Superstar DJ Tracy Young is Zooming from a Kansas City Margaritaville resort, but she’s hardly wasting away in Margaritaville. In fact, her career is in currently in full swing. Five years ago, at nearly age 50, she made Grammy history, or herstory, when she won Best Remixed Recording for her Pride Radio mix of her “I Rise” by her longtime friend and collaborator, Madonna. “That was the first time a woman had even been nominated [in that category]. And that blew me away, because with all the female presence in the DJ/production world, I just was like, ‘There’s a problem here,’” she states.

But much like Madonna herself, by that point, Young had already reinvented herself multiple times. She’d started as a radio station music director and at Interscope Records before she was hired to the work the turntables at Ingrid Casares’s Miami hot spot Liquid in the mid-‘90s, a gig that introduced her to Casares’s pal, Madonna. And now, in another full-circle moment, Young is reinventing herself yet again — this time as a live entertainer who commands the crowds at massive, very un-nightclub-like venues like the Hollywood Bowl — on the road DJing on the farewell tour by another female pop trailblazer of the ‘80s and queen of career reinvention, Cyndi Lauper. (FYI: While the media once infuriatingly attempted to concoct a rivalry between the two MTV stars, Young, who has known Lauper for more than 20 years, points out, “I know for a fact that Cyndi has no problem with Madonna.”)

And Young is also working with Niki Haris and Donna De Lory, the iconic Madonna backup singers who for many years were such a key part of Madonna’s act that they practically formed a Destiny’s Child-style trio. And there’s another “serendipitous” connection here, because it was actually De Lory’s demo vocal of a song originally co-written for Cyndi Lauper by De Lory’s then-boyfriend, “Open Your Heart,” that led to De Lory getting hired by Madonna in the first place and forming her lifelong friendship with Haris. “I always say that’s how we started becoming women together,” Haris muses. “We were so young when we first started, and by the time we ended, we were all knocking on 50.”

Yes, it’s all connected. And — just like Young, Lauper, and their former famous boss — Haris and De Lory have kept grinding and reinventing themselves, separately and together, in genres ranging from new age and world music to gospel and jazz. However, it was teaming with Young, initially on a remake of the disco classic “Last Night a DJ Saved My Life,” that reintroduced Haris and De Lory to the dance music world. Haris and De Lory are joining Young via Zoom today, and it’s such a lovefest that their wide-ranging conversation, as seen in full in the video above (during which Haris and De Lory reminisce about the groundbreaking Blonde Ambition tour, filming Truth or Dare, their momentous VMAs performances of “Express Yourself” and “Vogue,” and their favorite stage outfits, and even occasionally break into song), that at one point they literally forget they’re doing an interview and they begin consulting their calendars, coordinating when the three of them can meet up at one of Lauper’s tour stops.

“These are three women supporting each other. That’s what we’re really doing, more than making music. We’re also making some incredible moments together,” Haris says of their obvious bond. “The universe was trying to tell us something, because [De Lory and I] were starting to get calls to do these dance shows. … And [Young] kept the ball rolling for us. It added a whole other spunk and energy into what Donna and I were already doing. So, it saved our lives. I was like, ‘Do we do another broken-down-instrumentally jazzy thing? I know we have so much more music in us.’ And yeah, [Young] reminded us of that.”

“I was a fan [of Haris and De Lory], not even knowing that I would meet them and end up working with them,” Young points out. “They gave Madonna that voice, what we know to be the ‘Madonna voice.’ The three of them were angelic. They sounded angelic together, and put Madonna in that mix. Magic.”

Young, who has done 14 Madonna remixes to date, didn’t begin working with Madonna until 2000 (starting with “Music”), and she’s still not quite sure why her circulating demo cassettes first caught Madonna’s attention in Miami back in the ‘90s. “It’s probably that I’m awesome!” she jokes, adding more seriously, “I am sure [it was partially because] I was female. I’m sure that had something to do with it, because at that time, there were no girls that you would see in the DJ booth, ever.”

