FEATURE:
Hardly a Pretender!
The Making of a Pop Icon: Madonna’s Like a Virgin at Thirty-Eight
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ALTHOUGH it is not a big anniversary…
PHOTO CREDIT: Steven Meisel
I wanted to mark the upcoming thirty-eighth anniversary of Madonna’s Like a Virgin. Released on 12th November, 1984, the iconic album was re-released worldwide in 1985. I think that her second studio album is one of her most important and underrated. When we think of the ‘classic’ Madonna albums, usually we look towards Like a Prayer (1989) or Ray of Light (1998). After her eponymous 1983 album, there is a definitely sense of new ambition and boldness on Like a Virgin. Although her most explicit, expressive, and remarkable work would start to take shape later in the decade, Madonna ensured that her second studio album was unlike her debut the year before. Whereas Madonna wrote most of the songs on her debut, Like a Virgin saw her working with writers like Steve Bray. Bray actually produced the album alongside Madonna and primary producer Nile Rodgers. Like a Virgin has more pronounced Dance Pop and Disco sounds because of Rodgers’ involvement. I like the evolution between albums. Although there are a couple of deeper cuts that lack depth and memorability, Like a Virgin has more than enough to hold your interest. The title track is one of the most celebrated in Madonna’s catalogue. Angel, Love Don’t Live Here Anymore, and Pretender are also terrific tracks. The opening track – and the only song that could truly open things – is the divisive Material Girl. Not in terms of quality! I think many Madonna fans can agree that it is one of her greatest moments. I think Madonna resented being seen as material and having shallowness. Trying to establish herself as independent and strong, a song that talked about excess and material things possibly went against what she felt. That said, she performed Material Girl in subsequent tours and has an improved relationship with the song.
Although Like a Virgin fluctuated in the U.K., it did get to the top of the chart. A chart-topper in the U.S. and other nations, it is a huge-selling album that started to establish Madonna as the Queen of Pop. I don’t think enough people credit Like a Virgin with putting Madonna in that position. After only two albums, she was very much head and shoulders above most of her female peers! Big singles like Material Girl and Like a Virgin, tied to interviews and a lot of airplay, meant that Madonna was a huge star that was becoming an icon. I am going to come to a Wikipedia article that documents the legacy of Like a Virgin. First, back in 2019, Albumism celebrated thirty-five years of Madonna’s second studio album with ten fast and fun facts:
“(1) The first time that Madonna performed the controversial title track was at the first-ever MTV Video Music Awards on September 14, 1984, roughly seven weeks before the single’s official release on October 31, 1984. It remains arguably the most infamously memorable performance in the event’s history, for obvious reasons.
(2) The iconic photograph that adorns the album cover was shot by Steven Meisel, the revered fashion photographer who collaborated with Madonna on her provocative Sex coffee table book in 1992, eight years after Like A Virgin’s release.
(3) Signaling her growing stature in the pop music sphere, Madonna enlisted Chic co-founder and producer extraordinaire Nile Rodgers to oversee recording sessions for Like A Virgin. Hot on the heels of his production work for David Bowie’s massively successful 1983 Let’s Dance album, Rodgers invited his Chic bandmates Bernard Edwards (bass) and Tony Thompson (drums) to play on Madonna’s second LP, consistent with his greater emphasis on live instrumentation relative to Madonna’s synth and drum machine indebted debut album Madonna (1983).
“When I was talking to Madonna during the making of Like A Virgin and I got Chic to play on her songs, she kept saying: ‘Why don’t we just use a drum machine instead?’ Rodgers recently recalled to Classic Pop magazine. “I replied: ‘Because if you do that, then anybody can sound like you. But if we play it, then only we will sound like that.”
(4) While filming the iconic, Marilyn Monroe inspired music video for “Material Girl,” the album’s second official single, Madonna met the actor Sean Penn, whom she married seven months later on her 27th birthday (August 16, 1985). Their four-year marriage concluded with the couple’s divorce in 1989.
(5) Like A Virgin was Madonna’s first album to hit #1 on the Billboard 200 chart. Since she achieved the initial milestone, eight of her albums have also reached the top spot, with her most recent album Madame X (2019) debuting at #1 earlier this year.
