Robbed hit of the week 10/21/19 - Madonna's "Bedtime Story"...
from the album Bedtime Stories (1994)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #42
This week's "robbed hit" is by Madonna, who's 1994 release Bedtime Stories had landed her another top-5 pop hit in "Secret", as well as the biggest single of her career with the seven-week chart-topper "Take A Bow" in the beginning winter of 1995. Coming off that huge success should have given her leeway in her next single release, which she took full advantage of with one of the most ambitious and experimental tracks of her career, "Bedtime Story". Written by Icelandic siren Bjork along with Brits Nellee Hooper and Marcus De Vries, with Hooper co-producing the track with Madonna, "Bedtime Story" was a dark and lush delve into deep house and electronica, with the singer going on a stream of consciousness as synths and rhythms swirl around her. Even for a music video pioneer the clip for the song was stunning, directed by Mark Romanek in the year of massive budget videos, this special effects wonder costed five million and had a space in the Met Museum of Modern Art...
While "Bedtime Story" scored Madonna yet another #1 on Billboard's Dance Club Play chart, the song became her first American single since her breakthrough with "Holiday" in 1983 to fail to make the top-40, frustratingly and criminally stopping at #42 in April of 1995. Internationally, fans had a much better reaction, sending the single into the top ten in the UK (#4), Finland (#4), Australia (#5), and Italy (#8), and reaching the top-40 in Belgium (#38) and New Zealand (#38).
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Here's the "Sound Factory Remix" by Junior Vasquez that helped the song top the dance chart...
One of Junior's over treatments of the song, the "Wet Dream Mix", was used when Madonna performed the song at the Brit Awards in 1995...
On her Re-Invention tour in 2014, "Bedtime Story" was played in one of the interludes as Madonna changed, with gymnasts on trapezes gyrating about against a video backdrop...
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