FEATURE:
Introducing an Icon…
Madonna’s Eponymous Debut at Forty, Anniversary Tour Dates, and a Continuing Fight Against Ageism
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I will do other anniversary features…
IN THIS PHOTO: Madonna in 1983/PHOTO CREDIT: Gary Heery
around the fortieth anniversary of Madonna’s eponymous debut album. Released on 27th July, 1983, Madonna is an album that introduced the world to someone who would fast become a global icon and superstar. I am coming in a bit early, as there are things to talk about. I might finish off by discussing Madonna and its impact. I am not sure whether there are any anniversary releases in terms of vinyl and an expanded edition of the album, but there are rumours Madonna is touring. Madonna’s latest album, Madame X, was released in 2019. I think there were some live dates after the release, but she did sustain some injuries and setbacks which delayed others. Happily, it seems like she may be back on stage to mark forty years since her debut album came out. This article explains more:
“Madonna debuted with her very first album in 1983, and as Billboard reports, the Queen of Pop is planning to celebrate the milestone by embarking on a 40th anniversary tour.
The music icon is planning her as-yet-unannounced 40th anniversary tour — her first-ever live trek to serve as a career retrospective — with her longtime manager Guy Oseary. “It’s going to be the biggest tour she’s ever done,” one source told Billboard, featuring music from the entirety of her career. The tour will include both stadium and arena dates, reportedly including a multi-night run at the O2 in London.
The upcoming tour comes after Madonna re-signed to Warner Music Group and agreed to launch an “extensive, multi-year series of catalog reissues.” Still, the legendary pop star won’t be selling her catalog any time soon, explaining last year, “Because they’re my songs. Ownership is everything, isn’t it?” The same goes for a biopic about the artist that Madonna plans to co-write and direct herself. “No one’s going to tell my story, but me,” she said. Clearly, then, Madonna’s next tour will be created on her own terms.
Last year, Madonna allowed Beyoncé to sample her iconic 1990 track “Vogue” for a cross-generational pop moment in Queen Bey’s “Break My Soul (The Queens Remix).” In honor of the Material Girl’s 64th birthday, we updated our list of her Top 20 Songs”.
I am not sure whether there will be a concept around the 1983 album and whether she is prominently featuring the album. Maybe she will do a career-spanning set. Regardless, there will be a lot of demand. At sixty-four, Madonna still has no equals when it comes to her Pop music and stage shows. It is not the sentiment of most who heard the news about tours, but a headline from a recent article in The Times shocked me. Perhaps not as callous as the wording might suggest, but this feeling that, at sixty-four, Madonna back on stage might be a lumbering and embarrassing spectacle. Rather than shock, titillate, fascinate and wow as she has done through her career, is she making a mistake? I am not sure what people think she will do. Maybe fall over a lot of wet herself?! Is she going to injury herself in the first show and have to pull out. There is a suggested undertone that, in her sixties, Madonna’s sexuality and proactiveness is going to be cringe-worthy. Her sex-positive approach and stage shows might not be that appropriate for a woman of her age! I think her stage shows will be incredible, and obviously she will not try to recapture her past shows. It will be a high-energy and conceptual show, but it is premature to assume that she is going to be a disaster. It is a little sad and angering that, forty years after her debut was released (more or less), she is still facing criticism. Madonna has had to deal with ageism for decades now. Like many women in music, when they are in their thirties and especially in their forties, their music is sidelined and only played by certain radio stations.
PHOTO CREDIT: Mert Alas & Marcus Piggott
Not only does Madonna receive sexism and ageist remarks for her Instagram photos, the media in general seems to have this age line where women are has-been or too old when they get to a certain point. In a 2019 interview with Vogue the subject of ageism came up. For an artist who has given the world so much through the decades, Madonna does seem to have to fight to be heard. Fighting for so many women who are written off or seen as lesser when they grow older. These are not standards and rules that men in the industry are subjected to. It is an awful and misogynistic double standard that does not need to go away very soon. Age should have nothing to do with music. It doesn’t matter how old an artist is! To this day, Madonna is an innovator and chameleon of an artist who can go through different personas and keep her music and image fresh and fascinating:
“When Decca Aitkenhead meets Madonna for the June cover interview of Vogue, she is not sure which iteration of the pop powerhouse will receive her – and the impeccable Georgian façade of her central London townhouse betrays no clue. The mother of reinvention, Madonna has variously been a singer, actor, dancer, filmmaker, activist, author and philanthropist. She has been a Kabbalah spiritualist, a punk club kid, an English country lady, a dominatrix; she has played Eva Perón and Breathless Mahoney, and channelled Marilyn Monroe. But, even now, aged 60, and with her 14th studio album, Madame X, due for release on June 14, her career still feels like a battle.
