by Lucy O'Brien
Initially the song was marketed by Warner—with a failure of nerve, to the dance charts. With no picture of Madonna on the cover, it was assumed she was black. Though it was niche marketing, it successfully established her as a credible dance artist. To Wendy Fonarow, author of Empire of Dirt, an anthropological study of indie music, Madonna was “totally dance culture.” Fonarow remembers going to an underage dance club in L.A. called The Odyssey, which attracted mainly gay men and avant-garde teens. “We liked dancing until it closed at four a.m. The DJ knew what the current singles were at the Danceteria, and he’d test them out on us. When we heard ‘Everybody,’ we loved it. We thought it was just another throwaway black dance diva, but when we saw her—unwashed, stringy dyed blond hair, lacy fingerless gloves, lots of bangles and scraps of clothing—we were totally hooked on the way she looked. She was dressed in the same way we were. We weren’t Madonna wannabes; it was a reflection of what was going on in our club culture in L.A.”
Although it failed to make a dent on Billboard, in November 1982 the record went to number one in the dance charts. Madonna was then moved to write one of her best-known songs, “Lucky Star,” about Mark Kamins. Along with Steve Bray, Kamins had set her on the road and helped create the musical identity she needed. Although Madonna’s face wasn’t on the cover of her first single, she made sure that after the next one she was no longer anonymous. She would do her homework, tagging along with Warner plugger Bobby Shaw, accompanying him at meetings with radio and club promoters to soak up information and contacts. “She wanted to be a star. She’d do anything to be a star. She wasn’t difficult to be around—she just didn’t stick around,” says Kamin. “Music is like a horse race. Madonna had timing on her side, fashion on her side, and her get-up-and-go. She was on a mission. She never stopped.”
At the same time as “Everybody” was setting New York alight, Madonna became a lover of a young, up-and-coming black artist, Jean-Michel Basquiat. Like her, he was ambitious, claiming: “Since I was seventeen, I thought I might be a star.” The difference between them lay in his urge to self-destruct. A self-confessed “party animal,” he took copious amounts of drugs and was prone to depressive moods. But when he worked, he was brilliant. “I don’t think about art while I work. I try to think about life,” he said. His naive expressionist paintings were influenced by graffiti art and imagery from popular culture. His alter ego was called SAMO, an entity that was given to such messages as SAMO AS A NEO ART FORM. SAMO AS AN END TO PLAYING ART.
He became contemptuous of the high-art echelons that courted him—satirizing capitalist culture while at the same time enjoying its money and celebrity. Madonna met him in the early 80s, while he was still establishing himself and not yet affected by the fame that derailed him. His depictions of marginal black urban culture, his use of found objects and old furniture, the sheer inventiveness with which he turned popular culture inside out, all this influenced her. And she impressed him with her feisty professionalism. “Jean was this male chauvinist, and Madonna was into sexual energy. The relationship was kind of like an act for both of them,” said Nick Taylor, an artist and close friend of Basquiat’s. “It was before these two people were so famous, but it was like a regal, arranged marriage.”
She was her own tag line. She was the BOY TOY scrawled on countless subway stations. Her style, an amalgam of thrift store and punk, was about wearing found objects—that old pair of tights, that clumsy wooden crucifix, those rubber typewriter bands as bracelets. Basquiat made his identity—ethnic and street-aware—a core feature of his art. In the same way, Madonna began to build her persona of the good Catholic girl gone bad. She understood early on how to make an impact. Once she threw a party filled with graffiti kids. As Taylor said to writer Phoebe Hoban: “Madonna turned on the tape machine and everybody jammed. I remember around that time [she] lived on 4th Street between A and B. It was a really sleazy neighborhood, filled with street gangsters. She had these two little Hispanic kids that were kind of her bodyguards. She’d bring them everywhere.”
By the spring of 1983, Madonna had grown tired of Basquiat’s negativity. Her disciplined lifestyle contrasted with his penchant for getting stoned and sleeping till the afternoon. She mingled easily with his friends but didn’t take part in the rituals. While everybody was doing drugs, she would munch carrot chips. According to Basquiat’s assistant, Steve Torton, Madonna bailed out because Basquiat “never saw the sun. She said she couldn’t take it. I saw her at Bond’s and I said, ‘How’s Jean?’ and she said, ‘He’s on dope. I went over there tonight and he was nodding out on heroin. I’m not having anything to do with that.’ She moved out, just like that, totally emotionless.”
