Like a Virgin

Like a Virgin is the second studio album by Madonna, released on November 12, 1984, by Sire. Nile Rodgers produced it at the Power Station in New York in April and May 1984, after Warner Bros. refused her request for creative control of the record and offered her a choice of producer instead. Four of its nine songs came from outside writers, the title track from Billy Steinberg and Tom Kelly, “Material Girl” from Peter Brown and Robert Rans, “Dress You Up” from Andrea LaRusso and Peggy Stanziale, and the Rose Royce cover from Miles Gregory; she wrote or co-wrote the other five, four of them with Stephen Bray. The album is dance-pop, and it alternates between two rhythm sections: the Chic players on four tracks and drum machines on the other five.

The album entered the Billboard 200 at No. 70 and reached No. 1 on February 9, 1985, where it stayed for three weeks; the title single had already spent six weeks at No. 1, the first of her career. “Material Girl” reached No. 2, and “Angel” and “Dress You Up” both stopped at No. 5. It was the first album by a woman to sell more than five million copies in the United States, and it has sold more than twenty-one million worldwide. The trade press reviewed it warmly and the consumer press more coolly. The album entered the National Recording Registry in 2023.

Background

Madonna’s debut album, Madonna, went gold in June 1984, eleven months after its release. Brian Chin, Billboard’s dance columnist, attributed the slow climb to her singles, which had built her a club audience, then radio play, then album sales.¹ The debut reached its chart peak only in October 1984, the month “Lucky Star” reached No. 4, so the second album was recorded and mixed while the first was still climbing.² Billboard’s year-end tally for 1984 put her twenty-sixth among album artists on the strength of that one record and third among women, behind Cyndi Lauper and Linda Ronstadt and ahead of Barbra Streisand and Tina Turner; she did not appear among the year’s top new pop artists.³ Cash Box, in the week the second album shipped, still called her “the new artist.”⁴

Warner Bros. refused Madonna’s request for full creative control of the second album and offered her a choice of producer. She appealed by letter to Seymour Stein, a founder of Sire: “Here I am forced to choose a man once again – help me!” Nile Rodgers, Chic’s guitarist, was at the top of her list, on the strength of the record he had just made, David Bowie’s Let’s Dance.⁵

In an interview with NME, Madonna said that the first album’s producers had come out of a different school and that the new production would not be so slick: “I want a sound that’s mine.” She called the debut’s songs weak, and said she had picked every song on the new album and wanted them all to be hits, with no filler.⁶

Reggie Lucas, who had produced the debut, told Rolling Stone in November 1984 how the production passed to Rodgers. “I wanted to push her in a pop direction. She was a little more oriented toward the disco thing, but I thought she had appeal to a general market,” he said. “It’s funny about that thing with [Mark] Kamins. The same thing that happened to him pretty much happened to me on her second record, when they had Nile Rodgers.” Mark Kamins had brought her to Sire with her first single, “Everybody.”⁷

The same article quoted Bray, her co-writer, answering the charge that she was being exploited: “People say that, but that’s resentment of someone who’s got the drive. She doesn’t care if she ruffles someone’s feathers.”⁷ It was her first Rolling Stone cover, and it described fans across the country already copying her teased hair, rosaries and bare midriffs. In it she said: “All I said was, ‘I know this record is good, and one of these days Warner Bros. and the rest of them are going to figure it out.‘”⁸

Rodgers had been told that Madonna was a “totally self-centered bitch” and difficult to work with; when he met her, he judged her a true professional.⁹ She told him that if he did not love the songs they could not work together, and he answered that he did not love them yet but would once he had finished working on them.¹⁰

Recording

The sessions took place at the Power Station in April and May 1984. Madonna and Rodgers agreed that the debut had come out too slick and too synthetic, and Rodgers brought in his partners from Chic, the bassist Bernard Edwards and the drummer Tony Thompson, to play live with his own guitar against the cassette demos she had made with Bray.¹¹