Self-declared awesomeness aside, Young actually wasn’t all that confident when Madonna first approached her about doing a remix, for 1998’s Ray of Light Gothic-pop track “Frozen” — and she actually turned Madonna down. “I felt like at the time, if I had taken a remix and not been prepared, I would never get the opportunity again. So, I thought it was worth that risk to not do it. It all worked out, but I remember being like, ‘I just ruined my life!’” Young chucklingly confesses. “But I just didn’t feel ready. I didn’t know enough. And so, by the time ‘Music’ came, I was like, ‘Yeah, let’s go! Let’s do it.’”

Interestingly, despite since making a name for herself as a remixer in a male-dominated field, when she first started, Young went by the unisex alias of “The Young Collective,” rather than the full name that years later would be engraved on a Grammy statuette. “I didn’t want my gender to be a factor. I wanted them to judge the music,” she explains. “I mean, I knew it was going to be a gender thing. I knew that was going to be, like, ‘Oh, she’s fucking Madonna!’ [Those untrue rumors] happened anyway. … It’s always something: ‘She slept her way to the top. She’s sleeping with Madonna. That’s why she got this and that.’ So, I just felt at that time, ‘I don’t want to put my name on this. I want to see if people really like it.’”

Haris and De Lory also ruefully recall all the salacious gossip that followed Madonna back in the day, long before Young came onto the scene. “I heard it from people I was working with in the industry, when I was doing sessions and everything,” says De Lory. “All the stories that men had about Madonna, because she was a very sexual person and it came through in her dancing and her work and everything. And there’s nothing wrong with that, but they told the stories that said there was something ‘wrong’ with that.”

“She told us, ‘I don’t think I’m the best singer. I’m here to provoke conversation. I’m here to push buttons.’ This is what she’s about,” adds Haris. “And she can’t help it but be sexy. She’s Italian and fine. What else is she going to do? She would’ve been fine if she would’ve been a housewife in Michigan. Madonna is going to be fine and sexy. That’s what it is.”

[Men] were threatened,” De Lory elaborates. “They didn’t like her. Too powerful. She had so much power. But honestly, working with her after being in the business doing sessions and working with so many men, engineers, producers, everything, I felt so empowered to be on that stage. It gave me so much strength to know I could continue on in the business and hold that space for myself. That was the most incredible part of the whole thing for me, was the confidence and the influence and the power that she had, that she was the boss.”

“This is more reason why it’s so important to tell our stories and make sure we keep them out there,” Haris says, as the conversation continues about how both Madonna and Lauper have crusaded for the rights of not only women, but for people of color and the LGBTQ+ community, for decades. “Because we watch the pendulum try to swing back to that kind of thinking again, that people are starting to be disenfranchised, disowned, deported because they’re different or they look different, or rights are being taken away because they love different. So, that’s why these stories are important.”

Meanwhile, Young, who is a lesbian, became her own boss (she now runs an imprint label, FEROSH Records), and her true identity became better known after Madonna’s veteran publicist, Liz Rosenberg, pitched Young for a Billboard feature. Then “Tracy Young,” not “The Young Collective,” really made headlines when she was the DJ at Madonna’s wedding to second husband Guy Ritchie. (Young refuses to dish about the reception, saying, “People got married and they were in love; it’s not my wedding to talk about,” but she reveals that she played “some real dope music, a lot of house music” and got the party started with Daft Punk’s “One More Time.”)

And Young is now getting the party started as Lauper’s pre-show DJ, warming up audiences with curated sets that are specific to each city, and she says this gig, which coincided with her reconnecting with Haris and De Lory, could not have come at a more needed time. Shortly after her career peak at the 2020 Grammys, COVID hit, and then her mother (a pianist who was “a huge, huge inspiration”) and stepfather both died, just one month apart. Young subsequently hit rock bottom, struggling with addiction and feeling creatively stalled. And this time, it was the DJ’s life that was saved, thanks to Lauper’s kind offer.

