A year before Madonna birthed her expression of sexual freedom on September 14, 1984, Billy Steinberg and Tom Kelly wrote a song called “Like a Virgin.”
“I wrote the lyrics before we wrote any music. I had been in a relationship that was rather difficult, and I extricated myself from that relationship and I met somebody new, and I felt sort of reborn, if you will,” said Steinberg. “And so I wrote, ‘I made it through the wilderness, somehow I made it through, I didn’t know how lost I was until I found you. I was beat, incomplete, I’d been had, I was sad and blue, but you made me feel shiny and new, like a virgin.’ So it was really just telling the story of what I had been through and where it was in my life.”
The song came to Steinberg on September 10, 1983, while he was driving his pickup truck around his father’s vineyard in Thermal, California, a small town in the Coachella Valley.
He showed the lyrics to his songwriting partner Tom Kelly. “I especially related to the lyric at the time, since I was going through a tough divorce,” said Kelly. “Initially, I tried to compose a ballad or midtempo song to accompany the lyric, but it wasn’t working. Out of frustration, I started to clown around, performing the song in an uptempo, Smokey Robinson-style, with falsetto vocals. Lo and behold, it worked.”
“We tried to place ‘Like A Virgin,’ but everyone looked at us like we were nuts,” said Steinberg. “Some people even asked us to change the title. I knew that compared to most mainstream pop lyrics, the title and theme might seem a bit jolting and risque. But I liked the idea of writing a lyric concept which hadn’t quite been done before.”
“Everybody liked the song that heard it but nobody wanted to touch it until we played it for Michael Ostin,” said Kelly. Ostin was then Senior Vice President at Warner Bros. Records at the time.
“We were nervous about playing ‘Virgin’ for Ostin,” said Kelly. “When he heard it, he flipped over the song. He said it would be great for his artist Madonna to record. Madonna at that time wasn’t a major artist yet, it was before Borderline and Lucky Star became hits, but it was clear that she would be a perfect artist to sing this song.”
The first evolution
“My father was very strict, very Catholic, and very conservative. I mean, I literally couldn’t leave the house unless my skirts were a certain length—you know, half an inch off my knee. I often had to go and change. I guess I just had to rebel against all that,” said Madonna looking back on her upbringing.
Raised in the Detroit suburbs, a 19-year-old Madonna relocated to New York City in 1978 to pursue her dance career.
“I’d gone to a a trillion auditions on Broadway for musical theatre, because I finally figured out that being just a dancer was not going to get me anywhere. I started auditioning for musicals and I could combine singing and dancing,” recalled Madonna. “So I finally went to this audition and I danced every dance routine, then they asked me to sing all these songs, then they made me come back, then they made me dance with this guy, then they made me sing another song, and it went on for hours and hours and hours. That night this french guy called me he was one of the producers of the show and he said ‘well you didn’t get the job’ and I said ‘well what are you calling me for then’ he said ‘well we want we want to make you a star… so they took me to Paris.”
“They gave me all this money and they put me in a really Posh apartment and I had a car and a driver and I freaked out because I went from having nothing to having everything,” said Madonna about her time with Aquarius records. “I was there for six months and I realized at that time that I did wanted to be a singer but I didn’t want to be made into a singer. I didn’t want to be part of a factory. I wanted to go back back to New York and learn how to write music and play an instrument myself without all these rich people behind me pulling my strings like a marionette. I wanted to earn it.”
“I wanted to make a difference in the world. I wanted to be somebody, and I wanted to be a rebel. So I was a rebel, and I wanted to somehow make that translate into my music.”
The second evolution
Madonna returned to New York determined to forge her own path and learned to write music and play the guitar. She became part of two bands, The Breakfast Club and Emmy and the Emmys, but eventually created a four-track demo tape with her boyfriend Stephen Bray that included a song called “Everybody.”
Taking her cassettes around to New York nightclubs, Madonna brought her tape to Danceteria, where she met resident DJ Mark Kamins, who not only played her music but also became her producer and, eventually, a romantic partner.
“I was always going to a club called Danceteria. I would bring my cassette tapes to the DJs and drive them all crazy. I was relentless. They would see me and run because I just wanted them to play my cassette,” said Madonna. “I finally got this guy Mark to play my cassette. It was a song called ‘Everybody.’ I swear to God, I had to promise everything to him to get it played, and when he played it, everybody got up and started dancing to it, and it blew my mind. I mean, seriously, like that was everything to me.”
Kamins brought Madonna’s demo to Island Records, but founder Chris Blackwell rejected her music, “because I couldn’t work out what on earth I could do for her.”
