"In the beginning, Madonna created Madonna, and she was good. Her early songs were catchy and danceable. Her outfits were a wreck, but she sensed the '80s zeitgeist and a fashion icon was born. Madonna wannabes wore fingerless gloves and plastic bangles, belly-baring shirts and bras in plain sight. It was a trashy celebration - of our bodies and the dance floor and the intoxicating possibility that Madonna's was a shallow-sounding-but-secretly-potent recipe for redemption," Anderman writes.

Pictured, Madonna posed at the MTV Video Music Awards at New York's Radio City Music Hall in 1984.