As they drifted apart, she focused her attention on her second single, “Burning Up.” It was crucial to make the follow-up to a number one dance single just as powerful. Mark Kamins assumed he would be producing the song, but Warner drafted in the heavy-hitter of R&B, Reggie Lucas. “When it came to working with vocals, I didn’t have the experience,” says Kamins. “If you listen to ‘Everybody,’ it’s a very thin voice. If you listen to the stuff Reggie did, he worked more, took her voice up to another level. That’s what Madonna needed.” She said at the time: “I wanted Mark Kamins to direct me, but ‘Everybody’ was the first record he’d ever done.” She referred to a version of the song Steve Bray had recorded as “really full and lush-sounding, which is how it should have been.” Although disappointed at not being able to take his protégée further, Kamins (who’d been savvy enough to sign her to his own production company) cut a deal with Warner that granted him a percentage of future royalties. This was a considerable sweetener. “I didn’t mind ’cause I had my little piece of the rock. I had no problems with that, I wasn’t jealous or upset,” Kamins asserts.
On “Burning Up,” Madonna has better vocal control, singing with more restraint and a sense of authority. The song itself, however, is not as dynamic as “Everybody.” Over a New-Order-meets-gay-disco dance beat there squalls a corny rock-guitar riff. In the song she plays a woman frustrated by unrequited lust. She’ll do anything, she declares with cheerful self-abasement. She’s down on her knees panting like a dog, but her reluctant suitor is not impressed—a factor no doubt influenced by the dated early 80s synth sound.
Sire financed a video for “Burning Up,” which received heavy rotation on the fledgling MTV cable station. It was a rudimentary early 80s affair, complete with campy surrealism—her eye, a flower, a car, a Grecian head. She plays a hot chick writhing in the road, waiting to be run over by her boyfriend (Ken Compton) in a pale blue convertible. The only shot that saves it from being standard exploitative fare is that at the end of the video she is the one driving the car—a neat twist that showed right from the start Madonna was aware of subverting the female-as-victim role. It was the first time many people saw the girl behind “Everybody,” and with that, her wider audience began to bite.
Madonna then went on an aggressive promotional tour with her dancers Erica Bell, Bags Riley, and Martin Burgoyne. “I told her there were asses she had to kiss and she did that, no problem,” said her A&R man Michael Rosenblatt. “Saturday nights, we’d get in my car and do three discos. A coupla songs, a coupla grand.” From the beginning, Madonna has always had a strong rapport with her dancers, a symbiotic energy she learned from doing contemporary dance. Erica and the crew weren’t just her backup, they were close clubbing friends. When they were off-duty, Madonna and Erica would go to the Mudd Club and terrorize all the attractive men. Madonna would say: “Rica, I’m the best-looking white girl here, and you are the best-looking black girl here, so let’s do it.” They’d target cute boys, boldly kiss them on the mouth, take their phone numbers, and while the boys were still watching, crumple up the numbers and throw them away. That spoiled defiance spilled over into their live performances, making them compelling to watch. “You couldn’t take your eyes off her,” recalls Ginger Canzeroni, former manager of The Go-Go’s, who saw Madonna perform at a down
town club. “She was very attractive, she was street. There was something different about her.”
With a club tour and two successful singles in the bag, Sire took up their modest album option, and Madonna went into Sigma Sound studio with Reggie Lucas. This is where their differences really became apparent. A former guitarist for Miles Davis and producer for sophisticated soul singers like Stephanie Mills and Phyllis Hyman, Lucas was used to coaxing subtle sounds out of his musicians, adding texture and complexity to the mix. Madonna sang well within a certain range, but knew her voice would get lost amid complicated arrangements. “Reggie, I thought, might be able to push me, having worked with Phyllis Hyman and Roberta Flack. The only problem was that he wanted to make me sound like them,” Madonna said later.
