This tawdry swing-jazz number was inspired by Madonna's turn as Breathless Mahoney, a '30s nightclub singer in the 1990 movie Dick Tracy. Prior to the film's release, the singer issued the soundtrack album I'm Breathless, a collection of jazzy tunes from and inspired by the movie. "Hanky Panky" was its second single, following "Vogue."
"Hanky Panky" is also the title of a chart-topping Tommy James And The Shondells song from 1966.
Breathless Mahoney tries to seduce the otherwise-engaged Dick Tracy - played by her real-life boyfriend Warren Beatty - and in this tune, Madonna imagines Breathless pulling out all the stops by praising the merits of a good spanking. Madonna, who wrote the song with her frequent collaborator Patrick Leonard, explained the concept in a 1991 Rolling Stone interview conducted by Carrie Fisher. She said: "The spanking thing started because I believed that my character in Dick Tracy liked to get smacked around and that's why she hung around with people like Al Pacino's character [mobster Big Boy Caprice]. Warren asked me to write some songs, and one of them - the hanky-panky song - was about that. I say in the song 'Nothing like a good spanky,' and in the middle, I say, 'Ooh, my bottom hurts just thinking about it.' When it came out everybody started asking, 'Do you like to get spanked?' and I said: 'Yeah. Yeah, I do.'"
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