its debut week - which is hardly dreadful for what's considered one of her less successful releases. The top five are best-ofs from Bon Jovi, The Beautiful South and Sting, M People (a new entry) and the first two Labour Of Love albums from UB40 combined into one (for those people who really hate themselves). Six of the next seven albums are best-ofs too, with the next highest new entry being a Frank Sinatra duets album (#29) - his final album.

Wikipedia has a massive amount on the album (433 milliPeppers) which tells us its her sixth album and a lot of it was driven by the public's reaction to Erotica, its predecessor - feel free to read it all and let me know if I missed anything. One fact that did jump out at me is that the video for "Bedtime Story" is the fourth most expensive ever - with the most expensive being  Michael & Janet Jackson's "Scream" (which they really did throw a load of money at), followed by two other Madonna tracks, "Die Another Day" and "Express Yourself". 

Back to the album, the critical response was pretty positive at the time (9/10 from NME!) and also retrospectively, although some of the claims of its ground-breaking nature feel somewhat overblown to me. I can appreciate the argument that it's her "most underrated and overlooked work, due to it being sandwiched between her most controversial (Erotica) and, arguably, her best (Ray of Light)" but I'm not sure anyone needed the 2020 social media campaign #JusticeForBedtimeStories. Especially since it's not like it bombed commercially - although it only made it to #1 in Australia, it made the top ten pretty much everywhere and got to #3 in the US, selling over eight million copies globally. 

Because of its popularity, discogs.com tells us that you can pick up a decent version for a quid but if you want the velvet embossed limited edition CD, it's going to set you back £301.74 - apparently it's very collectable. Considering how tiresome Madonna could get with her tendency to "shock" around this time, I thought this album was considerably more bearable than I was expecting - but I remain to be convinced it's the unrecognised masterpiece that some contributors to Wikipedia obviously believe it is.

13/11/94 - Certainly not for me
27/11/94 - A good example of "not my kind of thing"