How Madonna Went Provocative

This phase actually alienated longtime fans and critics when the Queen of Pop released the provocative "Justify My Love" on November 1990. The lead single for her greatest hits album The Immaculate Collection caused controversy, especially with the 18-rated NSFW video being banned by MTV, with rumours that Madonna was bisexual. However the single was a number-one hit in her native America and a number-two hit in the UK. 

She took a step too far in 1992, when the controversial song "Erotica" really alienated fans and critics, with several critics saying that her career was over plus the music video was given post-watershed heavy rotation three times on MTV, before being banned outright. This gets even worse as the book accompanied it, Sex was banned in Japan, as it was deemed "pornographic" by the country. Plus due to this, she was banned from entering the Vatican. Not only that, she changed her "adult contemporary" image, by sporting a cropped blonde haircut and shaved off her eyebrows, meaning that she had wear pencilled on eyebrows until her eyebrows had grown back, sometime before the "Rain" music video.

The album, which shared the same name as the single, received good reception from critics, but it was not successful as her previous four albums, called as the "classic" era by some fans. However, in a retrospective light, several fans have now considered Erotica as one of Madonna's best albums she ever recorded, despite the album banned in the Vatican, Lebanon (not because of the sexual content, but because of the scandal surrounding the title song using an unauthorised sample of a song by acclaimed Lebanese singer Fairuz) and China.

The following album, the R&B-influenced Bedtime Stories was not sexually explicit, though it did cause some controversy, when Madonna swore