On August 20 1995, Human Nature was released in Europe as the final single from the Bedtime Stories album.
In North America, Human Nature had been rush-released two months earlier in an attempt to re-engage radio programmers after a particularly poor reception to the Bedtime Story single – which had been virtually ignored by most stations who instead kept their focus on Madonna’s previous radio smash hit, Take A Bow.
On August 19 2009, Madonna’s Celebration single was released as a digital remix EP on iTunes in North America.
The EP featured remixes by Benny Benassi, Paul Oakenfold and Johnny Vicious.
Although Madonna had produced the album version of Celebration with one of the world’s best known DJ’s, Paul Oakenfold, it was Benny Benassi’s remix that, deservedly, captured the most attention.
Madonna chose to feature Benassi’s remix in the music video for the single, and it was also used as the closing performance of her MDNA Tour. She would also collaborate on several songs with Benassi for her album, MDNA.
On August 18 1987, Madonna performed the first of three sold-out Who’s That Girl Tour concerts at Wembley Stadium in London.
In total, Madonna performed for 216,000 fans during the three nights at Wembley.
On August 17 1960, Sean Justin Penn was born.
On August 16 2021, Madonna re-signed with Warner Bros. Records, the label controlling the bulk of her catalogue of music. This follows a thirteen-year period that essentially saw Madonna releasing her new music independently with distribution through Interscope Records, via her 360 deal with Live Nation. She retained the rights to the masters of the three albums released since her departure from Warner, and the new deal sees licensing rights for these albums revert to Warner in 2025.
Also announced are plans for Warner Rhino to reissue Madonna’s albums as deluxe editions – something fans have long requested and is frankly long overdue considering her stature and influence on popular music over the past 39 years, not to mention the wealth of unavailable and unreleased material in the vault.
Congrats to Madonna and Guy Oseary for recognizing the value and support that Warner has consistently brought to Madonna’s recording career; having all of her recorded works on the same label is as much a score for fans as it is for both Madonna and Warner Bros.
On August 16 2015, singer/songwriter Joe Henry shared a touching birthday tribute to his sister-in-law, Madonna:
This is the young woman I met shortly after our family’s move to Michigan in 1975 – as I entered my sophomore year of high school and, she, her senior one. Together, we were in the Thespian Society; and in that winter’s first production, we were cast as mother and son – the wife and child of Ralph Waldo Emerson – in a play about Thoreau.
She was whip-smart and short on patience; and to tell the truth, she scared me more than a little, but along with her sister Paula, her presence upon my landscape nudged open a door through which I would pass and find my life utterly and forever changed…that unusual and sprawling family becoming, years later, my own.
No one is more surprised than I by the way our lives have expanded; by the way that our journeys have diverged and become entangled. Like anyone, I can sometimes forget to see the flesh and blood/heart and mind behind the parade float that is her public persona. But then I will find myself across the kitchen table from her, sharing a martini, and be additionally shocked to recognize anew the compact, terse-yet-compassionate human at the switches.
I have told this tale before, but it bears repeating: when Elvis Presley died on this date in 1977, this upstart professed in real-time that she felt his spirit had passed out of his body and through her own in exodus.
I laughed at her then for such outrageous self-possession, at the arrogance that I assumed must allow her to declare such publicly.
Today, when there is laughter, it is the laugh of recognition I hear – and it begins somewhere high above me, where things that once seemed implausible play with wild abandon and in broad daylight.
Happy Birthday, Madonna Louise Veronica Ciccone.
On August 8 1992, Madonna’s This Used to Be My Playground (and the theme song for A League of Their Own) hit number-one on the Billboard Hot 100 in the USA, becoming Madonna’s tenth chart-topping single, breaking her tie with Whitney Houston to become the female artist with the most number-one singles at that time.
The song was written and produced by Madonna and Shep Pettibone, and recorded prior to final sessions for Madonna’s 1992 studio album Erotica. Together with Rain and In This Life, This Used To Be My Playground is one of three Pettibone collaborations from the Erotica sessions that was not co-written with Tony Shimkin, according to the ASCAP database.
