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Coming fresh off of the heels of 1989's Like a Prayer and 1990's Justify My Love, Madonna was at an all time high in popularity. Unsuprisingly, Madonna would continue working on music, but also worked on a book called Erotica and Sex respecively. Both Works sold well, however Sex would bring more discussion to the table (litterally, as it described as a "coffee table book) as it would bring up the topics of LGBTQ sexuality and AIDS, which made some people unhappy or uncomfortable.

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In 1990, Madonna was as astronomically popular as a boundary-bulldozing, unapologetically bacchanalian performance artist could get. Drawing from Harlem drag balls, "Vogue" went Number One nearly worldwide. The tour showcasing it, Blond Ambition, mixed spectacle with social commentary so sharply that it reinvented the pop concert and yielded the smash documentary Truth or Dare. And that year's The Immaculate Collection, her first greatest-hits set, would eventually rank among the world's biggest-ever albums, despite MTV banning its gender-blurring and cinematically exquisite "Justify My Love" video.

Some loathed this classically trained dancer/DIY provocateur - a megastar peer of Prince and Michael Jackson since her 1984 blockbuster Like a Virgin - with a venom reserved for successful women forging their own path. But for her vast audience, she was nothing less than liberating, and her uninterrupted string of hits defined pop for a decade. What some considered violations of taste made her more commanding: Even the way she toyed with ordinarily unflappable talk show hosts like David Letterman was more rock & roll than actual rock stars.

Nearly everything changed two years later with Erotica and Sex. Released respectively on October 20th and 21st, 1992, the first fruits of her multimedia Maverick entertainment company weren't flops; her fifth studio album, Erotica racked up six million sales worldwide and yielded several hits, while Sex - an elaborate coffee table book created with fashion photographer Steven Meisel and Fabien Baron of Harper's Bazaar - sold out its limited 1.5 million printing in a few days, an unparalleled success for a $50 photography folio bound in metal and sealed in a Mylar bag to evoke condoms. It remains one of the most in-demand out-of-print publications of all time.

But both record and book, despite a few positive reviews, inspired widespread vitriol. "There's nothing erotic about it, unless one finds the idea of a singing death mask sexy." That was Entertainment Weekly's take on Erotica's rendition of "Fever," but it summed up many assessments of the entire album. Others appreciated Sex's forthright presentation of LGBTQ sexuality and S&M even less. "Of course, some of us actually like the opposite sex; some of us believe it is possible to have great sex without whips, third parties or domestic pets," groused not some reactionary macho windbag, but a female film critic for The New York Times.

Why did projects Madonna intended to open minds shut so many down?

As her stardom snowballed through the Eighties and early Nineties, AIDS decimated the scene that helped birth Madonna. Taking music and fashion cues from lower Manhattan's punk rebelliousness and midtown's disco hedonism, pre-stardom Madonna was a fixture in the bohemian underground chronicled by photographer Nan Goldin in her autobiographical The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, a likely Sex influence, along with the severe stylization of Helmut Newton, Guy Bourdin and Robert Mapplethorpe. By 1992, AIDS claimed Goldin's subjects, Mapplethorpe himself, much of the art world (including Madonna's friend Keith Haring), and a growing chunk of Madonna's audience. It also killed and would go on to kill her cohorts, including Blond Ambition dancer Gabriel Trupin. Just as racism and the Black Lives Matter movement shaped Beyoncé's Lemonade, AIDS and ACT UP - the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, the direct action advocacy and educational group whose motto was "Silence = Death" - yielded Erotica and Sex.

Madonna previewed both works with the lead single and video for "Erotica," which boldly picked up where "Justify My Love" left off, and is narrated by Mistress Dita, her Sex dominatrix alter ego. "Give it up, do as I say," she growls over gritty funk that combines the clatter of R&B's New Jack Swing with house music's heavy bottom. "Give it up and let me have my way."

But in much of what follows on the LP, the woman behind the vixen doesn't get what she wants: Her relationships fall apart as she awakens from spells cast by deceptive lovers ("Bye Bye Baby," "Waiting," "Words"). Booze, chain-smoking, and anonymous sexcan't numb the pain ("Bad Girl"), and a friend steals her man ("Thief of Hearts"). Meanwhile, comrades die ("In This Life") while kindred outcasts struggle ("Why's It So Hard"). "I'm not happy this way," she sings in "Bad Girl." Sensuality was merely part of the picture: Erotica is Madonna's concept album about love and intimacy under the shadow of plague.

