Before the unimaginable worldwide fame, the high-profile relationships, the activism, the meaning of her every move analysed by cultural studies undergraduates... Madonna was on the dancefloor, striking a pose and getting into the groove. As Mark Lindores explains, her enduring relationship with dance music in all its evolving guises is the key to explaining not only Madonna’s longevity but also her popularity. As the pop icon herself sings: ‘I know a place you can get away, it’s called a dancefloor…’

As 2024 limped to a dull, dreary finale it was the refuge of social media that presented us with the first glimpse of Madonna shortly after 3pm ringing in 2025 on the other side of the world. Comfortably ensconced in the DJ booth of Tokyo’s 1OAK nightclub surrounded by a wall of iPhones recording her every move, the OG pop icon was clearly having the time of her life, arms draped around her son Rocco, dancing and singing along to Peggy Gou’s ‘(It Goes Like) Nanana’. As the comments sections quickly filled with the usual casual misogyny, ageism and general disapproval that have greeted her every move for decades – “What is she wearing?”, “It’s time she acted her age”, it all rather begged the question: Where else would you expect to find Madonna on New Year’s Eve?

After all, this is the woman who, with ‘Everybody’, ‘Into the Groove’ ‘Vogue’ and ‘Music’ among many others, has displayed a comprehensive understanding and affinity for dance music, penning some of the most precise and perfect elegies of that unique feeling when music triggers the body to be a conduit for physical and emotional release. Following a year which saw her experience tremendous highs (she wrapped her Celebration World Tour performing to a record 1.6 million fans on Rio’s Copacabana Beach last May) and crushing lows (the death of her beloved brother Christopher), she was naturally to be found living her best life in one of the magical meccas she celebrates so enthusiastically in her music.

Madonna pinpointed the exact moment that she fell in love with dance music – in a New York club called Pete’s Place in the late-70s – in a 2005 interview with The Observer. Describing a profound feeling which many can relate to, she cited it as one of her main sources of inspiration when creating. “My initial thought was ‘WOW’!” she said. “I thought: ‘Oh my God, are there other places like this?’ I didn’t know you could just walk into a club and start dancing by yourself. I thought someone had to ask you! You could just dance for six hours and nobody will bother you and you don’t even have to drink. I felt an incredible sense of liberation and I felt happier. That sense of freedom and feeling independent. There was nothing fun or glamorous about my life at that time and I needed some excitement. In the nightclub I was free.”

Officially the biggest selling female artist in history, she is concurrently the most decorated artist on the Billboard Dance Charts with 50 number one singles (collated on her 2022 ‘Finally Enough Love’ remix collection) , a summation of a career in which she has transitioned from style-savvy street urchin to globe-straddling wanton bride, daring dominatrix to born-again spiritual scion, cyber cowgirl to politically charged renegade to glitter-strewn dancing queen, the list goes on. While she has manoeuvred each sonic and stylish shift with ease, the one constant through them all has been her devotion to the dancefloor.

“When it comes to dance music and club culture, Madonna’s influence is immeasurable,” says DJ and producer Tracy Young, who has worked with Madonna for over 25 years, reworking hits such as ‘Music’, ‘Hung Up’, ‘4 Minutes’ and ‘Don’t Tell Me’ and even DJed at her wedding to Guy Ritchie. “From the very start of her career, she seamlessly blended underground club sounds with mainstream pop, opening doors for dance music to reach broader audiences. Tracks like ‘Holiday’, ‘Physical Attraction’, ‘Vogue’ and ‘Music’ weren’t just hits—they redefined what dance music could achieve on a global scale. Her partnerships with producers like Shep Pettibone, William Orbit, Stuart Price and countless others consistently pushed boundaries, bringing the energy and creativity of the club scene into the mainstream without losing its authenticity.”

By the time Madonna released her first single, 1982’s ‘Everybody’, with its sleazy synths, funky bassline and killer refrain demanding the listener ‘Let the DJ shake you/Let the music take you’, she had already established herself as a fully paid-up member of New York’s Bacchanalian Bohemia. She had arrived in the city just in time for disco’s last dance from her native Detroit four years earlier as urban legend would have it, with just $35 and her ballet slippers to pursue her dream of becoming a professional dancer.

