June 7, 2024 • 40 mins
When Madonna performed “Like A Virgin'' at the first MTV Video Music Awards in 1984, she scandalized the audience and her own team. But she also stole the show, cementing MTV’s place in cultural history. In this episode, Susie and Jess look back at Madonna’s early years in New York, the events that led her to that stage and how she became one of pop's most enduring icons.
GUESTS:
- Mary Gabriel, author of Madonna: A Rebel Life
FOR MORE:
- Madonna: Our 1985 Cover Story (Spin)
- Madonna’s Celebration Tour Proves She Won’t Quit (NY Times)
- Buy Mary Gabriel’s book Madonna: A Rebel Life
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey everyone, This is part two of our episodes about
Madonna's iconic performance at the first MTV Video Music Awards.
If you haven't listened to part one yet, I recommend
starting there.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
Welcome to mcvly Music Television.
Speaker 1 (00:14):
In nineteen eighty one, the launch of MTV, a new
twenty four hour music channel, changed cultural history forever. By
captivating teens across the country and pushing.
Speaker 3 (00:23):
Boundaries, you'll never look at music the same way again.
Speaker 1 (00:27):
Enter Madonna, a scrappy twenty somethingter singer who also loved
challenging the status quo and was ready to become a star.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
What are your dreams to rule the world?
Speaker 4 (00:38):
There you go, ladies and gentlemen, this is Madonna.
Speaker 1 (00:40):
When MTV gave her the chance to perform at the
first Video Music Awards, Madonna did what she does best,
scandalized the audience, and for better or for worse, stole
the show.
Speaker 5 (00:53):
After I got off stage during that performance, my manager
was white as a ghost, and he looked at me.
Speaker 6 (00:58):
He said, do you know what you just did?
Speaker 2 (01:01):
Your career is over, but her career was just beginning.
I'm Susie Bannacharum and.
Speaker 1 (01:09):
I'm Jessica Bennett, and this is in retrospect, where each
week we revisit a cultural moment from the past that
shaped us.
Speaker 4 (01:16):
And that we just can't stop thinking about.
Speaker 1 (01:18):
Today, we're talking about one of Madonna's iconic early performances,
one that was so scandalous many predicted it would end
her career. But we're also talking about the rise of
MTV and how together MTV and Madonna became a force
that would define eighties pop culture.
Speaker 2 (01:35):
This is Part two.
Speaker 3 (01:38):
The year is nineteen eighty four and Madonna, who is
not a huge star yet, has just performed like a
vision at the first ever Video Music Awards. I am
dying to know what happens right after the performance, because,
as we talked about in part one, all the overt sexuality,
the writhing around on the ground Madonna did that really
(01:59):
shocked audience.
Speaker 4 (02:01):
You could say it even had the.
Speaker 3 (02:02):
Potential to put her budding career in jeopardy, except, of course,
we know that it didn't. So what actually does happen
after that?
Speaker 1 (02:11):
So what happens right after is despite the fact that
the audience and the other performance are clutching their pearls,
you know, this performance does what Madonna wanted to do.
It gets her name out there, and teenagers and new
fans who see her, they all go running to their
local music stores trying to buy you know, this song,
but it's not available yet, so they buy whatever other
(02:33):
Madonna music they can find. And at this point that's
just her first album, and that album, which was released
a year before this, suddenly jumps to number eight on
the Billboard charts.
Speaker 4 (02:42):
It's so funny.
Speaker 3 (02:43):
I can just imagine all these teenagers like rushing to
Tower Records where we used to go to get their
hands on Like a Virgin. This, of course was back
in the day when you had to literally like get
in a car or walk to the record store to
get the album, not just downloaded on your phone.
Speaker 4 (02:59):
So when does that album finally come out?
Speaker 1 (03:01):
So this performance at the VMA's the Like a Virgin performance,
happens mid September, and Like a Virgin the album is
finally released in November, and it's followed by the video
for Like a Virgin the day after, and the song
itself shoots to number one in the US, in Australia,
in Canada and stays there for six weeks. The album
(03:24):
is also a number one hit in the United States
and by February it goes triple platinum. So within just
a few months and more than three million albums are sold.
So Warner Brothers executives are thrilled, right, they are absolutely
thrilled with the performance. And in the end, all of
(03:44):
the scandal and the handwrigging around the MTV performance have
actually done exactly what she believed they would do, which
is bringing her more and more attention.
Speaker 4 (03:55):
And brought a ton of attention to MTV two. I'm sure.
Speaker 2 (03:58):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (03:58):
In fact, Bob Pittman, who who was one of MTB's
founders and I should mention also runs iHeart Are Producers Hi.
Bob said after this that the first year it was
everything we could do to get some talent to come
to the event and fill seats, and by the second
year everyone wanted to be in the show. Right, So
she really makes it clear that being part of the
(04:19):
show can be good for your career and in fact,
as I've said, it boosted her album sales.
Speaker 3 (04:25):
Yeah, I mean I remember at this time, weren't there
the wannabes who were the Madonna superfans basically in the
way that we have the beehive or swifties today.
Speaker 1 (04:35):
Yes, her fans were called the Madonna wannabes, or more
often the press would just call them the wannabes.
Speaker 4 (04:40):
And tonight she winds off a twenty six city concert
tour which has been completely sold out, largely to teenage girls,
many of who might be called Madonna wannabes.
Speaker 1 (04:50):
She was such a figure of delight for young girls
and young women that they really emulated her. In fact,
people wanted to look so much like me Madonna that
within two years of that album coming out, The Like
a Virgin Album, a flagship Macy's store in Manhattan held
a Madonna lookalike contest in Midtown Manhattan.
Speaker 7 (05:10):
Hundreds of Madonna wanna be He's packed into the Madonna
Land shop.
Speaker 6 (05:13):
At Macy's department store for a Madonna lookalike contest.
Speaker 2 (05:16):
And Andy Warhol was one of the judges. I'm amazing.
Speaker 1 (05:21):
They opened a department called Madonna Land and so wow,
they buy all the clothes to make you look just
like Madonna.
Speaker 4 (05:29):
Incredible.
Speaker 1 (05:29):
Yes, it's different.
Speaker 2 (05:30):
It's nobody else does it.
Speaker 5 (05:33):
She's pretty and I like her.
Speaker 2 (05:34):
It's the only one that we can look up soon. Nowadays,
she doesn't condemn femininity.
Speaker 8 (05:38):
And anywhere madonnas well, everybody looks at you her style,
her look, the sort of like rag in your hair
and the plastic bracelets and the lots of jewelry that
really became the look of the eighties.
Speaker 1 (05:51):
Like when people do eighties parodies now they dress like
Madonna dress. And in fact, she has said since that
at some point she stopped dressing like that because it
didn't feel unique, became spacial anymore. Like she's like, I
would walk down the street and see a million versions
of myself, and so it's one of the reasons she
starts to reinvent herself over and over again, because she's
so commonly emulated. And you know, she's not just a
(06:15):
pop star, right, she's really, in her mind an artist,
a person who is making statements about what a woman
can be and should be in the world. And you know,
this is just a perfect example of another time in
her career where people told her that her career was
over and she overcame. That's going to happen in her
career over and over and over again, and every time
(06:37):
the people who said she couldn't rise above whatever the
scandal was have been proven wrong.
Speaker 3 (06:48):
What do you think gave her that confidence, Like, are
there any hints or has she spoken about her upbringing
or where she came from and how it contributed to
where she would ultimately go.
Speaker 1 (06:59):
Yeah, I mean, I think Madonna's background, her childhood is
really interesting and really speaks to why she ends up
being the way she is. And I've been thinking about
nothing but Madonna for three weeks, So I'm going to
tell you a little bit more about her, just her
history so that we have that context. So Madonna was
born in Detroit. Her full name is Madonna Louise Chacone.
(07:23):
A lot of people think Madonna is a stage name,
but she was actually named after her mother. She grew
up in a very middle class Italian Catholic family and
she is one of eight children, four brothers and three sisters.
And the thing she often talks about in terms of
why she's so independent and confident and keeps her own counsel,
(07:44):
is that her mother died of breast cancer when she
was just six years old. And this just had a
profound impact on her in the way that you would expect.
And she's talked about this loss over the years, and
she has said that the reason why she was so
focused on running away from that part of her life
is because it really gives her this sense that you
can lose everything in an instant, your sense of security,
(08:08):
and so she's tried not to rely on other people.
Here she is talking about it in a nineteen ninety
five interview on ABC's Primetime Life.
Speaker 3 (08:17):
I really did feel completely abandoned at that point in
my life and sort.
Speaker 5 (08:22):
Of left me with a hungerl a longing, a feeling
of emptiness.
Speaker 6 (08:27):
You sort of grow up being afraid to love things.
Speaker 1 (08:30):
So she ends up kind of keeping her own counsel,
for lack of a better way of putting it. You know,
she has this huge family, there's all these other kids.
She ends up having a step mom she really doesn't like,
and so she kind of just withdraws into herself in
a way and decides that no one is ever going
to make her feel that unsafe and insecure again. And
(08:51):
that is I think the inherent origin story of Madonna.
Speaker 2 (08:55):
She is this girl, this.
Speaker 1 (08:56):
Little girl who lost her mother and had to kind
of raise herself in a way.
Speaker 2 (09:02):
And she loves her father. She sings about her father.
