Madonna likes to say that what happened next, when she famously rolled around the stage, skirt up, panties and garters exposed for all the world to see, was her attempt to retrieve a lost shoe. As she made her way down the cake, the unimaginable became undeniable as she began to shed her bridal wear: first shoes, then veil after which she loosened her hair, boudoir-style. It was a song about a virgin, sung by a woman wearing a bustier-and-tulle wedding dress and a belt that identified her as a Boy Toy. Sonia Moskowitz/Getty Imagesįrom a distance, Madonna looked appropriately bridal atop the cake, singing a song that no one except the people who heard her debut the song at New York’s Paradise Garage earlier that year had ever heard. To perform during the show, MTV lined up Rod Stewart (the dean of music videos simply because he made so many of them), ZZ Top, Hall & Oates, Tina Turner, Ray Parker Jr., Huey Lewis and the News, and the new gal, Madonna.Īmerican singer & actress Madonna poses outside the first MTV Video Music Awards at Radio City Music Hall on September 14, 1984.

Bette Midler and Dan Aykroyd had agreed to host. It was MTV’s first awards event, and if it was successful, MTV executives thought it could be the fledgling music video industry’s very own annual Oscar-Grammy ceremony. The stage that night at Radio City Music Hall was filled with stars who had been cajoled into helping launch the show.

Another observer called it “the award-show equivalent of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address - the ideal against which all successors would be measured.” It was, in other words, unforgettable. One writer compared Madonna’s performance at the MTV Video Music Awards in September of 1984 to iconic music moments like Elvis Presley causing jaws to drop in living rooms across America with his “pelvic thrusts” on The Milton Berle Show in 1956, and the Beatles’ few minutes on The Ed Sullivan Show in February of 1964, which created the template for the ensuing 20 years of pop-rock music.

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