The Madonna Collection: 1993

Sunday, October 25, 2015

I'll Remember...1993

Madonna’s The Girlie Show tour recently turned 20, kicking off as it did on September 25th 1993. Its logistics almost seems quaint now - at only 39 dates and lasting barely 3 months, it bears little comparison to the mega-tours which are the norm nowadays. As a concert, however, its imprint is evident all over pop. The Blond Ambition tour of 1990 had taken Bowie and Broadway as its palimpsest, Madonna stamping her authority to create something daring and iconic. Afterwards she had vowed to never tour again. By 1993, however, Madonna was in the eye of the worst backlash she had ever faced following the perfect storm of her Erotica album, Sex book and Body of Evidence film. The critics had savaged all three (which, to be fair, was justified with the film) and while prurience ensured the Sex book was an instant sell-out, Erotica proved to be Madonna’s lowest-selling studio album to date. All three projects, of course, had sex at their core: having turned the controversy surrounding Blond Ambition and the panting Justify My Love to her own advantage, Madonna no doubt felt emboldened in her daring. It wouldn’t be the last time that she misjudged the mood of her audience but it perhaps remains the most spectacular and most informative.

Labelled as ‘desperate’ and every other epithet still deployed today against women who use their sexuality in ways deemed ‘unacceptable’, Madonna didn’t apologize and she didn’t back down. She understood what most critics did not - that Erotica was an astounding concept album far beyond what any of her peers (save Prince) were capable of rather than limp, lazy titillation (viewed through the prism of the album, the Sex book makes much more sense than it does taken as a standalone project.) Added to the hubris built over the preceding few years, this passionate belief in her work meant that Madonna came out fighting. Thus, her pledge to never tour again was revoked and The Girlie Show was born.