Speaker 1 (09:05):
She's very close to her family, but losing apparently I mean,
you know, I lost my dad when I was young.
It really does end up being kind of a defining thing.
You never really feel whole again in some fundamental ways.
And you know, the interesting thing about Madonna is that,
you know, there's kind of this assumption that she's a
(09:26):
high school dropout. And in fairness, that assumption comes from
the fact that in early interviews that I've watched, she
actually said she was a high school dropout.
Speaker 3 (09:34):
Oh really, I'm a famed high school dropout.
Speaker 4 (09:37):
So I don't believe anything they tell you.
Speaker 3 (09:38):
I think I read once she used to make up
stories like this when she talked to the press because
she thought it was funny.
Speaker 1 (09:44):
Yes, a friend of hers told a story in this
nineteen ninety one profile in New York magazine I found
about how she would make up outrageous things to tell
reporters just because she thought it was hilarious, and then
they would laugh about these pieces when they came out.
Speaker 3 (09:58):
That's so funny and also so different from the carefully
curated things that celebrities say now.
Speaker 9 (10:04):
But she did actually go to college, right, She got
a full scholarship to the University of Michigan. I mean,
she's incredibly smart, and she was in the dance program there.
She always wanted to be a dancer, and at some
point during her first two years, she does an internship
in New York and she gets really restless, and she
does drop out of the University of Michigan and she
moves to New York in nineteen seventy eight, and she
(10:26):
says in an interview, you know, it was the first
time I'd ever taken a plane by myself, because she
drove when she came to New York the last time.
And it's the first time I'd ever gotten a taxi cab.
And I came here with thirty five dollars in my pocket.
And it was the bravest thing I'd ever done.
Speaker 1 (10:42):
Wow, And when you think about it, it was really brave,
you know.
Speaker 2 (10:45):
I mean, nobody in her family wanted her to do this.
Speaker 1 (10:48):
Her father was dead set against it, and she just
really believed that she would be able to find her
own way. So she shows up in New York. She
doesn't actually know where to go, so she asks the
cab driver to take her to the center of everything.
So funny, and he drops her off in Times Square
because I guess he's like I guess this is the
center of everything. And then there is this crazy story
(11:12):
and she has told it a few times, so I
think this is really what happened, but it's wild to
think about.
Speaker 2 (11:18):
So she's wandering around, she doesn't know what to do.
She finds like a market and she's sort of roaming
around this mark, this fair or market street fair, and
this random man comes up to her and is like,
why are you walking around with your suitcase? And she says, oh, well,
I don't have a place to live because I just
got here. And he's like, well, do you want to
stay with me now?
Speaker 1 (11:39):
Any other person would be like no, because you're probably
like an ex murderer. Yeah, but she says yes, and
she stays with him for two weeks and he's actually
really nice to her and like makes her breakfast every
day and does.
Speaker 2 (11:53):
Not make a move on her.
Speaker 1 (11:54):
And what's so crazy about this is, she says in
an interview in nineteen ninety one, she doesn't even remember
this man's name.
Speaker 2 (12:01):
Wow, it's so insignificant, dirt.
Speaker 4 (12:03):
I mean, he must remember her name.
Speaker 1 (12:05):
I mean one would think, right, But also just like
he must be kind of an odd guy because he's
just like going around letting random people stay with him.
And it's probably worth noting that New York at this
time was pretty dangerous.
Speaker 3 (12:16):
Yeah, I mean getting dropped off in the middle of
Times Squares, not like getting draped, having the middle of
Times Square to die.
Speaker 1 (12:22):
Yeah, it's a wild thing that she sort of just
like accepted the kindness of this stranger and it worked
out for her. Eventually, she does find her own place,
but she's often kind of living, you know, hand to mouth.
Her first job is at the dunkin Donuts across from Bloomingdale's.
Speaker 2 (12:38):
She has no money.
Speaker 1 (12:39):
So when I say she finds her own place, I
mean she's often just like staying with people or like
you know, couch surfing, and she does a lot of
odd jobs. She has so little money. And Mary Gabriel,
who just wrote this amazing biography of her, it's called
Madonna a Rebel Life. She describes how scrappy this time
was in her life.
Speaker 7 (12:59):
She was so broke, and you know, people who want
to denigrate her story or say, oh, it's a myth,
you know, she was absolutely strong, broke, not once, not
for a little while, but for years. And you know,
friends who knew her at the time were appalled by
the way she lived. She would eat out of the
garbage if there was some fresh French fries in there
that somebody else hadn't eaten. It wasn't a big deal.
(13:21):
She stole a lot, you know, and she freely admits
all this stuff. She was a street kid. I mean,
she was borderline homeless, street kid for many years.
Speaker 4 (13:45):
What area of the city did she live in when
she first got here.
Speaker 1 (13:47):
Well, so she mostly lived in Alphabet City, which even
when I was in college in the nineties was no
man's land. People were like, don't go down to Alphabet City.
It started to gentrify, you know, in the years after
I graduated. But it was a really rough time, as
I said, in New York. You know, there was a
lot of poverty. It was a high crime era. And
(14:08):
you know, Madonna was really trusting, as this story that
I just told about this random guy proves, and she
says that that often worked in her favor. But she
has also said that, you know, a couple times during
this air she was sexually assaulted because she was living
in really broken down places. And there's a story in
the book where one of her friends from college who
(14:29):
lives in New York goes to visit her and is
afraid to touch anything because it's so disgusting. In the
apartment building where she lives. There was just this sense
that New York was kind of a dystopian nightmare. When
you would come to New York, the police department would
hand out, you know, public service announcements telling Taurus not
to leave their hotels after dark.
Speaker 4 (14:50):
Yeah, good evening. We're coming off the bloodiest year in the.
Speaker 2 (14:53):
History of New York. Well, how bad is crime on
the subways today? Police said the robbers were getting robbed.
Speaker 7 (14:58):
Nineteen eighty one is less than twenty four hours old,
and another nine people have been killed.
Speaker 2 (15:03):
It makes you feel very helpless.
Speaker 1 (15:05):
So it's just this kind of unsettling time, but it
was also a really fervent time creatively. Here's Mary Gabriel again.
Speaker 7 (15:12):
When Madonna arrived in New York, she began hanging around
with people who introduced her to the pop world, and
that was really the beginning of Madonna, because suddenly she
realized that she didn't maybe want to dance to music exclusively,
she wanted to actually make music. And the timing was
so incredible because at that moment there was a revolution
(15:32):
in pop culture. The entire scene was about experimenting, and
that's really at the core of Madonna as an artist.
I mean, she thrives in an experimental environment. She took
every possible chance, artistically, personally, professionally, throughout every rule in
the rule book, and created herself and an entire genre
(15:53):
which we're now seeing, you know, we now take for
granted in the Beyonces and the Taylor Swifts of the world.
Speaker 3 (15:59):
That's a really interesting point Mary's making because in large part,
wasn't this creative artistic time in New York also a
reaction in some ways to the Reagan era or the
conservatism of the Reagan era we talked about in Part one.
Speaker 1 (16:13):
Yeah, that's right. The larger conservative movement is really giving
rise to this really creative and unique scene in New
York for artists especially. And here's Mary on that.
Speaker 7 (16:23):
After Vietnam, after Nixon was the beginning of the Reagan years,
there was a real artistic backlash. I think for some
artists it was conscious, but I think it was a
matter of survival. For others, you know, they had something
inside themselves they wanted to express, and they knew that
they would never be able to do it in the
mainstream because they were gay, because they were black, because
(16:44):
they were a woman who actually wanted to express herself,
not what a guy told her to express. So they
found a refuge and it was this you know, crazy
dangerous world that hadn't yet been developed by the likes
of Donald Trump and you know, the developers of the
eighties in Lower Manhattan, and it was highly political but
highly personal. So it's that, you know, the like what
(17:06):
the early feminist said, the personal is political.
Speaker 6 (17:08):
They lived that life.
Speaker 7 (17:10):
And they had no one there to criticize them because
nobody was paying attention to them. Is so they had
the freest kind of existence where anything you wanted to do,
as long as it didn't hurt someone was okay. Anything
you wanted to be was okay. It was the absolute,
utter expression of freedom.
Speaker 1 (17:27):
So this point that Mary is making about how much
the people who Madonna is surrounded by sort of feel
outside of the mainstream is also really emphasized by the
AIDS crisis and how much Madonna is surrounded by the
AIDS crisis while she is in New York in the eighties.
And you know, one of the reasons Reagan is so
despised by liberals of that era is how slow he
(17:49):
was to respond to that. And Madonna is really deeply
impacted by that, and that really informs the political identity
that she will be known for for the rest of
her career. You know, a lot of artists sort of
shy away from that. But she is entering New York
at this time where she wants to pursue dance and
(18:13):
she wants to pursue music, but she is also surrounded
by a lot of crisis and sadness. So what she
says about that is that she wanted to put something
into the world that was the opposite of that, that
was happy, that gives people hope, and that's why she
decides in the end that she is going to pursue
(18:34):
this really creative artistic existence.
Speaker 4 (18:37):
Okay, and so how does she do that well?
Speaker 1 (18:39):
And so initially she comes to New York to pursue dance.
She thinks she's going to be a dancer. She dances
with Alvin Ailey for a little bit, but she realizes
that she's a bit old to be a dancer in
New York, which is crazy because she's in her twenties,
and that she's just not as talented as the other dancers.