“People have always been trying to silence me for one reason or another, whether it’s that I’m not pretty enough, I don’t sing well enough, I’m not talented enough, I’m not married enough, and now it’s that I’m not young enough,” she tells Aitkenhead. “So they just keep trying to find a hook to hang their beef about me being alive on. Now I’m fighting ageism, now I’m being punished for turning 60”.
I will switch to something more positive. I will end with a couple of glowing reviews for one of the best and more underrated albums of the ‘80s. Bringing back Disco and Dance in 1983 – at a time when Pop had progressed and transformed -, there is something ground-breaking and hugely innovative about Madonna. It is an album that is inspiring artists to this day. I listen to a lot of Disco-inspired artists of today and know they are influenced by Madonna. Almost forty years since it came into the world, the Pop icon’s debut has not aged or faded. It doesn’t quite get the huge credit it deserves. We talk about the importance of albums such as Like a Virgin (1984), Like a Prayer (1989), and Ray of Light (1998), but her 1983 debut is not seen as impactful. Not as wide-ranging in terms of the sounds and themes explored, we need to give new appreciation and respect to an album that reinvented Pop. Thirty-five years after its release, CLASH discussed the legacy and importance of the mighty Madonna. I do hope that there is an album reissue, maybe with an extra vinyl of remixes. Perhaps there will be remastered versions of Madonna’s videos, or artists will cover some of the album’s best-known tracks. Forty is an important anniversary, and I do hope that a lot of exposure and investigation does the way of an album that arrived at a time when music was in transition. It was a time when various genres were in their infancy or dying out:
“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.
IN THIS PHOTO: Madonna in 1983/PHOTO CREDIT: Alan Ilagan
Throughout the course of ‘Madonna’, she discusses the tropes present on most pop debuts – the idea of love, loss and the struggles of early adulthood. The overriding presence of her lyrics here is her independence and her ability to challenge the preconceived ideas that others have of how she should act and the choices that she is making.
On ‘Borderline’, one of two songs on the record penned exclusively by producer and former Miles Davis band member Reggie Lucas, she pleads with the subject to "try and understand[…] I've given all I can" and that their actions are pushing her to her limits – a theme that she would revisit a few years later with the more on-the-nose and initially shocking ‘Papa Don't Preach’.
Trying to find a dud track on this record is harder than you might expect. The entire first side – comprised of the aforementioned singles ‘Lucky Star’ and ‘Borderline’ as well as ‘Burning Up’, the album's second single that was also one of Madonna's earliest solo compositions, and ‘I Know It’ – provides a well-rounded slab of early 80s pop music, rife with all of it’s trappings, yet not weighed down by any of them.
As we descend into the latter parts of the record, she doubles down on these disco-inspired traits. ‘Physical Attraction’, for all of it’s doe-eyed sensitivities, would not be out of place in any dancehall or club in the east coast. Likewise, ‘Think Of Me’ feels destined to only ever be accompanied by an awe-inspiring light show, pulsating throughout it’s near five minute run time but never feeling anywhere near uncomfortable.
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”.
On 27th July, Madonna turns forty. Its second single, Burning Up, is forty on 9th March. One of my favourite Madonna albums, and one of the most influential ever, it is a masterpiece! I have seen some mixed or three-star reviews for Madonna. It is an undeniable five-star album that is timeless! This is what AllMusic had to say about one of the greatest debut albums in music history:
“Although she never left it behind, it's been easy to overlook that Madonna began her career as a disco diva in an era that didn't have disco divas. It was an era where disco was anathema to the mainstream pop, and she had a huge role in popularizing dance music as a popular music again, crashing through the door Michael Jackson opened with Thriller. Certainly, her undeniable charisma, chutzpah, and sex appeal had a lot to do with that -- it always did, throughout her career -- but she wouldn't have broken through if the music wasn't so good. And her eponymous debut isn't simply good, it set the standard for dance-pop for the next 20 years. Why did it do so? Because it cleverly incorporated great pop songs with stylish, state-of-the-art beats, and it shrewdly walked a line between being a rush of sound and a showcase for a dynamic lead singer. This is music where all of the elements may not particularly impressive on their own -- the arrangement, synth, and drum programming are fairly rudimentary; Madonna's singing isn't particularly strong; the songs, while hooky and memorable, couldn't necessarily hold up on their own without the production -- but taken together, it's utterly irresistible. And that's the hallmark of dance-pop: every element blends together into an intoxicating sound, where the hooks and rhythms are so hooky, the shallowness is something to celebrate. And there are some great songs here, whether it's the effervescent "Lucky Star," "Borderline," and "Holiday" or the darker, carnal urgency of "Burning Up" and "Physical Attraction." And if Madonna would later sing better, she illustrates here that a good voice is secondary to dance-pop. What's really necessary is personality, since that sells a song where there are no instruments that sound real. Here, Madonna is on fire, and that's the reason why it launched her career, launched dance-pop, and remains a terrific, nearly timeless, listen”.
