What was Madonna’s best-selling album?
After rousing up the Catholic church and single-handedly redefining the concept of women’s sexual agency all over the world, what was next on the hitlist for Madonna? Oh, yeah, just creating one of the best-selling albums of all time. Putting her life’s work in a line like this makes the whole thing sound frankly preposterous, but in many ways, it’s the only fitting way of conveying the absolute iconic imprint she has left on the globe.
After all, the moniker of the ‘Queen of Pop’ doesn’t come without putting some hard graft in first. But when it comes to stars who singularly defined music in a particular moment or era, there’s none more wide-ranging or visionary than Madonna herself. She burst onto the scene in 1982 with ‘Everybody’ and never looked back, becoming an almost-overnight household name and, in the space of just a few short years, the sonic pinnacle sitting on the throne at the top of the world.
Indeed, as the height of her first glittering decade in the business came to a close, it was only right that Madonna turned inwards in a reflective mood. At that point, 1982 had only been eight summers ago, but by the standards of Earth-shattering domination she had whipped up, it was enough, by anyone else’s measure, to last a lifetime. With this in mind, the ‘Queen of Pop’ called to her regal subjects and granted them the gift they had always wanted—a compilation album.
Subsequently, with a hand-picked selection of 15 of her greatest hits so far, Madonna released The Immaculate Collection into the world in 1990, and it soon became her best-selling album. Shifting over 30million copies from the shelves, the record not only became the definition of Madonna, but one of the most successful compilation albums from a solo artist, as well as one of the best-selling albums of all time. If anyone ever argues that in the 1980s, pop was the best genre and era for it to ever exist, The Immaculate Collection might just prove them right.
How did Madonna change music with The Immaculate Collection?
Frankly, the track list for The Immaculate Collection is an embarrassment of riches when it comes to the cream of the crop of ‘80s pop, from ‘Holiday’ to ‘Into the Groove’ to ‘Vogue’. And although this was a seismic part of the puzzle in making the album the cultural juggernaut that it was, there was more to it than just reminiscence: it was a look to the future as much as it was a celebration of the past.
Helming two new songs, ‘Justify My Love’ and ‘Rescue Me’, making history was all in a day’s work as far as the legacy of this album was concerned, as with the help of writer Lenny Kravitz, they too became surefire hits. The former, in particular, also became the best-selling video single of all time, with a typically risque visual output which merrily got banned from MTV.
All in all, if you were to chalk up a selection of albums that truly changed the course of music history, Madonna’s greatest hits would certainly rocket straight up there. This was much more than a swan song or dining out on days gone by, however. If there’s anything The Immaculate Collection managed to prove, it was that the shock, horror, controversy, and ultimate pop stardom would only continue to bubble from the champagne glass of Madonna’s world.
