“Everyone Here Is A Work Of Art”, So Who’s On Madonna’s “Danceteria” Name-check?
Madonna’s new album Confessions II landed on 3 July, and buried in the tracklist is Danceteria, a song that plays like a guest list for the downtown New York club where her career began. It’s half party, half memorial for the friends she outlived. Many of the people she names never made it out of the 1980s, and several were lost to AIDS.
The club that made her
Danceteria was the multi-floor club at 30 West 21st Street where a broke, ambitious Madonna talked her way to the front of the line. On the track she recreates the night DJ Mark Kamins played her first single demo tape: “He played my tape Everybody.”
Kamins, who briefly dated Madonna, gave that debut single its first public airing at the club. The aside in the song, “hide the cocaine” tells you what kind of night it was.
Martin Burgoyne, the friend she never got over
The emotional centre of the song is Martin Burgoyne. “Meet this boy named Martin Burgoyne, he’s my best friend, he’s my boytoy,” she sings. Burgoyne was her roommate, her first club-tour manager and the artist who designed the sleeve for Burning Up.
In 1986 he was diagnosed with HIV/AIDS. Madonna paid his medical bills at St Vincent’s Hospital and leased him a flat nearby so he could stay close to care. He died that November, aged 23. She later dedicated Live To Tell to him on tour and wrote In This Life in his memory.
The doorman who gave her a stage
“We see the line, it’s way too long, cut to the front, there’s Haoui Montaug.” Montaug worked the Danceteria door and ran the cabaret night No Entiendes, which gave a young Madonna her first live performance in December 1982, and later put an early Beastie Boys on stage, too.
He died in 1991, also of AIDS, on his own terms at a farewell party. Madonna joined by phone from Los Angeles.
The artists who became legends
Then comes the art crowd: “There’s Fab Five Freddy and Basquiat, Keith Haring and Kenny Scharf, everyone came from Shafrazi.” Jean-Michel Basquiat dated Madonna around 1982, before either of them was famous. Keith Haring was openly gay, an AIDS activist, and one of the most recognisable artists of the decade; he died in 1990, aged 31.
Kenny Scharf and Fab Five Freddy are still working, and Tony Shafrazi was the gallerist who showed them. Here’s a poignant detail: Haring designed the invitation for Burgoyne’s 1986 benefit, and Andy Warhol drew the artwork. Small world, short lives.
The elevator girl and the rest of the room
Remember Debi Mazar before Goodfellas and Entourage? The actress was the Danceteria lift operator who later did makeup on Madonna’s early videos. The closing stretch of the song opens out to the people who shaped the sound and the look: stylist Maripol, breakdancers Rock Steady Crew and Crazy Legs, plus Chic and Sister Sledge producer, Nile Rodgers, Talking Heads’ David Byrne, the B-52’s and the Lounge Lizards.
Why Lou Reed gets a writing credit
Listen for the “doo, doo-doo” refrain and the line “take a walk on the wild side,” and you’ll hear why Lou Reed is credited as a co-writer. The song interpolates his 1972 track Walk on the Wild Side, itself a tribute to the queer and trans regulars of Andy Warhol’s Factory. Madonna is quietly filing her own roll call under that same lineage.
A chart-bound dance record that doubles as a memorial for the gay men and downtown misfits who built her, many of whom the culture has forgotten.