In excerpts from his studio diary, Erotica 's co-producer/songwriter Shep Pettibone - a skilled remixer who helped Eighties dance grooves evolve from disco to house music - archived the singer's feedback on the album's early slick mixes. "I hate them," she said. "If I had wanted the album to sound like that, I'd have worked with [earlier collaborator] Patrick Leonard in L.A." Instead, Madonna demanded rawness, "as if it were recorded in an alley at 123rd Street in Harlem."

And so her "Vogue" collaborator reverted to the rhythm-intensive immediacy of his remixes as he reworked much of the album until it boomed, banged and sizzled like his increasingly popular remixes: Pettibone's version of "Express Yourself" was the one heard in Madonna's massive video. Instead of composing a radio-targeted album later reshaped for the clubs, Pettibone, together with Madonna, and André Betts - a newcomer who co-produced "Justify My Love" with Lenny Kravitz - made Erotica resemble an alternately party-minded and private collection of 12-inch singles. Even ballads like "Bad Girl" take arrangement cues from club music; in this case, a somber, slo-mo slant on Black Box's piano-pounding house anthems.

Unlike Erotica, which contrasts moods and tempos but maintains a deep and yearning sonic continuity, Sex is varied in style and content. Some shots are straightforward, such as the introductory snaps of Madonna cavorting with two tattooed and pierced lesbian skinheads. The authenticity of her playmates accentuates the fastidiousness of her makeup and the newness of her fetish-wear, which makes Madonna look like a tourist. There's little less sexy than that.

Other photos are open to interpretation: One features four masculine figures standing at urinals with Madonna superimposed in pink. The clash of iconography and grain of the image means it takes some staring to notice one has a hand on another's ass - and even more scrutiny to realize these two apparent dudes are actually women; probably the same butches in the earlier tableau. Here Madonna looks like she's visited that same seedy men's room, and the double exposure insinuates it's on her mind. She's not alone: When bigots obsess over transgender folk in public restrooms, this is what they're imagining. They'd deny the compositional beauty of the image, but there it plainly is, contrasted and highlighted by the sleaze.

Clearly she intended to instigate more than that era's version of the far right: One of the most realistic photos depicts her in a gymnasium under a basketball hoop with books tossed about and a school uniform half off. One guy holds her between his legs, and another guy's hand is poised to explore her naked crotch. There's more than a suggestion of struggle: Only her strained smile signifies consent.

Penned by Madonna, the text also varies in tone. Sometimes she's acting out scenarios likely avoided in real life. Elsewhere she's clearly speaking her own mind, yet with the disclaimer, "Nothing in this book is true," which, to follow her logic, might be a lie. So when she wrote, "The women who are doing [porn] want to do it: No one is holding a gun to their head," critics lambasted the musician. Given that Madonna posed nude in 1978 when she was broke and couldn't stop Penthouse and Playboy from publishing the results in 1985, this statement comes across as atypically naïve.

Because Sex and Erotica launched Maverick and her renegotiated $60 million contract with Time Warner, speculation over the Material Girl's earnings framed nearly every critical analysis. But Madonna's moxie has never been just about profit and fame. As her charities and donations have attested for decades, she also aims to make the world a better place: She just opened a pediatric hospital in Malawi. Back then, she taught soft-core sex ed.

"I think the problem is that everybody's so uptight about [sex] that they make it into something bad when it isn't, and if people could talk about it freely, we would have people practicing more safe sex," she told Vanity Fair at the time. "We wouldn't have people sexually abusing each other, because they wouldn't be so uptight to say what they really want, what they really feel." Maybe that's a little simplistic, but it's genuinely humanitarian. At a time when the straight media essentially characterized all sex as dangerous, Madonna tried to illustrate that it could be safe and stimulating, particularly if we open our minds, free our bodies, and try something besides standard intercourse.

Nowadays, S&M and explicit LGBTQ imagery is never more than a few clicks away, but the internet was in its infancy in 1992: Photos of sexual activity were exclusive to specialty bookstores until Robert Mapplethorpe's headline-grabbing 1989 retrospective The Perfect Moment, which placed S&M and interracial gay sexuality onto museum walls. The resulting controversy - inflamed by North Carolina's obstructionist Senator Jesse Helms and his attempt to prevent the National Endowment for the Arts from funding "obscenity" - engaged viewers in a moral debate. Accordingly, Sex was never about pretty pictures.

