Madonna

Madonna: Reinvention as a Business Model

In 1978 she abandoned a dance scholarship at the University of Michigan and arrived in New York with "$35 in [her] pocket" — "the bravest thing [she'd] ever done," as she later put it. Five years afterwards she had a Sire Records contract. Seven years afterwards she was the most argued-about woman in America. The arithmetic of that ascent is the most reliable thing anyone can say about Madonna Louise Ciccone.

Bay City, and the Mother Who Died

She was born on 16 August 1958 in Bay City, Michigan, to Silvio "Tony" Ciccone, an engineer whose parents emigrated from Pacentro, and Madonna Louise Fortin, an X-ray technician of French-Canadian descent. She shared her mother's name; the family called her Little Nonnie. On 1 December 1963 her mother died of breast cancer. Madonna was five.

What followed was a Catholic-school childhood in the Detroit suburbs marked by deliberate misbehaviour — cartwheels in hallways, hanging from monkey bars, lifting her skirt in class — conducted by a girl who nonetheless collected straight A's and a quarter from her father for each one. She has described herself then as a "lonely girl who was searching for something." She left Rochester Adams High School in January 1976 a straight-A student and a cheerleader. Her ballet teacher Christopher Flynn, the first adult to take her seriously, said she was "the best student in the class."

Thirty-Five Dollars

New York was not romantic. She worked as a hatcheck girl at the Russian Tea Room and an elevator operator, studied at the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and under Martha Graham, and was held at knifepoint by two men and sexually assaulted — later describing it as "a taste of my weakness, it showed me that I still could not save myself in spite of all the strong-girl show."

She sang and played drums and guitar in the Breakfast Club, then formed Emmy, then signed to Gotham Records in March 1981. The DJ Mark Kamins pushed her demo at Danceteria; "Everybody" followed in October 1982. Her self-titled debut, on 27 July 1983, reached number eight and produced "Holiday," "Borderline" and "Lucky Star."

Like a Virgin, and the Wannabes

*Like a Virgin* (November 1984) became the first album by a woman to sell more than five million copies and eventually passed 21 million; the title track held number one for six weeks while conservative groups demanded bans. At the 1984 MTV Video Music Awards she appeared atop a giant wedding cake in a gown and white gloves and rolled provocatively across the stage — a performance MTV News later called one of the most iconic in pop history.

Then came the part that mattered commercially: imitation. Styled by Maripol in lace, fishnets, crucifixes and stacked bracelets, she generated the "Madonna wannabe" phenomenon and effectively wrote the visual grammar of 1980s female fashion. *True Blue* (1986), which she co-wrote and co-produced entirely, topped the charts in 28 countries and sold 25 million — the best-selling album by a woman of the decade.

Blasphemy as Strategy

In January 1989 she signed with Pepsi and premiered "Like a Prayer" in a commercial. Then the actual video appeared: stigmata, burning crosses, a dream sequence with a saint. The Vatican condemned it, boycotts were called, and Pepsi pulled the ad and killed the sponsorship. The single went to number one. Of the album, Rolling Stone's J.D. Considine wrote that it was "proof not only that Madonna should be taken seriously as an artist but that hers is one of the most compelling voices of the Eighties."

The pattern repeated. The 1990 Blond Ambition tour was condemned for a simulated masturbation sequence, named tour of the year by Rolling Stone, and turned into a Grammy-winning video and *Truth or Dare*, then the highest-grossing documentary ever made. "Justify My Love" was banned by MTV and went to number one because of it. In April 1992 she formalised the leverage, founding Maverick with Time Warner on a $60 million advance and a 20 per cent royalty, the highest in the industry at the time.

The Year It Stopped Working

On 20 October 1992 she released *Erotica* and simultaneously published *Sex*, a book of explicit Steven Meisel photographs. The book hit the bestseller list; the Washington Post dismissed it as an "oversized, overpriced" collection of "hardcore sexual fantasies." The backlash swallowed the album, which became her lowest-selling to that point despite favourable reviews. A 1994 *Late Show* appearance — unbroadcastable profanity, handing David Letterman her underwear and urging him to smell it — raised the question of whether provocation had become a reflex. She answered by retreating: *Bedtime Stories* (1994) softened everything, and "Take a Bow" spent seven weeks at number one.

Evita, Ray of Light, and the Second Act

She had written to the director Alan Parker asking for *Evita*, trained her voice and studied Argentine history. "This is the role I was born to play," she said. "I put everything of me into this because it was much more than a role in a movie... And I am prouder of Evita than anything else I have done." It won her the 1996 Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Musical or Comedy.

*Ray of Light* (1998), made with William Orbit, is widely regarded as her masterpiece: 16 million copies, number one in seventeen countries, four Grammys. *Confessions on a Dance Floor* (2005), built with Stuart Price as a continuous DJ set, topped the charts in a record forty countries. In 2007 she left Warner for a ten-year, $120 million deal with Live Nation; the Sticky & Sweet Tour grossed over $408 million. She entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2008, her first year of eligibility.

Why Madonna Is Called a Genius

The faculty in question is not musicianship. It is timing, and a curatorial ear. Her method across four decades has been to find the producer who owns the sound about to matter and get there first: Orbit for the electronica of 1998, Mirwais Ahmadzaï for *Music*, Stuart Price for the 2005 disco revival, Timbaland and Pharrell Williams for *Hard Candy*, Diplo and Avicii for *Rebel Heart*. She has been explicit about it, saying she prefers "unconventional, lesser-known artists who are making music unlike anyone else out there." Paired with that is a cold read of how outrage converts into sales, and a businesswoman's instinct that produced Maverick and the Live Nation deal. The academy takes this seriously enough to have generated its own subfield, "Madonna studies."

The counter-case is substantial. She is not a virtuoso singer or player, and her records live or die on the collaborators she picks; when the pick is wrong, as on *American Life*, the result is her weakest work. Her film career outside *Evita* is close to a disaster — Razzies for *Shanghai Surprise*, a universally panned *Swept Away*, and A.O. Scott's judgement that the part "requires the surrender of emotional control, something Madonna seems constitutionally unable to achieve." And *Sex* proved the provocation instinct is fallible. Genius as strategy, then, rather than genius as art.

Legacy

She is the best-selling female recording artist of all time, the first woman to earn a billion dollars from concerts, holder of twelve US number-one singles and twenty MTV Video Music Awards, and was the highest-paid female musician for eleven years spread across four decades. The larger inheritance is structural: every pop star who changes persona between albums, runs her own label and treats controversy as a release schedule is working inside a template she built.