Madonna

St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture by Robin Markowitz

In late 1983, an unfamiliar, high, piercing female voice emerged on American pop radio with increasing and puzzling frequency. Shortly thereafter, a sexually obsessed, self-involved, and irregularly clad young woman writhed on music video screens in homes and in dance clubs in urban areas across the United States imploring "Everybody" to dance her dance of liberation. The intriguing figure with the jarring voice turned out to be a white neo-disco singer who frequented the bohemian enclaves of lower Manhattan during the early 1980s, seemingly just trying to make it in show business. When asked her real ambition, the young woman told a stunned Dick Clark: "To rule the world." Madonna Louise Ciccone meant it. Over the course of the next decade, the self-proclaimed "Boy Toy" fought to dominate every corner of the entertainment world with seductive films, consistently successful music, and disturbingly magnetic public gestures, while at the same time expressing a more generous desire to convert everyone to her cause of personal freedom.

Madonna's rise to "world domination" did not come in a vacuum. The Bay City, Michigan native first appeared as a mere aftershock to a series of large and small pop explosions that rocked the music world during the 1980s. After Michael Jackson's thunderous transformation from former child prodigy to Elvis-sized icon, the next tremor came from thirtyish female singer Cyndi Lauper who couched her broad-based feminism in a cloak of gentle weirdness and cute, cuddly charm. Lauper was soon swept aside by the triumph of the young black musician, writer, producer, and singer from Minneapolis once called Prince, who pushed an ethos of sex as salvation in his film Purple Rain. While Prince had been performing and fomenting nervous unrest over his themes of overt sexuality at his Warner Bros. record label for several years, it wasn't until he found his place in the post-Jackson hysteria that he crossed over to the mainstream. Not long after Prince's biggest pop moment, the nearly middle-aged blue-collar rocker Bruce Springsteen found himself sucked into the post-Thriller whirlwind. Unlike artist's like Prince, Jackson, and Elvis Presley, whose fame seemed to cause them personal strife, Madonna seemed especially capable of handling her own rise to celebrity.

Madonna Ciccone had a bittersweet childhood in a suburban town in Michigan, losing her mother to breast cancer when Madonna was five years old. As a young adult, Madonna left her studies at the University of Michigan to pursue her career with vigor in New York. Seemingly impervious to most criticism, Madonna trusted her own instincts as she embarked on her own path.

Madonna's initial acceptance by the critical mainstream of rock was, to say the least, chilly. Madonna originally appeared too glossy, too egocentric for the left-leaning, humanist rock critical establishment. It was easy for such critics to like Prince--himself a sexually obsessed, ego-centric male ex-disco singer. He was described as "daring," and "challenging." He too had a decidedly less than charming voice, was capable of producing glossy records, yet his violence and machismo saved him from the scorn experienced by Madonna. Even his desire to leave R&B behind in favor of a rock style so whitened that MTV played his videos before they would touch those of the "too black" Michael Jackson earned him immediate praise as another great barrier-smasher in the rock pantheon. Prince was the critics' darling years before he hit it really big.

That Madonna accomplished similar maneuvers from the opposite direction initially earned her derision. When the general music buying and listening public connected immediately with her, the dissenters wrote her off as a concoction of pure music-biz hype. By early 1985, however, this became an increasingly laborious task. After Madonna's first single, "Everybody," crossed over from the dance charts to Billboard's "Hot 100" and her first and second albums, Madonna and Like a Virgin, had become the latest post-Thriller sensations, she demanded some serious attention.

Madonna is the one performer of all those caught in the mid-1980s pop mania who used it successfully to make her point. Madonna relished the massive attention, knew how to use it to further her personal and artistic interests, and literally had no other ambition than to dominate popular entertainment for as long as possible. If it meant hiring Michael Jackson's manager, she did that; if it meant creating disconcerting publicity stunts that deliberately subverted religious, sexual, and racial mores, she also did that. "Unlike the others, I'd do anything/I'm not the same; I have no shame" she sang in "Burning Up," a single from Madonna, her first album. She courted mass attention and her pursuit of it became an essential part of her presentation. Madonna quickly found her voice and it was and remained for a long time a dead-on connection with her audience. Her work needed no further justification. Her personal striving, at first glance so redolent of an 1980s Reagan-era ethic, contrasted intriguingly with her clear ambition to share this sense of limitless possibility with her largely adolescent female audience.

Even as Madonna achieved sensation status, she continued to have critics. Rolling Stone magazine accused Madonna of having "one guiding emotion: ambition." While it is difficult to recall any male rocker taken to task for committing that particular infraction, Rolling Stone leveled a worse claim: that she had "used her boyfriends" in her climb to the top. "The men who have gotten close to her--tough guys a lot of them--have gotten their hearts broken as often as not." Unlike many other women, Madonna seemed aware of and able to use her sexuality to further her own ideas.

As her popularity increased, many tried to find comparisons and influences. Some tried to equate Madonna to Marilyn Monroe, especially given the 1984 "Material Girl" video, with her take on "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend." But Madonna soon made it clear that she was really nothing at all like Monroe. Madonna projected an image of the self-possessed woman who will get out of life exactly what she wants regardless of what any man might want her to be. She conveyed a strength of will rarely matched by any other pop singer, woman or man.