Twenty-five years after publication, it's easier to differentiate between Sex's weaknesses and strengths. The sequence with pop rapper Vanilla Ice - Madonna's then-boyfriend - was always tacky, and the section in which she sandwiches herself between hip-hop's Big Daddy Kane and supermodel Naomi Campbell is more stilted than ever. Actress Isabella Rossellini - who appears in a man's suit caressing Madonna and her female friends with an emotional intimacy missing from those celebrity shots - nailed the book's major limitation when she told The Huffington Post in 2014, "Madonna was almost too beautiful, too perfect ... to have that vulnerability or the sense of shock that a regular, more normal, not-so-professional fitted body could convey." No matter how many personas the icon tries on like a pop-art Cindy Sherman, Madonna is Madonna when she takes off her clothes - maybe even more so.

And yet I recognize her intentions. Madonna and I are of the same generation, and before she was a star, we'd party at the same NYC clubs like Danceteria, where her career began. I lost my dad to cancer when I was young just as she lost her mom at age five, and so I know all too well how grieving reactivates that original deprivation, like when my very first lover died of AIDS 30 years ago. After that went co-workers, mentors and friends until the mid-Nineties, when combinations of antiviral medicines slowed and then ultimately stopped HIV's progression for many patients who followed their medication regimen with military precision.

But until then, if you lived in a major city and were gay or an intravenous drug user, sex worker or among their intimates, you were an endangered species. There was no cure, and our government was indifferent. Breaking their silence was essential to our survival and sanity. So when Madonna launched her business with Sex and Erotica, LGBTQ people knew she wasn't exploitative: She was trying to save our lives by politicizing her anger. The frustration of Erotica that critics of the era bemoaned, we applauded because it was our own. Sure, she borrowed some of our fabulousness, but she also gave back plenty.

Accordingly, Erotica is also filled with love. The album's steamiest - and funniest - cut, "Where Life Begins," celebrates cunnilingus with cheeky wordplay, but also sweetness and warmth: Crooning over Andre Betts' hip-hop ballad beats, she beckons the listener, "Go down where I cannot hide," as if to suggest her womanhood is this chameleon's constant truth.

The album's most driving dance track, the hit "Deeper and Deeper," revels in romantic surrender. But LGBTQ people interpret it more specifically about embracing same-sex attraction. "This feeling inside, I can't explain/But my love is alive, and I'm never gonna hide it again," Madonna belts in the concluding verse, hitting that declaration harder than anything in her catalog. Set in a pansexual nightclub much like Danceteria, its video pays tribute to Andy Warhol, here represented by actor Udo Kier - a Warhol graduate who also plays Sex 's dungeon master. But it also tips a hat to Madonna's late mentor Christopher Flynn, who introduced the straight-A student and cheerleader to the gay discos of Detroit.

"I always felt like I was a freak when I was growing up and that there was something wrong with me because I couldn't fit in anywhere," she told director Gus Van Zant in Interview in 2010. "But when he took me to that club, he brought me to a place where I finally felt at home."

Her elegiac "In This Life" offers gratitude to Flynn and her late roommate Martin Burgoyne while addressing AIDS head-on. "He was only 23/Gone before he had his time," she sings of Burgoyne; "He was like a father to me ... taught me to respect myself," she croons about Flynn. Like "This Used to Be My Playground," the similarly mournful League of Their Own chart-topper released four months before Erotica but written and recorded midway through the album, this lament reveals the wounded child concealed behind her workaholism. Her fragility makes the singing stronger.

This sincerity spills into "Rain," the sunny single that revived sales eight months after the album's release, and the final track, "Secret Garden." Madonna ponders her feminine essence as a hidden paradise of pleasure, a Garden of Eden, and she reveals insecurities ordinarily concealed, hoping they'll blossom into self-knowledge. "I wonder if I'll ever know/where my place is, where my face is/I know it's in here somewhere," she whispers over a thrusting bass line, a gyrating breakbeat and breezy jazz piano that wanders with her thoughts. When she does sing on the chorus, she's not the ballsy belter of her hits, but an aching, affectation-free spirit waiting for "a place that I can be born," as if the true Madonna hadn't yet arrived.