Believing in Madonna, Kamins sent the tape to Seymour Stein, President of Sire Records. Stein, recovering from heart surgery at Lenox Hill Hospital, listened to the demo on his hospital bed.
“I’m sure I was going nuts in that little room, but I immediately felt an excitement. I liked the hook, I liked Madonna’s voice, I liked the feel, and I liked the name Madonna. I liked it all and played it again,” said Stein. “I never overanalyze or suck the life out of whatever I instinctively enjoy. I reached over and called up Mark. “Can I meet you and Madonna?”
Kamins and Madonna dropped by the hospital that evening. “By the time Madonna walked in with Mark Kamins that evening, I had been fully briefed and tidied up by a team of ladies. Not that she really cared about my predicament. She’d come to get a record deal before some old record guy croaked, along with his check-signing hand,” stated Stein.
“She wasn’t even interested in hearing me explain how much I liked her demo. ‘The thing to do now,’ she said, ‘is sign me to a record deal.’ She then opened her arms and laughed. ‘Take me, I’m yours!’,” recalled Stein. “Peering into the back of my head with those Madonna eyes, she said, “And now, you give me the money.'”
Stein signed Madonna on the spot, stating, “The deal we agreed to was modest: Madonna would get an advance of $15,000 per single, for a total of three singles, with an option for an album. On top of that, there was an additional publishing deal by which she’d get a $2,500 advance for every song she wrote. It was more of a test run than a full deal, but that’s all she needed, and under the circumstances, that’s about all I could offer,” said Stein.
“Everybody” was released as Madonna’s debut single on October 6, 1982, followed by “Burning Up” and “Holiday.” These singles set the stage for her first album, Madonna, which was released in July 1983 and brought her global attention with songs like “Borderline” and “Lucky Star.”
The music videos for “Borderline” and “Lucky Star” were in heavy rotation on MTV, which played a crucial part in building her profile. Madonna knew that the television was an important part of expanding her music, stating, “Kids today worship the television.”
“People started writing about me and photographing me and analyzing me and criticizing me and scrutinizing me, and all those things. I started to think about my place in the world and think about people’s point of view about me, and I started thinking about pushing boundaries, pushing the envelope. I started reading what people wrote about me, and one thing that really irritated me was that people didn’t seem to put the idea of being sexual and being intelligent together. And I had set out to defy that those two could exist together. So that was my next goal.”
The third evolution
“I change from day to day,” said Madonna. “Sometimes people think that if you’re a girl, you’re going to be a pushover and they can get away with more. They can kind of pull the wool over your eyes. You’re not going to be as strong as a man and like getting what you want, demanding what you asked for. But I just surprise them when they see that they’re wrong. And on the other hand, the advantages are the charms, you know, that people always fall for.”
After her debut album, Madonna wanted creative control over her second album and asked to produce the record herself. Sire Records declined this request but offered her the choice of working with any producer she wanted.
Madonna chose Nile Rodgers, who co-founded the group Chic and brought the world disco classics including “Le Freak,” “Good Times,” and “I Want Your Love.” By the early 1980s, Rodgers was producing albums for David Bowie, Diana Ross, and Sister Sledge.
“I chose to work with Nile Rodgers because I think that he’s a genius, and I wanted to work with a genius on my record,” said Madonna.
“I was always excited by her because here was this brand-new person who exuded an aura of superstardom,” said Rodgers. “In a very matter-of-fact kind of tone, she said, ‘Nile, if you don’t like all these songs, I can’t work with you.’ And I said, ‘Well, Madonna, I don’t like all the songs, but let me tell you this, by the time I get finished with them, I’m gonna love them.'”
When Warner Bros. A&R executive Michael Ostin played both “Like A Virgin” and “Material Girl” for Madonna and Rodgers, Rodgers favoured “Material Girl” and didn’t believe strongly in the “Like A Virgin” hook. Rodgers recalled, “Only Madonna believed in that song to the depth that she believed in it. I was going for Material Girl, I’m a club guy. I don’t come from a world where the lyric is more important than the groove, I don’t get that and she stuck to her guns, she was steadfast and unwavering and every argument I could throw at her, every argument the record company could throw at her… she knew.”
The nine-track Like a Virgin album took approximately two months to record, from early April through May 1984 at Power Station Studios in New York. The album featured the title track and “Material Girl,” among other songs. Eager to capitalize on the momentum from her first album, Madonna planned a summer release. However, “Borderline” unexpectedly started to climb the charts. Sire Records delayed the “Like a Virgin” release to avoid slowing down her debut album’s success. Madonna was eager, stating, “Come on, come on, let’s put this out,” but she understood the label’s strategy. The album would remain shelved until November.
