Background
"Into the Groove" was written and produced by Madonna and Steve Bray. During an interview with Time, Madonna said that she wrote the song while watching a Latin boy across her balcony. Calling the song 'dorky', Madonna explained:
"When I was writing it, I was sitting in a fourth-floor walk-up on Avenue-B, and there was this gorgeous Puerto Rican boy sitting across me that I wanted to go out on a date with, and I just wanted to get the song over with. I ultimately did go out with him and the song was finished just before my last date with him, which I'm kinda happy that it did not continue."
"The dance floor was quite a magical place for me. I started off wanting to be a dancer, so that had a lot to do with the song. The freedom that I always feel when I'm dancing, that feeling of inhabiting your body, letting yourself go, expressing yourself through music. I always thought of it as a magical place – even if you're not taking ecstasy. Hence that came to me as the primary inspiration for 'Into the Groove'."
She had written the song for her friend Mark Kamins' protégée, Chyne. Kamins made Madonna record a demo of the song, which he wished to modify later for Chyne. However, Madonna believed that the song would be more suitable for her film Desperately Seeking Susan, and re-recorded it with Bray, making it suitable for the soundtrack. When Kamins came to know about it, he was furious that Madonna did not have the courtesy to tell him that she wanted the song for a different purpose. He felt walked over by Madonna, who retorted: "I'm tough, I'm ambitious and I know exactly what I want. If that makes me a bitch, that's okay." Ultimately Madonna won and the song was used as the soundtrack of Desperately Seeking Susan. "Into the Groove" did not appear on the soundtrack album of the film, but was released on the 1985 worldwide re-issue of Madonna's second studio album, Like a Virgin, instead.
The music video is made up of clips from the film, with the lyrics often matching the images. Doug Dowdle of Parallax Productions, a company that pioneered in movie tie-in music videos during the 1980s, created this video from edited footage of the movie, directed by Susan Seidelman. This was done because there were five Madonna videos already on power rotation on MTV, and Warner Bros. did not want the audience to be saturated with any new video. Hence, they decided to use the shots from the film and made a music video. During a 2009 interview with Rolling Stone, Madonna commented: "'Into the Groove' is another song I feel retarded singing, but everybody seems to like it."
Read more about this topic: Into The Groove
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