February 18, 2009 Earworm

I've long suspected the choice of "Rain" as a single was clearly an attempt at damage control after Madonna's vagina had been given free rein during the "Erotica" period. As with any of her albums, the first two singles - "Erotica" and "Deeper And Deeper" - did well, but "Bad Girl", perhaps too confessional, broke her string of top twenty hits. As the unsold copies of "Erotica" began their return to the distributors, "Sex" continued to be a punchline and the debacle of "Body of Evidence" sank: it was beginning to look like a major crisis for the newly christened multimedia company, Maverick.

Taking the most commercial track from the album, track ten - which was exactly where the long winded album should have ended - and stripping it of its low moaning synth lines at the bottom - the tension of the unfulfilled, replacing it's beautiful strings with what sounds suspiciously like elements of "Crazy For You", and dropping the internal dialog found in the recitation on the album version, a remix was created that was as sterile as the double bagged. As dull as it became, it worked and back in the top twenty she went with what sounded like a typical ballad of love in which no one notices lyrics like "I will raise you from the ground (everything strange) and without a sound you'll appear (everything wild) and surrender to me". In other words, all the things that suggested the unsafe, all the things that made "Rain" one of her most interesting records to date, and all the things that sometimes still choke me up a bit when I hear it.