It even opens with Papa Don’t Preach, an impossibly ambitious pop song dealing with a knocked up daughter looking to he father for some good advice. Madonna’s first album where she had significant control (co-writing credits for every track, c0-production credit) and the first since getting married to Sean Penn (she dedicated the album to “my husband, the coolest guy in the universe”, which had no-one fooled) True Blue is Madonna’s first “grown up” album. If she had never released a note of good music after Like A Virgin, it would hardly have mattered.
Produced by Nile Rodgers (roped in after his work on Bowie’s Let’s Dance, though both Madonna and Rodgers claimed to like each others work from beforehand) to perfection, Like A Virgin is absolutely the moment that Madonna became a star, and changed her from good, but potentially forgettable footnote to the thing that she would become. Like a Virgin is an incredible record, with at least three (the title track, Material Girl and on a later reissue, Into the Groove) of the best pop songs of all time sitting casually with its walls. The amount of growth between Madonna and Like a Virgin is incredible, and if bands who make great débuts have to worry about difficult second albums, Madonna perhaps showed the way to do it right here. But the music wins out, and although Madonna would craft better pop songs later, there are some exquisite tunes here. It used then top-of-the-range synths and drum machines, which all the contemporary reviews comment make it state of the art, but of course mean that it very much now sounds like an album made very much in 1983. Madonna herself is apparently not entirely satisfied with the album, as its too reliant on disco, and she wasn’t in complete control. Proof then, that everyone has to start somewhere, and for Madonna it was here, a pop-disco album which of artists that were around at the same time, most calls to mind Prince (who had just made a real break for the mainstream the year before with his 1999), so perhaps it is little wonder people thought that maybe she was black.
Madonna Aka Madonna The First Album (1983)Īpparently, after her début single, Everybody (the closing track on her first album), people didn’t even realise Madonna was white (she doesn’t appear on the single’s sleeve), which seems quaint and inconceivable after years of her being an impossibly big pop phenomena. I’m kicking off with Madonna, mainly because she has just announced she has named her new on MDNA, and it will be out in March, and I’m quite excited. I’ll probably end up doing in depth profiles of these artists as well, at a later date. As an alternative to the in-depth profiles of an artist, for long established artists I may do these posts which are just about the music (man), going through each album to give you reccomendations on what to buy and what to avoid like an unholy plague.