“Vogue” by Madonna

Madonna's "Vogue" arrived in March 1990 as the lead single from I'm Breathless, her soundtrack album, and it sounded like nothing else on the record. She wrote and produced it with Shep Pettibone, who built a sleek house groove with disco in its bones, and she took its whole reason for being from voguing, the dance that New York's underground had made its own.

The song sells escape, the dance floor pitched as the one place where the rules fall away, and its middle eight turns into a roll call of stars from Hollywood's golden age. David Fincher shot the black-and-white video in 16 hours while she was rehearsing the Blond Ambition World Tour, and together song and clip hauled a whole subculture into the mainstream.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.