Music videos and performances

In The Madonna Companion, biographers Allen Metz and Carol Benson noted that more than any other recent pop artist, Madonna had used MTV and music videos to establish her popularity, and enhance her recorded work. According to them, many of her songs have the imagery of the music video in strong context, while referring to the music. The media and public reaction towards her most-discussed songs like "Papa Don't Preach", "Like a Prayer" or "Justify My Love", had to do with the music videos created to promote the song and their impact, rather than the song itself. Madonna's initial music videos, reflected her American and Hispanic mixed street style and a flamboyant glamour. She was able to transmit her avant-garde downtown New York fashion sense to the American audience. The imagery and incorporation of Hispanic culture and Catholic symbolism, continued with the music videos from the True Blue era. Author Douglas Kellner noted, "such 'multiculturalism' and her culturally transgressive moves turned out to be highly successful moves that endeared her to large and varied youth audiences". Madonna's Spanish look in the videos became the fashion trends of that time, in the form of boleros and layered skirts, accessorizing with rosary beads and crucifix like the video of "La Isla Bonita". Academics noted that with her videos, Madonna was subtly reversing the usual role of male as the dominant sex. This symbolism and imagery was probably the most prevalent in the music video for "Like a Prayer". The video included an African American church choir, Madonna attracted to a statue of a black saint, and singing in front of burning crosses. This mix of the sacred and the profane upset the Vatican and resulted in the Pepsi commercial withdrawal.
Madonna's emergence occurred during the advent of MTV, and "with its almost exclusively lip-synced videos, ushered in an era in which average music fans might happily spend hours a day, every day, watching singers just mouth the words." The symbiotic relationship between music video and lip-syncing, led to a desire for the spectacle and imagery of music video to be transferred to live stage shows. Chris Nelson of The New York Times reported: "Artists like Madonna and Janet Jackson set new standards for showmanship, with concerts that included not only elaborate costumes and precision-timed pyrotechnics but also highly athletic dancing. These effects came at the expense of live singing."Thor Christensen of the Dallas Morning News, commented that while Madonna earned a reputation for lip-syncing during her 1990 Blond Ambition World Tour, since then she has reorganized her performances by "stay[ing] mostly still during her toughest singing parts and [leaves] the dance routines to her backup troupe ... [r]ather than try to croon and dance up a storm at the same time." She was instruemntal in introducing RF microphones, generally known as Boom Mounting — the use of a headset boom fastened around the head or over the top of the head, with the microphone capsule on a boom arm that extends to the mouth. Later, it came to be known as the "Madonna-mic" because she was one of the first major performers to use them.