(6) Though closely associated with Like A Virgin, the hit single “Into The Groove” was not included in the original track sequencing for the album. It was subsequently added to the album’s European-only 1985 reissue and appeared in the 1985 film Desperately Seeking Susan, though it was curiously absent from the soundtrack. “The dance floor was quite a magical place for me,” Madonna once reflected in revisiting the song’s impetus. “I started off wanting to be a dancer, so that had a lot to do with the song. The freedom that I always feel when I'm dancing, that feeling of inhabiting your body, letting yourself go, expressing yourself through music. I always thought of it as a magical place—even if you're not taking ecstasy.”
(7) Although Like A Virgin proved to be a smash success commercially, the critical reception that welcomed her sophomore long player was lukewarm at best, with more than a few critics unwilling to embrace her growing credibility as a pop artist and vocalist. This scrutiny would begin to dissipate, however, with the release of 1986’s True Blue and particularly 1989’s Like A Prayer, which earned well-deserved critical plaudits across the globe.
(8) On April 10, 1985 at Seattle’s Paramount Theatre, Madonna launched The Virgin Tour, her first national tour, which spanned 40 dates in all, concluding in June 1985 with a five-date run split between New York City’s historic venues Radio City Music Hall and Madison Square Garden. Though their debut album Licensed To Ill (1986) wouldn’t arrive for another year-and-a-half, the Beastie Boys were selected as the tour’s opening act. However the upstart hip-hop trio were neither the first nor the second choice to share the billing with Madonna—The Fat Boys and Run-DMC were the preferred picks, but the groups were not available and too expensive, respectively. “I don't know why she thought it would be a good idea,” Adam “Ad-Rock” Horowitz said of Madonna and her management’s decision to invite the group on the tour during a 1998 SPIN interview. “It was a terrible idea. But it was great for her in a way because we were so awful that by the time she came onstage, the audience had to be happy."
(9) Like A Virgin remains Madonna’s highest selling studio album of her career to date in the United States, having earned the coveted diamond certification reflective of 10 million units sold. The rest of her top five selling studio LPs include 1986’s True Blue (7 million), her eponymous 1983 debut Madonna (5 million), 1998’s Ray Of Light (4 million) and 1989’s Like A Prayer (4 million). The 1990 hits compilation The Immaculate Collection has also earned diamond certification status.
(10) Albumism readers and writers disagree with respect to where Like A Virgin ranks within Madonna’s studio album discography, with the former ranking it #12 and the latter placing it at #3”.
The fact that Like a Virgin has sold so many copies and scores so highly in polls of her best albums shows how important it is. I still feel it is a little underrated by some critics and fans. Surely one of her five best albums, it definitely helped shape the sound and face of Pop in 1984. Sexy, playful, assured, varied and fun, Like a Virgin is a superb album that does not sound that dated. Some of the production is not that strong, but the fact we are playing songs from the album and discussing it today shows how important it is! I want to get to a review of Like a Virgin that was published many years after the album came out. First, Rolling Stone said this in 1985:
“IN THE EARLY Sixties, when girls were first carving their niche in rock & roll, the Crystals were singing about how it didn’t matter that the boy they loved didn’t drive a Cadillac car, wasn’t some big movie star: he wasn’t the boy they’d been dreaming of, but so what? Madonna is a more, well, practical girl. In her new song, “Material Girl,” she claims, “the boy with the cold hard cash is always Mr. Right/’Cause we’re living in a material world/And I am a material girl.” When she finds a boy she likes, it’s for his “satin sheets/And luxuries so fine” (“Dress You Up”).
Despite her little-girl voice, there’s an undercurrent of ambition that makes her more than the latest Betty Boop. When she chirps, “You made me feel/Shiny and new/Like a virgin,” in her terrific new single, you know she’s after something.
Nile Rodgers produced Like a Virgin, Madonna’s second LP; he also played guitar on much of it and brought in ex-Chic partners Bernard Edwards on bass and Tony Thompson on drums. Rodgers wisely supplies the kind of muscle Madonna’s sassy lyrics demand. Her light voice bobs over the heavy rhythm and synth tracks like a kid on a carnival ride. On the hit title song, Madonna is all squeals, bubbling over the bass line from the Four Tops’ “I Can’t Help Myself.” She doesn’t have the power or range of, say, Cyndi Lauper, but she knows what works on the dance floor.
Still, some of the new tracks don’t add up. Her torchy ballad “Love Don’t Live Here Anymore” is awful. The role of the rejected lover just doesn’t suit her. Madonna’s a lot more interesting as a conniving cookie, flirting her way to the top, than as a bummed-out adult”.