In the meantime, Madonna was invited to perform at her friend Keith Haring’s ‘Party of Life’ birthday celebration at the Paradise Garage nightclub on May 16th.
Haring stated, “In the spring of 1984, it’s time for my birthday, and I stage what I call my Party of Life event. I want to make this into quite a grand affair… So I plan this big party, which is for my birthday, but not on my birthday. I ask Madonna if she could sing at the party, and she agrees. As a matter of fact, she had been to my studio just days earlier to play me some cuts from her new album, ‘Like a Virgin,’ which at that time hadn’t come out yet. I immediately liked ‘Dress You Up’ and ‘Like a Virgin,’ and we decide she’ll sing these two songs at the party. While we’re hearing these songs, I do a painting on Madonna’s leather jacket, which she wears to the party. Madonna decides that she wants to sing these two songs on a brass bed covered with frilly material and strewn with white roses.”
In attendance were Andy Warhol, Diana Ross and Jean-Michel Basquiat, and others. Warhol stated that “Madonna didn’t start until so late.”
“The stage darkened and then when it lit up again there was a big brass bed in the middle of the stage with Madonna. She did ‘Like a Virgin’ and she was wearing her boy toy belt and she, you know, was wearing a bustier,” said video artist Courtney Harmel.
Madonna started sexually teasing with Like A Virgin, in music, lyrics, and looks. Appearing on an interview with MTV, Madonna stated she just finished recording the album, teasing her second, “I’m really excited about it… I just want to put something new out… you can’t do that till the other stuff isn’t interesting anymore.”
MTV VJ Mark Goodman asked Madonna about her fashion, specifically her leather jacket that had “boy toy” written on it. “Well, it’s my tag name. It’s what I write up on walls.” “What does it mean?” “What do you think it means?” But it also has a kind of humorous meaning to it.”
Madonna was preparing for her next evolution.
The fourth evolution
In July, with a budget of $150,000, Madonna went to Venice, Italy to shoot the video for “Like A Virgin.” Directed by Mary Lambert, who directed Borderline, said, “For Like a Virgin I said ‘Let’s do it in Venice!’ The idea of Madonna singing in a gondola was the most outrageous thing I could think of. And Madonna dug it, because she has the whole thing with the Catholic Church and her Italian heritage. It turned into a huge party.”
After filming the music video, Madonna returned to New York to prepare for the MTV Video Music Awards, which were scheduled for September 14, 1984 at Radio City Music Hall. This was MTV’s inaugural awards ceremony and the network struggled to book major artists, so much so that they had to threaten to pull ZZ Top’s videos from rotation if they didn’t perform.
“We’re getting closer to the show, we’re building sets, and Madonna had no idea what she wanted to do,” recalled MTV’s VP of programming Bob Garland. “She called me the next day and says, ‘I’ve got it. I want to sing “Like A Virgin” to a Bengal tiger.’… And I go, ‘You mean like a baby one?’ ‘No, no, full grown.’… I go, ‘You want a white, full grown Bengal tiger onstage at Radio City Music Hall? If it gets loose and kills [then Sony head] Walter Yetnikoff, I’ve got a [expletive] problem.’” He told her to find another idea, and she did, “so we had a 17-foot cake built.”
Maripol, Madonna’s fashion designer, said, “The idea of that performance came from a kind of a vision I had. We used the exact dress she is wearing on the album cover… It was incredible because nobody expected it to be so raunchy.”
With Bette Midler and Dan Aykroyd hosting, Madonna, dressed in a white wedding gown with a fitted bra, lace gloves, and her “Boy Toy” belt buckle, opened the show with “Like a Virgin” in front of Michael Jackson, David Bowie, Tina Turner, Prince, Billy Idol, Cyndi Lauper, George Michael, Quincy Jones, and millions of people watching live on TV.
“I was standing on top of a wedding cake—as one does,” Madonna recalled. “And I walked down these steps, which were the tiers of a wedding cake, and I lost… my white stiletto. I thought, ‘Oh my God, how am I going to get that? It’s over there and I’m on TV.’ So I thought, ‘Well, I’ll pretend I meant to do this,’ and I dove onto the floor. And I rolled around, and I reached for the shoe, and as I reached for the shoe, the dress went up, and then the underpants were showing. And I didn’t mean to.”
Everything Madonna displayed, from lifting her veil, loosening her hair, rolling around, and gyrating on the stage, elicited a buffet of emotions from the audience, from stunned confusion to minimal applause. Annie Lennox called Madonna’s performance “very, very whorish… It was like she was fucking the music industry.” Cyndi Lauper stated, “I loved that. It was performance art.”
