Madonna’s first song to reach one billion views on YouTube might surprise you

Madonna will forever be the queen of pop, but she’s also the queen of groundbreaking music videos. It’s surprising then that, until now, none of them had reached one billion views on YouTube.

From the famously “blasphameous” “Like A Prayer” music video in 1989, to the more recent, seeming reenactment of the massacre at Orlando’s LGBTQ+ nightclub for 2019’s “Gun Control”, Madonna has always pushed boundaries and caused controversy with her music videos.

In the ‘80s and ‘90s, she was the contentious queen of MTV, and managed to redefine the art of the music video for decades to come.

“Human Nature”, “Erotica”, and “Justify My Love” are just a few other videos that caused a stir among right-wingers and religious communities, but they also paved the way for artists like Lady Gaga, Katy Perry and Rihanna to push the envelope in their own videos.

Yet while those Madge clips have whipped up backlash, none of them have whipped up one billion views on YouTube. Even “Vogue” – one of her most cherished videos – has only amassed 189 million views on the platform.

Perhaps surprisingly, the very first Madonna music video to hit one billion views is her Latin American bop “La Isla Bonita”, from her 1986 third studio album, True Blue.

The sultry, hazy clip for “La Isla Bonita” was directed by her long-time collaborator Mary Lambert, and features the Queen of Pop portraying two different women: a Catholic woman and a flamenco dancer.

Its story follows the catholic woman as she weeps and pines for a guitar-strumming street musician outside her window. Following scenes show Madonna in red flamenco attire, dancing about a candlelit apartment and sensually laying on the ground.

A street dance party breaks out outside the apartment, with the Catholic woman rejecting the group’s suggestion that she joins them. The flamenco dancer, however, heads out to move to the music.

The shoot reportedly included over 500 Hispanic extras, and received some complaints regarding cultural appropriation. However, Madonna herself dubbed the song as a tribute to her Latin American fans.

While “La Isla Bonita” is far from Madonna’s biggest hit – it reached number four on the US Billboard 200, and is her 13th biggest selling song in the UK – the music video was a record-breaker.

After the video premiered on MTV in March of 1987, it became the most requested video for 20 consecutive weeks, the longest period of time in the channel’s history at the time.

There are several hundred music videos to receive over one billion music videos on YouTube, including Dua Lipa’s “New Rules”, Billie Eilish’s “Bad Guy” and Mark Ronson’s “Uptown Funk”.

However, many of those videos to reach over one billion views feature Latin pop and Latin hip-hop music, including Daddy Yankee’s “Despacito”, which is the platform’s most-watched music video ever with 8.7 billion views.

It suggests that those with a penchant for Latin pop, or those from the Spanish and Portuguese-speaking regions of the Americas, form a big portion of YouTube’s music video viewership. It may explain why “La Isla Bonita” – Madonna’s first song with Latin influences – is her first to reach one billion views.

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