"I made it through the wilderness, somehow I made it through!" With that girlish admission, Madonna opened her sophomore album, 1984's Like a Virgin — and officially took her throne.
Madonna's monumental sophomore album arrived just 16 months after the mononymous starlet's debut. Its self-titled precursor had earned the singer a Top 10 hit in "Holiday" and a handful of minor radio singles, and established her as a talent to watch as the singer/songwriter sounds of the 1970s gave way to '80s pop. But it wasn't until she released Like a Virgin that Madonna became the pop star whose name was on everyone's lips.
Featuring modern classics like the title track and "Material Girl" as well as fan favorites like "Over and Over" and "Shoo-Bee-Doo" — and a melodramatic cover of Rose Royce's "Love Don't Live Here Anymore" — Like a Virgin solidified the superstar prowess she'd hinted with Madonna. With a provocative cover to boot, the album set the stage for the boundary-pushing, chart-topping career that made her the undisputed Queen of Pop.
"Every important artist has at least one album in his or her career whose critical and commercial success becomes the artist's magic moment," biographer Randy Taraborrelli wrote in 2002's Madonna: An Intimate Biography. "For Madonna, Like a Virgin was just such a defining moment."
As Like a Virgin turns 40, revisit the album's impact on both Madonna's career and pop music as a whole.
It Made Madonna A Global Superstar
The success of Madonna's debut had been a slow burn, with the album steadily climbing from its Billboard 200 debut at No. 190 to an eventual peak at No. 8 over the course of more than a year. It became a standard bearer for the decade's dance-pop sound thanks to sparkly bops like "Lucky Star" and "Borderline," but its performance on both the charts and the larger cultural zeitgeist was ultimately small change compared to the cultural behemoth its predecessor would soon become.
Two months after its release, Like a Virgin became the pop star's first album to top the Billboard 200, replacing Bruce Springsteen's Born In the U.S.A. and eventually spending three consecutive weeks at No. 1. The studio set aso kicked off a hot streak of three chart-toppers for Madonna on the tally including 1986's True Blue and 1989's Like a Prayer.
The newly minted superstar's popularity at the time also launched the phenomenon known as the "Madonna wannabe." Fans all across the country began emulating her style, taking inspiration from her pop persona, and evangelizing for the Queen of Pop by wearing her merch.
In his 1985 story that helped coin the term, Time journalist John Skow seemed simultaneously aghast and fascinated by the trend, writing, "Twelve-year-old girls, headphones blocking out the voices of reason, are running around wearing T-shirts labeled VIRGIN, which would not have been necessary 30 years ago. The shirt offers no guarantees, moreover; they merely advertise Madonna's first, or virgin, rock tour, now thundering across the continent, and her bouncy, love-it-when-you-do-it song 'Like a Virgin.'
And the "wannabes" weren't just wearing shirts promoting Madonna's tour, either. According to Skow, teenagers and young women across the country were "saving up their babysitting money to buy cross-shaped earrings and fluorescent rubber bracelets like Madonna's, white lace tights that they will cut off at the ankles and black tube skirts."
It Gave Us Some Of Her Most Quintessential Hits
With her debut, Madonna had already scored her first No. 1 on Billboard's Dance Club Songs chart, thanks to the sugary escapism of "Holiday." But Like a Virgin featured a pair of shimmering singles that would eventually become timeless centerpieces of her catalog.
First came the title track, which was officially released as the album's lead single on Halloween 1984. With its erotic lyrics and flirtatious, danceable rhythm, the song set the tone for the album to come and earned Madonna her first No. 1 on the all-genre Billboard Hot 100.
Then there was "Material Girl" and its gleeful Mary Lambert-directed music video, an homage to Marilyn Monroe's timeless performance in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. By the time the song peaked at No. 2 on the Hot 100, its title had started to double as one of Madonna's many nicknames — even if, as she bemoaned in the decades that followed, calling her the "Material Girl" entirely sidestepped the track's ironic, feminist message.
The LP's rollout also included three additional singles: the new wave-leaning "Angel," "Into the Groove" (featured in Madonna's first major movie, 1985's Desperately Seeking Susan, and later added to the album as a bonus cut) and the lovesick "Dress You Up," all of which added to her chart successes. Though "Into the Groove" wasn't released commercially in the U.S., the other two singles each peaked at No. 5 on the Hot 100; meanwhile, both "Angel" and "Into the Groove" added to the seven-time GRAMMY winner's quickly proliferating collection of No. 1s on the Dance Club Songs chart.
It Helped Her Fight For Control Over Her Career
Since her earliest days dancing through New York City's downtown scene, Madonna had uncompromising confidence and a clear creative vision. After the success of her self-titled debut in 1983 had established her as a star to watch, when it came to crafting her follow-up, she wanted even more autonomy. However, the singer's request to produce her sophomore album herself was quickly shot down by her label at the time, Sire Records.
She started speaking out publicly in the press against what she called the label's "hierarchy of old men," famously telling Rolling Stone, "It's a chauvinistic environment to be working in because I'm treated like this sexy little girl. I always have to prove them wrong. This is what happens when you're a girl — it wouldn't happen to Prince or Michael Jackson. I had to do everything on my own and convince people that I was worth a record deal. After that, I had the same problem trying to convince them I had more to offer than a one-off girl singer. I have to win this fight."