“A year had gone by, and I hadn’t done any music. … Cyndi called me, and it got me motivated again. I was like, ‘God, I’ve got to start putting out music again,’” recalls Young, who’s now sober and in the best shape of her life. “It had been a year and a half of my mom being gone. I literally sat on the couch, ate, gained a lot of weight, did nothing but cry my eyes out. It was so unlike my behavior; anybody that knows me knows that I’m full of energy and always cracking jokes and being silly. But I just was not myself, and I could not snap out of it. So, when I say Cyndi saved my life, that’s what I mean, because she gave me something. She threw me back into it and said, ‘Girl, this is what you’re meant to do. Come on.’”

Young now plans to make more music with Haris and De Lory — the three just dropped “I Know You, I Live You” on FEROSH, with another collaboration, “WATR,” coming out Oct. 3 — and De Le Lory says, “It has been just flowing, and I know we will get together and write more. We’ve got to come to Miami!” De Lory and Haris, who respectively sang with Madonna until 2007 and 2016, haven’t ruled out working with their former boss again; De Lory says, “If that came about in the future, I feel like we would welcome it with open arms,” and Haris adds, “What we know for sure is that if Madonna and Donna and Niki ever get together and sing again, it’s going to be magic again, because that’s what it is.” But they too are looking forwards, not backwards. “The bottom line is that if all else fails, we know that the magic [with Madonna] has already occurred,” Haris asserts.

And that’s where the reinvention comes in, although Young clarifies, “I think that’s just being artists and evolving. I don’t think it’s really reinventing, because we all move. Like, I started as a DJ, but then I went to remixing. When you love what you do and you love music as much as the three of us do, you embrace what’s coming next. And so, I don’t see it as much as ‘reinventing’ as much as it is just being open to new experiences and learning. … I’m deep in this [Lauper] tour, and part of the tour is she tells all these stories, and she’s an amazing storyteller, and she says that there are many chapters of your life. And when you think you’ve closed the chapter, one will open again.”

And now, as Young looks to the future — whether it’s this week’s final leg of Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” tour, meeting up with De Lory and Haris again in person, or TBD projects further down the road, she knows that she has learned from the very best. “I’m very grateful I worked with both,” she says of her time with Lauper and Madonna. “Because they’re aligned in that way where I want to push the needle forward.”

Watch Tracy Young, Niki Haris, and Donna De Lory’s full gabfest above, in which they discuss Madonna memories and so much more.

Today it’s a holiday, time to celebrate, with a very special episode of Totally ‘80s ! This one is all about the undisputed Queen of the ‘80s, the Queen of Pop, the Queen of all media, and the Queen of my world, her Royal Magesty, Madonna Louise Ciccone — but specifically focusing on her long-forgotten and often-overlooked punk origins.

Joining me for this discussion is the legendary Susan Seidelman, director of the punk-rock cult classic Smithereens and author of the excellent new autobiography Desperately Seeking Something. But of course, Seidelman was also there to witness — and in some ways, facilitate — the rise of early Madonna, when she directed Desperately Seeking Susan.

Also joining me is Laura Jane Grace, frontwoman of the iconic punk band Against Me! and new supergroup Laura Jane Grace & the Mississippi Medicals, who also just happens to be one of the coolest and most knowledgeable Madonna fans around.

You can hear audio of this fascinating discussion below in full (or wherever you get your podcasts). The televised version, in which you can see all my Desperately Seeking Susan costume props in their full glory, can be viewed in the YouTube player above and is also airing on WMX Pop and Rock (Roku Channel 1154, Vizio Channel 1240, or on Xumo Play).

Madonna, released July 27, 1983. (Photo: Sire Records)

Thirty-five years ago, on July 27, 1983, a woman named Madonna Louise Ciccone released her self-titled debut album, and it soon launched not just a music revolution, but a fashion revolution as well. The disc’s stark black-and-white artwork — Madonna clasping her unforgettable face between bracelet-stacked hands on the front, wrapping a thick dog-chain necklace around her throat on the back — comprised some of the most striking pop imagery of the ’80s. It wasn’t long before every little girl in the world wanted to be Madonna (or a “Madonnabe”), bedecking themselves with oversized lace hair bows, crucifixes, stacks of rubber bangles, and, much to their parents’ chagrin, “Boy Toy” belts and visible bras.

