THE YEAR: 1985. The city: Portland. A sassy, ambitious young pop singer named Madonna opens her first national concert tour in the Pacific Northwest. The fourth and fifth dates of her ballyhooed Virgin Tour take place at Portland’s newly refurbished Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall. Ticket sales are strong, and the young woman goes on to become one of the biggest and most influential pop stars in the world, dominating charts and headlines for decades to come.

As for Portland, the city quietly sits, waiting patiently for a return engagement. It watches as Madonna’s 1986 album True Blue shoots her fame into the stratosphere, and again as 1989’s Like a Prayer solidifies her artistic credibility. Years tick by. Her 1990 greatest hits album The Immaculate Collection sells millions of copies, and her stop-and-start film career hits some occasional okay moments. Yet no further Portland concert appears on the books. The rest of the globe is offered repeated tastes of Madonna’s talents, with concerts and in-person performances that define their eras. Portland gets no such attention frwom her.

Then, a glimmer of hope! During a period in the early ’90s, when her career is characterized by sexually confrontational work, Madonna quietly slips into Portland to shoot a new movie. The city—its thirst for Madonna temporarily slaked—lets the icon prepare her new project, an erotic thriller called Body of Evidence.

The movie comes out. It is not good. Not good at all. Portland becomes the site of one of Madonna’s bigger failures.

Two more decades come and go, and nary a Stumptown show is to be found on any of Madonna’s tour itineraries. Then, in 2015, all that changes. The imperial popstress schedules a performance at Portland’s basketball arena as part of her Rebel Heart world tour on Saturday, October 17. The city breathes a sigh of relief, and then carefully, tentatively allows a whisper of excitement into its collective heart.

Madonna… is coming.

To celebrate Madonna’s first show in Portland in more than 30 years, we’ve planned this special issue devoted to all things Madge. We look at the best and worst moments of her career—her albums, her videos, her movies, her clothes, and more. It’s a scrapbook of impressions and interpretations that reveals a complex composite portrait of a woman who was always so much more than a simple pop singer. Because Madonna remains, for all of us, surprisingly personal—we grew up with not only her music and her weird British accent, but also her epoch-defining fashion sense and her quick-change ability to redefine herself over and over. Most importantly, the feminism inherent in her art remains nothing short of groundbreaking (even if that pioneering work sometimes gets taken for granted today), and her embrace of gay culture and her willingness to bring it into the mainstream offered great strides in accelerating the conversation.

It doesn’t matter whether you love Madonna’s music or not (although surely there is at least one song you can get behind): In the end, she’s changed the world for the better, and has been doing so for more than three decades. We all have Madonna in common. There’s no one else like her.

Welcome back, Madonna!

The Madonna Issue

It’s Our Madonna Issue!

Madonna Begins

Madonna’s Sex Positive Feminism

How Madonna Brought Club Music to the Pop Charts

The Best Videos of Madonna and Jean-Baptiste Mondino

Madonna’s Misunderstood Erotica

Just Like Madge

Our Halloween Costume Guide!

Coming to Terms with Sex

The Madonna-Off

Body of Evidence: Boobs, Bondage, and the Pittock Mansion

Madonna’s Monumental First Album

Madonna’s Five Sexiest Songs That Aren’t “Like a Virgin”

The Woeful Cinematic Career of Madonna

Ned Lannamann is a writer and editor in Portland, Oregon. He writes about film, music, TV, books, travel, tech, food, drink, outdoors, and other things.

18 replies on “It’s Our Madonna Issue!”

  4. Thanks for some Madonna love. I can’t think of anybody so hated and admired simultaneously; known for being good but over-ambitious…except for Hillary Clinton. I will proudly defend Madonna all my life (except for a few genuine embarrassments).

  5. Madonna does play guitar. She plays her rock influenced 80’s song Burning Up. I don’t think Nancy Wilson has an exclusive copyright on playing electric guitar. Madonna also plays acoustic guitar and ukulele on this tour.

  6. When Madonna first wore lingerie on the outside of tights, she was a trend setter. Ever since then, she’s been a trend follower. That said, her work with William Orbit is in my heavy rotation, yet today. I still doubt that she has anymore distinctive style on the guitar than John Oates if she really even plays more than air guitar.

    She’s not much of an actor, either, but is an excellent dancer, however.

    Nothing Really Matters
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAVx9RKaLPU&list=PLw7k9G6FR38GCV4BQMZPGwl28xwVE7DxQ&index=16

  7. Critics panned this FLICK, but I liked it.
    Who’s That Girl (1987)
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNuuxTTG-iM

    Like A Prayer
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79fzeNUqQbQ

    Open Your Heart
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snsTmi9N9Gs

    Rain
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15kWlTrpt5k

    Justify My Love
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Np_Y740aReI

    Madonna can kick and she can play air guitar, but she’s better than that at what she does well. She doesn’t need to stoop to stealing Nancy’s trademark as if nobody would notice.

  11. You think I’m not a fan of Madonna? I fucking love Madonna. That’s why I care enough to chasten her as I do. Dressing cheap isn’t cheap. Stealing someone else’s act is what’s truly cheap. Madonna doesn’t need to be cheap. That’s just her insecurity showing through.

  13. Pop is suffering from the same malady as the art world, which is stuck on the tired old rubric that shock automatically confers value. But those once powerful avant-garde gestures have lost their relevance in our diffuse and technology-saturated era, when there is no longer an ossified high-culture establishment to rebel against. On the contrary, the fine arts are alarmingly distant or marginal to most young people today.

    Pop is an artistic tradition that deserves as much respect as any other. Its lineage stretches back to 17th century Appalachian folk songs and African-American blues, all of which can still be heard vibrating in the lyrics and chord structure of contemporary music. But our most visible young performers, consumed with packaging and attitude, seem to have little sense of that thrilling continuity and therefore no confidence in how it can define and sustain their artistic identities over the course of a career. –Camille (the cunt) Paglia

    http://ideas.time.com/2013/08/27/pops-drop-from-madonna-to-miley/

    Jenny McCarthy on Playboy’s No Nudity Plans:
    ”It Breaks My Heart…I Will Be Wearing My Panties at Half-Mast”

    http://www.eonline.com/news/706509/jenny-mccarthy-on-playboy-s-no-nudity-plans-it-breaks-my-heart-i-will-be-wearing-my-panties-at-half-mast

    Statesboro Blues
    Taj Mahal & Gregg Allman
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=duWv1eMNdrk

  14. Hmmm, while I can never really view her as a feminist icon, she had some really great singles in her day, and fun to dance to.
    I tend to prefer the early stuff, but Ray of Light was cool too.
    I remain mystified why she became a feminist icon though, yeah, she took control over her sexuality, blah blah blah….
    Debbie Harry feels she was ripped off in her early looks by Madonna, as an aside, but for powerful women artists I was always thinking PJ Harvey, Kate Bush, Bjork, etc etc, were better role models for young women.

  16. Well, Paglia has some interesting thoughts too, but she is a bit bat-shit too, for my own tastes.
    For someone seemingly hating Madonna, you sure seem to have a vested interest in her, Genne.

  18. I’m a big fan of Madonna from the begging, and am disappointed when she so often falls short of her potential. There are only two things I can’t stand in this World. People who are intolerant of other people’s cultures …and the Dutch!

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