In this excerpt from her new book, Madonna: A Rebel Life, author Mary Gabriel looks back on the icon’s appearance at the first MTV Video Music Awards, which one observer called “the awa…
, who was in the audience and was familiar with both worlds, recognized Madonna’s segment for what it was. “I loved that — it was performance art,” she said. Lauper was right. Madonna was not merely a pop singer; she was also part of a rich tradition of creative women who used everything they had in their art, who simply were their art. Madonna’s performance about women, marriage, and sexuality arose out of that milieu. But most people didn’t get it.
The VMAs would be the first of many episodes in Madonna’s career in which she expressed herself using the methods common in the New York art world only to suffer the wrath of public opinion. The verdict time and again would be that she had gone too far, that her career was over. Time and again, the jury was wrong. Madonna’s actions earned her detractors, to be sure, but they also earned her loyal fans and increased attention., “I knew that day she had made it.
Madonna was at the VMAs because she was nominated for Best New Artist in a Video for “Borderline.” She lost to Annie Lennox and the Eurythmics, but she stole the show. Looking back from a distance of 30 years, MTV’s Jocelyn Vena said, “That three minutes in 1984 was the point when Madonna became a superstar.”
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