A quarter century after Sex and Erotica, the era's lingering image of the superstar is the shot of her fully naked - tresses teased and face painted like a Fifties starlet, a cigarette in her lips, and her feet in stilettos - thumbing a ride on a bucolic Florida street. Her nude femininity is perfectly sculpted, yet she exudes the assurance of a suited male bureaucrat. It's the book's most transgressive image, for it presents a woman self-objectifying, calling the shots instead of following them, sharing her amorous dreams with the pluck usually reserved for straight white men. There's no submissiveness; instead, its carnal opposite, flaunted while politicians and religious leaders preached abstinence as the only civilized response to a virus spreading throughout the world and claiming millions of lives. Instead, Madonna cast herself as Hugh Hefner and the Playboy Bunny.

This defiance flipped out men and women alike.

"I divide my career from before and after the Sex book," she told Spin four years later. " Sex was my fantasy, and I made money off of it. That is a no-no."

Her bravado lingered through Body of Evidence, a BDSM-charged thriller, and the Maverick-produced, straight-to-video drama Dangerous Game. Both were widely panned, as well as her 1994 Late Show appearance in which she asked David Letterman to smell her panties, smoked a cigar and said, "fuck" 14 times. In between, she staged her Erotica- centric Girlie Show World Tour, which furthered Blond Ambition's fearless exuberance, but only played three U.S. cities.

Madonna's sound and image then softened substantially with Evita, motherhood and wistful serenades like "Take a Bow" (her longest-running U.S. Number One) before she regained her audacity via 1998's soul-searching Ray of Light and 2000's experimental Music. And although some of her subsequent output has followed trends rather than setting them,she still puts on a rarely rivaled live show by foregrounding her body as the primary site of her art. That was daring in her Erotica/ Sex period. Doing that today, as a 59-year-old woman, makes Madonna even more radical. Watch her fiery acceptance speech last December at Billboard 's Women in Music shindig if you think she's lost her edge.

"I was called a whore and a witch," she recalled of that epoch. "One headline compared me to Satan. I said, 'Wait a minute, isn't Prince running around with fishnets and high heels and lipstick with his butt hanging out?' Yes, he was. But he was a man. This was the first time I truly understood women do not have the same freedom as men. ...I [felt] like the most hated woman in the world."

Today, Erotica's melancholy desire is all over the boldest substantial pop from Lana Del Rey and Father John Misty to Frank Ocean and Beyoncé, and its dirty house grooves animate chart divas from Katy Perry on "Swish Swish" to underground rappers such as Zebra Katz on "Ima Read." Let's not forget that Grace Jones and Debbie Harry made Madonna possible. But there's an even more direct line between Madonna's unrepentant and emphatically female sensuality - particularly in this incendiary phase - and what followed from Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Pink, Lady Gaga, Nicki Minaj, Ariana Grande, Tove Lo and now Cardi B. Without Madonna, modern pop as we know it would be unimaginable. Meanwhile, Sex 's provocations have permeated advertising, which was hardly the point. (Meisel's wood-paneled 1995 campaign for Calvin Klein evoked teen porn so brazenly that the Justice Department got involved and CK pulled the ads.)

However, popular music and art are no longer thoroughly defined by a straight white masculine perspective. Nearly everything is more sexualized, and that's not entirely positive, but alpha male artists and submissive female subjects don't dominate as much as they've done for centuries. We've finally hit a tipping point when popular culture is offering more viewpoints and voices: That's why there's a rise in fascism to suppress them. Sex and Erotica 's greatest contribution remains their embrace of the Other, which in this case means queerness, blackness, third-wave feminism, exhibitionism and kink. Madonna took what was marginalized at the worst of the AIDS epidemic, placed it in an emancipated context, and shoved it into the mainstream for all to see and hear.

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Why Madonna's Masterpiece 'Erotica,' Defiant 'Sex' Book Still Matter

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How the icon's 1992 projects (her own 'Lemonade') tackled homophobia, AIDS hysteria and female, queer desire, and set the blueprint for modern pop

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Continuing the tradition of making her public appearences exedingly sexy, Madonna went to the stage at the 2003 VMAs, along with Britney Spears and  Christina Aguilera and started kissing them. This went beyond the "normal" Madonna routine as it crossed the lines for wat was, at the time, social normes on sexuality. People who themselves were gay cheered while many other attendants had mixed opinions or confused faces. Even 18 years later, an article from The GUardian, from which some of this information came from is rated 17+, so it remains something engrained into Madonna's legacy to this day. (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/aug/29/artsfeatures.madonna)

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Let me take you back to an important moment in our nation's history: the 2003 MTV VMAs, when Britney Spears infamously kissed Madonna and spawned an entire generation of gay men. Christina Aguilera, another queen of pop, was also there and also kissed Madonna⁠-but MTV panned to Justin Timberlake's face during her kiss, so she missed her moment. (Remember, J.T. and Britney had just broken up, and MTV was clearly trying to cash in on that drama.) Missy Elliott closed out the iconic performance with a few lines from her song "Work It"-another thing that's grossly overlooked.

