Trivia / Madonna

• Banned in China: More like Banned On MTV as four of her music videos were banned by the network.^note "Justify My Love" and "Erotica" were banned due to sexual content with the former debuting on ABC's Nightline before being made available on VHS, which contributed to the song topping the Billboard Hot 100 and the latter only shown three times post-watershed on MTV before being banned outright, "What It Feels Like for a Girl" was banned due to depictions of violence and abuse and was only shown once on the network following an introduction from Kurt Loder and the original version of "American Life" was banned at her request after being shown on MTV's sister channel VH1 only once due to its content of military violence, especially due to the US invasion of Iraq occurring after it came out, hence she replaced it with an edited version with her singing with flags appearing in the background. Seriously, what has she done that hasn't been challenged by some censor somewhere?
  • To her credit, at least as far as being banned on MTV is concerned, while she has never apologised for being controversial, she has never criticised the network, either.
  • Back in 1989, Madonna's music video for "Like A Prayer" was unofficially banned in Italy for symbolism that would be considered blasphemous to the Catholic church (Jesus coming to life as a handsome black man and crosses being set on fire).
  • Due to her long, risqué resume, Madonna is not allowed to perform in Malaysia.
• Breakthrough Hit: She had a good-sized dance hit in 1982 called "Everybody". But not everybody remembers that song. They remember her late 1983 breakthrough hit "Holiday", which despite reaching only No. 16 paved the way for massive success later in the 1980s – her first top 10 was "Borderline" in mid-1984, and her No. 1 hit came in December 1984 with "Like a Virgin" – plus a career that's included acting, being a best-selling author (although several of her books have been banned), entrepreneur and philanthropist.
• Career Resurrection: Three times. After her Creator Breakdown album Erotica, Bedtime Stories proved to be a comeback for her but not a big one as Ray of Light proved to be such, then after American Life divided critics and fans in addition to being her least successful album at the time, she bounced back again with the well received Confessions on a Dance Floor. Madame X is slowly becoming this, after her previous three albums (Hard Candy, MDNA and Rebel Heart) received mixed to positive reviews.
• Channel Hop: Started out on Sire Records, becoming by far the biggest act on the label in the process. Ten years after signing with Sire, she started her own label and entertainment company Maverick in a joint venture with Time Warner, Sire's parent company at the time, with Erotica (and for that matter, Sex) being its first release. Bedtime Stories would be her last album under Sire, and she jumped ship to Warner Records proper and stayed there from Ray of Light to Hard Candy. After a falling out with Warner, she signed a 360 deal with Interscope Records and concert promoter Live Nation in 2010. In 2020, however, she not only returned to Warner, but took her Interscope catalog with her to bring her music under one roof. Warner will begin rereleasing her Interscope albums in 2025.
• Content Leak: Subverted. She anticipated people would try to leak "American Life" before it was released and she flooded the internet with fake mp3 files that claimed to be leak versions of the album but were actually just recordings of her saying "What the fuck do you think you're doing?"
• Creator Backlash:
  • Madonna has said that if she knew she'd be called the "Material Girl" for almost thirty years, she would have never recorded the song. This is because the song is meant to be a satire of materialism, and yet people took it at face value.
  • She also has some disdain for her first album, feeling the songs were immature (though still good) and that she had less creative input than she would've liked.
  • Subverted with her cover version of "American Pie". While she doesn't regret covering the song, she has said that she regretted including the song in international versions of her album Music and as a result did not include it in her greatest hits album GHV2.
  • In the late '70s she starred in a zero budget, trashy film called A Certain Sacrifice. It wasn't released at the time, but after she hit it big the director naturally tried to cash in, which she strongly objected to.
  • In a 2015 interview with Andy Cohen, she revealed that she "sort of gags" when watching Truth or Dare because of some of her behavior.
  • She was very disappointed by how Dangerous Game turned out and spent the entire marketing campaign warning people not to see it. Keep in mind this was the same year as Body of Evidence. She then revealed that it was out of her dissatisfaction with director Abel Ferrara's final cut, which excised many scenes and focus she wanted it to have.