She really can tell for herself that she doesn't have
what they have, so she starts to pursue music. She
(19:02):
has a boyfriend who is in a band, and so
she hangs out with him. So there are really these
two things that push her into a music career. At
some point, she auditions to be the backup singer for
this European disco star and his French record producers see
her and they sign her and they take her to
Paris and they're like, we're gonna make you into a star.
(19:25):
And initially it's kind of like a fairy tale. Even
when she talks about it, you're like, that's kind of great.
She arrives in Paris in nineteen seventy nine. She's given
this fancy apartment. She has a chauffeur and a maid
and a vocal coach and this like unlimited wardrobe budget.
And they tell her they're going to turn her into
(19:45):
the next Edith Poff with just like a crazy comparison.
And you know, you would think that this girl who
was essentially borderline homeless would look at this and be like,
my life is exactly what I want. This is amazing
but instead she hates it. She's bored, she feels creatively stifled.
She doesn't feel like they understand her and the story
(20:07):
she wants to tell. So she stays in Paris for
just a few months and she's like, no, I'm going
to go back to New York.
Speaker 2 (20:13):
I didn't like what.
Speaker 7 (20:14):
I was doing when I got there, so I left
and I never did a record there.
Speaker 3 (20:17):
I feel like this says so much about Madonna and
also goes against this notion that we've talked about that
she was somehow made or created by like some music executive.
In fact, she literally refused to be someone else's vision.
So I love that about her. What happens when she
gets back to New York.
Speaker 1 (20:36):
When she gets back to New York, she had met
this boyfriend right before she left who's in a band,
and she asks if she can stay with him, and
she decides she's going to be a pop star. She
just sort of decides because she's had this experience in
Paris and it's taught her that it's possible, but she
just doesn't want to do it the way they want
her to do it. She asks him to teach her
an instrument and he eats like, the only instrument I
(20:58):
could imagine Madonna learning first was the drums.
Speaker 2 (21:01):
So he teaches her the drums.
Speaker 1 (21:03):
And she literally sits in his apartment, which is, by
the way, an old synagogue that him and his brother
have converted into it loft I mean converting in quotes. Yeah,
it's like very much like a bohemian existence. And she
just listens to Elvis Costello records and she tries to
emulate the drumming. That's how she teaches herself to drum.
(21:23):
But she does it all the time. Like when she
does things, she does not do them by half. Yeah,
she's just like really intense about it. And at first
she joins her boyfriend's band, and she quickly realizes though
that she wants to be driving the vision. She wants
to be writing the songs. She wants to be the
lead singer. And you know, the boyfriend's brother who's in
the band with him, is like, why is this woman
(21:44):
like suddenly in charge? So eventually she's just like, this
isn't gonna work. She's incredibly ambitious. And the other thing
that they say about her, the people who are around
her at this time, is that she was always pursuing
music commercially. She was never like, you know, I just
want to sing and like, yeah, play in bands like
for these like little venues. She was always like calling
(22:05):
record producers, she was calling agent. She was constantly trying
to figure out how she was going to be a
huge success because she knew that's what she wanted. She
didn't want to just be in the indie scene. And
this era is also kind of defined by the fact
that she just leaves behind this string of broken hearts.
You know, there's always these men who help her in
(22:26):
some way. Her boyfriend who helps her get into the
band and teaches her to play music. There'll be another
ex boyfriend who moves to New York and becomes her
songwriting partner for a number of years, who's like very
integral to her success.
Speaker 3 (22:38):
Waita, you said she did Basquiacht too, right? That feels
like so perfectly New York of the early eighties.
Speaker 2 (22:44):
Yes, And actually there's a funny side note.
Speaker 1 (22:46):
There's a painting of best yachts from nineteen eighty two
called a Panel of Experts, and it actually depicts a
fight between Madonna and one of his.
Speaker 2 (22:54):
Exes whose name was Venus. Randomly, so you might think
it's not about actual people.
Speaker 1 (23:00):
But the funny thing is that Madonna's name has a
copyright symbol on it, which you know, many have interpreted
as his awareness of how famous she.
Speaker 4 (23:09):
Would go on to be so interesting.
Speaker 1 (23:11):
And in fact, he supposedly told art dealer Larry Gagoshian
that Madonna was going to be the biggest pop star
in the world, so he must have really believed.
Speaker 4 (23:20):
That, h okay.
Speaker 3 (23:21):
And it's because of Oscot that she has her graffiti
tag right, yes, boy toy, yeah, which is funny because
clearly she's none of these men's toy.
Speaker 2 (23:30):
No, she is very much nobody's toy.
Speaker 1 (23:32):
And you know, she very actively owns her sexuality, and
that's another sort of big thing that is different about Madonna.
Up until Madonna, you were allowed as an artist to
be sexy. You were supposed to be beautiful and sexy
as a female artist, but you weren't supposed to be sexual, right,
You were an object And the music industry was very
(23:53):
much a male oriented industry, was like a very rock
and roll industry for men by men, and the we're
supposed to be men, So as a woman, you were
supposed to appeal to men, but Madonna always refuse to
accept that. Like she was like, I want my fans
to be women. I want my fans to be queer.
I sure, fine, if men like my music, that's fine.
(24:14):
But I'm not making music for men to enjoy. And
so even her first single, which she ends up releasing
in eighty two, is a dance single, right, it's for
the gay clubs that she hangs out in, and within
a month it's number three on the Billboard Dance Club Charts.
And that's because she's literally going to the clubs where
(24:34):
she hangs out, and she's making friends with the DJs
and sometimes dating them, and she is getting them to
play her songs. You know, she is like doing what
we now call retail marketing. Yeah, she's an absolute operator.
She is not leaving her success up to chance. She
is incredibly ambitious and she is going to make sure
that her music gets played. And once it's played, people
(24:57):
love it and they start requesting it, and that that's
why it becomes so popular.
Speaker 3 (25:06):
Obviously, she goes on to have this incredible, incredible career
that could be many many podcasts devoted to that, and
probably are some, yes, but what are the moments we
should remember or highlight in terms of just what a
huge impact Madonna had and has on music and culture.
Speaker 1 (25:24):
Well, I mean, I think there's just so many things
you could say if you were trying to convince someone
who didn't understand how big an impact Madonna had, that
would tell you who she was in the space of music.
You know, she's widely referred to as the Queen of pop,
and that's because she is to this day, the highest
charting female musician. She's the highest grossing female touring musician
(25:47):
in history. She's the first woman to ever accumulate one
billion dollars in concert revenue. Madonna has thirty eight top
ten hits on the Billboard Charts. The Beatles are behind
her with thirty four, you know. I mean that is
just incredible when you think about it, Like, yeah, we
look at Taylor Swift this year, and I remember being
at a dinner party recently where someone said, and everyone
agreed with them, that Taylor Swift is the biggest musical
(26:10):
act in history, and I was just like, I don't.
Speaker 3 (26:13):
Know that, Yeah, because Madonna exists in over decades, over.
Speaker 1 (26:19):
Decades, and she's done so many of the things that
we look at Taylor doing and we're like, oh my god,
that's incredible. Madonna did these things in the eighties and
nineties when there were no you know, mentors, there were
no women you could look to and be like, oh,
that's a career I could have. You know, she was
really inventing the space of being a superstar pop icon.
(26:43):
And you know, she has sold four hundred million records worldwide.
She is certified by the Guinness World Records as the
biggest selling female recording artist of all time. You know,
more than Taylor Swift, more than Beyonce, more than Rihanna,
more than Mariah Carey and that Christmas song I think,
but sell a bajillion records over Christmas, and I you know,
(27:04):
love all those artists.
Speaker 2 (27:05):
I think they're amazing.
Speaker 1 (27:06):
I'm not taking anything away from Taylor or Beyonce, but
I do think sometimes the absolute legend of Madonna, just
what a legacy she has left in music for these
other artists, is sometimes kind of forgotten. Yeah, because now
everybody just talks about, you know, her age and what.
Speaker 10 (27:23):
She looks like, and how laid her concerts starts and
how late her concerts start exactly like it's just I
think easy to see her as tabloid fair now, but
Madonna is so much more than that, you know.
Speaker 1 (27:36):
Her legacy has been studied by sociologists and historians. There
are college courses were being taught about Madonna long before,
long before Taylor's Swift, you know. And to give you
an idea of her cultural references, there are so many
separate Wikipedia entries for the cultural impact of Madonna.
Speaker 4 (27:53):
Oh that's it.
Speaker 1 (27:54):
I could not count them all, Like, I can't tell
you how many there are, because every time I would
look for one, I would find another one. There's separate
entry from Madonna and sexuality. There's a separate entrance from
Madonna and religion. There's a separate entrance from Madonna as
a gay.
Speaker 3 (28:07):
Icon like that even like a fun marker for our times, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1 (28:12):
And not to mention, there's a Wikipedia entrance for every album.
There's a Wikipedia entrance for many of her songs. Like
she's literally too much.
Speaker 2 (28:20):
To encapsulate in a single web page, you know.
Speaker 1 (28:23):
And in that era of the eighties and nineties, really
she's often mentioned with Michael Jackson and Prince as the
three main stars of the eighties. You know, they were
really considered almost like a trinity, and they defined the era.
And when she topped the Billboard charts with Like a
Virgin in eighty four, there was an eight month period
where she and Prince and Michael Jackson just kept switching
(28:46):
off between Like a Virgin, Purple Rain, and Thriller. And
what's interesting is that all three of those artists were
born in the same year. They were all born in
nineteen fifty eight, and they were all born in Middle America.
