It’s almost impossible, given everything that came after, to imagine just how controversial Madonna’s boldly sexual performance at the first MTV Video Music Awards — where she debuted “Like a Virgin” live — was.
In September 1984, Madonna Louise Ciccone was just a 26-year-old pop star. She’d had success with dance floor hits like “Holiday” and “Lucky Star.” And MTV was a fledgling cable network that just showed relatively primitive music videos, usually just a clip of an artist lip syncing in front of a simple backdrop.
MTV launched in 1981, and initially was only shown in certain markets around the USA. After an initial slow start, artists like The Eurythmics and Michael Jackson (among the first Black artists to be featured) began to make music videos with budgets that resembled those of small films, and youth culture responded in an enormous way. By 1984, MTV was the single greatest tastemaker in the youth market. At that time, it made perfect sense that MTV needed a signature annual event and the VMAs was born. “It seemed like a good time to have a party,” recalled MTV cofounder Tom Freston. And what a party it was.
Looking back now (most of the show is available on YouTube), the first VMAs, which went down at Radio City Music Hall in NYC, is decidedly low-budget and almost innocent in many ways. Performances are fairly simple and the production looked like it was filmed in a high school gym. While other performers and attendees at the ceremony are an almost unbelievable list of musical legends — David Bowie, Tina Turner, Rod Stewart and ZZ Top — it was her performance that is most remembered.
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What Happened:
No dancers. No band. Just Madonna. That’s all that it took to get headlines worldwide. Madonna, in a lacy bustier, a “Boy Toy” belt buckle, wedding veil and, as well got to see, white suspenders, began to sing atop a wedding cake, as if she was a cake topper. She eventually climbed down the cake and took to the stage, her only prop the wedding veil that she took off and used as a scarf. It wasn’t until the end of the song that Madonna took the performance in a whole new direction. Collapsing to her knees on the stage, her wedding veil between her legs, Madonna begins to hump as she sang, and one of her hands reached between her legs as she moaned. Even though the cameras cut away almost instantly, Madonna’s suggestive behavior left no doubt that the performance had moved into explicit (for the time) sexual territory.
It’s hard to say whether Madonna calculated the move, and she has certainly never admitted that she planned for the performance to get as raunchy as it did. At the time, she told Billboard she blamed a wardrobe malfunction for giving the appearance of something more inappropriate, saying that one of her shoes fell off while she was getting off the cake, and she needed to get on the floor to put the shoe back on. “I dove to the floor and I rolled around,” she recalled. “As I reached for the shoe, the dress went up. And the underpants were showing.”
Why It Was a Big Deal:
Ever the visionary, she was one of the first artists to harness the potential of the MTV concept, seeing the opportunity to combine her artistic vision with her fearless boundary pushing. Cementing both her reputation and MTV’s central place in youth culture, it laid the groundwork for the non-stop controversy that she has courted ever since.
What People Said:
At the time, Madonna’s stylist Maripol said that MTV set Madonna up for the controversy. “I was right there,” she said. “I saw it happening. I saw what MTV did, and I can tell you that they tried to destroy her that day. They went under her skirt with the camera, they were trying to intimidate her.” Like anyone who tried to intimidate Madonna, MTV learned that it was not possible. “I knew, that day, that she had made it,” Maripol said. “Every journalist was rushing, going ‘Oh, my God who is this girl with the white outfit rolling and crawling on the floor with crosses in her ears and her name is Madonna? And she is singing about being a virgin?’ They were shocked.”
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What Happened Next:
The fallout was that this single, simple performance rebranded Madonna as a sexual renegade. She made headlines around the world, “Like A Virgin” became a worldwide phenomenon, paving the way for the album of the same name that came out two months after the VMAs and went to number one globally. The single also became her first number one single on the Billboard Hot 100, one of 11 total; to date, she garnered 38 Top 10 singles and 58 total entries on that chart.
Suddenly Madonna became synonymous with both the VMAs and proudly challenging sexuality, and she entered the most successful decade of a career.
After that performance, the VMAs realized that controversial performances were what people wanted, and Madonna has returned to perform many times, including the legendary performance in 2003 where she made out with Britney Spears.
And, while many of her peers from that era bowed out of the game or met tragic ends, Madonna never really went away: In 2024, she wrapped her massive Celebration Tour, a global trek that served as a commemoration of her 40-plus years of making hits, courting controversy, and making pop culture history.
