10 Perfect Pop Albums Of The 1980s
5. Like a Virgin - Madonna
To think...that the '80s actually started well before Madonna took over the world. In the stone age of MTV, you still had bands that were looking at videos as just a commercial for your song and never really put much thought into their photogenic appearance. Once we got a taste of Like a Virgin, we were officially living in the age of the Material Girl.
Though Madonna has made an effort to shun this side of her personality in recent years, her second album is the perfect bombastic version of her that made us all fall in love with her music. Bringing in Nile Rogers to work on some of her tracks, these songs always have a slick groove to them underneath the surface, accompanied by videos that saw these 'commercials' as high art rather than just some cheap thing. This wasn't Madonna just making a good record though...this was her laying the groundwork for the millions of pop divas that came after her.
In the wake of this one album, there's a good chance that we wouldn't get people like Lady Gaga or even Dua Lipa today, putting a greater focus on image and making every single they put out a spectacle when they came on the radio. You can call it a bit shallow if you wanted to, but it's not that simple. For Madonna, visuals do have value for music, and building the right image is what catapulted her to one of the greatest pop stars of all time.