And they would really, these three people, these three amazing artists,
rewrite what it meant to be a musician and to
be a success in the music business because obviously Prince
(29:08):
and Michael Jackson, as black men, also really fought against
a lot of tides and were very much not seen
as mainstream when they entered music.
Speaker 4 (29:18):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (29:18):
I mean, in some ways, what Prince and Michael Jackson
did for black musicians, Madonna really did for women.
Speaker 1 (29:25):
Yeah, she did. And you know, this is another thing
I talked to Mary Gabriel about. Here she is again.
Speaker 7 (29:30):
At that time in the pop world, women were not
taken seriously. They were almost like the performers of the fifties,
you know, female singers who sang lyrics that men had
generally written in front of a band of men, So
they were just an ornament and usually had to be
a sexy ornament. And their audience wasn't girls. Their audience
(29:54):
was men, and so everything was designed to titillate the
male universe. And I think that's what's critical to Madonna's story.
There were female artists who were strong and wonderful, like
Chrissy Hind, but they were always on the cutting edge.
They were in the avant garde, and Madonna took that
all of that information and made it mainstream and brought
it to pop.
Speaker 3 (30:15):
I think what's so cool in retrospect is that, especially
in those early years when Madonna broke all of these
barriers to make it into the mainstream, the music that
she was making and sending out into the world really
was for the girls who loved her and wanted to
be her, and the gays who adored her.
Speaker 2 (30:34):
Yes, those girls want to bees.
Speaker 1 (30:36):
They were really her first fans, and she gave them
a sense that they could feel free, that they could
be as free as she was.
Speaker 6 (30:44):
And here's Mary again on that. In her first years,
up until I would say about eighty six eighty seven,
she was singing to young women, and what she was
saying to them in really the most direct language possible.
You know, I have had the dreams that you have.
I know who you are, sitting in your suburban bedrooms,
dreaming big, but knowing because you were born a girl,
(31:07):
you're never going to have the opportunities your brother did.
I know because I was you and look what I did.
And so that was Madonna's message. It was at the
doctrine of liberation. According to Madonna.
Speaker 7 (31:17):
You know, there was second wave feminism, which had been
in the seventies and was dead by that time. Madonna
really did in every way introduce third wave feminism with
her early performances in the early eighties, because it was
absolutely about freedom. It was about have no fear, break
through rules, be who you want to be, you know,
and if you need help, I'm here.
Speaker 3 (31:51):
I want to bring us back to the original moment
we started with, which was on that stage, that VMA
stage in nineteen eighty four. Madonna, the wedding dress and
the seventeen footcake and the way that she pushed boundaries
and as a product of that really redefined what it
meant to be a star and also what was possible
(32:13):
as a star.
Speaker 1 (32:14):
Yeah, it's really true. I think the thing about Madonna
that is really interesting and very unlike almost any other
artists operating today, is that she never separated her work
from her politics. Everything she did, every controversial stand she
did while also being a commercial artist. She wasn't trying
to just push boundaries. She was trying to push boundaries
(32:37):
into the mainstream.
Speaker 11 (32:38):
You know.
Speaker 1 (32:39):
She wanted the success because she felt like that spotlight
helped her. And the first sort of great example of
that is that at the height of her fame, she
really embraces and celebrates queer identity because she feels that
the queer community is what helped her become a star.
Speaker 2 (32:57):
Right.
Speaker 1 (32:58):
She became rest star in those dance clubs where queer
and black kids were finding a way to feel safe
in a world that didn't feel very safe for them
at that time. You know, it was the middle of
the AIDS crisis. And so when she becomes a start,
right from the beginning, she's making sure that people know
(33:18):
that she is very much supporting that community.
Speaker 3 (33:22):
Yeah, and I mean worth noting that she was talking
about it in a way that, you know, it's far
different from the way that a lot of artists kind
of pander or perform their allyship or their wokeism today, Like,
she was not queerbaiting. She was genuinely being political and
what she was talking about.
Speaker 1 (33:40):
Yeah, celebrating and embracing those issues was just fundamental to
who Madonna was, right because, as Mary Gabriel says, those
early years in New York, the gay community was her world.
They were her best friends. That's who she was spending
her time with. Those were the people who were celebrating
and supporting her. So Madonna was really deeply affect by
what happened with AIDS.
Speaker 7 (34:02):
By nineteen eighty three, it was undeniably murdering tens of
thousands of men, and she was saying her best friend's dying.
And so rather than run away from that, she embraced
the cause. And it was for if you can imagine,
for a rock pop world, which is actually based on
the idea of sexuality, to associate yourself with a sexually
(34:26):
transmitted disease is suicide. I mean, rockers wouldn't go near
it because they were all about dicks and you know, screwing.
You know, young women didn't go near it because to
be talking about homosexuality or gay sex in Ronald Reagan's America,
when he didn't even mention the word AIDS for five
(34:47):
years as it decimated a huge part of the population,
was just a no go in his Christian world, his
Christian political world. So for Madonna to come out and say,
I'm going to talk about it, I'm going to sing
about it. I'm going to have safe sex, you know,
unadorned safe sex brochures in my albums, and she talked
about anal sex. She talked about hardcore stuff that most
(35:08):
people didn't go near. You know, if they didn't talk
about AIDS, they definitely didn't talk about the particulars of
how you get it.
Speaker 2 (35:13):
And so she was.
Speaker 7 (35:15):
Fearless with that, but because it was because she knew
it was a matter of life and death. And so
throughout her career she's done that. She's waited deep into
battles that other people didn't want to go near because
she frankly thinks that the causes are more important than
her career, and she also knows from experience that there
are enough people who will appreciate the bold stand she
(35:35):
takes that she has nothing to lose, and at a
certain point she had nothing.
Speaker 1 (35:39):
To lose because she was so powerful, and that power
that Mary is talking about, you know, she is always
using to kind of further the conversation. So in nineteen
ninety one, she makes her groundbreaking documentary Truth or Dare,
which just FYI was produced by Harvey Weinstein because every
time we do one of these stories, some horrible man
(36:00):
has to it here and here he is. And that movie,
you know, was meant to be just like a concert film,
but instead it ends up being really about her life
and her backup dancers. And it's one of the first
times that a mainstream film, documentary or otherwise really shows
gay people sort of just living their lives in a
(36:22):
happy and care free way. And it's considered, you know,
a little political, even though it's not intended in any
way to be a political movie.
Speaker 3 (36:30):
Yeah, it's actually quite powerful in its subtlety, especially in
an era when there was so much homophobia and fear
around AIDS. So it's quite subversive in how ordinary she's
treating it.
Speaker 1 (36:42):
Yeah, very much, and I think, you know, she continues
to do that. Her current tour celebration feels like it's
very much a statement in support of the LGBT community.
Her current show just really makes queer and transcultural the focus,
and she's really doing that so that she can support
and affirm LGBTQ.
Speaker 3 (37:02):
Writes, and which honestly isn't a small gesture right now
with what's happening politically, but it's actually making me think
that what feels even more radical about Madonna is the
fact that she is doing all of this and just
continuing to exist and perform at the age of sixty five.
Speaker 1 (37:22):
Yeah, I mean, we've talked about this, and sometimes she's
talked about this, right. One of her greatest frustrations is
that instead of talking about her art now, all everybody
does is talk about her age. And that's because in
our society, women over a certain age are expected, in
some ways to go away quietly and accept that they
no longer have anything to offer, and Madonna just refuses
(37:47):
to accept that. The fact that she chooses to keep
making music and touring and living loudly and embracing the
issues she cares about is huge. What has she said
about this, well, Interestingly, a few years ago, when she
was receiving the Billboard Women of the Year award, she
essentially said that her very survival and endurance is probably
(38:07):
her most revolutionary act, and I think this is a
really good place to end it, with her having the
last word.
Speaker 11 (38:15):
People say that I'm so controversial, but I think the
most controversial thing I have.
Speaker 2 (38:20):
Ever done is to stick around.
Speaker 4 (38:26):
To the doubters, the naysayers.
Speaker 11 (38:30):
To everyone who gave me hell and said I could not,
that I would not, that I must not.
Speaker 5 (38:42):
Your resistance made me stronger, made me push harder, made
me the fighter that I am today, made me the
woman that I am today.
Speaker 2 (39:00):
In Retrospect, Thanks for listening.
Speaker 1 (39:02):
Is there a pop culture moment you can't stop thinking
about and want us to explore in a future episode.
Email us at Inretropod at gmail dot com or find
us on Instagram at in retropod.
Speaker 3 (39:13):
If you love this podcast, please rate and review us
on Apple or Spotify or wherever you listen. If you
hate it, you can post nasty comments on our Instagram,
which we may or may not delete.
Speaker 1 (39:23):
You can also find us on Instagram at Jessica Bennett
and at Susie b NYC. Also check out Jessica's books Feminist,
Fike Club, and This Is eighteen.
Speaker 3 (39:32):
In Retrospect is a production of iHeart Podcasts and the Media.
Lauren Hansen is our supervising producer. Derek Clements is our
engineer and sound designer. Emily Meronov is our producer. Sharon
Atia is our researcher and associate producer.
Speaker 1 (39:46):
Our executive producer from the Media is Cindy Levy. Our
executive producers from iHeart are Anna Stemp and Katrina Norbel.