A series of menial jobs including a brief stint working at Dunkin’ Donuts, waitressing and nude modelling for art and photography classes kept a roof over her head, but it was the city’s nocturnal playground that defined her future. As Studio 54’s Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager were jailed for tax evasion in 1980, the exclusivity and outdated glamour of the infamous superclub gave way to a new wave of nightlife in Manhattan where creativity was currency and the clientele of clubs such as Danceteria, the Mudd Club, Palladium, Roxy, Club 57, Funhouse and Paradise Garage were hotbeds of untapped talent social networking its way to success.

Although these would expel a remarkable wave of creativity in the worlds of music, art, fashion, photography and film, including the Beastie Boys, Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Rick Rubin, Steven Meisel, Russell Simmons, LL Cool J and RuPaul, the biggest star to emerge was the one considered by many as the one least likely to. Madonna had dabbled in new wave and disco but was known mainly for being seen on the scene. While excess and experimentation were rife to withstand the musical marathons of Larry Levan or Jellybean, Madonna’s dance training had instilled in her a steely self-discipline which saw her avoid the pitfalls of her peers, barely even touching alcohol (her relationship with Basquiat had been wrecked by his heroin addiction). As one talking head in the 2015 documentary ‘Keith Haring: Street Art Boy’ recalled: “People didn’t take to her at all. They thought she was just a trashy white girl that couldn’t sing.”

Mark Kamins was the principal DJ at Danceteria – a simmering creative cauldron where punk kids, B-boys and hipsters put aside their differences to party – and an A&R scout for Chris Blackwell’s Island Records, when he agreed to play one of the tracks from a demo tape Madonna had been touting to anyone with industry influence. 

Speaking in 2012, just months before his death, Kamins fondly recalled how Madonna’s potent star quality and unbreakable self-belief convinced him that she was going to confound her naysayers before he’d even heard a note of music. “She was always on the dancefloor,” he said. “She had a tremendous need to perform – when she danced, people watched. I agreed to listen to her tape, and I liked ‘Everybody’, so I agreed to play the demo on the Saturday night. The floor liked it, so I took it to Island Records, I was doing A&R for them at the time, but they passed on Madonna. I’d also been working with Talking Heads, so I had a relationship with some people at Sire (an imprint of Warner Brothers) so I took her to [label boss] Seymour Stein who was in hospital recovering from surgery, and he signed her on the spot.”

Although delighted to have finally landed a deal, the reality failed to live up to her expectations and she was frustrated in her label’s lack of faith in her abilities or talents. She had envisioned her path would be like that of labelmate Prince, who had free reign to write and produce his own music and when that didn’t happen for her, she was compensated with being allowed to choose her producers. Paired with Reggie Lucas to record her debut album, the pair butted heads on several occasions due to creative differences. With hit records and experience to his name, Lucas expected the newcomer’s input to be minimal: the opposite turned out to be true. 

Though confident their collaboration had wielded future hits, Madonna was concerned that they sounded too similar to his work with disco divas Phyllis Hyman and Stephanie Mills and asked her boyfriend at the time, Funhouse DJ John ‘Jellybean’ Benitez to remix some of the album to reflect what was happening in the clubs. “There was something different about her because she was really a dance artist from the very beginning,” Jellybean told online newspaper First For Women of her inherent instinct for what makes a good dance record. “Madonna’s music had a lot of heart and passion and a rhythmic groove that people loved to dance to, with melodies and lyrics that you could memorise and sing-along to. That feel-good combination along with her pizzazz transformed ‘Holiday’ into an international hit. I had DJs reaching out to me from England, South Africa, France. There was no social media then and I would get letters mailed to the club and read about how much someone in Switzerland loved the record. I was getting all this information in bits and pieces.”

Cautious that she wanted her records to have style and substance, Madonna wanted to ensure that her records conveyed a message as well as made people want to dance. “I was very much invested in empowering women,” she told Paper magazine in 2022. “Because I think, while women were making great dance records, I feel like in the early days, while the songs and melodies are really strong and the singers are really good, they weren’t really invested in making women think: ‘Wow, I don’t have to live in a man’s world, living under the male gaze for the rest of my life. I can look at life in a different way and not settle. I can have my own voice and my own vision.’ So that was an important element.”

Contrasting the lyrics of disco standards such as ‘Don’t Leave Me This Way’, ‘Never Can Say Goodbye’ or ‘If I Can’t Have You’ with ‘Express Yourself’’s ‘What you need is a big strong hand to lift you to your higher ground/Make you feel like Queen on a throne/Make him love you ‘til you can’t come down’ or even ‘Into The Groove’’s ‘Boy, you’ve got to prove your love to me’, it’s easy to see that those statements have been there all along. One of the most recent examples of those self-empowerment anthems, ‘I Rise’ from 2019’s ‘Madame X’ album made history when DJ Tracy Young became the first woman in Grammys history to be even nominated in the Best Remixed Recording category, let alone win it.

“To be the first woman to receive that recognition felt monumental, not just for me but for all the talented women in the music, engineering and producer community,” Young says. “Winning the Grammy for a Madonna remix made it all the more meaningful – that song felt like such a celebration of everything she stands for and everything we’ve worked on together over the years. It’s a song that speaks to resilience, strength and the fight for equality, which resonates so deeply with her LGBTQIA+ fans and one which also reflects the power of music to unite, uplift, and inspire.”

It is these universal themes that have resonated with Madonna’s fanbase on a profound level – particularly the LGBTQIA+ demographic with whom she has shared a longstanding symbiosis. Throughout the 80s, as the gay community was ravaged by HIV/AIDS and forced back underground by prejudice and violence, Madonna was one of the few allies to show public support and endorsement. She hosted AIDS benefits, donated proceeds from her concerts, inserted safe sex leaflets into her albums and gave frank interviews to specialist gay publications such as The Advocate. She also featured queer representation heavily in her work, the most notable example being ‘Vogue’.

While her peers, Prince and Michael Jackson retreated behind the gates of their multi-acre compounds and disappeared into the vortexes of their own mythologies, Madonna was to be found on the dancefloor of 530 West 27th Street’s Sound Factory vogueing with the House Of Xtravaganza. Junior Vasquez spinned while they preened and posed, inadvertently inspiring what would become one of her signature hits. Reminiscing on their relationship at that time, Vasquez described their bond as being “like brother and sister” (they fell out in 1996 after he released the house track ‘If Madonna Calls’ featuring a voicemail message Madonna left for him). “She would come down to the Sound Factory,” he told In Magazine. “I would start playing sometimes at 10pm and she’d come into the booth or sit on the speaker. At that time it wasn’t crowded yet, so you could see the dancefloor and she saw [dancers] Jose Gutierez and Luis Xtravaganza. They were the stars of that Sound Factory runway show. They were a big deal and she saw that they stole the show – they were primo.”

The conversation about ‘Vogue’ in 2025 is a complex one, fiercely debated between two camps. On one side there are those that accuse Madonna of cultural appropriation for taking a gay subculture and gaining from it, and on the other, those that believe her helping it sashay into the mainstream was more a case of cultural elevation. Dancer/choreographer Jose Gutierez believes the latter. It was he that taught Madonna how to vogue and went on to co-choreograph the ‘Vogue’ video and dance on her groundbreaking Blond Ambition Tour. He also recently reunited with her onstage during the New York stop of the Celebration Tour to judge the mock voguing contest played out onstage in tribute to the Harlem drag balls.

“She didn’t steal it,” Gutierez recalls today. “She didn’t go to some Ivy League dance department and try to recreate voguing, she came to the club herself and sought us out. What people seem to forget is the good that came from this great pop/gay icon taking voguing and putting it onto the world stage – giving it the platform it needed. She came to the club and found two of the community’s own – myself and Luis [Camacho, aka Xtravaganza] – and took us with her. That was her way of honouring it and giving it credit and keeping it what voguing traditionally is. It gave me so much.”

Aside from cementing her relationship with her LGBTQIA+ audience, ‘Vogue’ was the impetus for another significant relationship, that between Madonna and Shep Pettibone. Though he had remixed her earlier singles and worked on 1987’s ‘You Can Dance’ remix album, ‘Vogue’ was the first time the pair had co-wrote and produced original work together. They went on to collaborate on the bulk of 1992’s criminally underrated ‘Erotica’ album (a gritty sonic snapshot of 90s New York with its deep house, hip hop, swingbeat and jazz), establishing a pattern which would continue throughout Madonna’s career where producers remixed tracks for her before going into the studio to create originals (William Orbit and Stuart Price walked the same path).

It was Shep’s remix of ‘Express Yourself’ in 1989, that transformed how Madonna viewed remix culture. She had previously been protective about her original art being altered too much, but when Pettibone rebuilt the song from scratch retaining only her vocal, supplementing the brassy funk of the original for a house-inspired beat, she loved it so much she dubbed her video (at the time the most expensive video ever made) with his version and performed it in her live performances, setting a precedent in how her music would be created and presented moving forward. 

As artists who had previously been successful in the 80s and had become synonymous with that decade (U2 developed their ‘Zoo TV’ project after finding themselves in a similar predicament), the art of remixing enabled them to reach an audience that maybe wouldn’t have been checking for them before. Madonna tapped into the trend and commissioned a series of mixes that revitalised her sound and saw her embraced by the club crowd – something that continues to this day. From performing ‘Like a Virgin’ for the (very) first time at the Paradise Garage at Keith Haring’s Party Of Life to launching ‘Confessions on a Dancefloor’ at London’s Koko (where she’d last played in its previous incarnation as Camden Palace in 1983), her bond to club culture is unbroken.

Although it became the norm in the 90s for pop or rock artists to turn their tracks over to superstar DJs whose names had become as famous as the artists they were remixing, Madonna’s impressive credentials as a dance enthusiast reveal themselves in her remixology, boasting a knowledge that extends way beyond bpms. Though her canon includes the work of the house giants servicing all the pop divas at the time – Junior Vasquez, Peter Rauhofer and David Morales, a deeper dive into her discography boasts an impressive range of eclectic talent ranging from Orbital, Groove Armada, Deep Dish and Stereo MC’s on remix duties, to Dallas Austin, Nellee Hooper, Timbaland and Diplo co-producing with her. While some artists rely on A&R teams and labels to pair them with the hot producer or coolest DJ, that has never been the case with Madonna. Whoever she is collaborating with reflects who she is currently listening to.

“That’s why her remixes have felt authentic – because she treats them like genuine extensions of her artistic vision,” Young offers. “She never treats them as an afterthought – they’re integral to how she engages with her music and audience. I think her roots in the club scene and her respect for its culture are why her remixes resonate so deeply. They’re not just reworks; they’re celebrations of the music, the energy and the community that surrounds it. She’s always curious and open to discovery and looking for what’s next. She doesn’t like to repeat herself as an artist. Over the years there have been many conversations between us about music, where she’s shared tracks she’s into or asked for recommendations. That genuine love for dance music is something that’s always evident – it’s not about chasing trends or following what’s popular but about creating something authentic and meaningful.”

Perhaps the greatest example of Madonna’s risk-taking paying off came in 1997, whilst working on her ‘Ray of Light’ album. When early sessions with Babyface (with whom she had scored one of the biggest US hits of her entire career with ‘Take a Bow’) and Rick Nowels failed to wield the results she wanted, she instead took a complete leap of faith on William Orbit based on the fact that she loved his ‘Strange Cargo’ suite of albums. Wanting her record to reflect the rebirth she was experiencing in her life as a new mother, Orbit’s baptismal bleeps and bubbles provided the perfect soundscapes for the introspection of her spiritual odyssey.

