page_title: Bedtime Story (Madonna song)
section_title: Reception and analysis
hierarchical_section_title: Bedtime Story (Madonna song) / Music video / Reception and analysis
context_page_description: "Bedtime Story" is a song recorded by American singer Madonna for her sixth studio album, Bedtime Stories. It was released as the third single from the album on February 13, 1995, by Maverick Records, and it also appears on Madonna's compilation album GHV2. "Bedtime Story" was written by Björk, Nellee Hooper and Marius De Vries; it was the only time Björk wrote a song for a Madonna album. She re-wrote a demo of the song to the current version, which was then produced by Madonna and Hooper. A mid-tempo electronic and house song with acid, ambient and techno influences, "Bedtime Story" has an underlying skeletal synth melody influenced by minimal trance music. The track was a departure from Madonna's pop-R&B-based outputs in favor of unconventional and electronic music. Lyrically it talks about the joys of the unconscious world.
  "Bedtime Story" received favorable reviews from music critics, who praised the song's hypnotic and electronic style, and deemed it an underrated song which could have had great potential.
context_section_description: The music video for "Bedtime Story" has received generally positive reviews from critics ever since its release. It was exhibited and permanently kept in different art galleries and museums, including the Museum of Modern Art as well the School of Visual Arts in New York City. O'Brien praised the video, calling it "one of [Madonna]'s most experimental" music videos and a "Dali-esque epic", causing it to enter "the portals of high art". MTV News' James Montgomery, while writing an article on the pop culture references of Britney Spears' "Hold It Against Me" music video (2011), claimed that "Bedtime Story" was an ultra artistic video, influencing Spears' one. Corinna Herr wrote in the book Madonna's Drowned Worlds that "Visual references to surreal paintings seem to be a key to Madonna's world of images" and listed "Bedtime Story" as one of these videos. In the same book, author Santiago Fouz-Hernández added that videos like Bedtime Story" included alchemical and hermeticist traditions, in particular the concepts of androgyny and masquerade. Herr also wrote regarding the video's new age influences and concept of an idealised world, one "which she is not necessarily a part, but to which she nevertheless seems to be attracted". Rettenmund commented that the video was rife with mystical and Sufi traditions, and described it as a "singular creation in Madonna's oeuvre".
  The music video has also drawn comparisons to Tarsem Singh's films, The Cell (2000) and The Fall (2006), in the sense that they both incorporate elements of Islamic mystic imagery, such as in the scene where the Sufi dance is executed, as well as the floating cube. According to writer Brad Brevet, who observed the similarities, deduced that both the video and the films deal with tapping into the subconscious of the human mind and hence the resulting strange visuals were directly an influence from "Bedtime Story". James Steffen, author of The Cinema of Sergei Parajanov, found that some of the imagery in the video were directly lifted from the 1969 Soviet film, The Color of Pomegranates, including the scenes showing a bare foot crushing grapes over a slab inscribed with Arabic, and a scene showing a bishop's croziers falling into hand. Steffen also noted that Romanek's influences for the video included the works of Russian film director Andrei Tarkovsky, including Stalker (1979) and Nostalghia (1983). Jake Hall from Dazed declared "Bedtime story" as the blueprint for "90s brand of futurism", adding that the video "eschews the obvious and instead relies on undulating CGI". It can be found on the Madonna compilations, The Video Collection 93:99 (1999) and Celebration: The Video Collection (2009).
caption: Museum of Modern Art in New York City, where the video is kept permanently on display
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