Happy 40th Anniversary to Madonna’s second studio album Like A Virgin, originally released November 12, 1984.
When I agreed, almost a year ago, to write this article about Madonna’s Like A Virgin album for its fortieth anniversary, I got myself into a bit of trouble.
Look, I’m a huge Madonna fan and always have been. I bought her Madonna debut album in 1983, saw her Virgin Tour in 1985, and was rendered speechless when she walked in front of me at the VH1 Fashion Awards ten years later.
I’ve produced segments about her for MTV. I own a ton of Madonna vinyl. I make Madonna TikToks, playlists and mixes.
I cried during her Re-Invention Tour at Madison Square Garden in 2004 and again twenty years later during her Celebration Tour at the Kia Forum. And for decades I have loved her at her best (1998’s Ray of Light) and respected her artistic journey even when I wasn’t fully on board (The Madame X Tour).
But, I have to admit that over the last 35 years or so I’ve barely listened Like A Virgin. After Like A Prayer dropped in 1989, I rarely ever felt the desire to pull up and play Like A Virgin—which is odd because, arguably, it’s her most important album.
It’s so rote anymore to state that Like A Virgin catapulted Madonna into global superstardom, but it’s true. Even though it took three months to hit #1 in the U.S., Like A Virgin sold over 21 million copies worldwide and remains Madonna’s best-selling studio album in the U.S. at 10 million copies.
It launched into mainstream culture Madonna’s brand of overt sexual liberation, manipulation of imagery and iconography, and big-tent pop song crafting that sold hundreds of millions of albums around the globe during the last four decades.
It’s also an incredibly important and iconic recording in American popular culture and music history. Last year the U.S. Library of Congress added Like A Virgin to its National Recording Registry along with Mariah Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas Is You,” Queen Latifah’s All Hail The Queen (1989) and Daddy Yankee’s “Gasolina” because of their “cultural, historical or aesthetic importance in the nation’s recorded sound heritage.”
Plus, the album still resonates today. Just look at singer-songwriter Sabrina Carpenter who’s covered “Material Girl” from Like A Virgin on several stops during her Short N’ Sweet Tour over the past few months. It’s amazing to me that the crowds actually know the words to that song after all these years. But that’s how legendary art can reverberate through generations.
I think one of the reasons why I kind of forgot about the album is because I was 15 years old when Like A Virgin was released which is, ahem…a long time ago. The official street date was November 12, 1984, but back then it was a bit of a crapshoot dependent on trucking and distribution efficiency for when the album would actually show up at your local record shop.
Listen to the Album & Watch the Official Videos:
As a young music nerd, I was obsessed with the album when it came out. I bought it first on vinyl and later on cassette (CDs were still a nascent format) probably from either National Record Mart or Camelot Music at the mall.
The album was bright, fun, kind of scandalous and easy to sing along to. Madonna felt young, wild and cool to me compared to the comic undertones of Cyndi Lauper whose She’s So Unusual (1983) album—which I loved—came out a year earlier and the more adult vibe Teena Marie gave me with my copy of Starchild (released a day earlier than Like A Virgin).
Through the end of 1984 and all of 1985, I couldn’t get enough of Madonna’s music videos, magazine stories, posters—basically, everything about Madonna during this era. I was Like A Virgin’s target audience. I was part of the reason why the album was selling 80,000 copies a day at its peak.
But Like A Virgin and its biggest singles, “Like A Virgin” (her first #1 hit in the U.S. in December 1984) and “Material Girl” (#2 in the U.S., thwarted by REO Speedwagon), became so ubiquitous, culturally dissected and even parodied that, eventually, they transcended being just great pop songs I loved listening to.
Instead, they morphed into cultural timestamp references owned by everybody. For me, those songs ultimately lost their charm—along with the Like A Virgin album.
So, as I grew up over the decades along with Madonna’s oeuvre of hits and misses, Like A Virgin became frozen in the wayback machine to me and, therefore, I just kind of ignored the album. In a list of my 25 favorite albums of all time I put together earlier in the year for this platform, I included three Madonna albums—Like A Virgin didn’t make the cut.
And I feel like I’m not alone in terms of where Like A Virgin sits in my appraisal of Madonna’s discography of studio albums.
Whenever I see prompts online in Reddit, Discord or Instagram asking what the best Madonna albums are, I rarely ever see Like A Virgin listed. Usually it’s her debut, Ray of Light, Erotica (1992), Bedtime Stories (1994), Like A Prayer, Music (2000) or Confessions on a Dance Floor (2005) that get mentioned.
I realize now, after spending the past few months diving back into Like A Virgin and intently listening to it “over and over” (wink wink), it actually should get mentioned in these lists.
Pushing the iconic music videos, lyrical controversies and the “Boy Toy” belt aside for a moment, when was the last time you paid attention to the musicality of this recording or explored the personnel behind the making of the album that was produced by thee Nile Rodgers?