Our artwork is from Pentagram. Our mixing engineer is Amanda
Rose Smith. Additional editing help from Mary we are your
hosts Susie Bannoncarum and Jessica Bennett.
Speaker 4 (40:04):
We are also executive producers.
Speaker 3 (40:06):
For even more, check out in retropod dot com
Hey everyone, This is part two of our episodes about
Madonna's iconic performance at the first MTV Video Music Awards.
If you haven't listened to part one yet, I recommend
starting there.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
Welcome to mcvly Music Television.
Speaker 1 (00:14):
In nineteen eighty one, the launch of MTV, a new
twenty four hour music channel, changed cultural history forever. By
captivating teens across the country and pushing.
Speaker 3 (00:23):
Boundaries, you'll never look at music the same way again.
Speaker 1 (00:27):
Enter Madonna, a scrappy twenty somethingter singer who also loved
challenging the status quo and was ready to become a star.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
What are your dreams to rule the world?
Speaker 4 (00:38):
There you go, ladies and gentlemen, this is Madonna.
Speaker 1 (00:40):
When MTV gave her the chance to perform at the
first Video Music Awards, Madonna did what she does best,
scandalized the audience, and for better or for worse, stole
the show.
Speaker 5 (00:53):
After I got off stage during that performance, my manager
was white as a ghost, and he looked at me.
Speaker 6 (00:58):
He said, do you know what you just did?
Speaker 2 (01:01):
Your career is over, but her career was just beginning.
I'm Susie Bannacharum and.
Speaker 1 (01:09):
I'm Jessica Bennett, and this is in retrospect, where each
week we revisit a cultural moment from the past that
shaped us.
Speaker 4 (01:16):
And that we just can't stop thinking about.
Speaker 1 (01:18):
Today, we're talking about one of Madonna's iconic early performances,
one that was so scandalous many predicted it would end
her career. But we're also talking about the rise of
MTV and how together MTV and Madonna became a force
that would define eighties pop culture.
Speaker 2 (01:35):
This is Part two.
Speaker 3 (01:38):
The year is nineteen eighty four and Madonna, who is
not a huge star yet, has just performed like a
vision at the first ever Video Music Awards. I am
dying to know what happens right after the performance, because,
as we talked about in part one, all the overt sexuality,
the writhing around on the ground Madonna did that really
(01:59):
shocked audience.
Speaker 4 (02:01):
You could say it even had the.
Speaker 3 (02:02):
Potential to put her budding career in jeopardy, except, of course,
we know that it didn't. So what actually does happen
after that?
Speaker 1 (02:11):
So what happens right after is despite the fact that
the audience and the other performance are clutching their pearls,
you know, this performance does what Madonna wanted to do.
It gets her name out there, and teenagers and new
fans who see her, they all go running to their
local music stores trying to buy you know, this song,
but it's not available yet, so they buy whatever other
(02:33):
Madonna music they can find. And at this point that's
just her first album, and that album, which was released
a year before this, suddenly jumps to number eight on
the Billboard charts.
Speaker 4 (02:42):
It's so funny.
Speaker 3 (02:43):
I can just imagine all these teenagers like rushing to
Tower Records where we used to go to get their
hands on Like a Virgin. This, of course was back
in the day when you had to literally like get
in a car or walk to the record store to
get the album, not just downloaded on your phone.
Speaker 4 (02:59):
So when does that album finally come out?
Speaker 1 (03:01):
So this performance at the VMA's the Like a Virgin performance,
happens mid September, and Like a Virgin the album is
finally released in November, and it's followed by the video
for Like a Virgin the day after, and the song
itself shoots to number one in the US, in Australia,
in Canada and stays there for six weeks. The album
(03:24):
is also a number one hit in the United States
and by February it goes triple platinum. So within just
a few months and more than three million albums are sold.
So Warner Brothers executives are thrilled, right, they are absolutely
thrilled with the performance. And in the end, all of
(03:44):
the scandal and the handwrigging around the MTV performance have
actually done exactly what she believed they would do, which
is bringing her more and more attention.
Speaker 4 (03:55):
And brought a ton of attention to MTV two. I'm sure.
Speaker 2 (03:58):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (03:58):
In fact, Bob Pittman, who who was one of MTB's
founders and I should mention also runs iHeart Are Producers Hi.
Bob said after this that the first year it was
everything we could do to get some talent to come
to the event and fill seats, and by the second
year everyone wanted to be in the show. Right, So
she really makes it clear that being part of the
(04:19):
show can be good for your career and in fact,
as I've said, it boosted her album sales.
Speaker 3 (04:25):
Yeah, I mean I remember at this time, weren't there
the wannabes who were the Madonna superfans basically in the
way that we have the beehive or swifties today.
Speaker 1 (04:35):
Yes, her fans were called the Madonna wannabes, or more
often the press would just call them the wannabes.
Speaker 4 (04:40):
And tonight she winds off a twenty six city concert
tour which has been completely sold out, largely to teenage girls,
many of who might be called Madonna wannabes.
Speaker 1 (04:50):
She was such a figure of delight for young girls
and young women that they really emulated her. In fact,
people wanted to look so much like me Madonna that
within two years of that album coming out, The Like
a Virgin Album, a flagship Macy's store in Manhattan held
a Madonna lookalike contest in Midtown Manhattan.
Speaker 7 (05:10):
Hundreds of Madonna wanna be He's packed into the Madonna
Land shop.
Speaker 6 (05:13):
At Macy's department store for a Madonna lookalike contest.
Speaker 2 (05:16):
And Andy Warhol was one of the judges. I'm amazing.
Speaker 1 (05:21):
They opened a department called Madonna Land and so wow,
they buy all the clothes to make you look just
like Madonna.
Speaker 4 (05:29):
Incredible.
Speaker 1 (05:29):
Yes, it's different.
Speaker 2 (05:30):
It's nobody else does it.
Speaker 5 (05:33):
She's pretty and I like her.
Speaker 2 (05:34):
It's the only one that we can look up soon. Nowadays,
she doesn't condemn femininity.
Speaker 8 (05:38):
And anywhere madonnas well, everybody looks at you her style,
her look, the sort of like rag in your hair
and the plastic bracelets and the lots of jewelry that
really became the look of the eighties.
Speaker 1 (05:51):
Like when people do eighties parodies now they dress like
Madonna dress. And in fact, she has said since that
at some point she stopped dressing like that because it
didn't feel unique, became spacial anymore. Like she's like, I
would walk down the street and see a million versions
of myself, and so it's one of the reasons she
starts to reinvent herself over and over again, because she's
so commonly emulated. And you know, she's not just a
(06:15):
pop star, right, she's really, in her mind an artist,
a person who is making statements about what a woman
can be and should be in the world. And you know,
this is just a perfect example of another time in
her career where people told her that her career was
over and she overcame. That's going to happen in her
career over and over and over again, and every time
(06:37):
the people who said she couldn't rise above whatever the
scandal was have been proven wrong.
Speaker 3 (06:48):
What do you think gave her that confidence, Like, are
there any hints or has she spoken about her upbringing
or where she came from and how it contributed to
where she would ultimately go.
Speaker 1 (06:59):
Yeah, I mean, I think Madonna's background, her childhood is
really interesting and really speaks to why she ends up
being the way she is. And I've been thinking about
nothing but Madonna for three weeks, So I'm going to
tell you a little bit more about her, just her
history so that we have that context. So Madonna was
born in Detroit. Her full name is Madonna Louise Chacone.
(07:23):
A lot of people think Madonna is a stage name,
but she was actually named after her mother. She grew
up in a very middle class Italian Catholic family and
she is one of eight children, four brothers and three sisters.
And the thing she often talks about in terms of
why she's so independent and confident and keeps her own counsel,
(07:44):
is that her mother died of breast cancer when she
was just six years old. And this just had a
profound impact on her in the way that you would expect.
And she's talked about this loss over the years, and
she has said that the reason why she was so
focused on running away from that part of her life
is because it really gives her this sense that you
can lose everything in an instant, your sense of security,
(08:08):
and so she's tried not to rely on other people.
Here she is talking about it in a nineteen ninety
five interview on ABC's Primetime Life.
Speaker 3 (08:17):
I really did feel completely abandoned at that point in
my life and sort.
Speaker 5 (08:22):
Of left me with a hungerl a longing, a feeling
of emptiness.
Speaker 6 (08:27):
You sort of grow up being afraid to love things.
Speaker 1 (08:30):
So she ends up kind of keeping her own counsel,
for lack of a better way of putting it. You know,
she has this huge family, there's all these other kids.
She ends up having a step mom she really doesn't like,
and so she kind of just withdraws into herself in
a way and decides that no one is ever going
to make her feel that unsafe and insecure again. And
(08:51):
that is I think the inherent origin story of Madonna.
Speaker 2 (08:55):
She is this girl, this.
Speaker 1 (08:56):
Little girl who lost her mother and had to kind
of raise herself in a way.
Speaker 2 (09:02):
And she loves her father. She sings about her father.
Speaker 1 (09:05):
She's very close to her family, but losing apparently I mean,
you know, I lost my dad when I was young.
It really does end up being kind of a defining thing.
You never really feel whole again in some fundamental ways.
And you know, the interesting thing about Madonna is that,
you know, there's kind of this assumption that she's a
(09:26):
high school dropout. And in fairness, that assumption comes from
the fact that in early interviews that I've watched, she
actually said she was a high school dropout.