I want to bring in AllMusic’s more contemporary take on one of Madonna’s best albums. A hugely important moment in Pop music, an artist that many only heard about a year before Like a Virgin was starting to dominate the charts and airwaves! Like a Virgin definitely turned Madonna into an icon of the ‘80s – and, looking back, it was the album that confirmed her place as the Queen of Pop:
“Madonna had hits with her first album, even reaching the Top Ten twice with "Borderline" and "Lucky Star," but she didn't become a superstar, an icon, until her second album, Like a Virgin. She saw the opening for this kind of explosion and seized it, bringing in former Chic guitarist Nile Rodgers in as a producer, to help her expand her sound, and then carefully constructed her image as an ironic, ferociously sexy Boy Toy; the Steven Meisel-shot cover, capturing her as a buxom bride with a Boy Toy belt buckle on the front, and dressing after a night of passion, was as key to her reinvention as the music itself. Yet, there's no discounting the best songs on the record, the moments when her grand concepts are married to music that transcends the mere classification of dance-pop. These, of course, are "Material Girl" and "Like a Virgin," the two songs that made her an icon, and the two songs that remain definitive statements. They overshadow the rest of the record, not just because they are a perfect match of theme and sound, but because the rest of the album vacillates wildly in terms of quality. The other two singles, "Angel" and "Dress You Up," are excellent standard-issue dance-pop, and there are other moments that work well ("Over and Over," "Stay," the earnest cover of Rose Royce's "Love Don't Live Here"), but overall, it adds up to less than the sum of its parts -- partially because the singles are so good, but also because on the first album, she stunned with style and a certain joy. Here, the calculation is apparent, and while that's part of Madonna's essence -- even something that makes her fun -- it throws the record's balance off a little too much for it to be consistent, even if it justifiably made her a star”.
I’ll finish with that Wikipedia article about the legacy of Like a Virgin. Still influencing artist to this very day, it is amazing to consider just how impactful the album is. Ahead of its thirty-eighth anniversary on 12th November, I know fans around the world will be playing the album loud:
“After the release of Like a Virgin, Stephen Holden commented in The New York Times: "No phenomenon illustrates more pointedly how pop music history seems to run in cycles than the overnight success of the 24-year-old pop siren known as Madonna. The month before Christmas, Madonna's second album, Like a Virgin sold more than two million copies. Teen-agers were lining up in stores to purchase the album the way their parents had lined up to buy Beatles records in the late 60's." Madonna proved she was not a one-hit wonder with the release of the album which sold 12 million copies worldwide at the time of its release. In 2016, Billboard ranked at number nine in the list of Certified Diamond Albums From Worst to Best. Like a Virgin was placed at fifth at Album of the Decade by Billboard—the highest peak by a female performer.
Taraborrelli felt that "Like a Virgin is really a portrait of Madonna's uncanny pop instincts empowered by her impatient zeal for creative growth and her innate knack for crafting a good record." He added that the success of the album made it clear what was Madonna's real persona. "She was a street-smart dance queen with the sexy allure of Marilyn Monroe, the coy iciness of Marlene Dietrich and the cutting and protective glibness of a modern Mae West". Although the album received mixed reviews, Taraborrelli believed that the "mere fact that at the time of its release so many couldn't resist commenting on the record was a testament to the continuous, growing fascination with Madonna ... Every important artist has at least one album in his or her career whose critical and commercial success becomes the artist's magic moment; for Madonna, Like a Virgin was just such a defining moment."
Chris Smith, author of 101 Albums That Changed Popular Music, believed that it was with Like a Virgin that Madonna was able to steal the spotlight towards herself. She asserted her sexuality as only male rock stars had done before, moving well beyond the limited confines of being a pop artist, to becoming a focal point for nationwide discussions of power relationships in the areas of sex, race, gender, religion, and other divisive social topics. Her songs became a lightning rod for both criticism by conservatives and imitation by the younger female population. Consequence of Sound ranked the album at number two on "The 10 Greatest Sophomore Albums of All Time," calling it the album that "carved out the throne...that would be Madonna's forever: the Queen of Pop”.
An album that I think does still not get the respect and true salute that it deserves, Like a Virgin is undoubtedly one of the most important in all of Pop! From 1984, Madonna would continue to expand her music, grow in confidence, and change her image. True Blue was her next studio album in 1986. In 1984, with the remarkable Like a Virgin, a global superstar…
WAS born.