The band that Madonna preferred to The Beatles: “I loved it”
While her throne has almost certainly been taken by the likes of Taylor Swift and Beyoncé during the 21st century, there was a time when Madonna seemed like the most unmovable woman in pop music.
Throughout the 1980s, her ascent was seen as a phenomenal achievement, the likes of which had never been seen before, and her frankly unstoppable rise to becoming perhaps the most well-known pop artist seemed to have come out of nowhere.
Of course, it hadn’t just materialised overnight, and her upbringing in a music-adoring household that encouraged creativity was certainly something that helped her to get a grasp of what it was going to take for her to reach these heights. From a young age, Madonna was surrounded by the arts, with her siblings all showing an interest in different things, while she initially pursued dancing and ballet as her main outlet before transitioning to music.
Born in the late 1950s and raised in the suburbs of Detroit, she would have been there to witness the explosion of another major movement in pop music’s history, with locally-based label Motown becoming a dominant force in the US charts during the formative years of her childhood. However, at the same time, the British Invasion of bands like The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and The Animals was taking hold of US radio, with large amounts of airtime being dedicated to this musical movement from across the Atlantic.
So, which of these actually captured Madonna’s interests first, ultimately sparking her earliest interests in the machinations of pop music and the artistry behind it? In an interview with Q Magazine in 1994, the singer revealed that while there was plenty of diversity in what she was hearing, Motown certainly took precedence over anything else in her pre-teens.
“That’s what was always on the radio, that’s what my friends were listening to,” she claimed, before adding that there were other things that had a significant influence on her. “I was always listening to classical music at my ballet lessons. Mozart and Chopin, Vivaldi, Bach, so I knew that. And there was what my father always listened to, which was Tony Bennett, Henry Mancini and Harry Belafonte.”
While many youngsters tend to reject the influence of their parents, especially during a generation where the new sounds that were emerging offered something far more thrilling than everything that had preceded it, Madonna still loved what her parents were listening to, in addition to her adoration for Motown. However, as far as The Beatles go, her interest in them was a little more passive.
“They were there, but I was more eager about The Supremes,” she added. “I was really into girl groups. But I had older brothers playing them, so I’d say they were a subliminal influence on me.”
Whichever way you want to look at it, it’s all pop music, and as somebody who managed to generate a chokehold over the entire pop sphere when she emerged in the 1980s, it shouldn’t come as a surprise to learn that her upbringing consisted of learning from the masters of the craft, like The Supremes. Diana Ross was perhaps the most celebrated female artist of her own generation, and what Madonna managed to do was improve upon this in her own way that brought things up to date.
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