The Producer She Didn’t Choose
When Sire Records greenlit Madonna’s debut album in 1982, everyone assumed Mark Kamins would produce it. Kamins, the Danceteria DJ who had championed her demo and carried it to Sire president Seymour Stein — who famously formalized her signing from a hospital bed while recovering from heart surgery — was the man who had started everything. But Sire’s A&R executive Michael Rosenblatt reasoned that Madonna needed something Kamins could not give her: an experienced hand at developing vocal performances. “Mark’s strength was grooves,” Rosenblatt explained. The job went instead to Reggie Lucas, a Warner Bros. producer fresh from acclaimed work with Stephanie Mills and Roberta Flack, who could bring an R&B grounding to Madonna’s dance material.
Lucas, for his part, was initially unimpressed. Madonna’s boho-punk style struck him as not “particularly avant-garde,” and neither artist quite knew what to do with the other. The collaboration stayed prickly to the end: Madonna, protective of the club sound she had fought for, was frequently dissatisfied with Lucas’s polished mixes, and DJ John “Jellybean” Benitez was brought in around the project to give several of the album’s tracks a tougher dance-floor edge. The tension, in hindsight, was productive. Lucas’s craftsmanship in the Philadelphia soul tradition and Madonna’s insistence on street-level energy met exactly in Borderline — a record smooth enough for radio and restless enough for the clubs. The album was also short of songs. So Lucas did what staff producers did: he studied her demos and live performances and wrote two songs specifically for her — Physical Attraction and Borderline. He developed Borderline with her while she was apartment-sitting for the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, an arrangement that says a great deal about the downtown New York art-bohemia the record was born in.
A Ballad Disguised as a Dance Record
Recorded in 1983 at Sigma Sound Studios in New York, Borderline is the debut album’s slow, glowing heart. Lucas drew on Stephanie Mills’s Never Knew Love Like This Before — a Grammy-winning hit he had co-written and co-produced — as a stylistic model, and used a drum machine for the first time in his career to get the track’s percolating pulse. Electric pianist Dean Gant plays the glittering introduction; bassist Anthony Jackson threads a melodic line through percolating synth-bass, vibraphone-like chords, and interlocking keyboard phrases. Author Rikky Rooksby has called it the most harmonically complex track on Madonna, its inversions steeped in 1970s disco, Philadelphia soul, and even mid-seventies Elton John.
Madonna sings higher here than anywhere else on the album, her voice treated to sound younger, and the lyric is more conflicted than its candy coating suggests: a narrator who knows her lover is emotionally withholding — “Just try to understand, I’ve given all I can, ’cause you got the best of me” — yet keeps pleading for commitment anyway. Slant Magazine noted the innuendo coiled inside the refrain’s central complaint: “You just keep on pushing my love over the borderline.” It ends with Madonna dissolving into throaty scat and improvised “la la la”s — the sound of an argument running out of words. Seymour Stein heard the finished take and was certain: “The passion that she put into that song, I thought, there’s no stopping this girl.”
First Top Ten — and the Start of the Streak
Released as a single on February 15, 1984 — in a radio edit trimmed by nearly three minutes from the album cut — Borderline entered the Billboard Hot 100 at number 76 in March and climbed to number 10 on June 16 — Madonna’s first top-ten hit in America. It stayed on the chart for thirty weeks, her longest-running hit until Take a Bow a decade later, and it began one of the great chart runs in pop history: seventeen consecutive top-ten singles, through to the end of the decade. It reached number four on the dance chart, was eventually certified gold by the RIAA, and Billboard placed it at number 35 on its year-end chart for 1984. Retrospectively the song kept accumulating honours: Rolling Stone named it the second-best song of 1984, Pitchfork included it among the greatest songs of the 1980s, and critics from AllMusic’s Stewart Mason — who called it a “pure treasure” — to Entertainment Weekly‘s Chuck Arnold, who wrote that Madonna “has never sounded more genuinely soulful,” have singled it out as the finest vocal performance of her early career. Time magazine judged that while she would later make more clever, showy, and sexy records, Borderline best captured “the essence of her pop appeal.”
The song’s chart story had a second act. Its original 1984 British release had peaked at a modest number 56, but the Britain of early 1986 was a different market entirely: the Like a Virgin album had made Madonna the defining pop figure of the moment, her film debut in Desperately Seeking Susan had turned her street style into a high-street uniform copied by a generation of so-called Madonna wannabes, and The Virgin Tour had converted the curious into the converted. Amid that mania, the re-released single surged to number two in the UK — held off the top only by Billy Ocean’s When the Going Gets Tough, the Tough Get Going — and to number one in Ireland, earning a BPI gold certification and a place among Britain’s fifty best-selling singles of 1986. Europe, in effect, re-heard the song with new ears, and this time recognized what Seymour Stein had heard in the studio three years earlier: not a promising club singer, but a star.
There is a final irony in the credits. Borderline — the song most identified with Madonna’s emergence as a singer rather than a dance act — is one she did not write. Lucas composed it for her, top to bottom, and yet within a year she had made it so completely hers that audiences assumed it was autobiography. The lesson was not lost on her. Stung by disputes over the album’s production and determined never to be handed her own identity again, she took progressively firmer control of her material, co-writing nearly everything that followed and, by Like a Prayer, co-producing as well. The debut album itself, paced by Borderline and Holiday, went on to sell more than ten million copies worldwide and has been canonized among the great debut albums in pop — the record of a club singer from Detroit by way of New York who walked into a Philadelphia-soul studio and walked out a star.
Two Men, One Graffiti Wall
The video was Mary Lambert’s first for Madonna — the beginning of a collaboration that would produce Like a Virgin, Material Girl, La Isla Bonita, and Like a Prayer. Lambert had been commissioned by Warner executive Jeff Ayeroff, who thought she could give the singer “a little more integrity and depth,” and she and Madonna built the concept together: no formula, invented as they went. Shot in Los Angeles, it casts Madonna between two worlds — her boyfriend from the street scene, and a smooth British photographer who discovers her and pulls her toward fashion and money. She tries the glamorous life, finds it hollow, and returns to the street, leaving the photographer covered in spray paint. Scholars have spent decades unpacking its interracial romance and its games with the male gaze; MTV simply played it relentlessly, and the heavy rotation made Madonna’s face — lace, crucifix earrings, stacked bracelets — recognizable across America. The video era’s opening ceremony, the first MTV Video Music Awards in 1984, duly nominated her for Best New Artist.
The Song That Kept Being Rediscovered
Madonna performed Borderline on her first tour, The Virgin Tour, in 1985, then largely let it rest until the Sticky & Sweet Tour of 2008, when she hauled it back as a pumped-up rock number, playing guitar. In between, it had been remixed by Shep Pettibone for The Immaculate Collection in 1990, the hits package that carried her first decade to a new generation, and the rankings kept arriving: Blender placed it at number 84 on its list of the 500 greatest songs since 1980, and Billboard included it in its 500 best pop songs of all time. Other singers kept finding it: Duffy, The Flaming Lips, and Kelly Clarkson are among those who have covered it, each drawn to the same quality the critics heard — a dance record with a bruise. Of all the songs on Madonna’s debut, Borderline is the one that pointed furthest forward. Everybody announced her ambition, Holiday her hedonism, but Borderline announced that underneath the club kid was a soul singer with a complicated heart — the combination that would sustain forty years of reinvention. It was, quite literally, where the streak began. Every Madonna era that followed — the prayer, the pose, the desert mystic — can be traced back to the moment a borrowed soul ballad proved that the club singer from New York could break your heart as convincingly as she could fill a dance floor.