I’ll Create a Look That’s Made For You: Madonna’s Like a Virgin at 40

Only a few weeks after the New Year, Dick Clark asks a 25-year-old Madonna on American Bandstand what she hopes will happen not just in 1984, but throughout the rest of her career. “Rule the world,” she replies, nonchalantly, as if she’s not predicting her own future but introducing it. A transition hits, and Faith Hill tells the camera that every girl in the world wanted to be Madonna; Michael Ian Black says that even some of the guys wanted to be Madonna. MTV holds a microphone up to a coterie of Madonna lookalikes trying on obtuse New York accents. The screen fills with snapshots of fingerless lace gloves, big black sunglasses, dangly earrings and side ponytails. A grainy clip of a blond superstar in a wedding dress takes the stage at Radio City Music Hall and writhes and thrusts to “Like a Virgin” three months before it would finally hit #1 in the United States. Watching all of that on VH1 more than 15 years ago, I felt like I’d been struck by lightning.

Raised in the Pontiac and Avon suburbs of Detroit, Madonna—born Madonna Louise Ciccone in August 1958—was the middle child in a family of six. Her mother died of breast cancer in 1963; her father was an optics engineer for Chrysler Defense. She was a good student but her own kind of oddity, garnering a reputation in grade school for doing cartwheels in the hallways and pulling up her skirt so the boys in her class could see her underwear. At Rochester Adams High School, she got all As and was on the cheerleading squad. The University of Michigan gave her a dance scholarship and she went, only to drop out and migrate to New York—where she’d live in the East Village in Alphabet City and hold numerous jobs, like serving as an elevator operator at Terrace on the Park or working as a hatcheck girl at the Russian Tea Room. Under the leadership of choreographer Martha Graham, Madonna became a well-regarded backup dancer. In Randy Taraborrelli’s 2002 biography of Madonna, she claimed she was a “lonely girl who was searching for something,” that she “wanted to be somebody.”

I’m fascinated by Madonna’s Big Apple origins: She was a backup singer for the French disco performer Patrick Hernandez. When she began a relationship with Dan Gilroy, whom she lived in an abandoned synagogue with, they started a band together called the Breakfast Club in 1979. But Madonna was gone from the troupe by the next year, ditching Gilroy to start a new band, Emmy and the Emmys, with her new boyfriend (and Breakfast Club drummer) Stephen Bray. By November 1980, Madonna bailed on Bray, too, this time to step out on her own as a soloist. Danceteria disc-jockey Mark Kamins liked her demo enough that he arranged a meeting between her and Sire Records president Seymour Stein. They’d ink a deal for three singles. There was an option for a record down the line, if the first recordings did well enough. Kamins would produce “Everybody,” Madonna’s debut single, in 1982. She was dating Jean-Michel Basquiat while living in SoHo around this time, lingering on the precipice of a Dancin’ On Air performance that would galvanize her next two singles—“Burning Up” / “Physical Attraction” and “Holiday,” the latter of which would reach #1 on the US Dance Chart and set in motion her debut eponymous LP.

A lot of kids my age saw the VH1 I Love the ‘80s episode that focused on 1984 and heard how the talking heads spoke of a Madonna-led revolution then, declaring that Like a Virgin was the pop measure that outgrew the ruler. I remember watching a handful of well-dressed, soon-to-be-bank-robbers debating the true meaning of “Like a Virgin” in Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs. “It’s about a girl who digs a guy with a big dick,” Mr. Brown argues. “The entire song—it’s a metaphor for big dicks.” “No, no,” Mr. Blonde interjects. “It’s about a girl who is very vulnerable. She’s been fucked over a few times. Then she meets some guy who’s really sensitive…” “That’s what ‘True Blue’ is about, now, granted, no argument about that,” Brown replies. Years went by and Madonna’s music began to exist more and more outside of the radio stations my parents listened to. Soon, I was 18 years old and watching Running on Empty, where a same-aged Danny (played by River Phoenix) sat in the back of a music classroom, surveying his classmates dancing to Madonna’s “Lucky Star.” In a flash, the teacher, Mr. Phillips, begins playing Beethoven’s Sonata Pathetique, 2nd Movement. Every student’s eyes glaze over. Phillips asks what the difference between the two compositions is, to which someone says the classical piece is very good and the pop piece is very bad. The class groans. “You can’t dance to Beethoven,” Danny says, much to Phillips’s amusement. Whether it was a dick-size conversation or vibe-shifting choreography, Madonna’s music was a question of access—her songs gave us a vocabulary for movement, for freedom and for meaning.

