FEATURE:
Madonna’s Eponymous Debut Album at Forty
IN THIS PHOTO: Madonna photographed by Gary Heery in 1983
Will We Get an Expanded Anniversary Release?
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WHEN Madonna’s…
ALBUM COVER PHOTO: Gary Heery
True Blue (her third studio album) turned thirty-five in 2021, it got an expanded release. That being said, I don’t think that Ray of Light got a special twenty-fifth anniversary reissue this year. I guess it depends how Madonna and the label feel, and whether it is worth the financial risk of releasing the album again and hoping that it sells. I think that things need to be considered for the approaching fortieth anniversary of her eponymous debut album. Madonna came out on 27th July, 1983. Even though there is a way to go yet, that date will come around soon enough! I recently wrote a feature that asks whether the book featuring Richard Corman’s photos of Madonna pre-fame in 1983 will be reissued. Thinking about the album and a possible fortieth anniversary, there are a number of photos that could be included. If you had a double vinyl that has this amazing new sleeve design, accompanied by some incredible album notes, lyrics, together with a selection of photos by Richard Corman - and, of course, some remixes, rarities, and some live versions of the album’s songs. Gary Heery is responsible for the cover image. i feel there could be outtakes included as part of that package. There are some wonderful photos of Madonna from 1983 and before that could see their way onto an anniversary reissue of her wonderful debut album. I think that this is one of the most important Madonna anniversaries. Even if her debut is not ranked alongside Ray of Light and Like a Prayer (1989), it is definitely one of her strongest albums. It got good reviews in 1983, but there has been this retrospective drive and extra appreciation. Madonna wrote or most of the songs on the album. She wanted to make it her work and not be another Pop star where other writers and producers were speaking for her. Even if there were collaborators from 1984’s Like a Virgin onwards, Madonna is an album where the future Queen of Pop was showing this confidence and faith in her music!
As such, you do hear this original and relatable artist who was soon primed for worldwide fame. I guess Madonna does fit into the sounds that were around in 1983. Her albums would become bigger and more experimental in future years, but there is so much to love about her debut. Containing gems like Burning Up, Borderline and Holiday, this is an album that will stand the test of time and inspire people for decades to come. I am going to round up with thoughts around an anniversary reissue of Madonna. Before that, there are a couple of pieces to bring in. One, from CLASH in 2018 (twenty-five years after Madonna’s release) highlights how this phenomenal debut is a masterpiece that changed the face of Pop:
“It's 1983. Punk is dead. Post-punk is on it's last limbs. According to those in the know, disco is dead also, although that proved not to be the case. Indie and alternative is in it's infancy and pop music seems as varied and sparse in it's tastes as it ever has done. Prince was working up to his career's pinnacle, Talking Heads were about to descend from theirs and, in that climate, it seemed that very few would enjoy more than their fifteen minutes of fame, in a sector of the industry that now felt more immediate than ever before.
Recovering from it's biggest shake up since the emergence of The Beatles in the early 1960s, pop music also felt boundless in what it now had to offer the world. MTV blew the entertainment world wide open in 1981, turning former child star Michael Jackson into The King Of Pop in the process. The industry needed a Queen to share his throne.
Step forward a 25-year-old Michigan native who now worked the restaurants of New York City, following after her move to the big apple, pursuing her dream of making a career in modern dance, fell flat on it’s face. Her name? Madonna Louise Ciccone, although the world would come to know her by only one name.
PHOTO CREDIT: Richard Corman
In 1982, bed-stricken by a recurrent heart condition, Sire Records' founder Seymour Stein pressed play on her demo for ‘Everybody’, the song that was to become Madonna's first single, as well as the closing track on the eventual debut record. Within hours of hearing it for the first time, and calling over to Danceteria DJ Mark Kamis (who had given Stein the tape in the first place), Madonna was by his bedside, signing the contract that would see her career begin with one of the most fabulously realised debut albums in music history.
It's now 2018 and Madonna is celebrating her 60th birthday. It's also 35 years since that eponymous debut album and subject of this spotlight review hit the shelves in record stores all over the world and, as I drop the needle on my newly acquired vinyl copy, I get a sense of just how exciting it must have been for someone in my position to be doing just that, more than three decades ago.