Speaker 3 (09:34):
Oh really, I'm a famed high school dropout.
Speaker 4 (09:37):
So I don't believe anything they tell you.
Speaker 3 (09:38):
I think I read once she used to make up
stories like this when she talked to the press because
she thought it was funny.
Speaker 1 (09:44):
Yes, a friend of hers told a story in this
nineteen ninety one profile in New York magazine I found
about how she would make up outrageous things to tell
reporters just because she thought it was hilarious, and then
they would laugh about these pieces when they came out.
Speaker 3 (09:58):
That's so funny and also so different from the carefully
curated things that celebrities say now.
Speaker 9 (10:04):
But she did actually go to college, right, She got
a full scholarship to the University of Michigan. I mean,
she's incredibly smart, and she was in the dance program there.
She always wanted to be a dancer, and at some
point during her first two years, she does an internship
in New York and she gets really restless, and she
does drop out of the University of Michigan and she
moves to New York in nineteen seventy eight, and she
(10:26):
says in an interview, you know, it was the first
time I'd ever taken a plane by myself, because she
drove when she came to New York the last time.
And it's the first time I'd ever gotten a taxi cab.
And I came here with thirty five dollars in my pocket.
And it was the bravest thing I'd ever done.
Speaker 1 (10:42):
Wow, And when you think about it, it was really brave,
you know.
Speaker 2 (10:45):
I mean, nobody in her family wanted her to do this.
Speaker 1 (10:48):
Her father was dead set against it, and she just
really believed that she would be able to find her
own way. So she shows up in New York. She
doesn't actually know where to go, so she asks the
cab driver to take her to the center of everything.
So funny, and he drops her off in Times Square
because I guess he's like I guess this is the
center of everything. And then there is this crazy story
(11:12):
and she has told it a few times, so I
think this is really what happened, but it's wild to
think about.
Speaker 2 (11:18):
So she's wandering around, she doesn't know what to do.
She finds like a market and she's sort of roaming
around this mark, this fair or market street fair, and
this random man comes up to her and is like,
why are you walking around with your suitcase? And she says, oh, well,
I don't have a place to live because I just
got here. And he's like, well, do you want to
stay with me now?
Speaker 1 (11:39):
Any other person would be like no, because you're probably
like an ex murderer. Yeah, but she says yes, and
she stays with him for two weeks and he's actually
really nice to her and like makes her breakfast every
day and does.
Speaker 2 (11:53):
Not make a move on her.
Speaker 1 (11:54):
And what's so crazy about this is, she says in
an interview in nineteen ninety one, she doesn't even remember
this man's name.
Speaker 2 (12:01):
Wow, it's so insignificant, dirt.
Speaker 4 (12:03):
I mean, he must remember her name.
Speaker 1 (12:05):
I mean one would think, right, But also just like
he must be kind of an odd guy because he's
just like going around letting random people stay with him.
And it's probably worth noting that New York at this
time was pretty dangerous.
Speaker 3 (12:16):
Yeah, I mean getting dropped off in the middle of
Times Squares, not like getting draped, having the middle of
Times Square to die.
Speaker 1 (12:22):
Yeah, it's a wild thing that she sort of just
like accepted the kindness of this stranger and it worked
out for her. Eventually, she does find her own place,
but she's often kind of living, you know, hand to mouth.
Her first job is at the dunkin Donuts across from Bloomingdale's.
Speaker 2 (12:38):
She has no money.
Speaker 1 (12:39):
So when I say she finds her own place, I
mean she's often just like staying with people or like
you know, couch surfing, and she does a lot of
odd jobs. She has so little money. And Mary Gabriel,
who just wrote this amazing biography of her, it's called
Madonna a Rebel Life. She describes how scrappy this time
was in her life.
Speaker 7 (12:59):
She was so broke, and you know, people who want
to denigrate her story or say, oh, it's a myth,
you know, she was absolutely strong, broke, not once, not
for a little while, but for years. And you know,
friends who knew her at the time were appalled by
the way she lived. She would eat out of the
garbage if there was some fresh French fries in there
that somebody else hadn't eaten. It wasn't a big deal.
(13:21):
She stole a lot, you know, and she freely admits
all this stuff. She was a street kid. I mean,
she was borderline homeless, street kid for many years.
Speaker 4 (13:45):
What area of the city did she live in when
she first got here.
Speaker 1 (13:47):
Well, so she mostly lived in Alphabet City, which even
when I was in college in the nineties was no
man's land. People were like, don't go down to Alphabet City.
It started to gentrify, you know, in the years after
I graduated. But it was a really rough time, as
I said, in New York. You know, there was a
lot of poverty. It was a high crime era. And
(14:08):
you know, Madonna was really trusting, as this story that
I just told about this random guy proves, and she
says that that often worked in her favor. But she
has also said that, you know, a couple times during
this air she was sexually assaulted because she was living
in really broken down places. And there's a story in
the book where one of her friends from college who
(14:29):
lives in New York goes to visit her and is
afraid to touch anything because it's so disgusting. In the
apartment building where she lives. There was just this sense
that New York was kind of a dystopian nightmare. When
you would come to New York, the police department would
hand out, you know, public service announcements telling Taurus not
to leave their hotels after dark.
Speaker 4 (14:50):
Yeah, good evening. We're coming off the bloodiest year in the.
Speaker 2 (14:53):
History of New York. Well, how bad is crime on
the subways today? Police said the robbers were getting robbed.
Speaker 7 (14:58):
Nineteen eighty one is less than twenty four hours old,
and another nine people have been killed.
Speaker 2 (15:03):
It makes you feel very helpless.
Speaker 1 (15:05):
So it's just this kind of unsettling time, but it
was also a really fervent time creatively. Here's Mary Gabriel again.
Speaker 7 (15:12):
When Madonna arrived in New York, she began hanging around
with people who introduced her to the pop world, and
that was really the beginning of Madonna, because suddenly she
realized that she didn't maybe want to dance to music exclusively,
she wanted to actually make music. And the timing was
so incredible because at that moment there was a revolution
(15:32):
in pop culture. The entire scene was about experimenting, and
that's really at the core of Madonna as an artist.
I mean, she thrives in an experimental environment. She took
every possible chance, artistically, personally, professionally, throughout every rule in
the rule book, and created herself and an entire genre
(15:53):
which we're now seeing, you know, we now take for
granted in the Beyonces and the Taylor Swifts of the world.
Speaker 3 (15:59):
That's a really interesting point Mary's making because in large part,
wasn't this creative artistic time in New York also a
reaction in some ways to the Reagan era or the
conservatism of the Reagan era we talked about in Part one.
Speaker 1 (16:13):
Yeah, that's right. The larger conservative movement is really giving
rise to this really creative and unique scene in New
York for artists especially. And here's Mary on that.
Speaker 7 (16:23):
After Vietnam, after Nixon was the beginning of the Reagan years,
there was a real artistic backlash. I think for some
artists it was conscious, but I think it was a
matter of survival. For others, you know, they had something
inside themselves they wanted to express, and they knew that
they would never be able to do it in the
mainstream because they were gay, because they were black, because
(16:44):
they were a woman who actually wanted to express herself,
not what a guy told her to express. So they
found a refuge and it was this you know, crazy
dangerous world that hadn't yet been developed by the likes
of Donald Trump and you know, the developers of the
eighties in Lower Manhattan, and it was highly political but
highly personal. So it's that, you know, the like what
(17:06):
the early feminist said, the personal is political.
Speaker 6 (17:08):
They lived that life.
Speaker 7 (17:10):
And they had no one there to criticize them because
nobody was paying attention to them. Is so they had
the freest kind of existence where anything you wanted to do,
as long as it didn't hurt someone was okay. Anything
you wanted to be was okay. It was the absolute,
utter expression of freedom.
Speaker 1 (17:27):
So this point that Mary is making about how much
the people who Madonna is surrounded by sort of feel
outside of the mainstream is also really emphasized by the
AIDS crisis and how much Madonna is surrounded by the
AIDS crisis while she is in New York in the eighties.
And you know, one of the reasons Reagan is so
despised by liberals of that era is how slow he
(17:49):
was to respond to that. And Madonna is really deeply
impacted by that, and that really informs the political identity
that she will be known for for the rest of
her career. You know, a lot of artists sort of
shy away from that. But she is entering New York
at this time where she wants to pursue dance and
(18:13):
she wants to pursue music, but she is also surrounded
by a lot of crisis and sadness. So what she
says about that is that she wanted to put something
into the world that was the opposite of that, that
was happy, that gives people hope, and that's why she
decides in the end that she is going to pursue
(18:34):
this really creative artistic existence.
Speaker 4 (18:37):
Okay, and so how does she do that well?
Speaker 1 (18:39):
And so initially she comes to New York to pursue dance.
She thinks she's going to be a dancer. She dances
with Alvin Ailey for a little bit, but she realizes
that she's a bit old to be a dancer in
New York, which is crazy because she's in her twenties,
and that she's just not as talented as the other dancers.
She really can tell for herself that she doesn't have
what they have, so she starts to pursue music. She
(19:02):
has a boyfriend who is in a band, and so
she hangs out with him. So there are really these
two things that push her into a music career. At
some point, she auditions to be the backup singer for
this European disco star and his French record producers see
her and they sign her and they take her to
Paris and they're like, we're gonna make you into a star.