The back cover of Madonna. (Photo: Sire Records)

But Madonna didn’t come up with her early signature look entirely on her own. She had a lucky star on her side back then, a visionary stylist, who helped craft that image. And that woman also went by a singular name: Maripol.

Without Maripol — a French-expat artist, jewelry designer, photographer, film producer, and NYC girl-about-(down)town — Madonna may never have become MADONNA. After all, Maripol was the woman who introduced street-style jelly bracelets to the mainstream (fun fact: Grace Jones was the first pop singer to wear Maripol’s rubber creations, on her ankles), and she was the woman who first convinced Madonna to dance onstage in a bra.

Speaking to Yahoo Entertainment from New York, Maripol humbly, grudgingly concedes, “Whatever, yes — I did create a legend.” Recalling the night that started it all, at New York hip-hop club the Roxy almost four decades ago, she says, “There was a lot of mix of culture coming from England, with people like Bow Wow Wow, and then there was Fab Five Freddy, from Yo! MTV Raps, which was also the beginning of this whole movement. Fab Five Freddy asked me if I could find cute girls, and I turned around and saw Madonna and asked her if she would want to go onstage. I asked her if she had a nice bra on, and she thought I was out of my mind! I asked her to actually take her top off. And the rest is history.”

So, was that the unofficial beginning of the underwear-as-outerwear trend? “No, that was the beginning of the fact that I’m French! I was less puritan than anyone else, and I was always taking my clothes off, unfortunately,” Maripol laughs. “After that, Madonna actually made an appointment to come see me in my loft, because she wanted me to create her look. … I had already invented the rubber bracelet, and I was the art director of Fiorucci, and I thought that she was the perfect person to carry around my style. And it was perfect for her as well.”

Maripol and Madonna’s first fashion collaboration was for the Madonna album cover, on which Maripol’s bold, punky jewelry was practically as much the star as Madonna herself.

Maripol’s involvement in Madonna’s early career opened many doors for the singer. For instance, there was the night that Madonna, at the time still a total unknown, performed at Fiorucci’s 15th anniversary soiree — a booking that Maripol, the art director for the trendsetting Italian boutique in the late ’70s and early ’80s, had to fight for.

“I had a big budget, and I kept saying to my boss, ‘I want this singer.’ Everybody was like, ‘No, no, who is that, who is Madonna? We want the girl who played in Flashdance, Jennifer Beals.’ And I’m like, ‘Jennifer Beals? She is not a singer!’ Finally, I won. I had a big rubber cake with 15 candles and Madonna to jump out of it, and Madonna jumped out that day. The club was packed, and she got the manager of Michael Jackson [Ron Weisner] to come, and I think he signed her right there on the spot.”

Maripol maintained a massive influence on Madonna’s style during the subsequent Like a Virgin era, more than once stopping her star client and friend from becoming a fashion victim. Recalling the cover shoot for the breakthrough sophomore album, Maripol says: “The art director had this idea, which was to have the black Sabbath-type virgin. You know, like black lipstick, black this, black that. And I kept saying to her, ‘We should go for the real thing, come on!’” Eventually Madonna wore her VMAs-immortalized white wedding dress (more on that in a bit), and the result was yet another iconic album cover.

Madonna, Like a Virgin. (Photo: Sire Records)

Maripol also stepped in when she thought the stage costumes for 1984′s Virgin Tour were, well, a little too Prince-ly. “There was a designer, a really nice English girl, Marlene Stewart. And Marlene designed everything [for the tour] very Purple Rain. And I went to Madonna and she showed me everything and I said, ‘Madonna, you’re Madonna. Why don’t you keep a bit of what you have?’ And she listened to me.”