Also forgotten are the many celebrities in the audience whose reactions to Britney, Christina, Madonna, and Missy deserve to be hung in the Louvre. Ugh, to be a fly in the wall at Radio City Music Hall that night.

Thankfully, MTV just uploaded an HQ version of this crucial VMAs moment to its YouTube page. Now we can relive it over and over-and all the Easter eggs I'm referencing are crystal clear. Here are the greatest ones.

Madonna's daughter, Lola, was one of the flower girls at the beginning of the performance.

Beyoncé's adorable clap when Britney first hits the stage.

Bey is a notable big Brit fan. We love legends supporting legends.

Avril Lavigne and Kelly Osbourne's less-than-enthused faces.

The textbook definition of moody goth girls not having any of the cheerleaders' nonsense. (For context: I'm also a moody goth girl.)

The sheer glee on Carson Kressley's face when he realizes Madonna, Britney, and Christina are all on one stage.

I know that face. It's called gay panic.

And then the face he makes when Madonna and Britney actually kiss.

Gay panic morphed into pure gay hysteria. Thank God we have this moment documented. Who cares about Justin Timberlake's reaction?!

Well, a lot of people did. But truthfully I'm more invested in Mary J. Blige's face behind him. What is she thinking? I need to know.

Speaking of people in the background: Yes, that's Lindsay Lohan awkwardly dancing behind Paris and Nicky Hilton.

Paris is how I think I look and dance when I'm out. Lindsay is me actually. And this was before they became tabloid friends! The age of innocence!

I leave you with this GIF of Snoop Dogg, who was so baffled by the entire performance that he unapologetically cracked up.

Never forget.

Now watch it all in its glory, below:

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8 Things You Never Noticed About the Britney-Madonna Kiss Performance at the 2003 VMAs

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Let me take you back to an important moment in our nation's history: the 2003 MTV VMAs, when Britney Spears infamously kissed Madonna and spawned an entire generation of gay men. Christina Aguilera, another queen of pop, was also there and also kissed Madonna⁠-but MTV panned to Justin Timberlake's face during her kiss, so she missed her moment.

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Wardrobe Malfunction Turned to Impromptu Performance

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Wardrobe Malfunction Turned to Impromptu Performance

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At the first VMAs, Madonna was going through her performance of her song Like A Virgin, when "About midway through the performance, as she stepped off the cake, one of her white stilettos came loose". Rather than stop the performance, she decided to roll with it and give the crowd a show. This horrified her former manager who said "That's it, you've ruined your career", as it would be assumed that showing that much of her body in such a risqué way would doom her. Instead, it did the opposite and had her popularity skyrocket, setting a trend her music videos would follow for years to come.

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The annual MTV Video Music Awards have been the scene of some outrageous celebrity performances over the years. Lady Gaga hanged herself on stage in 2009; Britney Spears danced with a giant python in 2001. But few can top Madonna's electrifying rendition of "Like a Virgin" at the first-ever VMAs in 1984, in which the then-relatively-unknown musician writhed around in a giant wedding dress, pantomimed masturbating and sang, "It feels so good inside."

It turns out that shocking performance - which turned both Madonna and the VMAs into household names - didn't exactly go as planned.
READ MORE: 10 of Madonna's Most Controversial Moments
When she began rolling on the floor, Madonna thought, 'I'll just pretend I meant to do this'

From the get-go, Madonna was "difficult," according to MTV execs. Originally, the 26-year-old wanted to bring a fully grown Bengal tiger on stage with her. MTV quickly nixed that idea, so instead, she opted to descend a 17-foot-tall wedding cake and sing the song (off her second album of the same name) in a white wedding dress.

About midway through the performance, as she stepped off the cake, one of her white stilettos came loose.

"So I thought, 'Well, I'll just pretend I meant to do this,' and I dove on the floor and I rolled around," Madonna told Jay Leno in 2012. "And, as I reached for the shoe, the dress went up. And the underpants were showing."

