Madonna's catalog of top-charting songs includes "Like a Virgin", "Material Girl", "La Isla Bonita", "Like a Prayer", "Vogue", "Take a Bow", "Frozen", "Music", "Hung Up" and "4 Minutes".

"[18] Madonna soon found an apartment in the Alphabet City neighborhood of the East Village[19] and had little money while working as a hatcheck girl for the Russian Tea Room, an elevator operator at Terrace on the Park, and with modern dance troupes.

[26] While with the band, Madonna briefly worked as a hat-check girl at the Russian Tea Room, and she made her acting debut in the low-budget indie film A Certain Sacrifice, which was not released until 1985.

[49] In late 1983, Madonna's new manager, Freddy DeMann, secured a meeting for her with film producer Jon Peters, who asked her to play the part of a club singer in the romantic drama Vision Quest.

[132] Consisting of sexually provocative and explicit images, photographed by Steven Meisel, the book received strong negative reaction from the media and the general public, but sold 1.5 million copies at $50 each in a matter of days.

[153] For a long time, Madonna had desired to play Argentine political leader Eva Perón and wrote to director Alan Parker to explain why she would be perfect for the part.

[179] She recorded the single "Beautiful Stranger" for the 1999 film Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, which earned her a Grammy Award for Best Song Written for a Motion Picture, Television or Other Visual Media.

[195] In May 2002 she appeared in London in the West End play Up for Grabs at the Wyndhams Theatre (billed as 'Madonna Ritchie'), to universally bad reviews and was described as "the evening's biggest disappointment" by one.

[49] In 2003, Madonna collaborated with fashion photographer Steven Klein for an exhibition installation named X-STaTIC Pro=CeSS, which ran from March to May in New York's Deitch Projects gallery, and also traveled the world in an edited form.

[204] Madonna gave another provocative performance later that year at the 2003 MTV Video Music Awards, when she kissed singers Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera while singing the track "Hollywood".

Containing R&B and urban pop influences, the songs on Hard Candy were autobiographical in nature and saw Madonna collaborating with Justin Timberlake, Timbaland, Pharrell Williams and Nate "Danja" Hills.

[240][241] Caryn Ganz from Rolling Stone complimented it as an "impressive taste of her upcoming tour",[242] while BBC correspondent Mark Savage panned it as "an attempt to harness the urban market".

The website for the project included over 3,000 art related submissions since its inception, with Madonna regularly monitoring and enlisting other artists like David Blaine and Katy Perry as guest curators.

[307] The live album chronicling the Rebel Heart Tour was released in September 2017, and won Best Music Video for Western Artists at the 32nd Japan Gold Disc Award.

[310] A few months earlier, the auction house Gotta Have Rock and Roll had put up Madonna's personal items like love letters from Tupac Shakur, cassettes, underwear and a hairbrush for sale.

[337] She also collaborated on three songs on Christine and the Queens album Paranoïa, Angels, True Love (2023)[338] and with The Weeknd and Playboi Carti on the single "Popular", which was taken from the soundtrack to the drama series The Idol.

[357] Following the Celebration Tour, Madonna restarted work on her biographical film[358] and later complained of producers wanting her to "downsize-down scale-think smaller" with regard to the project.

[363] Madonna's major influences include Debbie Harry, Chrissie Hynde, Patti Smith, Karen Carpenter, the Supremes, Joni Mitchell, Aretha Franklin and Led Zeppelin, as well as dancers Martha Graham and Rudolf Nureyev.

[371][372]Historians, musicians, and anthropologists trace her influences—from African American gospel music to Japanese fashion, Middle Eastern spirituality to feminist art history—and the ways she borrows, adapts, and interprets them.

[389] Professor Santiago Fouz-Hernández asserted, "While not gifted with an especially powerful or wide-ranging voice, Madonna has worked to expand her artistic palette to encompass diverse musical, textual and visual styles and various vocal guises, all with the intention of presenting herself as a mature musician.

[393] Stan Hawkins, author of Settling the Pop Score explained, "it is as musician and producer that Madonna is one of the few female artists to have broken into the male domain of the recording studio.

Pop vocalists usually sing songs 'straight', but Madonna employs subtext, irony, aggression and all sorts of vocal idiosyncrasies in the ways John Lennon and Bob Dylan did.

"[451] Chris Nelson from The New York Times commented that "artists like Madonna and Janet Jackson set new standards for showmanship, with concerts that included not only elaborate costumes and precision-timed pyrotechnics but also highly athletic dancing.

"[467] Andy Bennett and Steve Waksman, authors of The SAGE Handbook of Popular Music (2014), noted that "almost all female pop stars of recent years—Britney Spears, Beyoncé, Rihanna, Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, and others—acknowledge the important influence of Madonna on their own careers.

"[471] Professor John Fiske noted that the sense of empowerment that Madonna offers is inextricably connected with the pleasure of exerting some control over the meanings of self, of sexuality, and of one's social relations.

[472] In Doing Gender in Media, Art and Culture (2009), the authors noted that Madonna, as a female celebrity, performer, and pop icon, can unsettle standing feminist reflections and debates.

[473] According to lesbian feminist Sheila Jeffreys, Madonna represents woman's occupancy of what Monique Wittig calls the category of sex, as powerful, and appears to gleefully embrace the performance of the sexual corvée allotted to women.

[475] Writing for The Guardian, Matt Cain stated that Madonna has "broke[n] down social barriers" and brought marginalized groups to the forefront, by frequently featuring LGBT, Latino, and black culture in her works.

[477] Canadian professor Karlene Faith gave her point of view saying that Madonna's peculiarity is that "she has cruised so freely through so many cultural terrains" and she "has been a 'cult figure' within self-propelling subcultures just as she became a major.

"[481] Madonna has received acclaim as a role model for businesswomen, "achieving the kind of financial control that women had long fought for within the industry", and generating over $1.2 billion in sales within the first decade of her career.