We lost one music Queen today. The Queen of Soul, Aretha Franklin passed away in Detroit and it has prompted the whole internet to stop for a collective moment and just remember her contributions.
However, this also happens to be a day of a celebration of life for another Queen. The Queen of Pop turns 60 today. Happy Birthday, Madonna Ciccone!
Happy birthday Madonna! Check out our list of her 50 greatest songs https://t.co/fe8ajzixs7 pic.twitter.com/Go21fZraQh
— Rolling Stone (@RollingStone) August 16, 2018
Madonna was born and raised in Michigan and moved to New York City in the 70s to become a dancer. She performed in various bands as a drummer, guitarist and vocalist to make ends meet until she caught her first big break in 1982 when she signed her first recording contract. The rest is history.
Madonna has always been known for pushing boundaries. At a time when it was quite rare to see a female pop star being blatant with her sexuality, the Like a Virgin singer quickly became a public obsession. Through the 80s and 90s there was Madonna, Michael Jackson, and then everyone else. Her rebellious style and in-your-face attitude made her the perfect tabloid target. Madonna gossip was the best gossip and her personal life fueled lots of it.
She had a short and tumultuous marriage to actor Sean Penn and also dated Tupac Shakur. She even enjoyed a strange but very public affair with actor Warren Beatty after the two appeared together in Dick Tracy.
Throughout her career Madonna has been known as an artist who is constantly reinventing herself. It could be said that she invented the concept of reinventing oneself as an artist. These days it’s standard for female pop stars to take on a new “persona” with each new album release, but before Madonna there was rarely such a thing. Musicians kept their status in the industry by maintaining their fanbase and catering to what that base wanted. The “Material Girl” flipped that notion on it’s head and gave her audiences what they never knew they wanted until she made them want it.
Whatever your opinion of her style, politics or attitude there is no doubt that Madonna is an icon who changed the landscape of pop music forever and at 60 years old continues to release popular music, sell-out arena tours and use her fame to support charitable work in places like Malawi – the country from which she adopted two of children.
Happy Birthday to the Queen of Pop!
Just for fun, here’s a little trip down memory lane with some her biggest hits (and style changes!).
1.
THIS is vintage Madonna. Her first album Madonna (later retitled Madonna: The First Album )produced several hits right off the bat, including Holiday, Lucky Star and Borderline. But it was Everybody that first threw her onto the scene, a hit many people don’t remember when talking about the early days for the Queen of Pop. Watching back these videos makes me realize how much the age of video probably played into Madonna’s rise to stardom. For the pop scene she was the perfect representative – she was pretty, young, and she could pull off dance moves. She wasn’t a gifted vocalist, but she was a brilliant marketer and entertaining to watch. Timing is everything and she was the perfect fresh face for the age of MTV. Her music at this point was fun and easy to dance to, and her style was quickly copied across the country. What we think of as 80s fashion these days is actually “Madonna fashion”. She wasn’t yet fully-formed as a public personality, but the beginnings of what she would soon become are easy to spot.
2.
Madonna became MADONNA with her historic Like a Virgin album. She’s still know to this day as the “Material Girl”…a hit that launched her into her Marilyn Monroe phase. Her performance of the album’s title track at the MTV Music Awards sent church ladies all over America scurrying for the “off” button to the family tv and officially launched her into the stratosphere as one of the most famous and best-selling artists of all time. Watch how she instinctually knows where the camera is and how to look at it. That’s not as easy as it looks when you’re performing. You’ve got a million things going on at once. But it’s a sign of how good she was at her job, and how seriously she took the business of branding.
3.
The True Blue album was next and this was Madonna at peak 80s-fied Marilyn Monroe. With over 25 million sold, it broke records in it’s day and is still one of the best-selling albums of all time. –Papa Don’t Preach, True Blue, La Isla Bonita, Live to Tell…every single was a hit and the new look sent America into a fresh obsession with the late Marilyn Monroe. Every white girl wanted to look like Madonna and then every white girl wanted to look like Madonna looking like Marilyn Monroe. They’re all fantastic and they were all hits. I actually had to buy this record twice because the first one I bought had a scratch on True Blue that made it skip. I played it anyway until I could afford a replacement. To this day I still hear that skip in my mind when I hear that song. It was hard to choose one single from this album to post because they were all hits and all fantastic, so I guess I’ll just go with the skip!
4.
Like a Prayer was the Material Girl in full rebellious-Catholic mode and may have been the first time the public realized that they couldn’t count on the same Madonna album after album. Brunette Madonna blaspheming the Catholic crucifix, making out with black Jesus and dancing in front of burning crosses while backed by an angelic sounding gospel choir is my FAVORITE MADONNA. For you young folks out there it’s hard to explain just how controversial making out with a black man on tv and making a black man Jesus were at that time. Madonna was met with protests from churches and angry parents who didn’t want their kids watching such filth on tv. Which is kind of funny to think about because these days those burning crosses would probably have been what got her banned from social media.
*Sidenote: I miss the days when music videos told stories.
5.
Erotica brought us Madonna-as-dominatrix. Once again playing with public notions of sexual boundaries, she catapulted herself to a new type of fame. The album was also released at the same time as her coffee-table book Sex and it launched a tour filled with all kinds of naughtiness on stage.
6.
Bedtime Story was Madonna a little more serious and experimental. It’s not one of her most talked-about albums but you can see the beginnings of her fascination with electronica, setting her up for yet another transformation.
7.
Madonna’s most famous transformation was into a mother. After the release of Bedtime Story the performer took nearly four years off from making new music. When she returned, she delivered yet another stunning transformation. Electronica had been an underground genre for a long time but with Ray of Light she made it mainstream, introducing an entirely new audience to the indie art form. This was a more grounded, more mature Madonna and a lot of people think of this as her best album.
8.
Music was next and solidified Madonna as a bonafide electronica artist, but she also went back to her roots as the Queen of Pop by pulling in other popular artists and going back to making fun, party music. I love pregnant, thug-life cowgirl Madonna.
Since that time Madonna has pretty much stuck to the dance/electronica genre. Her last album was released in 2015 but she still tours and still wears crazy get-ups on the red carpet and continues to be the one woman every other woman in pop music is chasing. That’s an incredible legacy and one well-deserved.
“I’m tough, I’m ambitious, and I know exactly what I want. If that makes me a bitch, okay.”
Mmmkay, then…Happy Birthday, bitch! You go!
Just kidding....Kira is a writer, actor and suburban housewife and mother. Her mantra is "If I can't do it from the couch, is it really worth it?"
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