Jason Corsaro engineered and mixed the album. He learned whose album it was when “Holiday” came on the radio in Edwards’s car, on the day he was told about the job.¹² Corsaro wanted Thompson in the big live room, because the dead room used for R&B absorbed his drums. Rodgers said that R&B belonged in the dead room, and Corsaro put Thompson in the big room anyway. For a close microphone on the drums he used a Shure SM58 behind a pop shield, the only one that did not fail when he placed it that close. He said that an engineer looks like a genius when the players are that good.¹³ He also moved the project onto a Sony 3324 digital recorder because he believed digital was the future; the choice was his own. He said the arrangements were exposed enough that a bad move could be heard.¹⁴ The sleeve advertised the choice: “Fanatically recorded digitally from start to finish on Sony equipment.”¹⁵

Madonna greeted late musicians by telling them that time was money and the money was hers. When her treatment of one band member went too far, Rodgers walked out until she apologized. Corsaro said she was very determined for the record to succeed and did not hide it.¹⁶

Rodgers had doubted the title song before he agreed to record it.¹⁷

Choosing the title song, 1984

Rodgers wanted “Material Girl” as the lead single and called the title song “really queer,” doubting that its hook could carry a hit. Four days later the hook was still in his head, and he changed his mind: if it was that catchy, it must be something.¹⁷ Kelly had first set Steinberg’s lyric as a ballad. He then sang it in falsetto over a Motown-style bass line, and Steinberg said, “That is it right there.” Several A&R executives turned the song down because they thought its title bizarre, until Michael Ostin, of Warner Bros., brought it to Madonna.¹⁸ Steinberg had drafted the lyric driving through his father’s vineyards in the Coachella Valley, and said the hook simply popped out.¹⁹ Madonna said she liked the play on words, since no one can be like a virgin, and thought the writers so geeky they were cool.²⁰

Music

Like a Virgin is dance-pop with elements of synthpop and new wave. The sleeve credits Edwards and Thompson on four of the nine tracks: “Material Girl,” the title song, the Rose Royce cover “Love Don’t Live Here Anymore” and the doo-wop pastiche “Shoo-Bee-Doo.” The other five are drum-machine records, programmed by Jimmy Bralower on a LinnDrum and Simmons pads. Rodgers plays guitar on all nine, and Robert Sabino’s bass synthesizer runs under seven of them.²¹ After the live sessions Sabino overdubbed Prophet-5 synthesizer onto the band’s takes.²² The robotic male voice repeating the hook on “Material Girl” is Frank Simms.²³ Rodgers arranged and conducted strings for “Love Don’t Live Here Anymore,” Sabino plays acoustic piano on “Shoo-Bee-Doo” and Fender Rhodes on the Rose Royce cover, and Lenny Pickett takes a saxophone solo on “Shoo-Bee-Doo.”²⁴

In the New York Times, Stephen Holden wrote that Rodgers “has adapted some of the elements of Chic’s sound — a scrubby guitar, glistening electric keyboards and light, strutting dance-pop rhythms — to enshrine Madonna’s personality,” and he named the styles the album moves through: Philadelphia soul on “Love Don’t Live Here Anymore,” orchestrated doo-wop on “Shoo-Bee-Doo,” frilly pop-soul on “Dress You Up” and “Angel,” and a reggae lilt in “Material Girl.” He called “Pretender” “as elegant a piece of disco fluff as Chic at its airiest.”²⁵

The title track’s three-note bass motif reworks the Four Tops’ “I Can’t Help Myself,” as an unsigned Billboard singles review said on November 17, 1984, and its chordal guitar stab comes from Chuck Berry. A synthesizer doubles Edwards’s bass. The ad-libs at the end were copied from the Steinberg and Kelly demo.²⁶ Rikky Rooksby, the author of a guide to Madonna’s recordings, wrote that Thompson’s drums give the track “far more wallop than a drum machine ever could.”²⁷

