8 "Like a prayer" - Madonna
writers Madonna and Pat Leonard
"As close to art as pop music gets" - Rolling Stone
Part of the UncoolTwo50 project, marking the best singles from 1977-99.
Reputations can go down as well as up. Madonna had been the hottest thing in pop during the mid-1980s, smashes like "Into the groove" and "Papa don't preach" had been inescapable. Then she'd run into a bad crowd - married Sean Penn, made the not-very-good movie Who's that girl?, taken up running with a cougar, and dropped out of the media megastar limelight to appear in the Broadway play Speed-the-plow.
So, after an unusually long silence, we had high hopes for "Like a prayer". Madge did not disappoint.
"She's coming back with not just a good Madonna song, but with this totally over the top masterpiece. It's like she's stepped back in time to her "Like a virgin" disco days, pulled out a thumping great dance beat, mixed together all these ideas about religion and lurve in a most Prince-like fashion, and thrown in the massed ranks of a gospel choir to boot. Madonna returns triumphantly. Gasp in amazement." - Smash Hits
"Like a prayer" begins and ends with squealing guitar riffs, moves through basic pop-dance, to a gospel choir finale. Five-and-a-half minutes is long for a single, even in 1989, but it's difficult to say where any flab might lie.
It's the turning point in Madonna's career. She's no longer a bubblegum pop star who sings about falling for boys ("True blue"), breaking up bad relationships ("Causing a commotion"), and occasional balladry ("Live to tell"). No, here we have the proof that Madonna is constantly reinventing herself, striving to push the edge of art. We may have come into 1989 with doubts that Madonna was a great; "Like a prayer" proved she was.
Madonna's prepared to tackle the big burning questions of the late 1980s. Like, racism, and the Catholic church, and family relationships, and growing up. But mostly the Catholic church. "The theme of Catholicism runs rampant. It's me struggling with the mystery and the magic that surrounds it. My own Catholicism is in constant upheaval," Madonna said.
Madonna is causing a commotion. The video for her new single "Like a prayer" has been banned by RAI, apparently it's blasphemous against their local version of Christianity.
Ah, the video. Madonna plays the role of a young woman in the throes of religious ecstacy, kissing a Black man who may or may not be Jesus, giving herself stigmata, bailing him out of jail, there are burning crosses on a hillside, and it's all very confusing. Especially if you're only watching Top of the Pops, where they made a 110-second compilation of clips from near the end of the video, and showed them out of order.
People who did see the video saw something that offended them, and they were not shy in voicing their displeasure. The furore caused the Pepsi corporation to cancel their advert with Madonna, as if there's something wrong with the little girl watching her older self dancing in the middle of a city street.
Anyway, Madonna came out of it richer by about $5 million, her image was burnished as someone feisty and in control of herself, and the Pepsi company looked like cowards. Later in the year, she'd begin her Blonde Ambition tour, then came more music, movies, children, though the next husband is after the year 2000. Madonna continued to make essential music into the new century: we may argue when she stopped being relevant, but everyone agrees she'd jumped the shark by her atrocious interval act at the 2019 Eurovision Song Contest.
For this project's longlist, I limited myself to one Madonna single from two albums. "Open your heart" from True Blue, which is an astonishingly mature song composition. "Deeper and deeper" from Erotica, updating traditional Madonna. "You must love me" from the Evita soundtrack, an under-rated song from a reviled part of her career. And "Frozen" from the album of the same name.
