Year: 1984 (LP 1989)
Label: Balkanton Records (Bulgaria), BTA 11999
Style: Pop
Country: Bay City, Michigan, U.S.
Time: 38:59
Format: Flac Tracks 16/44,1 KHz
Size: 262 Mb
On her self-titled 1983 debut, Madonna sang perky little tunes about going on vacation ("Holiday") and falling in and out of love ("Lucky Star" and "Borderline"). These were ideas grandma and grandpa could get behind, and yet the 20-something Michigan native caused a minor sensation, setting the stage for a total pop-culture takeover. Clearly, music was only one of her weapons.
While Madonna offered Middle American mallrats a taste of underground NYC dance culture, what really got people talking was the singer herself. This spunky, self-assured club kid with the belly shirts and rubber bracelets liked being a topic of conversation, and with her second album, Like a Virgin, she endeavored to keep her name on everyone’s lips.
Released 30 years ago today (Nov. 12, 1984), Like a Virgin is sometimes thought of as Madonna’s artistic coming-out party, the moment she swapped frivolous bubblegum for more thoughtful examinations of female sexuality. Such praise stems mostly from what we now know about Madonna. However, for all its merits - and it has many - Like a Virgin isn’t exactly The Feminine Mystique set to music. In fact, it’s not all that different from its predecessor.
As with her first record, Madonna went into Like a Virgin wrestling Warner Bros. for more artistic control. After her negative experiences working with Reggie Lucas, she wanted to handle more of the production herself, and she found a winning collaborator in Chic guitarist Nile Rodgers, who’d just worked on David Bowie’s Let’s Dance.
Rodgers gave Madonna’s music some extra snap and sheen, and if he didn’t quite hand the singer her first classic album -- she’d have to wait another five years for that -- he did get her to the top of the Billboard 200. He also helped craft two of the decade’s most iconic singles.
The first, of course, is "Like a Virgin," Madonna’s first No. 1 pop hit. It’s here that she most explicitly tackles sexual politics and explores that whole virgin-whore thing so central to her image. The other is “Material Girl,” a winking gold-digger anthem that can be taken a couple of different ways. The remaining seven songs range from fun-enough dance tunes to flat-out filler – but that was all it took to propel Madonna onto the same plain as Prince, Michael Jackson and Bruce Springsteen.
"Material Girl": Like so many ‘80s pop classics, this one is inextricably linked to its video, which features a pretty-in-pink Madonna paying homage to Marilyn Monroe. It’s also more clever than most people realize. She’s either making a sarcastic statement about the decade’s rampant materialism or promoting the kind of "I got mine, bitches" feminism that’s always been her guiding light. Either way, "Material Girl" is a stylish sign-of-the-times synth-funk jam she didn’t write but totally owned.
"Like a Virgin": Ask a hundred people what this song is about, and you’ll get a hundred interpretations -- none as hilariously vulgar as Quentin Tarantino’s in Reservoir Dogs, but each as valid. "Like a Virgin" was actually written by a couple of men (Billy Steinberg and Tom Kelly), and that makes the finished Madonna product all the more ambiguous. Atop a bassline like the one heard in "Billie Jean" - another complex song about purity and sex - Madonna is coquettish yet knowing. "Like a Virgin" is about reconnecting with lost innocence through the act of lovemaking, a counterintuitive idea that was bound to confuse people. It didn’t exactly clarify things when she wore a wedding dress and humped the floor while performing the song at the inaugural MTV Video Music Awards.
Billboard 11/12/2014
01. A1 Material Girl (04:02)
02. A2 Angel (04:00)
03. A3 Like A Virgin (03:43)
04. A4 Over And Over (04:14)
05. A5 Dress You Up (04:03)
06. B1 Love Don't Live Here Anymore (04:50)
07. B2 Shoo-Bee-Doo (05:20)
08. B3 Pretender (04:35)
09. B4 Stay (04:07)
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