I’d been listening to Madonna for years before I heard her for the first time. Cultural osmosis had fashioned her into MTV royalty and a commercial darling. Anyone born after 1990 knows Madonna as the “Queen of Pop,” or, perhaps, an artist whose work became so foundational that Glee had no choice but to dedicate an entire episode to her catalog. But her larger-than-life legacy that towered over me slowly fell back down to earth. I began to understand that, to become a legend, you must first build your mythology from scratch. In 2024, Chappell Roan can get a crowd of a few hundred thousand people to sing the “Pink Pony Club” chorus together on a random summer weekend. You can trace the blueprints of that fascination back some 40 years, back to when Madonna coaxed superstardom out of a zeitgeist without precedent. Pop music remains commonplace because Like a Virgin bought the genre another 50, 60 years of timelessness. The word “antiquated” means nothing in the company of songs like “Dress You Up” and “Pretender.”

The release of Like a Virgin got delayed a few months because Madonna was such a lingering, smashing success—it’s a major reason why 1984 ended in such blockbuster fashion. The record was also an indirect sonic sequel to what is, perhaps, one of my favorite albums of the 1980s: David Bowie’s Let’s Dance. Madonna hand-picked Chic’s Nile Rodgers to produce Like a Virgin, largely because his work on Let’s Dance a year prior was so unfathomably brilliant. The two musicians had met previously at a NYC nightclub, and Rodgers said he “kept thinking to myself, ‘Damn, is she a star,’ but she wasn’t at that time.” When he was offered the producer gig, he wasn’t immediately sold, because some of Madonna’s peers bemoaned that she was a “totally self-centered bitch” who was a painful collaborator. But he said yes and, upon them linking up, found the budding superstar to be a “true professional.” “If you don’t love these songs, we can’t work together,” Madonna told Rodgers upon showing him the demos she’d made with Bray. “I don’t love them now,” Rodgers responded, “but I will when I’ve finished working on them!” Madonna wanted Like a Virgin to rewrite the script she’d put to work on her first record. She chose all nine songs herself, including four (“Material Girl,” “Like a Virgin,” “Love Don’t Live Here Anymore” and “Dress You Up”) that were composed by outside songwriters.

Like a Virgin was recorded at the Power Station in Hell’s Kitchen. Rodgers wanted to simplify the set-up and pivot away from the “heavily sequenced and synthesizer-led” construction of Madonna’s demo tapes, believing they sounded too similar to her debut record. He called upon his Chic bandmates Bernard Edwards (bass) and Tony Thompson (drums) to fill out the rhythm section, and an audio engineer named Jason Corsaro convinced Rodgers to digitally record Like a Virgin, believing the process would soon become “the future of recording.” A Sony 3324 24-track digital tape recorder captured the songs, and the crew used a Sony F-1 two-track to mix them. Madonna, who became a studio rat during the sessions, recorded her vocals in one of the Power Station’s high-ceilinged piano rooms, singing into a stereo AKG C24 tube mic with a Schoeps preamp and Pultec equalizer attached while surrounded by gobos. Bronx keyboardist Robert Sabino joined the sessions and laid down some tracking on his Sequential Circuits Prophet-5 and Rhodes piano. According to Corsaro, the final mixes of Like a Virgin were nearly identical to the Bray-produced demos but that they were finalized by “better musicians.”

Like a Virgin is not Madonna’s best album, though its Diamond certification from the RIAA, a leading role in Desperately Seeking Susan alongside Rosanna Arquette and the some 21 million copies sold over the last 40 years may suggest otherwise. What it did well, however, was take Madonna’s penchant for post-disco sequences and splash it with some hues of hip-hop and New Wave. It was more than just a synth-pop album, craving tastes of house music and a breathless, glitzy dedication to blithe dance provocation. Madonna brought a taste of Marilyn Monroe into the 1980s, transforming a song like “Material Girl” to become a Gentlemen Prefer Blondes-influenced, carnal take on the pleasures of greed and materialism; “Angel,” which features Rodgers’s pizzicato guitar-playing, twinkles with heavenly love and riffs on a lyric from Public Image Ltd’s “Death Disco”; Edwards reworked the Four Tops’ “I Can’t Help Myself” bassline into a stirring intro rhythm on “Like a Virgin.”

Even though I’d argue that there are four, maybe five Madonna albums better than Like a Virgin, it remains a gateway to better and bolder work. You don’t break ground on the template for your acolytes, from Britney Spears to Miley Cyrus, on Erotica without rolling around in a wedding dress at the VMAs first. The 1980s—especially the decade’s middle part—were a minefield for pop breakouts. Michael Jackson set the tone in 1982 when Thriller changed the game by selling 32 million copies and winning eight Grammy Awards. Two years later, Prince, Bruce Springsteen and Madonna all erupted, commercially, within months of each other—ending 1984 as the three best-selling, non-compilation albums of the year.

