Today is Madonna Day in the Pitchfork Reviews section; in honor of her birthday, we reviewed four of her key records.

Bedtime Stories, the confused, the misunderstood. The early ’90s found Madonna at peak levels of media saturation. Inescapable! Seven years of hits compiled on The Immaculate Collection, Madonna featured on virtually every award show, Dick Tracy paraphernalia in the McDonald’s Happy Meal. I saw her name on a religious pamphlet: “We Christians must reject the mainstream acceptance of the ethics and morals of Marx and Madonna.” I saw her in The Far Side, her Gaultier-ensconced breasts puncturing an inflatable life raft in a cheap sexist gag. She was less a musician and more a holy ghost. Bedtime Stories was the first Madonna album that felt like a non-event, an asterisk to her omnipresence, another hot day in a heat wave.

And as such, this album has been difficult to assess as an art object. Madonna was, in 1992-1994, an artist under siege. Sex, her soft-core porn coffee table book, had been called obscene; it has been subsequently been reassessed as a smart and entertaining post-feminist grand jeté. Her previous album Erotica, with its diversity and effective New Jack Swing tourism, was received generally well and is now considered among many of her acolytes to be her masterpiece. But Bedtime Stories is, if we must go full Pepsi Challenge with Erotica, a blurry non-event of an album.

Closing track and hit single “Take a Bow” is a kind song, lush in production and sentiment, and deservedly hung around the charts longer than any other of her singles. Babyface’s appearance here, at the height of his own artistry, is frankly lovely. It is for many fans, myself included, Madonna at her most sensitive and brave.

Bedtime Stories’ final single, “Human Nature,” in contrast, did poorly on the charts, and yet is one of her most effective grooves, with her anti-slut-shaming slogan, “I’m not your bitch, don’t hang your shit on me” thwocking its way through Jean-Baptiste Mondino’s amazing video. It is handily one of Madonna’s best songs.

Conversely, the album’s most successful worldwide single, “Secret,” beloved by many, just meanders—even upon its release I recall my young ears being distracted by the single edit’s monotony when it appeared on radio playlists. On the album proper, the track drags interminably over five-plus minutes. Listening again now, it sounds like a lesser version of subsequent album Ray of Light’s “Frozen,” the dry crumbs of “Secret”’s acoustic guitar tracks waiting to be muted and replaced with William Orbit’s thrilling, tensile production.

Most infamously, we have “Bedtime Story.” Like many other former teenagers falling head over heels for Björk’s first solo album, I recall staring incredulously at the B. Guðmundsdóttir credit when it appeared in Madonna’s liner notes. The song itself is unimaginably disappointing—sterile and static, a less-daring second cousin to “Violently Happy.” Björk’s detached science-textbook approach toward a love-song, which works so well when paired with her own mystic Icelandic aesthetic, doesn’t sit well alongside Madonna’s enthusiastic consumerism. Perhaps the song has some appeal, decades later, now that we’re familiar and tolerant of the sound of Björk-on-autopilot. Perhaps we view it affectionately as a blueprint for her subsequent masterpieces on Ray of Light. Ultimately it remains, to my ears, Madonna’s first truly embarrassing flop.

And most of the rest of the album never really achieves any level of indispensability. Several attempts at New Jack balladry have lovely moody productions married to unremarkable songs or performances. Opening track “Survival,” as carefully constructed as it is, sounds, well, much tidier than Madonna’s contemporaries. The “Inside of Me” sample of Aaliyah’s “Back & Forth”—out the same year—just reminds me as a listener about how 1994 was the year of Toni Braxton, Salt-N-Pepa, and Janet Jackson; far more exciting music than this.

The deep cuts on the B-side of Bedtime Stories have their fans. Babyface is here, Massive Attack’s string arranging collaborator Craig Armstrong is here also, with an expensive sounding moment, and there’s a cute Herbie Hancock sample on “Sanctuary.” But these songs, for me, are undone by all having nearly identical melodies and moods to “Secret.” What attempts to be sultry and smooth comes off as beige and un-fascinating; my mind wanders and my time is wasted. When Madonna plays tourist with gay culture, with Broadway, with Hollywood, with UK jungle, she is able to keep things (usually) deferential and still interesting, and often, achieve transcendence. But here, she sounds woefully out-of-her-depth as a songwriter and singer when slinging these square attempts at R&B balladry.

It is a compliment to the artist that only here, over a decade into her career, on her sixth studio album, does she, for the first time, let this listener down. Take “Human Nature” and put in on a golden record, play “Take a Bow” at my funeral, and let the rest of this sleepy album be forgotten; it is, to my ears and memory, Madonna’s first truly inessential moment.