The unyielding star of Madonna: How the queen of pop built her endless reign

Madonna in Paris on the Rebel Heart Tour in 2015. The original “Material Girl” created the template for following your creative vision that the greatest artists today, from Adele to Beyonce to Miley Cyrus, continue to follow. (Image by Chris Weger via Wikimedia Commons 2.0)

1984. New York Radio City Music Hall. The first-ever MTV Video Music Awards. Madonna, on stage, gave an unforgettable performance of her breakout hit “Like a Virgin”. Madonna, sheathed in a white wedding veil, lay on the stage. As thousands of balloons fell from the ceiling, Madonna brought the mic close to her mouth and whispered, “it feels so good inside”.

“Like a Virgin” polarized public opinion like little else at the time. Pre-pubescent girls danced to it playing on the radio, not knowing what it meant. Their mothers fretted about the “bad influence” of her songs, her actions, her visual imagery—which only got wilder with the years, with “Papa Don’t Preach” even getting whammied for supporting teenage pregnancy. Either way, it brought Madonna enough attention to firmly place her in the galaxy of rising pop stars of the time–indeed, she would go on to reign the charts, alongside Prince and Michael Jackson.

But one woman’s “scandalous” is another’s “provocative”. And provoking is what Madonna, the original queen of pop, has done through her four-decade long career–and why she remains an unyielding icon at 64.

Madonna Louise Ciccone, born in 1958, arrived in New York as a teenager, with not much money in her pocket, wanting to be a dancer. She waited tables, hung out with the artsy crowd (she dated the boundary-pushing graffiti and urban artist Jean Michel Basquiat), found her voice. In 1982, she released her debut self-titled album to middling success. But with 1984’s “Like a Virgin”, she was propelled to international stardom.

What followed is nearly two decades of dominating the charts, airwaves and TV screens—because Madonna has never been about the music alone. Platinum hits like “Papa Don’t Preach”, “Material Girl”, “Holiday”, “Like a Prayer” demonstrated her musical might—a keen ear for rhyme and sound, a combination that proved irresistible on the dancefloor.

Key to Madonna’s continued musical success has been reinvention. As times changed and new sounds trended, she morphed seamlessly from being a purveyor of disco-pop to a medium for experimental gospel and funk, to riding the EDM wave at the turn of the century. Only the rarest of creative chameleons can put forth a song like “Hung Up” in their mid-30s—featuring a rare sample of an ABBA song, chugging addictive groove, the urgent ticking of a clock—that not only conjured a comeback in 2005, but continues to be discovered afresh every decade since.

But Madonna, like a consummate pop star, has always been bigger than the music. She is a fashion icon who made cone bras cool for an entire generation. She is a queer icon—her songs, her videos, her collaborations with renowned choreographer Jose Xtravaganza, her close friendship with drag queen performer RuPaul, and her tributes to queer icons like Marlene Dietrich and Frida Kahlo have solidified her connection with the queer community. In a coming together of these two aspects, Madonna mainstreamed “voguing”, a dance technique born in 1960s Harlem and then adopted wholeheartedly into 1980s ballroom culture.

At the heart of it all is one foundational philosophy: The music is just the medium, and Madonna the messenger. And while she’s not put it quite in those words, a lot of her work boils down to smashing the patriarchy. She took on zealots—crosses appeared frequently on stage on her tours during the 1990s, and she would appear frequently performing provocative dance moves. As her critics marshalled from the sidelines, her performance of “Like a Virgin” got wilder—simulating masturbation on velvet beds on stage was a frequent occurrence in one phase. Extreme? Depends on who you ask.

Madonna is, as she said in a New York Times interview, celebrating her at 60, “woman fearlessly expressing herself and saying, ‘I’m encouraging all of you to be independent, to speak your mind, to express your sexuality freely without shame, to not allow men to objectify you, to objectify yourself’.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “All of those things seemed like the natural way of where we should be going. And strangely, a lot of feminists criticized me for it, and I got no support from that group. They thought, 'Well, you can’t use your sexuality to empower yourself as a female', which I think is rubbish, because that’s part of who I am and part of me as a female and a human being, my sexuality. That’s not the only thing, that wasn’t my only weapon and that wasn’t the only thing I was talking about.”

Whether a woman’s sexuality can be a useful weapon–or if it remains just something to be taken advantage of–in a man’s world, is certainly something we are reckoning with in the aftermath of #MeToo. But Madonna’s unapologetic feminineness continues to inform new waves of feminism, and the much larger gender equality movement. She is a mother, literally but also metaphorically—she birthed in countless people the desire to be. If that’s not good parenting, what is?

In the fast-paced world of entertainment, a provocateur is only as good as their last big shock—and there’s still some of that left in Madonna, even though she has reportedly begun to focus much more on her children, her own personal exploration of religion. In the last week of June 2023, news emerged that she had been hospitalized after being found inactive at her home, and her ongoing tour had been postponed.

At 64, Madonna is obviously not what she used to be. Her albums sell less, her appearance is regularly criticized. But let’s regard that in the light of an impossible feat she pulled in the 1980s. As the NYT put it, “Madonna had used her iron will to forge a particular type of highly autobiographical, uber-empowered, hypersexualized female pop star who became the dominant model of femininity across the nation. Without Madonna, we don’t have Britney Spears, Lady Gaga and maybe even Janelle Monae.”

Whether Madonna will return to the stage, the studio and to public light is anyone’s guess. In the meantime, let’s all put on our headphones and vogue to a Madonna original or two. What better way to celebrate an icon who taught the world there’s nothing more powerful than being your whole, free, multipersona, multihyphenate selves?