Alfred Soto, writing in Stylus in 2007, called “Angel” the apex of Rodgers’s post-Chic skills, and described a moody opening of pizzicato guitar, canned laughter and a dark keyboard under a giddy lyric, with Madonna dipping into her lower register before the vowel on eyes opens out. Madonna tied the song to her Catholic upbringing and the calling of angels for protection.²⁸ “Over and Over” is a resilience lyric about picking oneself up from disappointment, with what Chuck Arnold, writing in Billboard, called some of the punk attitude of “Burning Up,” a single from her debut. “Stay” is the album’s only song in triple time, three beats to the bar, and it is fast, with synthesizers, the sound of someone slapping a microphone and a spoken passage near the end. “Shoo-Bee-Doo” opens as a stripped-down piano ballad before turning bouncy, and John Murph, writing for Tidal, called it the track that shows her singing better than any of the hits.²³

Debby Miller wrote in Rolling Stone that Madonna’s light voice “bobs over the heavy rhythm and synth tracks like a kid on a carnival ride,” and that despite her “little-girl voice” there was “an undercurrent of ambition that makes her more than the latest Betty Boop.”²⁹ Holden described a “kewpie-doll voice” and “a tough-cookie voice that’s both coy and streetwise,” with the arrangements “spun around” it “like swirls of cotton candy,” and judged the album the year’s definitive model of danceable urban teen-pop. He placed her in a line of singers running back to the Shirelles and the Ronettes, and described her persona in economic terms: “In matters of love, she is a comparison shopper with a shrewd sense of her own market value.”²⁵

Outside writers wrote four of the nine songs, among them three of the album’s four singles. “Like a Virgin” is a first-person account of being made new by a lover. “Material Girl” is a comic monologue in the voice of a woman who prices her suitors. Madonna said she liked both songs because they were ironic and provocative and unlike her.³⁰ “Dress You Up,” by Andrea LaRusso and Peggy Stanziale, is a courtship song whose refrain promises to dress a lover in her love; of the man in it, Holden wrote, we are told only that he sleeps on satin sheets and wears custom English suits. “Love Don’t Live Here Anymore,” by Miles Gregory, is a song of grief. Madonna wrote or co-wrote the other five: “Angel,” “Over and Over,” “Shoo-Bee-Doo,” “Pretender” and “Stay.”

Title and artwork

The album takes its title from its third song. Steven Meisel shot the cover in a suite at the St. Regis: Madonna sepia-tinted on a satin bed in a wedding dress over a tight bustier, full-length gloves, heavy makeup, hair disordered, staring into the lens, with a belt buckle reading BOY TOY. Her stylist Maripol described the look as that of a bride of Satan.³¹ The sleeve credits the art direction to Jeffrey Kent Ayeroff, Paula Greif and Jeri McManus, and the design to McManus. Ayeroff was the Warner executive who also commissioned the “Like a Virgin” video and was then launching the label’s home-video division.^{32, 33}

Matthew Rettenmund, the author of Encyclopedia Madonnica, wrote that the cover communicates conflicting views of what a wedding dress should represent, virginity, and what it does represent, sexual knowingness. The scholar Graham Thompson located its provocation in her given name, the Catholic title for Mary, and argued that the artwork presents her as a desiring subject and not only an object of desire. The Colombian critic Manolo Bellón wrote that it is the first cover on which she plays a character, a virgin who does not want to be one.³⁴

What it inherits and what it introduces

The album draws on disco through Chic’s players and sound, and on doo-wop and 1970s soul through “Shoo-Bee-Doo” and the Rose Royce cover; Chin called most of its other tracks wave-pop.³⁵ Alexis Petridis, ranking her albums in The Guardian in 2023, described it as post-disco, with a touch of hip-hop in the rhythm of “Pretender” and a good deal of new wave rock, and wrote that it carried “the faint scent of the Mudd Club and the Paradise Garage.” He called it the last album on which she sounded like a product of the environment that made her.³⁶

