Today in Madonna History: February 27, 1991

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On February 27 1991, Madonna’s first greatest hits video collection, The Immaculate Collection video was certified double platinum (for sales of 200,000 units).

Stephen Thomas Erlewine (AllMusic) had this to say about the video collection:

If any artist exploited MTV and music video to its full extent, it was Madonna. Duran Duran may have been the first video stars, but Madonna was savvy enough to redefine her image with each video, not just each album. All of her major videos between 1983 and 1990 (with the exception of her first, Burning Up, and Justify My Love, which was one of the new tracks on the greatest-hits The Immaculate Collection) are included on the video edition of Immaculate. Images from the videos — the gondolas of Like a Virgin, the Marilyn Monroe homage of Material Girl, the faux-Blade Runner Express Yourself, the taboo-shattering Like a Prayer, the sleek, stylish Vogue — have not only become part of pop music history, but of pop culture, and that becomes apparent after watching this collection. It’s truly astounding to watch the videos back to back, as it confirms that Madonna always knew where she was going, visually and musically. The singles were benchmarks of pop music in the ’80s, and if anything, the videos are even more important. This is what mainstream pop was all about in the ’80s.

Today in Madonna History: February 5, 1985

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On February 5 1985, Madonna’s Like A Virgin was certified 3x platinum (for sales of 3 million units) in the USA.

Today in Madonna History: February 3, 1987

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On February 3 1987, Madonna’s True Blue album was certified 4x platinum, for sales of 4 million units in the USA.

Today in Madonna History: January 23, 1990

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On January 23 1990, Madonna’s Like A Prayer album was certified triple platinum for sales of 3 million units in the USA.

Producer Patrick Leonard talked to Billboard magazine about working with Madonna on Like A Prayer:

“She’d start writing lyrics and oftentimes there was an implied melody. She would start with that and deviate from it. Or if there was nothing but a chord change, she’d make up a melody. But, a lot of the time in my writing there’s a melody implied or I even have something in mind. But she certainly doesn’t need that.  She would write the lyrics in an hour, the same amount of time it took me to write the music, and then she’d sing it. We’d do some harmonies, she’d sing some harmony parts, and usually by three or four in the afternoon, she was gone.”

Today in Madonna History: January 6, 1993

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On January 6 1993, Madonna’s Erotica album was certified double-platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) for sales of 2 million units in the USA.

What is your favourite track from Erotica?

Today in Madonna History: September 20, 1994

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On September 20 1994, Madonna’s The Immaculate Collection music video collection was certified triple platinum (for shipment of 300,000 units) in the USA.

Today in Madonna History: September 19, 1990

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On September 19 1990, Madonna’s Hanky Panky was certified gold (for shipment of 500,000 units) in the USA.

During an interview with Rolling Stone, Madonna talked about getting a good “spanky”:

The spanking thing started because I believed that my character in Dick Tracy liked to get smacked around and that’s why she hung around with people like Al Pacino’s character. Warren Beatty asked me to write some songs, one of them, the Hanky Panky song, was about that. I say in the song ‘Nothing like a good spanky’, and in the middle I say, ‘Ooh, my bottom hurts just thinking about it’. When it came out everybody started asking, ‘Do you like to get spanked?’ and I said: ‘Yeah. Yeah, I do’.