Madonna’s Debut Album - A Retro Review

Super Madonna Fans revisit Madonna's glorious entrance into the world of pop.

 

Madonna (retitled Madonna: The First Album for the 1985 re-release) is the debut studio album by American singer-songwriter Madonna, released on July 27, 1983 by Sire Records. After having established herself as a singer in downtown New York City, Madonna was signed by Sire president Seymour Stein, due to the success of her debut single, "Everybody" (1982). She became the sole writer for most of the album's tracks, and chose Reggie Lucas as its primary producer. Unhappy with Lucas's production outputs, she invited John "Jellybean" Benitez to complete the album, who remixed three tracks and produced "Holiday".

Madonna has an upbeat synthetic disco sound, using new technology of the time, including the Linn drum machine, Moog bass and Oberheim OB-X synthesizer. She sang in a bright, girlish timbre, with lyrics about love and relationships. To promote the album, Madonna performed one-off gigs in clubs and on television in the United States and United Kingdom throughout 1983 and 1984, followed by The Virgin Tour in 1985. Five singles were released, including the international top-ten hits "Holiday", "Lucky Star", and "Borderline". Their accompanying music videos were released on the Madonna video compilation, which became the best-selling videocassette of 1985 in the United States.

Madonna peaked at number eight on the Billboard 200, and was certified five-times platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) for shipment of five million copies across the United States. It reached the top ten of the charts in Australia, France, Netherlands, New Zealand, Sweden and the United Kingdom, and sold more than 10 million copies worldwide. The album received generally favorable reviews from music critics and was ranked fifth on Entertainment Weekly's list of the "Top 100 Best Albums of Past 25 Years" in 2008. The album has been credited for setting the standard of dance-pop for decades afterward, and for pointing the direction for numerous female artists of the 1980s.