Madonna continued performing like it was all choreographed. She rolled around on the floor, then sprang up and danced, then returned to the floor. She ended the performance flat on her back, with her dress above her head.

Her manager thought Madonna ruined her career

After the show, Freddy DeMann, Madonna's former manager, was furious with her.

"He was white with anger, he was so upset," Madonna told Leno. "He said, 'That's it, you've ruined your career' ... I didn't even know that my butt was showing. I couldn't compute everything that had happened. And since I didn't really have a career yet, I didn't feel that I had lost anything."

Of course, the opposite was true: The performance immediately announced her as a star and is widely considered one of the most iconic moments in pop culture history. "She stole the show," Les Garland, MTV's former executive vice president of programming, said afterward.

Like a Virgin would go on to be Madonna's first number one album and become the first album by a female to sell over five million copies in the U.S. The 1984 performance was even replicated - to similar shocking effect - at the 2003 VMAs, only this time with Madonna in a tuxedo and Christina Aguilera and Britney Spears in wedding dresses.

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Madonna's Now-Famous 'Like a Virgin' Performance Was Thanks to a Wardrobe Malfunction

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The annual MTV Video Music Awards have been the scene of some outrageous celebrity performances over the years. Lady Gaga hanged herself on stage in 2009; Britney Spears danced with a giant python in 2001.

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Madonna has had a career surrounded in controversy and dealt with many issues that came with that: Whether it be making the chuch mad, being dropped from ads by Pepsi, questioning what can be deemed sexually acceptable" or making questionable decisions both in and out of media.

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Madonna Breaks Silence on Gaga 'Born This Way' Controversy

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Madonna Breaks Silence on Gaga 'Born This Way' Controversy

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Given the popularity of the two divas and  the fact that Gaga said that Madonna was a huge influence on her, it was inevitable that, at some point, some beef would show up between the two.  To the extent of which is not exactly clear, but Born This Way does include many of the elements of Madonna's work from hep past, including scenes that would leave some to question what is sexually acceptable to be shown in a music, similar to the conversations about Madonna's music videos of the late 80s and early 90s.

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ABC NEWS' ALICE GOMSTYN and JIM DUBREUIL REPORT: Nearly a year after Lady Gaga released her hit single "Born This Way," Madonna is finally offering her take on the song ... and it's not exactly enthusiastic. Gaga has long expressed her admiration for Madonna, calling the pop icon an inspiration. Comparisons between the two divas have been inevitable, from their dance-hall beats to their risque musical treatment of sex and religion. The two even teamed up for a "catfight" skit on "Saturday Night Live" in 2010.

But last February's release of "Born This Way" had many questioning whether the Mama Monster had gone too far in emulating her idol. The song, critics charged, was stunningly similar to Madonna's 1989 chart-topper, "Express Yourself."

Gaga would go on to say that she got an e-mail from Madonna's "people" saying they supported the song, but a representative for Madonna later said she was unaware of any such e-mail. When ABC News asked viewers to contribute questions for Cynthia McFadden's interview with Madonna, the most popular request by far was that McFadden find out how the singer feels about Gaga.

Read: Madonna on Younger Men, Missing 'Certain Things' About Marriage

McFadden did, starting with the question of whether Madonna felt Gaga was "copying" her. The pop singer's response, at first, was complimentary. She called Gaga "a very talented artist" and said she admired her songwriting. But she owned up to the connection between Gaga's music and her own.

"I certainly think she references me a lot in her work. And sometimes I think it's amusing and flattering and well done," she said.

Madonna said sometimes Gaga's work also appears to be a "statement about taking something that was in the Zeitgeist, you know, 20 years ago and turning it inside out and reinterpreting it."

Photos: Madonna Through the Years

"There's a lot of ways to look at it. I can't really be annoyed by it ...because, obviously, I've influenced her." But the Material Girl became coy when the conversation turned to "Born This Way." "When I heard it on the radio ...I said that sounds very familiar," Madonna said.

Asked if that felt annoying, Madonna responded, "It felt reductive." Pressed as to whether that was a good or bad thing, Madonna told Cynthia McFadden to "look it up" - we did; the term means "minimal" or "crude" - before smiling slyly and taking a sip from her tea cup.

See more about what Madonna had to say on Gaga, including whether she'd do a duet, tonight on "20/20? at 10 p.m. ET.