Madonna at Madison Square Garden in 1985. (Photo: Waring Abbott/Getty Images)

Madonna’s peekaboo bridal gown still stands as one of her most memorable looks, of course. Older generations may vividly recall the exact moment when they first saw Elvis twitch his pelvis on TV or when the Beatles first performed on Ed Sullivan, but for children of the ’80s, the defining televised music moment was when Madonna kicked off the first annual MTV Video Music Awards in 1984. No one had ever seen anything like it at the time, and Maripol was there to see it in person.

At first, it seemed like the racy performance might be career suicide for Madonna, Maripol recalls. “I was right there, I saw it happening. I saw what [MTV] did, and I can tell you that they tried to destroy her that day. They went under her skirt with the camera; they were trying to intimidate her.” But of course, the stunt instead stratospherically catapulted Madonna to superstar status.

“Madonna had to break through; I knew she was going to make it big, because I could see how ambitious she was, in a very genuine and sweet way. The wedding outfit did help. I knew that day that she had made it,” says Maripol. “Every journalist was rushing, running, going, ‘Oh my God, who is this girl with the white outfit rolling and crawling on the floor, with crosses in her ears and her name is Madonna? And she’s singing about being like a virgin?’ They were shocked, yes.”

Madonna at the first MTV Video Music Awards, in 1984. (Photo: David McGough/DMI)

Once the aforementioned Madonnabes came out in full force and took over malls everywhere, Maripol had mixed feelings about the trends she’d helped create. One time, when judging a Madonna lookalike contest in 1985 with none other than Andy Warhol at Macy’s (amusingly, the department store that would carry Madonna’s own Material Girl fashion line decades later), Maripol was conflicted. “I saw those young girls, and it was sad. They wanted to mimic Madonna, and they were so young. It was all about the fun and stuff but … oh my God,” she sighs.

Perhaps Maripol had mixed feelings over the fact that she never really got full credit for her pop-culture influence. When mall shops ripped off and mass-produced her designs, Maripol ended up broke. “If only I would have been smart, if only you could copyright the look — which I don’t even know if it existed back then — I would have been a multimillionaire, for sure,” she says. “I did go bankrupt because everybody copied me, every single industry. But genuinely, it doesn’t matter. I swear I don’t care. I became a freelance stylist to survive, and then I had a kid. I bankrupted in 1988 and had a kid in 1990. I’m very happy; I have a beautiful son now.”

Eventually the chameleonic Madonna changed her style, many times over, and while Maripol was still involved with Madonna’s later looks — the sleek bustier outfit Madonna wore for her Marilyn Monroe-esque makeover in the “Papa Don’t Preach” video and the rubber dress she wore in the “Express Yourself” video’s milk-lapping scene were both Maripol creations — eventually Madonna moved on to other designers (like Jean-Paul Gaultier, who created her early-’90s cone bra).

“I think Madonna might have a multiple personality. I know you [think I am kidding], but I think it goes with the pain of losing your mother so young [at age 5]. Multiple personality — that’s my theory,” Maripol muses. “But that is really excellent for her career, because she decides to really change her look, so people will never get bored of her. It’s a genius strategy. She says she changes her music, but come on, the music has always been the same.”

Maripol has certainly kept busy in past years. Among her many endeavors, she has released four art books, most recently Maripola X, a collection of erotic Polaroids from the 1980s. “I have a very young publisher, Adele Jancovici, and we really love each other and she’s very smart, and I trusted her to open my secret box,” she says of that book. “They’re all very sexy pictures of that period, of me mostly, but a lot of other people too. There is one for the first album cover of Madonna that was rejected by the record company that was never used. It’s a genuinely beautiful picture of her, but it was not in line with Madonna as we knew her, with all the rubber and being like a little punky. We had beautiful pictures with her with sheets around her, beautiful lights and makeup, but they were all rejected.”

Maripol signing a book at the launch party for Maripol: Little Red Riding Hood in 2010. (Photo: Neilson Barnard/Getty Images)

Maripol has also art-directed music videos for Cher, D’Angelo, Elton John, and Luther Vandross; contributed regularly to Document magazine; collaborated on a line of vintage-inspired jewelry and T-shirts with Marc Jacobs; launched a jewelry line called Atomic Glamour; and directed Arte Creative’s Keith Haring documentary, The Message. “I also have multiple personalities,” the artist laughs.