Corsaro, who had moved the sessions onto digital tape, said that he and Rodgers insisted the compact disc come out at the same time as the vinyl record, and that it was the first time this had happened.³⁷

Release

The album was finished months before its release because the debut was still selling. Billboard announced it on June 30, 1984, as due in about a month. By October it had been rescheduled for October 29 and billed as the month’s top release outside CBS. It appeared on November 12, catalog 25157, at a list price of $8.98. Rodgers said the debut had still been the focus, because one of its singles became a surprise hit: “then ‘Borderline’ hit out of the clear blue sky. We didn’t expect that.”³⁸

On May 16, 1984, five days after the sessions ended, Madonna sang “Like a Virgin” and “Dress You Up” at Keith Haring’s birthday party at the Paradise Garage, wearing a leather jacket Haring had painted for her, from a brass bed dressed with frills and white roses, in front of a downtown art crowd.³⁹ On September 14, she opened the first MTV Video Music Awards with the title song, emerging from a seventeen-foot wedding cake in the dress from the album cover and finishing the song rolling on the floor.⁴⁰

“Like a Virgin” preceded the album by twelve days in the United States and reached most of Europe on November 11. “Material Girl” followed in January 1985, “Angel” in April, backed on the American twelve-inch with “Into the Groove”, and “Dress You Up” on July 24.⁴¹ An international reissue in August 1985 added “Into the Groove,” the Desperately Seeking Susan song that was never an American single; it became her first British No. 1, and the album reached No. 1 in Britain that September, ten months after its release.⁴²

Mary Lambert directed the “Like a Virgin” video after Ayeroff asked her for something outrageous, and shot it in Venice and New York, with the palazzo interiors at Ca’ Zenobio degli Armeni. She worked from the Carnival of Venice and from things not being what they seem, which produced a lion mask and then a live lion, brought from Rome with its trainer standing off-camera holding a rifle; in one take the animal put its head between Madonna’s legs and roared. Ayeroff put the budget at $150,000 to $175,000, far more than the label had spent on a video before. Madonna said afterward that in a past life she must have been a lion or a cat. No video was made for “Angel”: one was planned and dropped because too many of her videos were already competing for airtime. The “Dress You Up” video is a performance filmed in Detroit on the Virgin Tour, her first concert tour, in 1985.³²

Warner Bros. formed a home-video division that autumn, and one of its first two releases was Madonna, a twenty-minute compilation of her four most recent videos, shipped on December 7 at $19.95. Distributors doubted it, since the videos were the ones already running on MTV; one said publicly that if that was all it was, it would not break out of music video’s low sales. The cassette then held No. 1 on Billboard’s music videocassette chart from April to November 1985, went platinum, and won the National Association of Recording Merchandisers’ award for the best-selling music videocassette.³³

On December 13, 1984, Madonna sang the title song on Top of the Pops in a pink wig and a gold metallic jacket, a performance a BBC viewers’ poll later voted the second best in the program’s history. On February 9, 1985, the night the album reached No. 1 in the United States, Cabaret Metro in Chicago charged five dollars for a Virgin Party, told twelve hundred people to wear white, and screened the videocassette.⁴³

Reception

The trade press reviewed the album warmly in its first week. Billboard gave it a Spotlight, the designation it used for albums it expected to reach the top ten or go platinum, and the unsigned notice credited “producer Nile Rodgers’ sleek but sinewy rhythm arrangements, burnished to surgical sharpness by crisp digital sonics,” and described “an updated disco groove” firing “the anything but virginal content of these songs.” Cash Box made it the lead album pick of the week, a hit for radio and the clubs with a healthy dose of disco-rock. Billboard’s singles reviewer had already called the title track an out-of-the-box radio smash.⁴⁴

In a longer Billboard review, Chin wrote that she does no searching whatsoever in her singing, but hits her notes straight on, and that against a pretty enough melody she sounds attractive, porcelain-like and occasionally vulnerable. He called it “her fine second album.” He singled out “Angel” as closest to the rhythm and blues of “Borderline” and “Lucky Star,” and called most of the rest wave-pop, harder than the debut and softer-centered than its competition. He thought “Dress You Up” prettier than one could imagine a song at that tempo, and called Rodgers’s production light-handed and finessed.³⁵

