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