(19:25):
And initially it's kind of like a fairy tale. Even
when she talks about it, you're like, that's kind of great.
She arrives in Paris in nineteen seventy nine. She's given
this fancy apartment. She has a chauffeur and a maid
and a vocal coach and this like unlimited wardrobe budget.
And they tell her they're going to turn her into
(19:45):
the next Edith Poff with just like a crazy comparison.
And you know, you would think that this girl who
was essentially borderline homeless would look at this and be like,
my life is exactly what I want. This is amazing
but instead she hates it. She's bored, she feels creatively stifled.
She doesn't feel like they understand her and the story
(20:07):
she wants to tell. So she stays in Paris for
just a few months and she's like, no, I'm going
to go back to New York.
Speaker 2 (20:13):
I didn't like what.
Speaker 7 (20:14):
I was doing when I got there, so I left
and I never did a record there.
Speaker 3 (20:17):
I feel like this says so much about Madonna and
also goes against this notion that we've talked about that
she was somehow made or created by like some music executive.
In fact, she literally refused to be someone else's vision.
So I love that about her. What happens when she
gets back to New York.
Speaker 1 (20:36):
When she gets back to New York, she had met
this boyfriend right before she left who's in a band,
and she asks if she can stay with him, and
she decides she's going to be a pop star. She
just sort of decides because she's had this experience in
Paris and it's taught her that it's possible, but she
just doesn't want to do it the way they want
her to do it. She asks him to teach her
an instrument and he eats like, the only instrument I
(20:58):
could imagine Madonna learning first was the drums.
Speaker 2 (21:01):
So he teaches her the drums.
Speaker 1 (21:03):
And she literally sits in his apartment, which is, by
the way, an old synagogue that him and his brother
have converted into it loft I mean converting in quotes. Yeah,
it's like very much like a bohemian existence. And she
just listens to Elvis Costello records and she tries to
emulate the drumming. That's how she teaches herself to drum.
(21:23):
But she does it all the time. Like when she
does things, she does not do them by half. Yeah,
she's just like really intense about it. And at first
she joins her boyfriend's band, and she quickly realizes though
that she wants to be driving the vision. She wants
to be writing the songs. She wants to be the
lead singer. And you know, the boyfriend's brother who's in
the band with him, is like, why is this woman
(21:44):
like suddenly in charge? So eventually she's just like, this
isn't gonna work. She's incredibly ambitious. And the other thing
that they say about her, the people who are around
her at this time, is that she was always pursuing
music commercially. She was never like, you know, I just
want to sing and like, yeah, play in bands like
for these like little venues. She was always like calling
(22:05):
record producers, she was calling agent. She was constantly trying
to figure out how she was going to be a
huge success because she knew that's what she wanted. She
didn't want to just be in the indie scene. And
this era is also kind of defined by the fact
that she just leaves behind this string of broken hearts.
You know, there's always these men who help her in
(22:26):
some way. Her boyfriend who helps her get into the
band and teaches her to play music. There'll be another
ex boyfriend who moves to New York and becomes her
songwriting partner for a number of years, who's like very
integral to her success.
Speaker 3 (22:38):
Waita, you said she did Basquiacht too, right? That feels
like so perfectly New York of the early eighties.
Speaker 2 (22:44):
Yes, And actually there's a funny side note.
Speaker 1 (22:46):
There's a painting of best yachts from nineteen eighty two
called a Panel of Experts, and it actually depicts a
fight between Madonna and one of his.
Speaker 2 (22:54):
Exes whose name was Venus. Randomly, so you might think
it's not about actual people.
Speaker 1 (23:00):
But the funny thing is that Madonna's name has a
copyright symbol on it, which you know, many have interpreted
as his awareness of how famous she.
Speaker 4 (23:09):
Would go on to be so interesting.
Speaker 1 (23:11):
And in fact, he supposedly told art dealer Larry Gagoshian
that Madonna was going to be the biggest pop star
in the world, so he must have really believed.
Speaker 4 (23:20):
That, h okay.
Speaker 3 (23:21):
And it's because of Oscot that she has her graffiti
tag right, yes, boy toy, yeah, which is funny because
clearly she's none of these men's toy.
Speaker 2 (23:30):
No, she is very much nobody's toy.
Speaker 1 (23:32):
And you know, she very actively owns her sexuality, and
that's another sort of big thing that is different about Madonna.
Up until Madonna, you were allowed as an artist to
be sexy. You were supposed to be beautiful and sexy
as a female artist, but you weren't supposed to be sexual, right,
You were an object And the music industry was very
(23:53):
much a male oriented industry, was like a very rock
and roll industry for men by men, and the we're
supposed to be men, So as a woman, you were
supposed to appeal to men, but Madonna always refuse to
accept that. Like she was like, I want my fans
to be women. I want my fans to be queer.
I sure, fine, if men like my music, that's fine.
(24:14):
But I'm not making music for men to enjoy. And
so even her first single, which she ends up releasing
in eighty two, is a dance single, right, it's for
the gay clubs that she hangs out in, and within
a month it's number three on the Billboard Dance Club Charts.
And that's because she's literally going to the clubs where
(24:34):
she hangs out, and she's making friends with the DJs
and sometimes dating them, and she is getting them to
play her songs. You know, she is like doing what
we now call retail marketing. Yeah, she's an absolute operator.
She is not leaving her success up to chance. She
is incredibly ambitious and she is going to make sure
that her music gets played. And once it's played, people
(24:57):
love it and they start requesting it, and that that's
why it becomes so popular.
Speaker 3 (25:06):
Obviously, she goes on to have this incredible, incredible career
that could be many many podcasts devoted to that, and
probably are some, yes, but what are the moments we
should remember or highlight in terms of just what a
huge impact Madonna had and has on music and culture.
Speaker 1 (25:24):
Well, I mean, I think there's just so many things
you could say if you were trying to convince someone
who didn't understand how big an impact Madonna had, that
would tell you who she was in the space of music.
You know, she's widely referred to as the Queen of pop,
and that's because she is to this day, the highest
charting female musician. She's the highest grossing female touring musician
(25:47):
in history. She's the first woman to ever accumulate one
billion dollars in concert revenue. Madonna has thirty eight top
ten hits on the Billboard Charts. The Beatles are behind
her with thirty four, you know. I mean that is
just incredible when you think about it, Like, yeah, we
look at Taylor Swift this year, and I remember being
at a dinner party recently where someone said, and everyone
agreed with them, that Taylor Swift is the biggest musical
(26:10):
act in history, and I was just like, I don't.
Speaker 3 (26:13):
Know that, Yeah, because Madonna exists in over decades, over.
Speaker 1 (26:19):
Decades, and she's done so many of the things that
we look at Taylor doing and we're like, oh my god,
that's incredible. Madonna did these things in the eighties and
nineties when there were no you know, mentors, there were
no women you could look to and be like, oh,
that's a career I could have. You know, she was
really inventing the space of being a superstar pop icon.
(26:43):
And you know, she has sold four hundred million records worldwide.
She is certified by the Guinness World Records as the
biggest selling female recording artist of all time. You know,
more than Taylor Swift, more than Beyonce, more than Rihanna,
more than Mariah Carey and that Christmas song I think,
but sell a bajillion records over Christmas, and I you know,
(27:04):
love all those artists.
Speaker 2 (27:05):
I think they're amazing.
Speaker 1 (27:06):
I'm not taking anything away from Taylor or Beyonce, but
I do think sometimes the absolute legend of Madonna, just
what a legacy she has left in music for these
other artists, is sometimes kind of forgotten. Yeah, because now
everybody just talks about, you know, her age and what.
Speaker 10 (27:23):
She looks like, and how laid her concerts starts and
how late her concerts start exactly like it's just I
think easy to see her as tabloid fair now, but
Madonna is so much more than that, you know.
Speaker 1 (27:36):
Her legacy has been studied by sociologists and historians. There
are college courses were being taught about Madonna long before,
long before Taylor's Swift, you know. And to give you
an idea of her cultural references, there are so many
separate Wikipedia entries for the cultural impact of Madonna.
Speaker 4 (27:53):
Oh that's it.
Speaker 1 (27:54):
I could not count them all, Like, I can't tell
you how many there are, because every time I would
look for one, I would find another one. There's separate
entry from Madonna and sexuality. There's a separate entrance from
Madonna and religion. There's a separate entrance from Madonna as
a gay.
Speaker 3 (28:07):
Icon like that even like a fun marker for our times, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1 (28:12):
And not to mention, there's a Wikipedia entrance for every album.
There's a Wikipedia entrance for many of her songs. Like
she's literally too much.
Speaker 2 (28:20):
To encapsulate in a single web page, you know.
Speaker 1 (28:23):
And in that era of the eighties and nineties, really
she's often mentioned with Michael Jackson and Prince as the
three main stars of the eighties. You know, they were
really considered almost like a trinity, and they defined the era.
And when she topped the Billboard charts with Like a
Virgin in eighty four, there was an eight month period
where she and Prince and Michael Jackson just kept switching
(28:46):
off between Like a Virgin, Purple Rain, and Thriller. And
what's interesting is that all three of those artists were
born in the same year. They were all born in
nineteen fifty eight, and they were all born in Middle America.
And they would really, these three people, these three amazing artists,
rewrite what it meant to be a musician and to
be a success in the music business because obviously Prince
(29:08):
and Michael Jackson, as black men, also really fought against
a lot of tides and were very much not seen
as mainstream when they entered music.
