her Pepsi episode, it was business as usual for Madonna, which meant sex, advancing countercultural thinking, and more sex. In 1992, she advanced the Madonna brand with a multichannel PR and marketing assault on mainstream music. She released her most provocative album, Erotica, which contained an ultrasexual S&M title song, as well as "When Life Begins," about oral sex, and "In This Life," a tribute to a friend who died of AIDS. With Erotica, Madonna broke the barriers of what could be said and sung in mass-market music, unusual for a female performer at that time. For example, she dealt with homosexuality so explicitly in the album that she even offended many gay fans. In one of her rare cover songs, she also sang "Fever," raising the temperature a little from Peggy Lees 1950s ver- sion, but enlarging the demographic age base. The sexual web Madonna had woven with Erotica was reinforced by the movie Body of Evidence and the book entitled Sex, a soft-core porn publication that transformed the term coffee table book to bedside table book. Expensively packaged in an aluminum cover with a steel-core binding, it sold over 500,000 copies at $50 and hit the cover of Time magazine. Today, expect to pay $100 or more for it on eBay. It featured hundreds of erotic photographs of Madonna and a host of celebrities including Isabella Rossellini, Big Daddy Kane, Naomi Campbell, and Vanilla Ice. Sex received enormous amounts of publicity-most of it negative-and scathing reviews from critics, but it helped sell over     2 million copies of the Erotica album. Though that multiplatinum number may sound impressive, it was actually one of her worst-selling albums, capturing only a fraction of the sales of her other best-selling albums, such as Like a Virgin. These three products thrust Madonnas image from racy and on the edge of acceptability to raunchy and over the edge. Hard-core fans loved the album and probably the book; they remained loyal because they expected her to challenge the status quo. But she pushed beyond mass-market appeal and turned off a lot of friends, which can be dan- gerous territory for even well-established brands like Calvin Klein. Tom Murry explains, "Theres a fine line between being sexy and going too far. You have to sense where your target audience is at a given moment-and how far you can take them without turning them off; without losing them." And Madonna did lose some fans. In many instances, however, fans saw her expression of sexual fantasies as a step toward equal rights for men and women, taking on the double standard that it was okay for men to produce erotica but not women. However, Madonna did change the standards for what is acceptable in the media with her innovative approach to positioning, opening the way for artists of the future to take off their clothes to sell records.     Chameleon Character