Notes

THE RECORD

Released in November 1987, You Can Dance was Madonna’s first remix record and her first record devoted entirely to the dance floor. Drawing principally from her first three studio albums, it returned songs including Holiday, Everybody, Physical Attraction, Into the Groove, Over and Over and Where’s the Party to the club environment from which much of her early music had emerged. The mixes extend introductions, repeat vocals, open up instrumental passages and allow the tracks to flow into one another, turning familiar recordings into something closer to a continuous DJ set. The collection also introduced one previously unreleased song, Spotlight, originally recorded during the True Blue sessions.

THE LEGACY

You Can Dance now feels less like an incidental compilation and more like an early statement about the importance of remix culture to Madonna’s work. Released when the full-length remix record was still an unusual proposition for a mainstream pop artist, it treated alternate versions as the main event rather than supplementary material. Its commercial success demonstrated that an audience existed for Madonna beyond the conventional track and record format, while its emphasis on DJs, extended mixes and uninterrupted movement established a thread that would run through her catalogue for decades. From the twelve-inch culture of the 1980s to Finally Enough Love: 50 Number Ones thirty-five years later, Madonna’s relationship with the remix can be traced directly through records such as this.