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It’s difficult to underestimate the impact of Madonna, 65, on American culture, particularly for the Gen Xers who first spied her cooler-than-cool look in her MTV videos for Borderline and Lucky Star. The Queen of Pop kept pumping out those chart-topping hits, while her evolving image influenced fashion and pushed boundaries for decades.
Enter Madonna: A Rebel Life, by Mary Gabriel (Oct. 10), author of, among others, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution. Her new book chronicles Madonna Louise Ciccone’s journey from suburban Michigan to no-last-name-necessary megastardom in exacting detail. Written without Madonna’s participation, it may be TMI for her more casual fans, but serious Material Girl devotees will surely eat up this weighty homage.
While Madonna’s career highs (and lows) have been obsessively dissected for decades, Gabriel highlights some lesser-known aspects of her life and work. Among them:
1. She’s a classically trained dancer.
Known for her grueling tour performances, it’s no surprise that Madonna is a dancer by training. She started studying ballet in her teens and later earned a dance scholarship from the University of Michigan, but dropped out to move to New York and train under such top choreographers as Martha Graham and Pearl Lang. While she’d soon ditch her classical repertoire for sexier moves at New York hot spots like Danceteria and Studio 54, Madonna’s early dance training provided her with the discipline she would apply to building her music career in the years to come.
2. She was one of the “children of Warhol.”
Before she was the Queen of Pop, Madonna cavorted with king of pop art Andy Warhol and the up-and-comers of the NYC art world, including artists Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, whom she briefly dated (she even wrote her 1983 debut album in his apartment).
The trio of artists were all in the audience when Madonna’s first tour reached Radio City Music Hall, and Warhol and Haring attended her 1985 Malibu nuptials to actor Sean Penn. When Haring died of AIDS-related complications in 1990, Madonna dedicated the last U.S. show of her “Blond Ambition” tour to his memory, raising more than $300,000 for AIDS research.
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