Speaker 4 (29:18):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (29:18):
I mean, in some ways, what Prince and Michael Jackson
did for black musicians, Madonna really did for women.
Speaker 1 (29:25):
Yeah, she did. And you know, this is another thing
I talked to Mary Gabriel about. Here she is again.
Speaker 7 (29:30):
At that time in the pop world, women were not
taken seriously. They were almost like the performers of the fifties,
you know, female singers who sang lyrics that men had
generally written in front of a band of men, So
they were just an ornament and usually had to be
a sexy ornament. And their audience wasn't girls. Their audience
(29:54):
was men, and so everything was designed to titillate the
male universe. And I think that's what's critical to Madonna's story.
There were female artists who were strong and wonderful, like
Chrissy Hind, but they were always on the cutting edge.
They were in the avant garde, and Madonna took that
all of that information and made it mainstream and brought
it to pop.
Speaker 3 (30:15):
I think what's so cool in retrospect is that, especially
in those early years when Madonna broke all of these
barriers to make it into the mainstream, the music that
she was making and sending out into the world really
was for the girls who loved her and wanted to
be her, and the gays who adored her.
Speaker 2 (30:34):
Yes, those girls want to bees.
Speaker 1 (30:36):
They were really her first fans, and she gave them
a sense that they could feel free, that they could
be as free as she was.
Speaker 6 (30:44):
And here's Mary again on that. In her first years,
up until I would say about eighty six eighty seven,
she was singing to young women, and what she was
saying to them in really the most direct language possible.
You know, I have had the dreams that you have.
I know who you are, sitting in your suburban bedrooms,
dreaming big, but knowing because you were born a girl,
(31:07):
you're never going to have the opportunities your brother did.
I know because I was you and look what I did.
And so that was Madonna's message. It was at the
doctrine of liberation. According to Madonna.
Speaker 7 (31:17):
You know, there was second wave feminism, which had been
in the seventies and was dead by that time. Madonna
really did in every way introduce third wave feminism with
her early performances in the early eighties, because it was
absolutely about freedom. It was about have no fear, break
through rules, be who you want to be, you know,
and if you need help, I'm here.
Speaker 3 (31:51):
I want to bring us back to the original moment
we started with, which was on that stage, that VMA
stage in nineteen eighty four. Madonna, the wedding dress and
the seventeen footcake and the way that she pushed boundaries
and as a product of that really redefined what it
meant to be a star and also what was possible
(32:13):
as a star.
Speaker 1 (32:14):
Yeah, it's really true. I think the thing about Madonna
that is really interesting and very unlike almost any other
artists operating today, is that she never separated her work
from her politics. Everything she did, every controversial stand she
did while also being a commercial artist. She wasn't trying
to just push boundaries. She was trying to push boundaries
(32:37):
into the mainstream.
Speaker 11 (32:38):
You know.
Speaker 1 (32:39):
She wanted the success because she felt like that spotlight
helped her. And the first sort of great example of
that is that at the height of her fame, she
really embraces and celebrates queer identity because she feels that
the queer community is what helped her become a star.
Speaker 2 (32:57):
Right.
Speaker 1 (32:58):
She became rest star in those dance clubs where queer
and black kids were finding a way to feel safe
in a world that didn't feel very safe for them
at that time. You know, it was the middle of
the AIDS crisis. And so when she becomes a start,
right from the beginning, she's making sure that people know
(33:18):
that she is very much supporting that community.
Speaker 3 (33:22):
Yeah, and I mean worth noting that she was talking
about it in a way that, you know, it's far
different from the way that a lot of artists kind
of pander or perform their allyship or their wokeism today, Like,
she was not queerbaiting. She was genuinely being political and
what she was talking about.
Speaker 1 (33:40):
Yeah, celebrating and embracing those issues was just fundamental to
who Madonna was, right because, as Mary Gabriel says, those
early years in New York, the gay community was her world.
They were her best friends. That's who she was spending
her time with. Those were the people who were celebrating
and supporting her. So Madonna was really deeply affect by
what happened with AIDS.
Speaker 7 (34:02):
By nineteen eighty three, it was undeniably murdering tens of
thousands of men, and she was saying her best friend's dying.
And so rather than run away from that, she embraced
the cause. And it was for if you can imagine,
for a rock pop world, which is actually based on
the idea of sexuality, to associate yourself with a sexually
(34:26):
transmitted disease is suicide. I mean, rockers wouldn't go near
it because they were all about dicks and you know, screwing.
You know, young women didn't go near it because to
be talking about homosexuality or gay sex in Ronald Reagan's America,
when he didn't even mention the word AIDS for five
(34:47):
years as it decimated a huge part of the population,
was just a no go in his Christian world, his
Christian political world. So for Madonna to come out and say,
I'm going to talk about it, I'm going to sing
about it. I'm going to have safe sex, you know,
unadorned safe sex brochures in my albums, and she talked
about anal sex. She talked about hardcore stuff that most
(35:08):
people didn't go near. You know, if they didn't talk
about AIDS, they definitely didn't talk about the particulars of
how you get it.
Speaker 2 (35:13):
And so she was.
Speaker 7 (35:15):
Fearless with that, but because it was because she knew
it was a matter of life and death. And so
throughout her career she's done that. She's waited deep into
battles that other people didn't want to go near because
she frankly thinks that the causes are more important than
her career, and she also knows from experience that there
are enough people who will appreciate the bold stand she
(35:35):
takes that she has nothing to lose, and at a
certain point she had nothing.
Speaker 1 (35:39):
To lose because she was so powerful, and that power
that Mary is talking about, you know, she is always
using to kind of further the conversation. So in nineteen
ninety one, she makes her groundbreaking documentary Truth or Dare,
which just FYI was produced by Harvey Weinstein because every
time we do one of these stories, some horrible man
(36:00):
has to it here and here he is. And that movie,
you know, was meant to be just like a concert film,
but instead it ends up being really about her life
and her backup dancers. And it's one of the first
times that a mainstream film, documentary or otherwise really shows
gay people sort of just living their lives in a
(36:22):
happy and care free way. And it's considered, you know,
a little political, even though it's not intended in any
way to be a political movie.
Speaker 3 (36:30):
Yeah, it's actually quite powerful in its subtlety, especially in
an era when there was so much homophobia and fear
around AIDS. So it's quite subversive in how ordinary she's
treating it.
Speaker 1 (36:42):
Yeah, very much, and I think, you know, she continues
to do that. Her current tour celebration feels like it's
very much a statement in support of the LGBT community.
Her current show just really makes queer and transcultural the focus,
and she's really doing that so that she can support
and affirm LGBTQ.
Speaker 3 (37:02):
Writes, and which honestly isn't a small gesture right now
with what's happening politically, but it's actually making me think
that what feels even more radical about Madonna is the
fact that she is doing all of this and just
continuing to exist and perform at the age of sixty five.
Speaker 1 (37:22):
Yeah, I mean, we've talked about this, and sometimes she's
talked about this, right. One of her greatest frustrations is
that instead of talking about her art now, all everybody
does is talk about her age. And that's because in
our society, women over a certain age are expected, in
some ways to go away quietly and accept that they
no longer have anything to offer, and Madonna just refuses
(37:47):
to accept that. The fact that she chooses to keep
making music and touring and living loudly and embracing the
issues she cares about is huge. What has she said
about this, well, Interestingly, a few years ago, when she
was receiving the Billboard Women of the Year award, she
essentially said that her very survival and endurance is probably
(38:07):
her most revolutionary act, and I think this is a
really good place to end it, with her having the
last word.
Speaker 11 (38:15):
People say that I'm so controversial, but I think the
most controversial thing I have.
Speaker 2 (38:20):
Ever done is to stick around.
Speaker 4 (38:26):
To the doubters, the naysayers.
Speaker 11 (38:30):
To everyone who gave me hell and said I could not,
that I would not, that I must not.
Speaker 5 (38:42):
Your resistance made me stronger, made me push harder, made
me the fighter that I am today, made me the
woman that I am today.
Speaker 2 (39:00):
In Retrospect, Thanks for listening.
Speaker 1 (39:02):
Is there a pop culture moment you can't stop thinking
about and want us to explore in a future episode.
Email us at Inretropod at gmail dot com or find
us on Instagram at in retropod.
Speaker 3 (39:13):
If you love this podcast, please rate and review us
on Apple or Spotify or wherever you listen. If you
hate it, you can post nasty comments on our Instagram,
which we may or may not delete.
Speaker 1 (39:23):
You can also find us on Instagram at Jessica Bennett
and at Susie b NYC. Also check out Jessica's books Feminist,
Fike Club, and This Is eighteen.
Speaker 3 (39:32):
In Retrospect is a production of iHeart Podcasts and the Media.
Lauren Hansen is our supervising producer. Derek Clements is our
engineer and sound designer. Emily Meronov is our producer. Sharon
Atia is our researcher and associate producer.
Speaker 1 (39:46):
Our executive producer from the Media is Cindy Levy. Our
executive producers from iHeart are Anna Stemp and Katrina Norbel.
Our artwork is from Pentagram. Our mixing engineer is Amanda
Rose Smith. Additional editing help from Mary we are your
hosts Susie Bannoncarum and Jessica Bennett.
Speaker 4 (40:04):
We are also executive producers.
Speaker 3 (40:06):
For even more, check out in retropod dot com
Popular Podcasts
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com