The third single release from Erotica was one of the ballads Madonna composed with Shep Pettibone, Bad Girl, but it wasn't a success. Although it is a really good song, and it has one of the best videos Madonna has, the scandals of that time made this single one of the least successful in Madonna's music career. People was getting tired of the bad girl Madonna after the Sex Book, Erotica, … This was also reflected in the charts: At that moment it was her only one single from 1983 that didn't reach top 20 in Billboard.
Bad Girl didn't even get any remix, just an extended and an edited version. It was released in USA with Fever as the B-side, and some remixes of Fever in the maxi-single tracklisting, at least, those Fever mixes made the release reach #1 in the sales charts. In Europe, where Fever was the fourth Erotica single, Maverick choose to add mixes of Deeper And Deeper to that release.
Bad Girl tell us the story of a woman who is not happy with the way she lives her life, she can't find her place in the society. She smokes and drinks too much, and searches for love in the arms of strangers. A very sad story, told by a really sad voice and an excellent video that suits perfectly the song. Another good point of this single is its great cover image, a stunning picture by Steven Meisel, the photographer of Sex, where we can see Madonna semi-naked, smoking, and lying on a bed.
Some internet auction sites have shown a couple of papers hand written by Madonna herself, with the first versions of the song Bad Girl. These are work copies where we can see how the song's lyrics have developed, and have joined to make the final Bad Girl. In the beginning there were different versions of the song, and Madonna used all of them to get the song and lyrics we all know.

Does Madonna smoke? Does Madonna drink? Does she uses drugs? In the actual times, nobody can say Madonna has an unhealthy life. She even has an exemplary way of life with all that sport and things like that, maybe influenced by her motherhood and her marriage with Mr. Ritchie. But in the past, things weren't different from her way of life today. Madonna has always carried a healthy life. She is vegetarian, or at least that's what she has said. She has always been quite fit due to all the usual exercise she makes daily, and all her tours, and that can be seen nowadays.
Does Madonna smoke? Madonna is a social smoker, it means, she smokes just with her friends. She smokes Malboro Light. We have seen her many times smoking cigarrettes, or even big cigars, as in the movies Desperately Seeking Susan and Dangerous Game, in the Express Yourself and Bad Girl videos, or the famous David Letterman interview.
Does Madonna drink? As the same as the cigarettes, she drinks in social enviroments. There have been alcoholism cases in her family, as it has been said for her brothers Martin and Mario. It has been said that Madonna has got drunk a few times, even she lost control, but that has happened in just a couple of times. We all know how she wants to control herself.
Does she use drugs? She doesn't like drugs, and the main reason is the same as alcohol: it makes you loose control, something very important for a person like her. Maybe she has used any drug sometime in all her life, who knows, but we are sure she doesn't need them, unlike other artists, to have a brilliant and successful career.

In January 1993 Madonna performed Bad Girl and Fever in the TV show Saturday Night Live, where she also made a funny parody of Marylin Monroe's Happy Birthday Mr. President. Although she sang Bad Girl quite well, it is still a poor performance. When she finished the song, she replied to Sinead O'Connor's breaking the picture of the Pope: she showed a picture of a rapper and broke it furiously, saying: 'Fight the real enemy'.