Madonna asked her label to get Rodgers to produce the album. He had just co-produced David Bowie’s 1983 smash Let’s Dance (Bowie was the album’s other producer) and remixed Duran Duran’s “The Reflex” for its upcoming single release (it became their first U.S. #1 later that summer in 1984).
There are a lot of reasons why Madonna wanted Rodgers to produce the album. In interviews, she said it was because he made amazing funk and dance music with CHIC, Sister Sledge and Diana Ross, plus a great pop record with Bowie.
Madonna was (and still is) a huge Bowie fan. In 1974 at age 15, she snuck out of the house and hitchhiked to see him in concert in Detroit. “He changed my life,” she told Mojo in 2019. “It was the first concert I ever went to…I recognized myself in him somehow and he gave me license to dream a different future for myself.”
For Madonna, getting to work with Rodgers on an album put her on the same playing field as Bowie. Once hired, Rodgers gathered an incredible group of musicians to make Like A Virgin.
They included Bernard Edwards—who co-founded the legendary band CHIC with Rodgers—playing bass guitar. Rodgers also hired other CHIC members for the recording sessions including Tony Thompson on drums, Rob Sabino on piano and synths and Karen Milne on strings.
Enjoying this article? Click/tap on the album covers to explore more about Madonna:
Rodgers, Edwards, Sabino and Thompson also played on Let’s Dance. Before that, all of the CHIC members recruited for Like A Virgin played on Sister Sledge’s 1979 album We Are Family and Diana Ross’ 1980 album Diana. Both albums were produced by Rodgers and Edwards. And like Bowie’s Let’s Dance, both albums were the biggest sellers of Sister Sledge’s and Ross’ careers.
The drum machine programming on songs like “Angel” and “Dress You Up” on Like A Virgin was handled by Jimmy Bralower whom Rodgers worked with on “The Reflex" and We Are Family.
Among the background vocalists hired for the sessions, Rodgers brought on brothers Frank and George Simms whom he previously hired for Let’s Dance. The brothers toured with Bowie on his Serious Moonlight Tour that supported the album.
Basically, Rodgers gathered an all-star team from some of his most successful previous recording projects to play on this album. These heavy hitters backed Madonna on Like A Virgin and gave it a warmer and more spacious organic instrumental sound than her primarily electronic debut album.
Some writers over the years have opined that Like A Virgin was “CHIC’s last great album”—a statement Rodgers said in 2021 that he was “actually sort of proud of.”
At first, Rodgers had to convince Madonna to include a live band for the recording. “I said, you know, Mo…if we just did another electronic record, you would be anybody,” he recalled in a podcast earlier this year. “There’s like a million girls that could do that.”
Madonna smartly agreed to the change. “He’s a genius,” she told MTV in 1984. “We just have a really good chemistry…I think he can work with anyone who’s good.”
That energetic and imperfect live band sound surrounding Madonna on some of the songs (especially Thompson’s powerful drumming) lent an air of rock gravitas and legitimacy to the album’s most ironic and cheeky songs, “Like A Virgin” and “Material Girl,” and turned them into mammoth global hits that defined and followed Madonna—for better or worse—throughout her career.
Take a moment and listen to how live the drums sound on those two hits—you can actually hear the spill from the room in those recordings. Or take in how gorgeous the real strings are on Madonna’s cover of Rose Royce’s 1978 song “Love Don’t Live Here Anymore” that Rodgers arranged and conducted himself.
Or focus your ears on Rodgers’ spunky guitar playing that’s primarily positioned in the stereo right channel on “Angel” while Bralower’s programmed drums and Sabino’s synth bass keep the energy effortlessly bouncing in the middle. Quite a balancing act between organic and electronic.
My ear was so untrained back in ‘84 or ‘85 to be able to pick up on any of this. All I knew was that the album was fun, the videos were everywhere, and the singles were instantly catchy.
Looking back on Madonna’s long career now, it’s clear that many of the songs on this album laid the groundwork for how so many of her songs—like “Ray of Light” or “Don’t Tell Me”—would find success in marrying organic instruments and digital soundcraft.
But don’t think that Madonna took a backseat in the making of the album even though she was still relatively new to studio recording sessions. According to the album’s engineer, Jason Corsaro, Madonna took control in the studio even with a seasoned pro like Rodgers at the producing helm.
Enjoying this article? Click/tap on the album covers to explore more about Madonna:
“She was there all the time, making sure everything was going right,” he said. “If someone played a part that she didn't like, she'd make this clear and tell him how she wanted it. She had her say, and nothing went by without her hearing it.”
Corsaro also noted that Madonna was in the room for all of the album’s mixing. “Nile was there most of the time,” he recalled. “She never left.”