But critics were torn on Like a Virgin. While The New York Times championed how Madonna flipped the boyfriends’ cars-worshipping, rebelliously postured tropes of pre-Beatles girl groups into a POV that is “decidedly more self-interested,” Billboard ridiculed her singing, calling her melody “pretty enough” to make the record a “fine second album.” Rolling Stone, in a 3.5-star review, said that there was “an undercurrent of ambition that makes her more than the latest Betty Boop.” The Pittsburgh Press called Madonna “Cyndi Lauper with her nose pinched shut,” concluding that “you could put these [songs] behind any decent-voiced singer” and that “Like a Virgin does not establish Madonna as anything special.” Perhaps that was not such a seething, controversial take in Reagan’s America, but Like a Virgin is multi-dimensionally inexplicable now—a project that demands consideration of both the music and the artist who made it. The album, catchy as it may be, introduced the world to Madonna the symbol and Madonna the icon. It’s an art piece that made “context” a necessary element of criticism, re-shaping schools of thought indefinitely.

Like a Virgin stood out, too, because of Madonna’s all-encompassing approach to promoting it. Jewelry designer and stylist Maripol created the look she donned throughout its lifespan, including the crucifixes, rosaries, fishnet stockings, bleached hair, flap skirts, lace tops and fingerless gloves. If everyone wanted to look like Pat Benatar at the beginning of 1983, cultural tides had turned over a year later when Madonna’s Like a Virgin aesthetic punctured the mainstream. Shopping malls across the United States started holding Madonna lookalike contests (Andy Warhol allegedly judged one of them); Out writer Nathan Smith said that the country’s young girls latched onto “the transformative transgressions of Madonna, a star who wanted to be in control of sexual identity and dictate the terms of her own erotic encounters.” Boys and girls wanted to be Madonna 40 years ago; boys and girls want to be Madonna now.

Like a Virgin and its “feels so good inside” proverb is, maybe, tame in retrospect, but we can never abandon the truth: It very well might be one of the most consequential and informative albums in the history of our ever-changing standard. Womanhood in America changed the moment Madonna dropped the title track on Halloween, just a month after she sang it at the VMAs—where she emerged from a 17-foot tall wedding cake wearing a belt buckle with “BOY TOY” plastered across the buckle and, after stepping out of one of her high-heels and diving onto the floor to cover up the malfunction, she flashed her underwear at the cameras and flipped the wide-eyed world into a landmine of uncharted desire. Culture shifts at award shows are few and far between nowadays, but “Like a Virgin” was a historical burst of access. Gender became more complex and fluid, sexuality found a nuanced identity—all of this, of course, had been present in the underground for decades, but Madonna was able to hide the pill in applesauce and put it down the throats of detractors and censors.

Very few releases in the 40 years since can be credited with building a brand new archetype. Thriller might be the quintessential 1980s product, but Like a Virgin was so quickly cherished that teenagers bought out the Madonna stock of record stores across the country like she was as big as the Beatles. And, just maybe, she was as big as the Beatles—in 1984, she may have been bigger. In an era where only men sang about sex, Madonna added a second page to a pop lexicon that was slowly growing out-of-date, giving mainstream music erotic, empowered and transformative color. Madonna’s tempest of popularity, simmered now as it may be, feels aptly topical again, as we are about to careen into another period of extreme conservatism. If Like a Virgin’s door-kicking mirage can still teach us anything four decades later, it’s that, hopefully, pop music is too demonstrative to regress—that it’s still a revelation we can affectionately covet for pleasure and survival.

Madonna has existed as a cultural phenomenon for my entire life. I find that to be a gift, as my mother was 13 when Madonna hit the shelves and can still recount a world before the Bay City, Michigan-born girl turned everything inside out. For years, my father had a stack of Playboy magazines hidden under his side of the bed. One of them was the September 1985 issue featuring Madonna. “UNLIKE A VIRGIN… FOR THE VERY FIRST TIME” was written across the cover in a bold, red font. I’d sneak into his room while he was asleep on the couch and memorize every page like they were nuclear codes, running my fingers over the “OUR LAST STAPLED ISSUE – IT’S A KEEPER” text long before realizing I wanted to be Madonna, not have her. Later, I’d sing along to “Into the Groove” in a friend’s mom’s car and, that Christmas, she’d gift me her old Madonna scrapbook that still had the $1 price tag glued to the front cover. I cut out all my favorite images and taped them up on my walls, mimicking the Queen of Pop’s poses in the reflection of the cracked, skinny mirror next to my closet.

I grew up with Like a Virgin and then, in adulthood, held the album close while I came out the first and second time. Manhood splinched me until Madonna sewed all the missing pieces back together. She recalibrated femininity, and I so deeply yearned to step into it. Her music was a rubber stamp on sex and power, a shade of wedding white turned into club-ready fashion. Religious jewelry draped down her ears and neck like the fingers of God; she squirmed onstage and curled her lips while she sang “all over, all over.” Prettiness became something obscene; I wanted a piece of the cake Madonna emerged from at the 1984 VMAs. A few years ago, in a Walmart in rural Ohio, a cashier whistled “Holiday” through her gapped teeth and told me that she and Madonna were waitresses at the same New York City restaurant in the early 1980s. I chose to believe her, if only because she believed it herself. Like Coca-Cola, neon signs, Star Wars and sitcoms, Madonna is a part of American iconography that’s recognizable in every language. Everyone has a story about her.

Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.