As the shimmering intro to ‘Lucky Star’ begins to play and is replaced by that prime 80s mix of synth beats, choppy guitars and a funky bass line, I find myself transfixed by her timeless, thousand yard stare, one half of which shoes an angelic, young adult, the other a hardened, tortured soul. She had the look of a woman both frustrated by her past and determined to ensure her future is markedly different. More endearingly, she has the look of someone who's completely unaware of how different that future would prove to be, for both herself, and the rest of the entire world.
It's difficult to think of many more debut albums that, in retrospect, hint so boldly at the career that an artist would grow into and the reputation that they would subsequently cultivate – the only one that springs immediately to mind is U2's ‘Boy’, an album made in Dublin kitchens but destined to be played in the world's biggest, best arenas.
Whilst nowhere near as daring sonically or visually as Madonna’s later works would prove to be, her debut album is, nonetheless, a masterpiece. Offering something for everyone without ever selling her talents short, to say it’s a tone setter for the themes that she would come to personify throughout the rest of the decade would be a huge understatement.
It’s a record of immense power and longevity that feels as impressive today as it would have done upon first release and the contrarians who say otherwise are the kind of people that you’d never really want to bump into at a party.
Considering she’d return less than a year later with ‘Like A Virgin’ and, before the decade finished, would release ‘True Blue’ and ‘Like A Prayer’, it’s easy to see why this album can be overlooked, but do so at your peril, as within this magnificent 41-or-so minutes is some of the finest, most relevant, most enduring and most danceable music, ever put to tape”.
IN THIS PHOTO: Madonna in New York in 1983/PHOTO CREDIT: Richard Corman
The reviews for Madonna have been largely positive. Although Rolling Stone and a few others were not entirely totally sold on the 1983 album, everyone recognises it for what it is: one of the most important and influential ever. If some dismissed Madonna as a Minnie Mouse soundalike and someone who was a one-hit wonder, those who were listening hard enough saw the potential. Madonna introduced this star who was getting into households around the world. In 1983, there was not a lot of Disco music around. Many felt that the genre had died a few years previous. Madonna was bringing it back to the mainstream. In years since, so many artists have been influenced by Madonna’s exceptional debut. In their retrospective review, this is what Pitchfork observed about the mighty Madonna:
“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 punk who 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”.
I do not know whether Madonna herself will have the time to promote the fortieth anniversary of her debut. On 27th July, the day Madonna turns forty, she has a gig in Tulsa, Oklahoma as part of her Celebration Tour. She is going to be fully immersed in her first big live tour for a few years! I am sure that there will be some announcement or event around the anniversary. There are these gaps in the Madonna universe that you’d love to see filled. There have been documentaries in the past but, as she is looking ahead to a tour and back on the debut album, something that captures this would be interesting (though she may record a tour documentary anyway and release that). No single book dedicated to her debut album and the period leading up to that has been published so far as I can tell. Also, you would love to see new articles and examinations of Madonna. Before the fortieth anniversary, I am going to do a few other features around Madonna. In addition to this tour and the anniversary, the Queen of Pop is sixty-five in August. It is a busy, eventful and important year for an artist who is still in a league of her own! The importance of Madonna’s debut album turning forty is pretty huge. Even if she will be readying herself for a gig on 27th July, I hope she can post something to social media. It makes me wonder whether there will be a reissue of the album. Maybe remastered HD videos on YouTube of the album’s singles (though Borderline has already had that treatment - and it looks really fantastic for it!). As I said at the start, seeing photos shot around 1982/1983 would add context and dimensions to one of the all-time great debut albums. The opening track from Madonna might be called Lucky Star. Not necessarily referring to her break in music, there is no doubt about the fact there was no luck involved! When it comes to the brilliance of Madonna’s debut album and the success that she enjoyed following its release in 1983, it was drive, determination and raw talent that got her there! This year, we get to celebrate forty years since Madonna arrived into the world and, with it, soon made her…
ONE of the most important artists in the world.