Bitch, She's Madonna. Put Some Respect On Her Name

By Michele Yeo

Happy Birthday, Madonna! The Queen of Pop turns 67-years-old today (August 16) and while it’s not exactly a milestone birthday, it is an opportunity to remind y’all to put some respect on her name because bitch, she’s Madonna! For certain age groups, to this day, her Madgesty remains in a class of her own: an undisputed icon, a trailblazing pioneer without whom we wouldn’t have many of the top female pop stars of today. But it sometimes feels like her impact isn’t quite filtering down to the younger population, that her true influence and contributions to culture are getting somehow lost in translation as the years pass. So, on this, the day of Madonna Louise Ciccone’s birth, allow us to make the case for why her legacy should be preserved, respected and revered because fam, we are losing recipes out in these streets. It’s time to open the schools! Sit up straight, y’all because class is in session. And yes, there will be a test at the end.

To really appreciate everything Madonna has achieved you have to appreciate her humble beginnings. By now, her lore is that of legend: growing up in a large midwestern Catholic family, losing her beloved mother to cancer when she was just six-years-old, and eventually moving from Michigan to New York at 17-years-old with a mere 34 dollars in her pocket. Far from an industry plant or a nepobaby, Madonna clawed her way up with true tenaciousness, steely determination, and a blind ambition not found in many. In the documentary Becoming Madonna, now streaming on Prime Video Canada, which chronicles her rise to fame from 1978-1992, Madonna’s early collaborators confirm as much. Former music exec Camille Barbone says, “her ambition was there and it’s what drove her to go through a lot of suffering to get where she was going. She did not have an easy life.” Musician and former collaborator Stephen Bray agrees saying, “Madonna has the grit, she just has that kind of willpower,” while another early collaborator says simply, “she was ruthless. In a good way. I mean, look what it got her.” Madonna herself saw her future and she wasn’t going to accept anything less than success saying in an archive interview, “I was going to be somebody and I was going to make something out of my life and I wasn’t going to spend the rest of my life in the boring Midwestern suburbs.”

By the early 80s Madonna had hustled her way into a recording deal and her debut self-titled album was released in 1983 spawning singles like “Everybody,” “Holiday,” “Lucky Star,” “Burning Up,” and “Borderline.” Madonna’s rise coincided with that of MTV and it’s disingenuous to deny that it didn’t play a part in what would become her massive success. No one understood the power of the music video, the importance of image creation, media manipulation, and marketing quite like Madonna. Her extreme acumen aside, Madonna also had that certain something. Mary Lambert, who directed many Madonna videos over the years including early ones like “Borderline,” “Like a Virgin,” “Material Girl” and her landmark “Like a Prayer” video confirms as much in Becoming Madonna, saying, “She just has this ability to connect with the camera that is supernatural. She’s like a magnet and the camera just connects with her face.” Indeed. Madonna truly had a face card that never declined. Not once.

After the release of her second album, Like a Virgin in 1984 it was becoming clear that Madonna, who once famously declared her desire “to rule the world” on an appearance on American Bandstand, that she was on her way to doing just that. In an archive interview in Becoming Madonna the singer predicts, “every little girl between the age of 10 and 18 is gonna wanna look like me.” Sounds egotistical but as someone who lived through this era and who tried, and failed to copy her trademark look, she was not wrong. It’s difficult to describe to someone who wasn’t of a certain age during this time period just what a huge star Madonna was and what a massive and indelible impact she had on young girls and on pop culture in general. You truly had to be there.

But where Madonna really shot into the stratosphere, where her legacy and impact on music and the culture would be solidified – whether people appreciate it in present day or not – would be in 1990 with the launch of The Blond Ambition Tour. A multimedia visual extravaganza featuring story arcs, extensive choreography, iconic Jean Paul Gaultier costumes – including the signature cone bra -and an overall theatricality not seen before, the show set a new bar for what a pop concert could achieve. Without Madonna there would be no Lady Gaga Chromatica Ball, no Beyonce Renaissance tour and certainly no Taylor Swift Eras tour. In an archive interview in the Becoming Madonna documentary, Madonna says, “I’m not really interested in a rock concert, I’m interested in presenting more theatre so that there’s a catharsis, an emotional arc, there’s a journey that you go through.”