• Creator Breakdown: In 1991-1993, Madonna went into overdrive pushing the boundaries over sexual content in her work, culminating in the release of the book Sex, the album Erotica and sexually explicit videos for the title track and "Justify My Love", and the movie Body of Evidence, in which Madonna played a nymphomaniac who literally fucked her weak-hearted husband to death. This led to a critical backlash of epic proportions. Madonna has since said that those three years were largely the culmination of her anger at her critics over her sexually charged persona and that she went overboard largely as a "fuck you, I'll be even MORE sexually explicit and raunchy and make money doing it and have you all talking about me even while you bash me".
• Creator's Favorite Episode: In a 2013 Reddit AMA, she considered the "Justify My Love" music video as her favourite music video.
• Distanced from Current Events: The original music video for "American Life" was pulled at her request for this reason, following the US invasion of Iraq. It fell under Keep Circulating the Tapes until 2005, when a director's cut was leaked online and since then both versions of the original video has been made available to watch online. Then in 2023, coinciding with the 20th anniversary of American Life, her official YouTube channel uploaded a remastered version of the original video.
• Dye Hard: She's a natural brunette, but she has dyed her hair a variety of colors, most commonly blonde. She reverted to being a brunette during the post-Who's That Girl/Like a Prayer, post-Erotica/pre-Bedtime Stories, late Ray of Light and American Life eras in addition to dying her hair black during the Ray of Light era and reddish blonde during the Confessions on a Dance Floor era.
• Executive Meddling: NBC forced Madonna to re-edit the footage of her on the cross during the concert special for the Confessions Tour.
  • This is the main reason for "The Immaculate Collection" including either edited versions or remixes of most of its tracks. Thankfully, the version of "Vogue" was better received than the version featured on I'm Breathless, and the version of "Express Yourself" was well-received enough to end up on the Celebration compilation. Celebration would end up using mostly original versions of the tracks.
• Fandom Life Cycle: Her first album saw some success, but Like a Virgin was a breakthrough, and her fandom went on to consistently grow in spite of - or perhaps because of - her controversies. Even if her output in the 2010s is not as well known in the mainstream, Madonna retains a massive following.
• Long-Runners: She's been around for over three decades now.
• Rarely Performed Song: For unknown reasons, Madonna has not performed her 1992 song "Bad Girl" in decades, with her only performance being her 1993 appearance as host and musical guest on Saturday Night Live. She has also never sung her megahit "This Used to be My Playground" from the A League of Their Own soundtrack live, either.
• Reality Subtext: "Me Against Madonna", Mad TV music video parody of the Britney Spears song "Me Against the Music", which portrayed Madonna (post American Life) hunting down Britney Spears so that she can bite her neck and drain her "youth and energy".
• Throw It In!: The distinct bassline for "Like A Virgin" was the result of the arpeggiator on the Linn drum machine mechanically interpreting a Mowtown-style bassline (specifically the one from "Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch") playing on the Jupiter 8 synthesizer while recording the demo, resulting in the rhythm coming out in steady 8th notes.
• What Could Have Been:
  • "Like A Virgin" was originally written as a ballad, but Billy Steinberg & Tom Kelly couldn't make it work that way. As a goof one afternoon, they played it slightly faster.
  • The Rebel Heart leaks were massive. At least 15 songs were leaked that Madonna has never released officially, and there's a mountain of demos and remixes for every track (including over 100 for "Living For Love"). Acoustic songs became dance tracks and vice-versa, and collaborations between Natalia Kills and Pharrell Williams were canned.
  • The Madonna: Truth or Dare documentary was supposed to be directed by David Fincher, who passed on to direct Alien³.
  • Madonna and director Mark Romanek originally wanted either Federico Fellini or Jean-Luc Godard to play the film director in the "Rain" video. Neither was available, and musician Ryuichi Sakamoto was cast in the part instead.
• Working Title:
  • Ein Sof for American Life.
  • Black Madonna and Liquorice for Hard Candy.
  • "You Thrill Me" for "Erotica".
• Write What You Know: Billy Steinberg, who wrote the lyrics to "Like A Virgin," based it on a very specific personal experience he'd had where he'd gone from one very difficult relationship into a much happier one, which made him feel "shiny and new."

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