Musically, "Justify My Love" is a trip hop inspired song, with mid-tempo settings and instrumentation. The lyrics of the song are primarily about sex and romance. Madonna's vocals are primarily spoken and whispered, but almost never sung, a style which she again employed on her following studio album Erotica (1992).

Causing controversy worldwide, the accompanying music video was deemed too sexually explicit for MTV and was banned from the network.

“We respect her work as an artist and think she makes great videos,” said MTV executives in a statement about the clip. “This one is not for us.”

@TJP77 People today don't realize exactly how big of a deal this video was when it came out. At the time, Madonna was pretty much the biggest star in the world, maybe tied with Michael Jackson, but even he was a bit past his prime. She was it. And when this video was released, literally hell broke loose. It was immediately banned by MTV (still an extremely relevant channel at the time), and the controversy was all anyone could talk about. It was released on VHS tape -- the first song to be released as a 'video single', I think. She was on 60 Minutes, she was on every magazine cover, and Tipper Gore was all over it. And really, compared to everything that had come before it, this video was extremely explicit. Nobody had seen a major pop star behave like this before. I was 13, and my parents wouldn't let me watch it at all. I of course found a way, but it was like nothing I had ever seen.

Nowadays we have constant access to basically any kind of video you can imagine, including every variety of ****ography in existence. We barely even think twice about seeing a celebrity or pop star naked or even on a sex tape. But in 1990, it was unheard of to see the biggest star in the world perform sexually like this. Madonna deserves a lot of credit for taking this kind of risk, and doing it tastefully.