The driving force of Madonna’s debut remains its palpable physicality, born out of New York dance clubs, a new pop mandate to move your body in ways both public and private.
Sire Records founder Seymour Stein was lying in a hospital bed the first time he heard Madonna. It was 1982, and the man who’d signed the Ramones, Talking Heads, and the Pretenders had one of his usual heart infections. Listening to his Walkman, Stein perked up when he heard a bass-heavy demo of Madonna’s first single, “Everybody.” He called the DJ who’d given him the tape, Mark Kamins of New York’s anti-Studio 54 utopia Danceteria, and asked to meet Madonna, a Danceteria regular and waitress. Hours later, the 24-year-old dancer-turned-musician from Bay City, Mich. was in that hospital room, hoping Stein was well enough to draw up a contract.
Stein did sign her, and the following year put out Madonna, a cool and cohesive debut that helped resituate electronic dance-pop at Top 40’s apex with hits like “Holiday,” “Lucky Star,” and “Borderline.” But the suits at Warner Bros., which had acquired Sire a few years earlier, didn’t quite know what to do with the former punkwho was writing and performing muscular R&B for the club. Their early inclination was to work her at black radio stations, favoring a cartoonish urban collage for the “Everybody” cover instead of Madonna’s already perfected thousand-yard stare. Listeners weren’t sure what to make of the singer cooing those pleading vocals on the rising dance hit, but it wouldn’t be long before Madonna did something about that too.
At Madonna’s convincing, the label let her shoot a chintzy performance video for “Everybody,” followed by a more polished video for her striking second single “Burning Up.” In it, she tugs at a thick chain looped around her neck and rolls around in the street while singing lines like, “I’m not the others, I’d do anything/I’m not the same, I have no shame,” her panting underscored by Hi-NRG beats and raunchy rock guitar solos. A man drives towards Madonna, but at the end, it’s her behind the wheel—the first great wink to her signature subversion of power through sex. Though her 1984 MTV Music Video Awards performance is now considered erotic lore on the level of Elvis’ censored hips, that writhing set to “Like a Virgin” would have had little context without the slow, sensual burn of Madonna throughout ’83 and ’84. It was a record that seemed quirky but innocuous enough based on the feel-good wiggle of its initial crossover hit, “Holiday,” but the driving force of Madonna remains its palpable physicality—a mandate to move your body, in ways both public and private.
Part of what gives Madonna such affecting rhythm is its use of electronic instruments that sounded like the future then and typify the ’80s sound now—instruments like the LinnDrum and the Oberheim OB-X synthesizer. Disco had brought dance music to pop’s forefront, where producers like Giorgio Moroder traded its saccharine strings for robotic instrumentation, but by the early ’80s, the genre had cooled off. People still danced to synthesizers, but their positioning was crucial—both within culture and musical compositions. The Human League and Soft Cell scored two of 1982’s biggest and most synthetic smashes, but back then the gulf between punk-derived new wave and bygone disco seemed wider than it ever really was. Disco and disco-adjacent stars like Donna Summer and Michael Jackson still were programming their hits, but the overall focus was back on a full-band sound. There’s no shortage of organic instruments on Madonna’s debut—“Borderline” wouldn’t be the same without the piano’s melodic underscoring, standout album cut “Physical Attraction” without its funky little guitar line—but the slinky digital grooves often take center stage. Through this, Madonna is able to achieve an almost aggressive twinkling that still feels fresh: the effervescent fizz at the start of Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Cut to the Feeling” seems cribbed straight from “Lucky Star.”
Madonna vaguely criticized her debut’s sonic palette while promoting its follow-up, 1984’s Like a Virgin, but its focus is part of what makes the album so memorable, so of a time and place. She would soon become known for ritual pop star metamorphosis, but with a clearly defined musical backdrop, Madonna was able to let shine her biggest asset: herself. The way Madonna’s early collaborators talk about her—even the ones who take issue with her, like Reggie Lucas, who wrote “Borderline” and “Physical Attraction” and produced the bulk of the album—often revolves around her decisiveness, her style, the undeniability of her star quality. Some of these songs, like the self-penned workout “Think of Me,” aren’t all that special, but Madonna telling a lover to appreciate before she vacates is so self-assured, the message carries over to the listener. And when the material’s even better, like on “Borderline,” the passionate performance takes it over the top.
Maybe the New York cool kids rolled their eyes at the Midwest transplant after she blew up, but she had effectively bottled their attitude and open-mindedness and sold it to the MTV generation (sleeve of bangles and crucifix earrings not included). Innocent as it may look now, compared to the banned bondage videos and butt-naked books that followed, Madonna was a sexy, forward-thinking record that took pop in a new direction. Its success showed that, with the right diva at the helm, music similar to disco could find a place in the white mainstream—a call to the dance floor answered by everyone from Kylie to Robyn to Gaga to Madonna herself. After venturing out into various genre experiments and film projects, when Madonna needs a hit, the longtime queen of the Dance Songs chart often returns to the club. This approach doesn’t always work, as her last three records have shown, but you can’t fault her for trying to get back to that place where heavenly bodies shine for a night.