The Blond Ambition tour was not only hugely influential, it was massively successful, and, at times, controversial. The Catholic Church famously protested the tour because of the on stage simulation of masturbation – laughable given what was going behind their own closed doors at the time. It also spurred the behind-the-scenes documentary, Truth or Dare. Once again, Madonna remains a trailblazer in this arena. With all due respect to artists like Lady Gaga, Katy Perry and Taylor Swift who have all released their own documentaries lifting the curtains on respective lives, careers, and tours, there is simply no comparingt hem to Truth or Dare, it remains the gold standard of the genre. Whereas today’s pop stars are hyper aware of their image, of their own PR, and present a glossy, publicist-approved version of themselves in fear of being “cancelled” Madonna showed everything warts and all: flagrantly making fun of Kevin Costner for calling her concert “neat”, shamelessly pining for a then-married Antonio Banderas, and revealing herself to be a full on brat at times – years before Brat Summer would become a thing.

Over the years Madonna has caused, courted, and coveted controversy like few others – mostly in the areas of sexual and religious expression. Pepsi, who had paid Madonna five million dollars (approximately 12 million dollars in 2025 money) famously pulled her commercial and their support of her Blond Ambition tour after the release of her video for “Like a Prayer” featuring burning crosses, stigmata imagery, and Madonna kissing a Black Jesus-type figure. Rather than back down or acquiesce, she stood on business and forged ahead without changing a thing. In Becoming Madonna, the video’s director, Mary Lambert recalls Madonna’s attitude during the videos’ creative process as being unrepentant: “It’s my money, shut the fuck up…I’ll never forget she said, ‘we girls have work to do so all you guys, get out of the room.’” Pepsi would later release the banned commercial in 2023 as part of their 125th anniversary.

Madonna also made it abundantly and unapologetically clear that sex was something women enjoy and covet just as much as men, and that women shouldn’t settle for anything other than the very best in the bedroom, boardroom or anywhere else. She promoted self pleasure, self expression, and decentring men long before it was fashionable. Just check the lyrics of her 1989 hit “Express Yourself”: “Second best is never enough, you’ll do much better baby on your own.” If he’s not prioritizing you or giving you what you need or deserve, dump him, girl! Before Sabrina Carpenter became the unofficial spokesperson for short, horny blonde girls everywhere, there was Madonna. And Madonna caught A LOT of shit for it. While her antics may not seem wild or groundbreaking through the lens of 2025, at the time she was being called things like, “queen of slut rock” and “a porn queen in heat.” And this was before the release of her scandalous Sex book in 1992. A book that went on to sell 1.5 million copies and one that, to this day, remains one of the in demand out of print books.

It may be easy to write off Madonna as someone who has simply subsisted on attention and controversy and who has manipulated the media for her own personal gain, but you cannot deny she’s also used her powers and cultural caché for good. In the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, while HIV and AIDS were ravaging the gay community, Madonna used her star status to draw attention to the rising epidemic, to bust myths, and clear up misunderstandings about how it was transmitted and to promote treating those living with the illness as human beings. While this doesn’t seem groundbreaking now, it’s important to contextualize that this was while HIV and AIDS patients were being treated like lepers and before president Ronald Reagan deigned to address the disease at all publicly. Madonna appeared in HIV public service announcements and, as part of her Who’s That Girl tour in 1987, staged a benefit concert at Madison Square Garden with profits going to amfAR, The Foundation for Aids Research. All 14 thousand fans in attendance were distributed comic books containing facts about HIV and AIDS with frank information about how it was, and was not, transmitted and promoting condom use. And she did this at her own personal detriment. In the Becoming Madonna documentary we learn how the AIDS-related death of her best friend and former roommate Martin Burgoyne fuelled tabloid headlines that she too was infected with the virus (implying they had sexual relations) and insinuated that she had passed on the virus to her then-husband Sean Penn.

When it comes to professional accomplishments, few people can match Madonna. The numbers, much like Shakira’s hips, don’t lie: she’s released 83 music videos, 11 concert tour videos, 14 studio albums, and sold more than 300 million units worldwide making her, according to Guinness World Records, the best-selling female recording artist of all time. Love her, hate her, or simply just not know that much about her (which hopefully this piece has remedied) there is no denying Madonna is a true Queen. We’re not ones to support a monarchy but when it comes to Madonna, we’ll make an exception. While her reign may be in the rear view mirror, there’s no denying her impact on the present and on the future. Madonna, the legend that you are, we salute you. It may not be the second Sunday in May but today is Mother’s Day.