I was just a borderline Madonna fan at first — and then her second decade happened
The year is 1983. My sister and I are avid MTV viewers, 12 and 9 years old respectively and losing much of our precious childhood being glued to the television and letting image and sound wash over us in a torrent. She is old enough that several pop acts have already gotten their claws in her — Duran Duran, Rick Springfield, the English Beat — and although the Police will soon claim the first money I ever spend on an album (“Synchronicity,” a great but weird choice for an elementary schooler), I remain unformed enough to still be a free agent. And one day, for the very first time, we see her.
She’s bopping around a stark white set with a pair of dancers (we in the writing biz call this “foreshadowing”), her dirty blond hair messy in a bow, wearing a thrown-together outfit of black lace and silver jewelry and flirting mercilessly with the camera every second she’s in closeup. She has a funny name that, as a Jewish kid with little knowledge of Catholicism, I’ve never heard before but am about to hear again soon, many, many times and for the rest of my life.
Ladies and gentlemen, I’ve finally met Madonna. It will be 17 years until I succumb to her at last.
Of course, it was possible — practically unavoidable, in fact — for a child of the ’80s who wasn’t invested in the whole Madonna-industrial complex to be deeply knowledgeable about it regardless. Madonna — who plays TD Garden Monday and Tuesday — made sure of it. Her post-disco dance-pop (and the cinematic ballads that ran alongside like a parallel track) may not have been to my developing musical tastes of New Wave, guitar rock, and deeply square adult contemporary, but Madonna’s drive for ubiquity ensured that I grew up as a neutral companion, neither a fan nor a hater but steeping in every step of her rise to monolithic status nevertheless. She was all-conquering. And I was part of “all.” It would merely take a little extra time.
In fact, the first real cracks in my resistance wouldn’t appear until 1994, several years after “The Immaculate Collection” rather definitively (and unfortunately) cemented what would come to be seen as Madonna’s canonical work. That’s when “Secret” appeared; the combination of acoustic strums, mechanical electronic beats, and the swirling descent of the chorus pricked up my ears.
Four years later, on the urging of my sister (still in the mix, even as adults), I cued up “Ray of Light” in a record store’s listening booth, and if there’s a better way to experience that song for the very first time than having cushioned earphones funnel it into your eardrums while clamping out the world, I can’t imagine it. Then came 1999’s marvelous, shivering psych-pop banger “Beautiful Stranger.” And when Newbury Comics’ in-store speakers introduced me to the pitch-twisted, glitch-tempoed, cosmic-taffy mea culpa “Nobody’s Perfect” the following year, I went ahead and did something I had never done before: I purchased my very first Madonna album.
“Music” didn’t disappoint, but it could have been a simple one-off for me had it not been for the release of “GHV2” the next year. Picking up where “The Immaculate Collection” left off, it compiled the hits of Madonna’s ’90s, and I eagerly snapped it up to acquire the songs that had lit the long fuse of my minor Madonnaissance. Instead, it triggered a major one. Here they were, at long last: the lush, throbbing disco-house rush of “Deeper and Deeper”; the agonizing and transcendent one-two punch of “What It Feels Like for a Girl” and “Drowned World/Substitute for Love”; the defiantly frisky “Human Nature”; even the nakedly grasping “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina.” All would instantly lodge themselves in my heart.
And still, even as I quickly acquired copies of “Erotica” (a good album) and “Ray of Light” (an awfully good album), her foundational persona-defining songs of the previous decade didn’t call out to me. It turned out that I didn’t just love ’90s Madonna, I preferred her. This is, to put it mildly, an uncommon take. Popular perception and what’s played in public spaces (radio playlists, in-store play, etc.) implicitly argue that Madonna’s imperial phase — the period where she was an unstoppable force in both sales figures and cultural impact — lasted through “Vogue” and not one second longer.
But Madonna’s imperial phase lasted a full decade beyond that thanks to megasmashes like “Take a Bow,” “Ray of Light,” and “Music,” which hit No. 1 in 2000. And still she had some juice left, pulsating to No. 7 with “Hung Up” in 2005 and hitting the Top 10 (with the assistance of Justin Timberlake and Nicki Minaj) as late as 2012. Cutting Madonna off at the dawn of the ’90s ignores half of the era in which she was at her most vital and most successful.
My ’90s Madonna evangelism of course led me back through the ’80s as well, the matter-of-fact soundtrack of my childhood. My wife’s copy of “The Immaculate Collection” has become a road-trip staple, and I can hear the artist I love slowly come into being, even as she’s already arrived for everyone else. But “Ray of Light” has made some recent inroads with my 8-year-old, and it’s giving me a twinge of excitement knowing that he’s starting to hear the pop star I know she’ll become, the one it took me so long to open my heart to.