With such a bustling career, Maripol once again stresses that she harbors no resentment toward Madonna, reasoning, “I’m very happy for her. And you know what? In a way, I got the freedom to walk around in the street, and she doesn’t have that. And I think it’s very difficult for her to not be able to have that freedom. Once you lose that freedom, does that make you more happy in life? I’ve always kept good relation with her and I really wish her the immense best, and I will get my claim of fame eventually.”

Follow Lyndsey on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google+, Amazon, Tumblr, Spotify.

This article originally ran on Yahoo Music.

“It’s a bit shocking, actually. S—, I’m getting old,” Gracia laughingly tells Yahoo Music when he realizes he won the “Make My Video” contest three whole decades ago, when he was just 21. Gracia credits “True Blue” with launching his legitimate film career, which has included shooting commercials and even working with Ridley Scott. But he recalls that his video almost didn’t make it past MTV’s submission process at all.

“I sent it in, but the day before the deadline, the tape was returned to me with no explanation,” he reveals. “So I threw a fit and asked my dad to please fly me to New York overnight, so I could hand-deliver this thing.” After landing in New York at 6 in the morning and looking up MTV’s Times Square address in the phone book (“There was no Internet then”), a determined Gracia pounded the Manhattan pavement until 9 a.m., waiting for MTV’s office to open.

“I walked downtown, freezing my ass throughout, drinking coffee, just to warm up and keep walking. By the time I made it to MTV, I had an overdose of caffeine; I was hyperventilating and sweating cold when I went up to the counter,” he chuckles. “I go to the secretary and with far more broken English than I have now, I tell her, ‘I came all the way from Miami to deliver this video, because it was sent back to me with no explanation. I worked very hard on this, so it has to be in the competition!’ I still remember her horrified look. So she picks up the phone and calls somebody, and then two somebodys come out looking scared. So she must have said, ‘This guy is just dying for you to grab this tape.’ So I give them the same speech, and they said, ‘Sure, we’ll take a look at it.’ And they took the tape.”

As a relieved Gracia exited MTV’s headquarters, mission accomplished, he spotted a FedEx truck outside being loaded with what appeared to be rejected videotapes. “Later I found out that when they reached 3,000 [contest entries], they couldn’t view them anymore — because they had to view them all, select 10, and play them for hours on rotation for fans to vote, and they physically couldn’t view more than 3,000. They had underestimated Madonna’s popularity! So when I won and I was back [at MTV], they showed me the room where the tapes were, and there was a mountain of them on the floor. I guess I was number 3,001.”

It’s understandable why Gracia was so desperate to make sure his video was considered; the aspiring director had indeed labored hard on this passion project. Teaming up with a slightly older filmmaker, Cliff Guest, whom he’d met while interning on a local low-budget horror flick, he pooled all of his resources to make the shoot happen. Guest and his friends donated equipment, including a homemade steadycam, to the cause. Coral Gables High in Miami granted Gracia use of the school’s entire drama department, and let him film on campus. (Gracia’s younger sister, Anabel, and her two drama-student friends played the leading roles.) A friend’s father lent the crew a 1957 Thunderbird convertible. And four days and 600 bucks later, Gracia and Guest had a winning video on their hands.

Gracia admits that while he was “obsessed with MTV” growing up and “watched it religiously,” he wasn’t a massive Madonna fan; his tastes leaned more towards progressive rock. “I was into Genesis and Queen and all that stuff,” he says. “Madonna was not on my radar… I almost felt bad [for winning], in the sense that I wasn’t a real fan, but then it felt good that I got it right without being a fan. And the fans voted for it, so it’s like a bittersweet thing.” Guest, however, “was a real fan of Madonna” — so he was even more nervous than Gracia to meet the pop star when the directorial duo awkwardly accepted the “Make My Video” prize in person.