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When Madonna Louise Ciccone was 15, she put on a black silk cape and the biggest platform shoes she owned, snuck out of her bedroom window in suburban Michigan, and hitchhiked to Detroit to see David Bowie live.

The night changed her life—not just because the music was great, but because, as she put it more than 20 years later while accepting Bowie’s induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, “it was great theater.

Here was this beautiful, androgynous man, just being so…perverse.” More than a musician, Madonna—like Bowie was—is a supreme cultural curator.