The consumer press was cooler: Robert Christgau graded it a B, and People called it a tolerable bit of fluff.⁴⁵ Rettenmund, in his essay for the National Recording Registry, wrote that the record “rankled mostly male rock critics, who sneered at Madonna’s unbridled sensuality,” and tied their response to Disco Demolition Night; one epithet they used was Minnie Mouse on helium.⁴⁶

The album entered the Billboard 200 at No. 70 on December 1, 1984, and reached No. 1 ten weeks later, her first No. 1 album; the title single topped the Hot 100 on December 22 and held for six weeks, her first No. 1 single. The album stayed on the Billboard 200 for 108 consecutive weeks and on the British chart for 134.⁴⁷ Time reported in May 1985 that it had sold 4.5 million copies in the United States. It became the first album by a woman to sell more than five million copies there, and the Recording Industry Association of America later certified it diamond, for ten million; it has sold more than twenty-one million worldwide.⁴⁸

Legacy

The Parents Music Resource Center was founded in May 1985 by four women in Washington, six months after the album came out. One of them, Tipper Gore, the wife of Senator Al Gore, had heard her eleven-year-old daughter playing Prince’s “Darling Nikki,” from his album Purple Rain, and founded the group because of it. The center’s list of fifteen objectionable songs, the Filthy Fifteen, began with “Darling Nikki” and put “Dress You Up” eighth, under sex.⁴⁹

Time’s cover story of May 27, 1985, called the imitators “Wanna Be’s” and described twelve-year-old girls in T-shirts labeled VIRGIN, which advertised her tour and the song. Macy’s opened a Madonnaland boutique and ran a look-alike contest judged by Andy Warhol. Madonna later listed the look the crowds wore, down to the rosaries and the lace gloves.⁵⁰

“Weird Al” Yankovic parodied the title song as “Like a Surgeon,” which reached No. 47 on the Hot 100. By one account the idea was partly Madonna’s: she had wondered aloud when he would turn “Like a Virgin” into “Like a Surgeon,” and a mutual acquaintance passed the remark to his manager. Yankovic generally did not take parody ideas from other musicians.⁵¹

In 1987 Madonna told Rolling Stone that the song was about feeling brand-new and fresh, and that listeners had taken it as a wish to lose her virginity: “That’s not what I sang at all.”⁵² Quentin Tarantino opened Reservoir Dogs (1992) with his own character, Mr. Brown, reading the song as being about sex, and Madonna is said to have signed a copy of Erotica to him: “To Quentin, it’s not about dick. It’s about love.”⁵³

Stephen Thomas Erlewine gave the album 4.5 of 5 in AllMusic and wrote that Madonna had hits with her first album, “but she didn’t become an icon, until Like a Virgin.” Sal Cinquemani gave it 3.5 of 5 in Slant in 2001 and found the calculation on the record apparent, writing that it “throws [the album’s] balance off a little too much for it to be consistent.” Chuck Arnold wrote in Billboard in 2019 that she “has definitely made better albums,” among them Like a Prayer and Ray of Light, “but her second LP changed the course of pop history.”⁵⁴

“Material Girl” became a nickname she disliked. “I hate that name,” she told Britain’s Daily Star. “Everyone relates that title to me because of the song I did like 300 years ago. It’s a title I got stuck with.”⁵⁵ Murph credited the album with creating an archetype of pop stardom that Gwen Stefani, Pink and Lady Gaga followed.⁵⁵

The Library of Congress added the album to the National Recording Registry in 2023.⁵⁶

Further reading

• Stephen Holden, “Madonna’s Siren Song,” The New York Times, January 6, 1985 — the review that places her singing in a line running back to the girl groups

See also

• True Blue — her next album