Happy birthday 'Erotica'

Yes, it really has been a whole two decades since 1992. One of our top five Madonna albums, Erotica, turns twenty years old today and should be paid the respect it's due. The first body of work to significantly dent Madonna's reputation, it has in fact stood the test of time and been the subject of many critical revisions, with a multitude of cyber column inches having been devoted to recognising the album as a milestone not only in her career but - similarly to Ray of Light but obviously nowhere as significantly - within pop music as a whole.

The eponymous single remains incredibly sexy today, as does it's filthier B-side counterpart "Erotic". Disco throwback "Deeper and Deeper" (soul sister to "Vogue") is one of Madge's most underrated singles, while the glorious ballad "Rain" was the first Madonna song we ever came into contact with - ever. "Secret Garden" is a fabulous foreshadowing of the San Antonio chilled piano house movement developing in Ibiza and Chicago and "In This Life" is a painfully moving tribute to friends lost to HIV & AIDS - incredibly significant for the time period it was recorded in. "Why's It So Hard" and "Where Life Begins" are two of her best ever album tracks and the video for "Bad Girl" is absolutely in her top 20 (we can make such ridiculous statements with artists who have Madonna's body of music videos). The Erotica era is notorious for her first fall from grace, especially coming on the back of her imperial/Immaculate Collection period when she quite literally ran the world, but it was genuinely artistically daring and the era we most wish we had been fans like we are now. Unfortunately we weren't even two years old.

While the album birthed her most underrated tour (The Girlie Show, an artistic triumph), our favourite child of the Erotica era is a performance on her 2006 tour in support of Confessions. "Erotica" hadn't been performed since 1993 and most had assumed it had been shunned for it's overtly provocative  nature but Madonna's marvellous musical director Stuart Price managed to turn a demo of the song, complete with alternate lyrics, into a shimmering violet bittersweet melancholy - yet still somehow gloriously sexy - disco performance and remains one of our most listened to Madonna songs ever. It's a tour performance we can watch over and over again, and revel in it's simplicity and magic.

Happy birthday Erotica, you filthy cunt.