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When Madonna Louise Ciccone arrived in New York from Michigan aged 19 in 1978, she had a small suitcase, a winter coat and $35 in her pocket. In an interview with the broadcaster Howard Stern years later, she would admit that she was frightened: “The massive scale of New York took my breath away … I was poised for survival … But I was also scared shitless and freaked out by the smell of piss and vomit.”

In the ensuing years, Madonna would experience grinding poverty, living in a succession of cockroach-infested apartments where addicts populated the hallways, and often going without food. Yet Whitley Setrakian, Madonna’s roommate at the University of Michigan, where both had studied dance, says: “I’ve never seen her so happy and so sure.” She recalls Madonna telling her: “Every day I’m here in this city I can’t stop thinking about all the days I haven’t been here. I feel like I’m running a race and everyone’s had a head start.”

Full review by The Guardian HERE

In this excerpt from her new book, Madonna: A Rebel Life, author Mary Gabriel looks back on the icon’s appearance at the first MTV Video Music Awards, which one observer called “the award-show equivalent of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address — the ideal against which all successors would be measured.”

ONE WRITER COMPARED Madonna’s performance at the MTV Video Music Awards in September of 1984 to iconic music moments like Elvis Presley causing jaws to drop in living rooms across America with his “pelvic thrusts” on The Milton Berle Show in 1956, and the Beatles’ few minutes on The Ed Sullivan Show in February of 1964, which created the template for the ensuing 20 years of pop-rock music. Another observer called it “the award-show equivalent of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address — the ideal against which all successors would be measured.” It was, in other words, unforgettable.

Full article at RollingStone