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Madonna Breaks Silence on Gaga 'Born This Way' Controversy; '20/20' Exclusive Tonight

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ABC NEWS' ALICE GOMSTYN and JIM DUBREUIL REPORT: Nearly a year after Lady Gaga released her hit single "Born This Way," Madonna is finally offering her take on the song ... and it's not exactly enthusiastic. Gaga has long expressed her admiration for Madonna, calling the pop icon an inspiration.

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'Justify My' Love continuing the controversy

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'Justify My' Love continuing the controversy

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It would not take long for another one of Madonna's songs to bring back controversy. Just one year after "Like A Prayer", "Justify My Love" was released, and the video to go to it was not well received by MTV. Given the video's sexual tone, when the video was submitted to MTV, they rejected it outright, "‘Is there one scene or another that you specifically object to?’ They said, ‘No, it was the whole tone’.  This did little to deter the popularity of the song, reaching top of the charts similar to "Like A Prayer".

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From PEOPLE.COM:

How much controversy can you cram into five minutes? If you're Madonna, enough to make your new single a hit. On Nov. 6, 1990 - 25 years ago this week - Madonna released the first single from The Immaculate Collection, " Justify My Love." In the month that followed, Madonna filmed a video for the song, submitted it to MTV (which promptly rejected it), and then rode the resulting controversy all the way to the bank. The video was ultimately sold as a "video single," and it sold well.

Today, the incident is remembered as one of the biggest controversies in Madonna's career, which is saying a lot. In case you didn't shell out for the VHS tape back in the day, watch the video below. (And yes, it and other videos in this post may be NSFW. Obviously.)

In celebration of the song's 25th anniversary, PEOPLE.COM has compiled a list of factoids you may not know about the tune, the video, and the associated fallout.

1. The video is actually pretty tame by today's standards

Given all the controversy about Madonna using the video to promote sex, sadomasochism, cross-dressomg and whatever else critics perceived in it, it just doesn't seem quite so racy 25 years later. It's all about sex, sure, and it's very sexy, but the most scandalous thing in it is a woman who's topless except for a pair of suspenders that (mostly) cover her nipples. Of course, the female nipple is still a controversial body part today, but give the video a spin now and decide for yourself if you should be offended - and if changing sexual mores are a good thing or a bad thing.

2. And the controversy helped propel the single to the top of the charts

Isn't it crazy what free publicity can do? In just two months, "Justify My Love" was No. 1 on the Billboard Top 100. It stayed there for two weeks. By February 1991, "Justify My Love" went platinum.
3. The VHS single sold over 1 million copies
And they weren't cheap: The initial retail price for the illicit video was $9.98, according to Entertainment Weekly.

4. The European release of the video actually gave a nod to MTV

As an extra, the video included Madonna's performance of "Vogue" at the MTV Music Video Awards, which aired just weeks before the channel banned "Justify My Love."

5. Madonna, of course, had opinions about the ban

Being interviewed on Nightline on Dec. 3, following MTV's official rejection of the video on Nov. 27, Madonna pointed out that MTV's ban on nudity in music videos might be inconsistent. "When I did my 'Vogue' video, there's a shot of me where I'm wearing a see-through dress, and you can clearly see my breasts. They told me that they wanted me to take that out, but I said I wouldn't, and they played it anyway," she said. "I thought that I was once again going to be able to bend the rules a little bit."

She also claimed that the sexual content of the video wasn't as dangerous as other themes more readily accepted on television. "I would like to address the whole issue of censorship on television. Where do we draw the line in general?" she said. "I draw the line in terms of what I think is viewable on television. I draw the line at violence and humiliation and degradation."

6. It wasn't any one scene that got the video banned

Per Madonna in the Nightline interview, the censors didn't cite any scene in particular as grounds for banning it. "When we gave it to MTV, we asked if they would play it. They came back a while later and said no," she said. "I asked them, 'Is there one scene or another that you specifically object to?' They said, 'No, it was the whole tone.' So we didn't even really get a chance to try to make it viewable. They rejected it completely."

7. The financial advantages of the ban were not lost on her

In the Nightline interview, Madonna smiles when it's pointed out that she has a reputation for being an ace self-promoter, but when asked if making a video likely to be banned was a publicity stunt, she says no. "It may seem like it was a publicity stunt, and I was very lucky, I must say. But I did not plan on selling this video ... The controversy just happened. It wasn't planned," she said. "So lucky me."