Not long after the sessions started, they began to clash. Madonna complained that Lucas wanted to put “too much stuff” in, as opposed to the minimalist demos she favored. She said that the track “Borderline,” for instance, was much too subtle, but ironically it has become a key favorite with Madonna fans. Notable for its sweet melody line and sense of yearning, “Borderline” is about trying to secure love that is just out of reach. The music mirrors the sentiment of the song, with a slowly evolving keyboard motif and no clear-cut chorus—so with each line there is tension but no release. In a study about what makes “commercial song a global object of desire,” musicologist Luiz Tatit suggests that hit songs have clear “identity markers,” that they are “concentrated around the refrain.” A typical example of this would be “Lucky Star,” with its simple structure and upfront vocal. This was the template for Madonna’s early sound—clear, direct, and unambiguous. She instinctively understood what made a Top Ten hit.
By contrast, “Borderline” is about thematic exploration, “a search,” as Tatit states, “for completion in the area of melody,” with the tune echoing the lyrical lovers’ misunderstandings and separations. It wasn’t where Madonna wanted to go just yet, and although it reached a respectable number ten in the Billboard charts, it wasn’t the smash she needed. If Madonna had gone in Reggie Lucas’s direction, it would have taken her longer to imprint herself on national consciousness, but maybe she would have won that elusive artistic credibility sooner.
Anthony Jackson, a top session player for everyone from Paul Simon to George Benson and Steely Dan, played bass on “Borderline.” “It was a catchy song: that type of writing is musically unique. Reggie [Lucas] always had a very good harmonic and melodic sense—his approach resembles that of Philadelphia producer Thom Bell. It requires a depth of knowledge, training, and sophistication to pull it off,” he recalls. An old high school friend of Reggie Lucas, Jackson ended up playing on “Borderline” by accident. “I was doing a session, and Reggie was in one of the other rooms. He came to me and said, ‘When you’re done with your session, there’s something you might like to play on. She’s a new artist. Her name’s Madonna.’”
Jackson went in and doubled the synth bass line, underpinning the track with a rich, laid-back, funky groove. “She was completely unknown at the time. I have to give Madonna a lot of credit. She knows she’s not the greatest singer, but she knows how to get the music down. She’s got style, and a way of choosing songs and guiding the way they go,” says Jackson.
Madonna has dismissed her self-titled debut as little more than an “aerobics album.” It’s true that some of the tracks exude the air of a gym workout. “Physical Attraction,” for instance, is a song that breathless 70s pop act Olivia Newton-John would have been proud of, while “Think of Me” laces its full-tilt disco energy with some perfunctory jazz-funk saxophone. “Lucky Star,” though, stands out for its shimmering keyboards, synth claps, and the earthy backing vocals of soul sister Gwen Guthrie. Madonna’s backup singers have always provided a strong counterpoint to her straightforward girlish midrange vocal—while she delivers the melody and the message of the song, they weave around her, embellishing the lower registers and filling out her sound. In the same way that her dancers act as a foil for Madonna the star, so her singers, from Guthrie to Siedah Garratt, Niki Haris, and Donna DeLory, give her songs a rich texture with their call-and-response and harmonizing.
Keyboards, too, form a major part of her sound, though this album was a little heavy on the baroque, almost progressive rock chords of the song “I Know It,” a strange piece about the end of a relationship. It is an uneven album, very much a beginner’s one, with some of Madonna’s motifs in place. Struggling to break out of early-80s disco pop to find her own style, she sometimes hits it bang-on, while in other places she sounds like a cross between pop rocker Pat Benatar and white “chocolate soul” artist Teena Marie.
Lyrical themes emerged that became typical of Madonna’s oeuvre—romance songs of unrequited love, songs of female bravado and the search for men and meaning. Mingled in with that was a rudimentary sense of spiritual exploration. In “Lucky Star,” she sings for the first time about the angel as her spirit guide and protector. But early Madonna is mostly about the power of the dance. This is best expressed in “Holiday,” a song that cemented her style. With its bubbling Latin undertow, crunchy bass and strings, and Fred Zarr’s elegant closing piano riff, it’s one of her most persuasive numbers. There’s tension, release, resolution, and celebration, complete with Madonna’s playful commands and exhortations. Written by Curtis Hudson and Lisa Stevens, the song was recorded for the album at the last minute and produced by a new hotshot DJ, John “Jellybean” Benitez. In the same way that Mark Kamins steered her to the starting block, the honey-eyed Benitez helped to take Madonna to the next phase.