Eventually, the label offered a compromise: Madonna could choose to work with whichever executive producer she wanted, no questions asked. Taking the victory, the singer selected Nile Rodgers, who had just come off producing one of her favorite albums, David Bowie's 1983 smash Let's Dance.
Reportedly, the dynamic between the singer and the Chic co-founder wasn't always smooth as they created the album together. But Like a Virgin certainly set the precedent for Madonna's unwavering insistence on controlling her sound, her image and her message to the world — and she's been credited as a producer on every one of her albums since.
It Birthed The First Iconic MTV Video Music Awards Performance
Six weeks before sending "Like a Virgin" to radio, Madonna opened the first-ever MTV Video Music Awards with a scandalous, high-concept performance of the song.
The singer emerged atop a 17-foot-tall wedding cake, dressed in a racy wedding dress and bustier similar to her outfit from the album artwork. (Adding an extra touch of provocation, Madonna accessorized the look with her now-famous "BOY TOY" belt, which she also wore for the cover art shoot.)
The moment became instantly iconic, with Madonna throwing back her veil as she sang, "Like a virgin/ Touched for the very first time/ Like a virgin/ When your heart beats next to mine."
Madonna's performance also included one of the earliest televised wardrobe malfunctions. As the pop star climbed down the wedding cake's multiple levels, one of her high heels accidentally slipped off. To cover up the gaffe, the singer crash-landed on the floor, inadvertently flashing the camera with a shot of her underwear as she writhed around on the ground.
"I thought, 'Well, I'll just pretend I meant to do this,'" the icon recalled three decades later in a 2014 Billboard retrospective about the performance. "And, as I reached for the shoe, the dress went up. And the underpants were showing."
While many industry insiders decried Madonna's performance at the time and even went as far as to declare her career would be over due to its scandalous nature, Les Garland, MTV's executive vice president of programming at the time, had a more accurate reading of the moment: "She stole the show."
It Pushed The Envelope For Female Artistry — And Paid Major Dividends
Sex appeal had been a key component of male pop stardom since the days of Elvis Presley swinging and thrusting his hips on "The Ed Sullivan Show." However, it arguably wasn't until Madonna's Like a Virgin that a female pop singer channeled her own sexuality so unabashedly into her music. After all, the lyrical content of the title track alone was enough to leave the older generation clutching their pearls (even if some of those parents were likely the same fans who had been shrieking along to Elvis and the Beatles in their youth).
And yet, Madonna seemed to not only welcome controversy, but openly court it, refusing to cover up, tone it down or censor herself. Of course, the singer would continue to push boundaries even further as her career evolved — within a decade, she would release 1992's Erotica and its scandalous coffee table companion Sex — but Like a Virgin served as a deliberate turning point in the pop star embracing her sexuality and daring the masses to object.
Breaking societal barriers paid off: the album quickly became the first by a female artist to sell more than five million copies in the U.S. It was certified diamond by the RIAA in May 1998, and with a reported 22 million copies sold worldwide as of press time, it remains one of the best-selling albums of all time.
Nearly four decades after its release, the album was deemed worthy of preservation in 2023 by the Library of Congress into the National Recording Registry based on its "cultural, historical or aesthetic importance in the nation's recorded sound heritage."
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It Paved The Way For Future Generations Of Pop Stars
Without Madonna's pioneering influence on Like a Virgin, it's hard to imagine life for the pop stars who followed in her footsteps.
Would Britney Spears have writhed around with an albino python at the 2001 MTV VMAs if it wasn't for Madonna's scandalous performance of "Like a Virgin" nearly three decades before? As the star said herself, she certainly learned from Madonna's tutelage over the years.
"I was in awe of the ways Madonna would not compromise her vision," the Princess of Pop wrote in her 2023 memoir about working with Her Madgesty on "Me Against The Music," their 2003 duet from Spears' Into the Zone. "It was an important lesson for me, one that would take a long time for me to absorb: she demanded power, and so she got power."
Spears wasn't the only pop star inspired by Madonna's fearless nature and bold self-belief, either. The Spice Girls have credited the superstar as "a big influence" on their career and the "girl power!" message they spread across the globe more than a decade after Madge ascended to her throne with Like a Virgin.
More recently, Madonna's influence can be clearly traced to everything from Lady Gaga's avant garde style to Taylor Swift's penchant for creating musical eras, or Christina Aguilera's unapologetic embrace of her sexuality in her own Stripped era and Tate McRae baring all in her "it's ok, i'm ok" music video from earlier this summer.
"One element of Madonna's career that really takes center stage is how many times she's reinvented herself," Taylor Swift said nearly a decade ago when Madonna was named the top touring artist at the 2013 Billboard Music Awards."It's easier to stay in one look, one comfort zone, one musical style. It's inspiring to see someone whose only predictable quality is being unpredictable."
Thankfully, we'll never know what the music industry would look like without the Queen of Pop — and Like a Virgin inaugurated a legacy that has endured for four decades and counting.