“[Manager] Freddy [DeMann] did say to me afterward in the dressing room—he was white with anger, he was so upset—he said, ‘That’s it, you’ve ruined your career’… I didn’t even know that my butt was showing. I couldn’t compute everything that had happened. And since I didn’t really have a career yet, I didn’t feel that I had lost anything,” said Madonna.
Madonna’s publicist Liz Rosenberg stated, “People came up to me and told me her career was over before it started.”
“I knew, that day, that she had made it,” said Maripol. “Every journalist was rushing, going, ‘Oh, my God, who is this girl with the white outfit rolling and crawling on the floor with crosses in her ears and her name is Madonna? And she is singing about being a virgin?’ They were shocked.”
“I think we all know she had a few drinks, because she had to get up the nerve to crawl around like she did,” said Les Garland, EVP at MTV. “She stole the show.”
Madonna shifted global culture that night and directly countered Time Magazine’s declaration. A few months earlier, the April 1984 cover declared the sexual revolution “is over” and “there is growing evidence that the national obsession with sex is subsiding.” For Madonna and her generation, a revolution may have ended, but an evolution had just begun.
Lyrically: Like A Virgin by Madonna
“Like A Virgin” was the first single released from Madonna’s second album of the same name, released on October 31, 1984.
“She just copied our demo. Her record was produced by Nile Rogers, and our demo sounds identical to the Nile Rogers/Madonna record. They used it as a blueprint,” said Steinberg. “Well, I had a good feeling about it, you know. I realized at the time that the title was provocative, and you never know if maybe radio stations would balk at playing a song with that title. I don’t know, but I did have a strong feeling that we had something special and that she was the perfect artist to release this song.”
“Recording artists, they want to take what the writer has and make it theirs. And if they do that successfully, they feel like it’s them. They really want the writers to recede and be out of the picture,” said Steinberg.
I made it through the wilderness
Somehow I made it through
Didn’t know how lost I was
Until I found you
I was beat, incomplete
I’ve been had, I was sad and blue
But you made me feel
Yeah, you made me feel
Shiny and new
Oh, like a virgin
Touched for the very first time
Like a virgin
When your heart beats next to mine
“I had been in a relationship that was rather difficult, and I extricated myself from that relationship and I met somebody new, and I felt sort of reborn, if you will,” said Steinberg. “And so I wrote, ‘I made it through the wilderness, somehow I made it through, I didn’t know how lost I was until I found you. I was beat, incomplete, I’d been had, I was sad and blue, but you made me feel shiny and new, like a virgin.’ So it was really just telling the story of what I had been through and where it was in my life.”
Did the song make Madonna or did Madonna make the song?
“The song came first. It was actually written from a male point of view. It was about going through a divorce. You know, ‘I made it through the wilderness, somehow I made it through, I didn’t know how lost I was until I found you.’ It was like, you know, new love,” said Kelly.
Since the song was from a male perspective, Madonna shifted the original lyrics from “Gonna give you all my love, girl,” to “Gonna give you all my love, boy.”
Gonna give you all my love, boy
My fear is fading fast
Been saving it all for you
‘Cause only love can last
You’re so fine, and you’re mine
Make me strong, yeah, you make me bold
Oh, your love thawed out
Yeah, your love thawed out
What was scared and cold
Like a virgin, hey
Touched for the very first time
Like a virgin
With your heartbeat next to mine
“Every song on my new album really is like a different part of my personality. You know, like ‘Like a Virgin’—it’s kind of innocent sexuality,” said Madonna.
“When I did the song, to me, I was singing about how something made me feel a certain way—brand-new and fresh—and everyone else interpreted it as ‘I don’t want to be a virgin anymore,” said Madonna. “That’s not what I sang at all.”
Madonna made headlines around the world, “Like A Virgin” became a worldwide phenomenon and went to the extent of crowing her with the title of “Queen of Pop,” and the term “Madonna Mania,” arrived, similar to what happened with The Beatles 20 years earlier with Beatlemania.
“Like a Virgin” was released on October 31, 1984, followed by the album on November 12, 1984. This catapulted Madonna into global superstardom and became her first number-one hit on the Billboard Hot 100, claiming the top spot in December 1984 and holding it for six weeks. The album sold 80,000 copies per day at its peak.
In 2023, the album was inducted into the Library of Congress’ National Recording Registry, recognized as “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant” to the nation’s recorded sound heritage.
“I don’t think that I’m using sex to sell myself. I think that I’m a very sexual person, and that comes through in my performing. And if that’s what gets people to buy my records, then that’s fine. But I don’t think of it consciously—well, I’m going to be sexy to get people interested in me. It’s the way I am. It’s the way I’ve always been,” said Madonna.
“I want to conquer the world,” said Madonna in 1983.
