It’s 1984. Madonna is 25 years old and has just released her second album, Like a Virgin. She gives an interview to MTV.
Question. How do you define yourself? What category do you fall into?
Answer. In a new category that I’ve defined [smiles].
Question. What’s original about that category?
Answer. [A few seconds of silence]. Me [more laughter].
Madonna Louise Ciccone turns 68 this August. Much has changed in her personal life and musical career over the past few decades. However, her essence still harks back to those two answers in that interview, which took place almost at the beginning of her career. She is still very much herself: unique, inimitable, powerful, relentless and, above all, free.
When describing the singer, the cliché of “reinvention” is invariably used. But this isn’t entirely accurate, because Madonna uses different paths to reach the same goal: to absorb the sound of alternative dance clubs and redirect it toward the pop charts. This happens again in her new work, her first in seven years, which is titled Confessions II. Scheduled for release on July 3, it serves as a continuation of Confessions on a Dance Floor, her 2005 album. Both albums were produced by the Englishman Stuart Price, an expert at capturing the trends going on in countercultural clubs.
In her latest album, the singer presents dance as a shamanic journey. To promote it, she’s been seen in nightclubs behind the DJ booths, dancing uninhibitedly alongside young disciples like Charli XCX or Sabrina Carpenter.
One of the songs on the new album is titled Danceteria, the name of the New York club where the singer of Like a Prayer began her career. It was in this venue that she premiered her first single, Everybody, back in 1982, before an audience of 300 people. Miraculously, someone recorded the performance, so that today, we can enjoy watching it. Dressed in cycling shorts, a hat, a white shirt and a jacket, with her blonde curls swirling across her forehead, the music was pre-recorded, meaning that only her audacious voice was live.
Three dancers accompanied this cheeky young woman in a delightfully amateurish number. There, Madonna was taking her first step toward her ambition: “I want to conquer the world,” she kept repeating.
In 1977, at the age of 19, Madonna arrived in a dangerous New York City. She only had $35 in her pocket. She didn’t know a soul and had never been to the center of the world. She wanted to be a dancer: singing hadn’t even crossed her mind.
Madonna escaped the provincial, conservative and religious environment of her birth – Bay City, Michigan – at the suggestion of her dance teacher, Christopher Flynn, a gay man and the singer’s first cultural mentor. “At school, I felt like a freak, a misfit. I saw myself through heterosexual, sexist eyes. I was too busy repressing myself. And then Christopher came along and introduced me to life,” the singer said. Flynn invited her to a David Bowie concert. She would always remember it.
Madonna’s life was marked by three painful events. First, the loss of her mother to breast cancer. Her mother was 30 years old, while the future artist was only five. Her mother was a devoutly religious woman who dedicated herself to giving birth to and raising six children. Her father, a traditional Italian engineer, ruled the house with an iron fist: no television, no noisy games at home, a strict curfew and bedtime. After he was widowed, he remarried in 1966; Madonna never got along with her stepmother. The artist acknowledged that her mother’s death devastated her, though it also fueled her ambition. “That void prepared me for my later achievements,” she noted.
The second great loss in her life was that of Martin Burgoyne, her best friend in her early career. A dancer and choreographer, Martin introduced Madonna to the gay clubs of New York, where she began to develop as an artist. He was her confidant and designed her first tour; they were inseparable. In 1986, at the age of 23 – and in the midst of the AIDS epidemic – Martin died from the virus. Since then, Madonna has participated in numerous fundraising campaigns to fight against AIDS.
The third traumatic event also occurred before the release of her first album, during her early years in New York: she was raped by a man who dragged her to a rooftop at knifepoint. It was the late 1970s and the city was experiencing a moment of artistic excitement, with the arrival of punk and the rise of dance clubs… but it was also the urban center with the highest number of robberies and murders.
Madonna survived as best she could and later had to grapple with the consequences of some of her decisions. At 21, she accepted a job (which barely paid anything) to pose nude for a photographer. Those images were published in 1984 (when the artist had become popular) in the erotic magazines Playboy and Penthouse. Far from being intimidated, the singer declared: “I’m not ashamed!”
That same year, 1984, saw the release of the album that would forever transform Madonna into a global superstar: Like a Virgin. Nile Rodgers, the album’s producer and a master of dance music, recently told a story during a performance in Madrid. It reflected the singer’s ambitious and courageous character, from the very beginning of her career: “I told her, ‘Madonna, the first single should be Material Girl. I think it’s a very marketable slogan.’ But she replied, ‘You can kiss my material ass, because the [first] single will be Like a Virgin.’” Madonna knew that the song – performed with a large cross around her neck – would cause a huge stir.
In a career spanning four and a half decades, the artist has released mediocre albums (MDNA), average ones (Rebel Heart), as well as some groundbreaking and seminal works that influenced much of the commercial pop that followed, such as Like a Prayer, Erotica, Ray of Light and Confessions on a Dance Floor. However, while her musical legacy is undeniably important, what truly transcends is her stature as a fundamental figure in contemporary popular culture. This is due to her open approach to sexuality, her commercial acumen, her relentless desire to provoke, her advocacy for the LGBTQ+ community, her commitment to giving visibility to racialized communities, her feminist touch, her desire to delve deeper into art as an evolving form of expression, her fighting spirit, her audacity in navigating the jungle of social media… and her more recent confrontation with ageists.
Today, it’s worth remembering that, when she was taking her first, stumbling steps in New York City — during that difficult and distressing period, back when she had to take any job to survive and even resorted to scavenging for food in dumpsters — she always insisted to her friends: “I want to be famous. I want attention. I want everyone to love me.” Well, she certainly achieved it.
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