Originally intended to convey a certain freshness or wonder at the world, Madonna’s ‘Like A Virgin’ has endured over the decades thanks to its multiple levels of meaning and widely-varied incarnations. My favorite rendition remains her entrancing and then-scandalous performance of the song during her Blonde Ambition Tour, in which she introduced the world to cone-bras on male dancers, and simulated self-pleasure on a velvet-topped scarlet bed. With Middle Eastern musical accents and a slow-burn take on her classic #1 hit, the ‘Like A Virgin‘ of 1990 was a wild reimagining that went far beyond a ‘freshness’ and into decidedly sultry territory – Madonna finally giving in and culminating in the sexual gratification that everyone (wrongfully) assumed the song was about from the beginning.
For me, this version embodies the glamorous and glorious spring of 1991, when ‘Truth or Dare’ was about to take the world by summer storm, kicked off by Madonna’s scene-stealing underwear show at the top of the stairs at the Cannes Film Festival. It was a legendary Madonna moment, and sowed the seeds of an era of sexy self-reflection that would later find full flowering in her ‘Erotica’/’Sex/ project. Back then, it seemed slightly salacious, but today it feels like a quaint little ripple compared to the tsunamis to come. And so ‘Like A Virgin’ was about a certain innocence after all, a fresh look at a fresh season starting all over again.
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