8. Madonna also spoke the phrase "sexual fannies" on Nightline

She said it accidentally while trying to say "sexual fantasies," but given that it happened during her discussion of how she'd previously tried to slip more risqué content past MTV's censors, it's a notable Freudian slip.

9. Strangely enough, Nightline aired the video in its entirety

And that might seem surprising, since ABC is a broadcast network, not a cable channel like MTV. In the above clip, you can see that the video was prefaced by anchor Forrest Sawyer with the following message: "Obviously we are broadcasting it late at night, and only adults are watching. You should know that this video includes graphic portrayals of sexuality and nudity."

10. Madonna's co-star in the video was her real-life boyfriend at the time

But her relationship with actor-mode Tony Ward had ended by April 1991. A PEOPLE report from 1991 noted, "It may be a coincidence, but [Ward] seems to have dropped from her arm at about the same time tabloids revealed that he had married an old flame, Amalia Papadimos, 23, in a quickie ceremony in Las Vegas on Aug. 21, 1990 - after he had begun dating Madonna."

The May 11, 1991, episode of SNL had Delta Burke hosting and Chris Isaak as the musical guest, but it also featured a surprise appearance by Madonna in a pre-taped "Wayne's World" bit that introduced the phrase "Wow, look at the unit on that guy" to the pop culture lexicon.

12. It's an homage

According to the book Madonna as Postmodern Myth, the video is a tribute to the 1963 French film Bay of Angels, which starred Jeanne Moreau.

13. There's a Public Enemy connection

"Justify My Love" samples a beat that had previously appeared in the Public Enemy song "Security in the First World." The response to Madonna's use of the beat was artistic: In 1991, the group's producer, Hank Shocklee, commissioned the rap group Young Black Teenagers to use the beat again in a response song, "To My Donna."

14. There's a James Brown connection

The Public Enemy beat is, in turn, based off the one in Brown's 1970 track "Funky Drummer," which means it is a kinda-sorta grandparent to "Justify My Love."

15. There's a Lenny Kravitz connection, too

Kravitz cowrote the song with Ingrid Chavez (who co-starred in Prince's Graffiti Bridge), and he also co-produced the track. At the time, it was rumored that Madonna and Kravitz were in a relationship, but Kravitz, who was still married to Lisa Bonet at the time, denied that their interaction had been anything other than professional.

16. The song was based on a letter Chavez had written for Kravitz

As Chavez recalled to Vibe in 2013, the creation of the song was surprisingly simple. "Andre [Betts] got a beat going, Lenny recorded a synth line, and then he asked me if I had something I wanted to say. I had a letter on me (my letters are like poems), and so I got on the mic and basically read the letter. One take and the rest is history," Chavez said.

17. Chavez also sued Kravitz over the song

Chavez sued on grounds that she'd been denied a songwriting credit for "Justify My Love." On Jan. 29, 1992, Chavez and Kravitz settled out of court. Payment details weren't disclosed, but Chavez did eventually get an official credit and a chunk of those royalties.

18. There's a remix of the song that's arguably even better designed to be controversial

Titled "Justify My Love (The Beast Within Remix)," this version ditches most of the lyrics and replaced them with passages from the Book of Revelations.

19. Jay-Z put his own spin on the song

The 2003 track "Justify My Thug" is a hip hop re-working of "Justify My Love."

20. In the end, the video aired on MTV2

In 2002, the spinoff channel to MTV aired "Justify My Life" as part of a late-night countdown of the most controversial music videos. So ... all that hullaballoo turned out to be for nothing, just twelve years down the line.

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Justify My Love, 25 Years Later: A Short History of the Song, the Controversy and the Sex.

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From PEOPLE.COM: How much controversy can you cram into five minutes? If you're Madonna, enough to make your new single a hit. On Nov. 6, 1990 - 25 years ago this week - Madonna released the first single from The Immaculate Collection, " Justify My Love."

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"Like A Prayer" Official Music Video (Youtube 2009)

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"Like A Prayer" Official Music Video (Youtube 2009)

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“Like A Prayer”'s music video caused a big ruckus when it was first released back in 1989. The video itself contains a lot of imagery some would consider suggestive, such as a scantily clad (for the time) Madonna, burning crosses, and a black man being falsely accused which prompted Madonna to pray to a black saint. The church was not happy with this, being condemned by the Vatican. Pepsi was also not happy with this, having an ad with the song and Madonna quickly getting pulled of the air in the US.

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Madonna - Like A Prayer (Official Video)