The range of songs on Like A Virgin show that Madonna wanted to introduce wider aspects of her artistry to the world. Her eponymous debut featured all uptempo dance tracks, but she had ambitions to record a wider variety of music in her career which was another reason why she wanted Rodgers to produce Like A Virgin.
“I think that he embodies a lot of different styles that I think my music embodies,” Madonna told MTV’s Alan Hunter in 1984 after the album was completed. “There's some old stuff that sounds like old Motown. There's some really high energy…there's a lot of synthesizers,” she added. “It shows my growth as a singer and a songwriter.”
The slower songs on the album, “Shoo-Bee-Doo” and the Rose Royce cover, were the first times we’d hear Madonna take on a toned down, softer and more emotional vocal performance on an album.
This was new territory for those of us who bought Madonna’s first album a year earlier. We hadn’t heard her do a ballad yet since future #1 single “Crazy For You” from the Vision Quest movie wouldn’t come out until early 1985 (she landed her first GRAMMY nomination for it, but lost to Whitney Houston in 1986).
After diving back into this album over the past few months, I’ve grown to really really love “Shoo-Bee-Doo.” Maybe it’s because it’s the only song on the album that, according to the credits, Madonna wrote by herself. Or maybe it’s because there’s a gentle and youthful innocence imbued in her vocal performance that is such an anomaly on the album.
In the song you can sense how Motown hits were an early musical inspiration to Madonna when she was younger. In fact, I wonder if Stevie Wonder’s 1968 top 10 song “Shoo-Be-Doo-Be-Doo-Da-Day” inspired the title of Madonna’s song.
But there’s also a satiny sheen in the chorus reminiscent of The Carpenters meshing with those shades of Motown. That combo makes sense, given Like A Virgin collaborator Stephen Bray’s comments in a 2022 podcast where he talked about how he and Madonna were big fans of both kinds of music.
“We both loved The Carpenters. I don't know if that's a thing that people know,” Bray said. “It's Motown, it's The Carpenters…we both grew up on Detroit radio, which was this really beautiful blend of Black music and pop music and everything in between.”
Like “Shoo-Bee-Doo,” the Rose Royce cover is also another outlier on the album—as Like A Virgin's only sad song. Within the context of the album, “Love Don’t Live Here Anymore” still feels overly adult and dramatic after all these years. But its inclusion (suggested to Madonna by her label) makes sense, knowing that Madonna listened to Edith Piaf and Nina Simone when she was growing up.
“Love Don’t Live Here Anymore” (which was released as a single in 1996 to promote Madonna’s Something To Remember ballad collection) does provide some emotional ballast to lend Like A Virgin a bit of sobriety within a mostly frothy and fun group of songs.
Enjoying this article? Click/tap on the album covers to explore more about Madonna:
Critics at the time, though, weren’t kind to her attempts on the album to tackle more emotional songs like this cover. A Los Angeles Times writer noted her vocals were “flimsy” and that “Madonna should stick to disco.” Another critic described her voice as “one-dimensional.”
An otherwise positive Like A Virgin album review by Rolling Stone in January 1985 called Madonna’s Rose Royce cover “awful” and added, “Madonna’s a lot more interesting as a conniving cookie, flirting her way to the top, than as a bummed-out adult.”
But with future hits from beautiful torch songs over the decades like “Live To Tell,” “This Used To Be My Playground,” “Frozen” and 1995’s “Take A Bow” (her longest-running #1 single in the U.S. at 7 weeks), Madonna proved to those critics that success is always the best revenge.
I found myself over the past few months also really getting back into the deeper cuts Madonna co-wrote with Bray on Like A Virgin like the bright and blippy “Over and Over” and another Motown-inflected song, “Stay.” Both songs foreshadowed a bit of what we’d hear in 1986 on her True Blue album with songs like “Jimmy Jimmy” and the album’s title track.
On that album, Madonna would share co-producing credits with Bray and Patrick Leonard. Obviously she had taken what she learned from the expensive Like A Virgin studio sessions, with a hit-making maestro like Rodgers and his talented team of musicians, and poured it into the making of True Blue which became her biggest-selling album worldwide.
So, after rooting around in this album during the last few months, I’ve realized that Like A Virgin is an incredible timestamp of a period in Madonna’s career when so much was on the line. She had some fame, but needed this album to take her to the next level. The songs had to hit…and they did.
And it’s wild to think that Rodgers and the musicians he hired for the Like A Virgin sessions that made this album a global smash were also responsible for delivering career-best albums and singles for Sister Sledge, Duran Duran, David Bowie and Diana Ross. That’s a lot of legacy pulsing throughout all the songs on Like A Virgin.
I have to say now that I officially have a renewed crush on this album. If you haven’t pulled up Like A Virgin in a long time, definitely give it a spin and play it loud.
“Pretender” is still a skip, though. Can’t win ‘em all.
Listen: