Madonna Celebrates 30th Anniversary Of Monumental ‘True Blue’ Album


This week 30 years ago, Madonna released her biggest international selling studio album True Blue. Madonna took to Instagram Friday morning to celebrate the anniversary and to thank her fans for all the support they have been giving her throughout the years.

Rolling Stone brings us back in time to the Summer of 1986, when True Blue was released.

“Released on June 30th, 1986, today marks the 30th anniversary of Madonna’s third studio album, True Blue. At the time, the Material Girl was in love: She’d married Sean Penn the year before, and she said she named the song and the album it appeared on after a favorite expression of Penn’s.”

The article adds that the album cover was shot by the late photographer Herb Ritts. The look on the album cover was a far cry from the look Madonna displayed just one year earlier during the “Like A Virgin” era, which critics predicted would be Madonna’s peak and that she would soon fade. It wouldn’t be the first time Madonna proved her critics wrong.

The True Blue era kicked off in early April of 1986 with the release of the first single “Live To Tell.” The ballad, often considered her best as a songwriter, was a huge commercial risk, and critics claimed the song would flop and alienate her fans. However, by early June of 1986, it was No. 1 everywhere.

The second release, “Papa Don’t Preach,” also hit No. 1 and created quite a controversy. As the New York Times noted at the time, the song received a lot of criticism and support.

‘The message is that getting pregnant is cool and having the baby is the right thing and a good thing and don’t listen to your parents, the school, anybody who tells you otherwise -don’t preach to me, Papa. The reality is that what Madonna is suggesting to teenagers is a path to permanent poverty,” Alfred Moran of Planned Parenthood told the Times after the song hit No. 1.

However, as the article notes, anti-abortion groups supported the song and saw it as a positive pro-life song. Madonna’s publicist at the time, Liz Rosenberg, said that Madonna was not taking a stand on anything and just singing a song.

Madonna performed a slowed-down version of “True Blue” on her recent Rebel Heart Tour. [Photo by Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images]
The next single, “True Blue,” was a ’50s style bop that hit No. 3. But Madonna would return to No. 1 in February of 1986 with “Open Your Heart,” an innocent song that didn’t have quite such an innocent video — at least for the conservative 1980s.

The final single from True Blue, “La Isla Bonita,” hit No. 4 in the United States, but was No. 1 everywhere else throughout the world. It remains the most played song from the album today.

As Broadway World notes, True Blue hit No. 1 in 28 countries, which was a record for the time. It sold more than seven million copies in the United States and 25 million copies worldwide. It preceded the Who’s That Girl World Tour, which saw Madonna playing in front of over 100,000 people at some stops.

Even though True Blue represented Madonna at her commercial peak, many would argue that she was at her most influential after the release of Like a Prayer in 1989 and during 1990, with her Blonde Ambition World Tour. It was that time Madonna’s work broke ground with messages of sexual feminism, gay rights, and other issues. Still, True Blue remains one of the most influential and biggest selling albums of the 1980s.

[Photo by Brenda Chase/Getty Images]

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