“I’d always loved a lot of techno music, but you never really think of it as being emotional,” Madonna explained in 1998 when the album was released. “So, what I wanted to do [with ‘Ray of Light’] was to make it intimate, make it emotional, to prove that it could be. I heard what William had been doing musically and it was exactly what I was looking for, so I asked him to produce the album.” 

“She’s an amazing person, producer and it was a true collaboration – it’s important to get this across,” Orbit told Hunger TV in 2014. “I don’t like it when people assume that I was the clever one doing the whole job. I’d feel mortified if I was her because she didn’t put her name on the production out of vanity, she was fucking in there with me. I’ve never met anybody who has more ability to make things happen like she does. Stuff happens and she makes it happen just by the sheer force of her will.”

When a revitalised Madonna decided on another sonic shift influenced by her love of the French dance boom of the early-2000s, she once again went to the source. Underground maverick Mirwais, whom she heard when his ‘Production’ album was submitted to her label, helped veer her in a harder, futuristic direction with organic elements for the ‘Music’ album. With his roots in the Parisian DIY punk scene, he wasn’t sure what to expect from a global pop icon but was soon impressed by the studio-savvy superstar and her willingness to take risks.

“She never imposed limits on me,” he told Keyboard magazine. “My natural side leans toward more experimental music. And with Madonna, she’s not only commercial. She’s also experimental. She has a natural feeling for new music and for good commercial music. She listens to a lot of underground music. She has a natural feeling for it. The mixture of her energy and her character are good for that. I think provocation is a really important element of pop music because without it, music isn’t exciting. Working with people like Madonna and trying to make something more experimental is provocation for the underground.”

It is perhaps this role as pop’s premier provocateur that has been key to Madonna’s longevity. As she brought her record-breaking Celebration Tour to a frenetic close on Rio’s Copacabana Beach last May, performing ‘Bitch I’m Madonna’ flanked by a troupe of dancers all dressed as the many different incarnations she has adopted over the past 43 years, it was hard not to marvel at her evolution. At a time when artists of her calibre are expected to embrace the “legacy artist” mantle and settle for a Vegas residency or rework the greatest hits into as many different iterations imaginable, Madonna’s curiosity for what’s next and fearlessness to experiment is what keeps her interesting. Only David Bowie comes to mind when trying to think of anyone else that refused to “play for the gallery” and was prepared to take the risks she does.

Twenty years on from her seminal dance opus, ‘Confessions on a Dancefloor’, Madonna thrilled fans by announcing on Instagram just before Christmas that she had reunited with Stuart Price to work on her next album. He had shown deep understanding and reverence for her discography when crafting the audio-biography setlist for her tour, seeking out rare mixes and deep cuts and the pair were inspired to work on new material, due later this year.

While the news of their reunion sparked a flurry of online reports with the term “return to form” already being bandied about and talk of Stuart “bringing out the best in Madonna”, it brought to mind something he said when Madonna’s name came up in conversation a few years ago which also echoes that of her other high-profile allies. 

“People always talk about ‘Madonna’s collaborators’, but she really doesn’t get the credit she deserves,” he said. “You don’t really produce Madonna, you collaborate with her. She’s always well prepared and has considered everything before she even gets into the room with a collaborator. It’s fantastic to work with someone with such strong direction.”

A quick search online and you will see similar testimonies from almost everyone that has worked with her (and is almost always given credit for the work before she is) from Nile Rodgers to William Orbit, Mirwais to Diplo, Shep Pettibone to Pharrell Williams. Whether it’s ‘Into the Groove’, ‘La Isla Bonita’, ‘Like a Prayer’, ‘Vogue’, ‘Music’, ‘Frozen’, ‘Hung Up’ or ‘4 Minutes’, there is only one name on the credits to all of those songs and that’s Madonna’s.

Read: Madonna's 12 best dancefloor 12-inches

Read: When Madonna played The Hacienda

Read: How Madonna's first album changed everything

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This feature first appeared in issue seven of Disco Pogo.

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