Madonna hilariously reacted to an ex-manager who pushed her to make Like a Virgin sound like Thriller

The Queen of Pop always got what the Queen of Pop wanted — even when she was still a rising princess fresh on the scene.

Madonna has revealed that one of the most memorable eras in her career was preceded by a "frustrating" period of conflict, as she battled high expectations after her meteoric rise to stardom and a manager attempted to retool her sound while they prepared to release her second studio album, 1984's Like a Virgin, with superstar musician-producer Nile Rodgers.

"I thought there were so many great songs on the record, and then suddenly my first album [1983's Madonna] started to become popular. I mean, it was a good thing. It was a good thing, but also frustrating," Madonna said in a new conversation with Rodgers in Paper magazine, with the Chic band co-founder and iconic David Bowie collaborator explaining that the pair finished work on Like a Virgin while her self-titled debut LP was "still the focus" for promotion.

"I was irritated that another song of mine was doing so well and now I had to wait to put something out that I was so excited about," Madonna continued. "Not that I didn't love Reggie Lucas and 'Borderline' and my first record, but the thing is, when I put out my first record it didn't really do that well. People didn't know who I was and then they weren't sure who I was, so it kind of had a resurgence right at the time we were going to release [it]."

Rodgers added that things got worse when Madonna's ex-manager, Freddy DeMann, started pressuring them to make Like a Virgin sound more like Michael Jackson's 1982 masterwork Thriller because label executives were still "a little bit unsure" of her potential for global success.

"I'll never forget when we played the album and Freddy said, 'Can it sound a little more like this?' And he put on f---ing Thriller [laughs]," Rodgers recalled. "And we said, you know, Michael Jackson has been a star his entire life and he worked his way up to Thriller. So he said, 'Well can you put a little more bass on it?' And all Madonna did was just write [the words] 'Bass Up' on the record. We never changed a thing. She just wrote it on the box the next time."

Ron Galella Collection/Getty Madonna and Michael Jackson at the 63rd Oscars

Madonna's intuitions about the album were correct: Like a Virgin would go on to become a defining pop bible for both the musician herself and pop music in general. It received diamond certification in the United States for selling more than 10 million units, and made pop cultural staples out of songs "Like a Virgin," "Material Girl," and "Dress You Up."

Still, as she told Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show earlier this week, Rodgers initially wanted the era to kick off differently, with "Material Girl" as the lead single instead of "Like a Virgin."

"Those are the days when I had no say in anything. Can you imagine those days even existing?" Madonna said. "I don't know why [we eventually] chose 'Like a Virgin' because I thought it was quite controversial. But it turned out the controversial thing wasn't the song itself, it was my performance on the first MTV [VMA] Awards. I did that show and I walked down these very steep stairs of a wedding cake and I got to the bottom and started dancing and my white stiletto pumps fell off. I was trying to do this smooth move and dive for the shoe to make it look like choreography, and my dress flipped up and my dress was showing. Those were the days when you shouldn't show your butt to have a career. Now it's the opposite. It happened by accident… when I went backstage, my manager told me my career was over with." (Obviously, her manager was wrong.)

The 64-year-old singer will cover the period leading up to the album's release in her upcoming self-directed biopic, which she has steadily worked on with a revolving door of writers including Oscar-winning Juno scribe Diablo Cody and Erin Wilson.

Madonna's latest compilation album, Finally Enough Love: 50 Number Ones, is available now.

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