A 1984 awards-show performance in a wedding dress and a belt reading 'Boy Toy', writhing on the stage (1984)
The first MTV Video Music Awards — the performance that made her notorious overnight.
Popular music · Pop
Madonna
born 1958 · American
Dance-pop — the Queen of Pop, Sire and Warner Bros.
Madonna is the best-selling female recording artist in history and the defining pop star of the 1980s and after, famous less for a single sound than for serial reinvention — club diva, Catholic provocateur, electronica convert, disco revivalist. She controlled her own image and business from early on, wrote or co-wrote most of her hits, and made controversy over sex and religion part of the work rather than an accident of it.
How to spot them
- ▸The Queen of Pop; the Boy Toy belt, the cone bra, the crucifixes, the constant costume change
- ▸Producers as collaborators: Nile Rodgers, Patrick Leonard, Shep Pettibone, William Orbit, Mirwais
- ▸Sire and Warner Bros.; her own label, Maverick
- ▸Trained as a dancer; moved to New York in 1978 with, by her own account, $35
Songs & albums
A 1986 single in which a girl tells her father she is keeping her baby (1986)
"Papa Don't Preach" — attacked by pro-choice and anti-abortion campaigners alike.
A 1989 video with burning crosses and a Black saint that cost her a soft-drink sponsorship (1989)
"Like a Prayer" — Pepsi pulled its advertisement after protests from the Vatican and others.
A 1990 single and dance craze drawn from Harlem ballroom culture, name-checking Garbo and Monroe (1990)
"Vogue" — produced with Shep Pettibone, video by David Fincher.
A 1998 album of Kabbalah, motherhood and electronica made with William Orbit (1998)
Ray of Light — her most acclaimed record, winner of four Grammys.
A 2005 dance single built on a rare cleared sample of a Swedish group's synth riff (2005)
"Hung Up", from Confessions on a Dance Floor, using ABBA's "Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)".
A 1996 film role as an Argentine first lady, which won her a Golden Globe (1996)
Evita, directed by Alan Parker.
A 1991 tour documentary, shot in black and white off stage and colour on it (1991)
Truth or Dare, released in Britain as In Bed with Madonna, following the Blond Ambition Tour.
Quick-fire facts
- •Born Madonna Louise Ciccone on 16 August 1958 in Bay City, Michigan; her mother died of breast cancer when she was five
- •Guinness World Records lists her as the best-selling female recording artist of all time
- •Like a Virgin (1984) was produced by Nile Rodgers of Chic
- •Her 1992 coffee-table book Sex, issued in a mylar wrapper, appeared alongside the album Erotica
- •The Blond Ambition Tour of 1990 was condemned by the Vatican and threatened with arrest in Toronto
- •She was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2008, in her first year of eligibility, by Justin Timberlake
- •The Celebration Tour of 2023–24 was a greatest-hits retrospective covering four decades
- •She has directed feature films, including Filth and Wisdom and W.E.
- •"Hung Up" is one of very few records for which Björn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson have cleared an ABBA sample
Drill it — 7 cards
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Sources
- Rock & Roll Hall of Fame — Madonna — Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductee
- J. Randy Taraborrelli — Madonna: An Intimate Biography