On September 3 1983, as Madonna’s first album entered the Billboard Top 200 Albums chart at # 190 in the U.S., the album was profiled for the second week in a row by Billboard magazine – this time being featured in the New On The Charts section (pictured above).
On August 31 2016, The New York Times profiled photographer Peter Lindbergh in which he recalled, among other works, his 1994 shoot with Madonna for Harper’s Bazaar magazine. Several outtakes from this stunningly beautiful session were featured along with the article.
“I worked only once with Madonna. What really struck me was her very strong motivation. We were doing a tribute to Martha Graham, her admired dance teacher. I discovered a dancer with a very rare talent: Madonna was moving in a very soulful and personal way, very touching and very much herself. At the same time, there was a feeling of perfection to everything she was doing. I was very interested in capturing some of this extraordinary contradiction, which I found absolutely stunning. Those images are as modern today as they were in 1994.”
– Peter Lindbergh, 2016.
On August 27 1983, Madonna’s debut album was reviewed in Billboard magazine. In the same issue, the album made its chart debut at #201 on the Bubbling Under LP chart.
On August 26 2008, a double white vinyl 7-inch set for Madonna’s Hard Candy singles 4 Minutes and Give It 2 Me was released in the U.S. by Warner Bros. Records.
This unusual collectible was Madonna’s first U.S. 7-inch single to include a picture sleeve since Keep It Together in 1990, and her first U.S. 7-inch single to be released in general since 2003’s American Life single.
The set also featured the non-album track (outside of Japan) Ring My Bell and the Eddie Amador House Lovers Edit of Give It 2 Me as b-sides.
On August 25 1990, Hanky Panky peaked at #18 on the Canadian Top 100 Singles chart (RPM). At the time it was Madonna’s lowest charting Canadian single since Borderline‘s peak of #25 in September, 1984. A handful of later releases would subsequently peak lower on the same chart, however, including Bad Girl (#20 – 1993), Bedtime Story (#46 – 1995) and Human Nature (#64 – 1995).
On August 19 2009, Madonna’s Celebration was released as a digital EP on iTunes in North America. The EP featured remixes by Benny Benassi, Paul Oakenfold and Johnny Vicious.
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.
Today In Madonna History 