Maybe not entirely male-dominated, Disco would have been largely imbalanced in 1983. Most of the bigger names and producers were men. Madonna was definitely a pioneer and someone who broke barriers and actually revived and repurposed a style of music that suffered a premature demise. A joyous and accomplished album released at a difficult time in the U.S., it was a call to the dancefloor at a time when it was really needed! The Quietus assessed and dove into Madonna’s debut album in 2013 – three decades after this remarkable introduction came into the world:
“But it was third single 'Holiday' that was her crossover in to the mainstream charts. It got her on Dick Clark's American Bandstand for an epochal performance wherein she stated that she intended to "rule the world". 'Holiday' was an irresistible confection, bubbling with joie de vie, emphasised by its cascading synth strings, meaty Moog bass and Nile Rogers-style chicken scratch guitar, and a lyric that neatly paired it with Kool & the Gang's 'Celebration'. In the vocal department, limitation becomes virtue as Madonna imbues the song with nifty touches such as the snatch of ethereal cooing that blows through the song's second refrain.
Similarly her dancing seemed lunging and graceless compared to the eye-popping feats of Jackson (surprisingly so for such a gifted student). But like her music, it quickly proved magnetic, life-affirming. Each raised knee to the thwack of Holiday's snare, indicative of a mover as disciplined as a featherweight prize-fighter, utterly at one with their body. Like all the songs on her debut, 'Holiday' is best heard in the original album version rather than the Immaculate Collection edit. The later version omits the climactic release the song has been building towards, Zarr's elated piano break, a last minute addition at Sigma Sound, Manhattan. These originals are 'deep' cuts, full of breaks and space.
'Holiday' put her in the Billboard top twenty. 'Borderline' (No ten) and 'Lucky Star' (No four) would nudge her closer to mega-stardom, the latter beginning a record-breaking sequence of Top five American hits. Crucially, these two songs saw her mastering video. Mary Lambert's mini-movie for 'Borderline' squeezed Diana Ross's 'Mahogany' and John Hughes into a pop video, adding then taboo-busting interracial romance. She even dabbles in a bit of graffiti, a nod to the world she hailed from.
The 'Lucky Star' promo, featuring just two back-up dancers and a blank set, was a showcase for Madonna as auto-erotic magnet. It is full of belly button close-ups and narcissistic strutting, accentuated by the punchy editing. At one point, she appears to be cradled by the pure white backdrop, like Keith Haring's Radiant Baby, both wide-eyed innocent and shrewdly knowing. In the video's opening shot, she lowers her shades, coolly staring back at the viewer, alluring yet impassive. Even feminist film scholar Laura Mulvey would have to concede that the gaze of popular culture, was by now, no longer purely the province of the male spectator.
Her first album was both cutting edge and quaint by the time of its release, informed by NYC's club underground but also using technology already employed by MOR artists. Phil Collins was using similar instrumentation as was Stevie Nicks on the exquisite Prince-assisted, 'Little Red Corvette'-influenced 'Stand Back'. Madonna would continue to break ground in the mainstream just as she would always remain slightly one step behind the avant-garde, ever reliant on it for inspiration to take to the masses. Nevertheless, her first album remains one of her best works, the supposed 'lack of variety' actually giving it a consistency and focus that often eludes her later music. Madonna now possesses the crazy will of a late period Bette Davis or a Joan Crawford, all exertion bereft of inspiration. But like those two icons, her best work often transcends the cloying cage of camp. That first album, with its elastic grooves, its joyous calls to "dance and sing" remains free of such excesses. It is that great pop record: a simple soundtrack to complicated times. Hot-housed in a pre-Giulani/Carrie Bradshaw New York City, it is the last gasp of a night-life without AIDS where everyone is a star in the discotheque. Where going out itself was a work of art. Now, as much as back then, Madonna urges you to do just one thing: "Feel the beat and step inside..."
It is great Madonna might come back to some big stages to celebrate forty years of her debut album. It is a shame that there are going to be conversations about her age and whether she can recapture some of the past. I have seen a few discussions online as to whether it will be a tragic and embarrassing affair. It will not! Not only does Madonna not have to answer to these people, but she is as commanding and exceptional now as ever. A Pop icon and innovator, if you can get tickets and she is playing near you, it will be a remarkable experience. Hearing tracks from her debut album played forty years later will please older fans and also introduce the album to new fans. In July, the world will mark forty years of the mighty Madonna. Some wrote her off in 1983 or felt that she was not going to go anywhere. As it turns out, she went on to dominate Pop and is considered one of the greatest and most influential artists of all! Back in 1983, when critics and fans were listening to Madonna’s debut, there were those who knew something special had been created. In some ways, Madonna is an album that salutes and resonated with…
THOSE who were properly tuned in.