Benitez was a hip young dude from the South Bronx, who had been deejaying since his teens in the early 70s. “Most of my friends aspired to be drug dealers, pimps, or bouncers, and we had a hangout in the basement of the apartment building—the clubhouse. We had a turntable there and I would bring my record collection and sit…and play records—never leaving the turntable, for fear that they would be stolen or scratched or broken somehow,” he told Bouncefm.com in 2006. People began to refer to him as “the DJ,” but to the young Benitez, “a DJ was someone that was on the radio—did weather and commercials and things like that.” It wasn’t until he saw a club DJ in action working two turntables at once that he discovered his calling.
“The music never stopped…Both songs playing at the same time. When I saw it happening, I was like, ‘Wow, this is cool!’” Benitez’s enthusiasm was infectious. He perfected his skills at sweet-sixteen parties and local clubs before doing gigs in Manhattan. By 1981 he was a DJ at the Funhouse. Located in a Manhattan warehouse district on West 26th Street, the club attracted Hispanic and Italian-American teenagers from Brooklyn and the Bronx. Known as “buggas,” the crowd would wear cut-off T-shirts, sweatpants, and bandanas. They were passionate devotees of Benitez. As writer Peter Shapiro documents: “The vibe was a combination of hip-hop and disco: the crowd would bark if they liked a song that Jellybean was playing and boo if they didn’t; the boys would be prowling the dance floor looking for people to battle with (both with dance moves and with fists) while the girls would be singing along to the cathartic songs of heartbreak.”
Into this melee came Madonna with Warner promo guy Bobby Shaw at her side. “It was quite common for record companies to bring new artists to meet DJs at that time,” recalled Benitez. “I had a very high profile, very credible, underground crowd…Madonna came in the DJ booth. We hit it off and she asked me to remix some of the songs on her record.” The two became lovers and quickly moved in together. The ideal partner for Madonna at that time, Benitez found himself remixing a large portion of her debut album. Just before it was in the bag, Madonna dropped “Ain’t No Big Deal,” a track she’d cowritten with Steve Bray that the latter had already produced for a group called Barracuda. That left space for another song.
“So she decided that she wanted a new song and I had a demo of ‘Holiday.’ She loved it and we went to the record company and they said, ‘Fine, you have to have
it ready by Friday,’” Benitez recalled. “I had never produced a record at that point…I didn’t know that much about making records! Although I knew how to take a track apart and restructure it, I’d never produced a record from scratch before.” Never one to back down from a challenge, Benitez thought up the sound in his head, assembled some musicians, and hummed the parts to them. Combining that with Madonna’s “very soulful approach to singing a pop song,” he created what was to be one of her most enduring hits. He has said since: “That launched my career and hers simultaneously.”
Madonna noted that her best results thus far had been with rooky producers. These hungry DJs and remixers were open to suggestion, and vital for keeping her music one step ahead. With her next album, she was determined to nail a pop sound that was uniquely hers. “I now know what I want on my next record. The production won’t be so slick, because where Reggie…comes from is a whole different school,” she said shortly before Madonna was released. “There will be a more crossover approach to it this time…In America, Warner doesn’t know how to push me, whether to push me as a disco artist or as New Wave because of the way I look. I’d rather just start another category.”
Madonna’s goal was to bring dance music to the people—and, crucially, to the elusive programmers of daytime U.S. radio. “She was a spunky little white girl coming on like a black chick,” recalls New Musical Express writer Barney Hoskyns. “We’ve seen that a lot since with hip-hop; ambitious white kids appropriating black gestures.” For Madonna, it was just a matter of inventing a new category of her own. The cover for her debut album said it all. The original artwork featured Madonna in bleached-out gold soft focus. She could have been anybody. The final version featured her with short peroxided hair and dark roots, looking straight into the camera, grabbing at a dog collar around her neck. She wore heavy black eyeliner, strong lipstick, and dozens of silver bracelets, chains, and leather wristbands. Her eyes were shining out with tremendous will, her image one of stylized rebellion. Shot in plain black-and-white, it seemed to say, I’m here, with chains and keys. Unlock me, unlock my power, I’m ready to be unleashed.