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WHEN MADONNA Louise Veronica Ciccone burst onto the global trading floor known as pop culture in 1983, she looked like the musical equivalent of a tech stock.
Lots of flash, loads of dreams, but, it seemed, very little to back it up. Most thought she'd be a shooting star, not a lucky one.
In 1983, the 25-year-old Madonna sang about teenage concerns: holidays and physical attractions and burning up for your love. But all that hardly mattered, because girls thought she was cool and guys thought she was hot. Few things beat that combination, but it's one that generally doesn't last. Someone cooler and someone hotter is almost always waiting in the wings.
Madonna, however, has become the exception. She is a bona fide blue-chip stock, one of a handful of artists who can move the entire musical market, selling more than 57 million copies of her 11 albums.
As she gets ready to launch her run of five sold-out concerts at Madison Square Garden on Wednesday, this seems like a good time to take stock of the singer's career. We chart the CARE FACTOR (on a scale of 1-10, with 10 being the highest amount of interest): how much we cared about what the Material Girl did.
MUSIC
July 1983: The straightforward, danceable "Madonna" is released to little fanfare, with the club track "Physical Attraction" as the first single. Club kids catch onto the new singer when "Holiday" comes out. But it's the video for "Borderline," when most of America sees her for the first time, that sparks interest in the album. CARE FACTOR: 3
November 1984: Madonnamania's first and biggest wave arrives with the release of the "Like a Virgin" album, as Team Madonna v.1.0 is in place with funkmeisters Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards onboard, along with collaborator Stephen Bray and remixer Jellybean Benitez.
CARE FACTOR: 10 December 1984: "Like a Virgin" becomes Madonna's first No. 1 single in the middle of a controversy over her seductively rolling around on the floor in a wedding dress to debut the song on MTV. It holds for five weeks.
CARE FACTOR: 8
May 1985: "Crazy for You" knocks USA for Africa's "We Are the World" from the No. 1 spot for a week,...