MADONNA – "Like A Prayer"

Just about the only song Tom has given a 10 to that I actually like.

Completely untouchable. One of the best songs of the entire decade.

‘If this isn’t a 10, ‘ I thought to myself, ‘then nothing is’

Favourit part of the video for me was the bows at the end: It’s OK everybody, we’re just a creative bunch of actor people, no need to get upset, no-one’s died….

Also, that she’s clearly not ‘inviting controversy’ because the area that she works in regards this as free expression of ideas, and no-one else within the troupe of players is either uninvolved or subordinate.

All that, from the closing seconds of the video…

This was one of the first obvious “10” records that I thought of when i stumbled upon this over a year ago.

Didnt care for it much then but like it now.

History would recall this as “Golden Age” Madonna I assume.

I thought Cherish was better but LAP still a fine record.10.

More magic to come from Madge later on.oh hello bunny didnt see you there……

The single actually came into the charts at number two, and I would imagine would have gone straight in at number one most other weeks at this time – Jasonmania was a commercial force to be reckoned with, hence ‘Too Many Broken Hearts’ sticking at number two for all of Madonna’s three weeks at the top.

I was 16 in 1989 and can attest that Madonna’s period of silence – fifteen whole months since her last record! – felt like an eon away from the limelight at the time, and made her comeback feel like a major cultural event, even without the controversy that surrounded this record. Thinking back, I can’t remember just who was offended though. I think that Pepsi abandoned their sponsorship. Perhaps Mary Whitehouse had something to say. Looking back, part of my retrospective misplaced hostility towards this record has been as its key place in the wearisome repeated cultural ritual of “Madonna’s latest controversial comeback!” (silliest example: ‘Erotica’. Or perhaps ‘American Life’), a tri-annual exercise in semiotics and marketing that one is supposed to have a position on.

As Tom alludes to (which is why I’m so surprised he gave it a 10), this record is calculating, bombastic, overambitious and overproduced. Madonna’s vocal is overly mannered, and the song’s central conceit doesn’t move me (perhaps because I’ve never experienced religious fervour?). Yes, it’s very slick – while also sincere in its own way – but for all its hooks, its crescendos, its ebbing and flowing, it leaves me, if not exactly cold, then lukewarm.

@#9 – 23 Daves expertly pinpoints the big problem with LAP, namely “an utter lack of subtlety about the entire thing which slaps you in the face like a million dollar fizzy drink advert, or a very finely sculptured charity single.” Touché…

I don’t like her voice on this one as much as previous records. Also I have an unfortunate allergy to gospel choirs on anything, even if there’s a good reason for their appearance 🙁
Still there’s obviously something pretty good here – the chorus melody is damn catchy, for instance.

Yep, the gospel choir and hugeness of this thing makes it Madonna’s equivalent of Foreigner’s ‘I Want To know What Love Is’.

I’m so glad this gets a 10. This is by far my favourite Madonna single.

Harder, rounded, so sure of herself and her place within the pop canon, Madonna comes to us with a statement of self. The pop starlet came of age with “Live To Tell”, but we know that arriving at a new place and actually knowing it are not the same thing. LTT addressed her past, her secrets. Never really giving away much, but allowing us a glimpse into the world of Madonna. LTT flirts with economy, by saying so much but revealing very little. “Like A Prayer” expertly plays with economy. How do you reveal so much by saying so little? “Life is a mystery/Everyone must stand alone” encapsulates the fundamental argument between faith and atheism in 8 words. Beat that Dawkins! Madonna has questioned her faith and continues to do so. She skips along that narrow margin between the divine and the profane, which brings us to the video.

Madonna collaborator Mary Lambert (Holiday, Like A Virgin) directs the video.
The common misconception with the video was that Leon Robinson’s character was a black Christ. The truth is that he portayed St Martin De Porres, the patron saint of mixed race people and television among others. Madonna displays stigmata and dances in front of burning crosses. Who is she provoking? Those who deserved to be provoked: the closed minds of racists and religious fundamentalists. A brave step in a conservative America. Controversial enough to force Pepsi to pull their campaign using LAP in their advert.
Accoring to Wiki: “The video features Madonna as a woman who witnesses the murder of a white girl by three white men, and the arrest of a black man who attempted to intervene and save the victim, but was falsely accused of the crime. After his arrest, Madonna flees to the church for safety, and she prays to Saint Martin de Porres, then she kisses him and he, crying, comes to life. Madonna joins a gospel choir singing and dancing the song and afterward, she testifies for the black man’s innocence which ends with him about to be released. In the end of the video, we can tell that it was all a theatre play.”
Of course this is a huge distraction from the song’s overall message: the blurred boundary between sex and religion, which Tom nails above.
Personally, the song has been niggling away at my attitude towards spirituality for 21 years. Even when I have questioned the validity of religion or have been seduced by the cold logic of atheism (Dawkins again) LAP has been merrily cropping up on the radio or MTV, reminding me I LOVE THIS SONG! How could I buy into a world without mystery or the concept of a divine influence, even if I doubt organised religion is a legitimate conduit for belief. Madonna say it’s ok to believe and that’s enough for me.

# 1 (2) – this one took a while to post alright Tom.

Let’s leave the long silence and big comeback to Madonna eh.

Very nice essay Tom. Well done, esp. about alerting people to the lifelessness of the Immaculate Collection mix of LaP (which is *still* better than the Immaculate versions of Into the Groove and Holiday – that collection is really a horror, systematically draining away peak pop moments).

The hype/controversy about the vid. really did seem to overwhelm the song a bit if you were in the US. And while Madonna came out of that looking like a very sharp manipulator of all around her (maximizing her publicity, while pocketing Pepsi’s $5 million, while hardly having the ad. shown so she was never tainted by the association – ‘that’s some kind of evil genius at work’ is how it felt IIRC), I for one definitely kept my distance from the whole LaP album for quite some time as a result (I think it was a great soul-II-soul-y single mix of Keep It Together that finally won me over – the album version of that track is lame).

Anyhow, I think I’m typical in finding that LaP has really grown on me. The self-importance and theatricality of the ‘Life is a mystery…’ opening irritated me at the time, but I like, even love it now (and I’m more sympathetic to people’s spiritually questing sides than I used to be. M. as f’ed up girl just trying to find her own peace of mind – I buy that sentiment from her now I guess.).

I still find the stop-starts of the first minute or two of the song fumbling and somewhat musically unnatural (I think that when the drums cut out each time we need the ‘one’ at the beginning of the next bar to close the musical phrase.), so this can’t be a 10 for me, but the head of steam the thing builds up by the end is v. impressive. So, for me, LaP (single version) starts great, and ends (last 3 minutes really) brilliantly but has some wobbles in between. A solid:
9
p.s. I’ve been listening to a lot of v.early ’70s Labelle for the last few days. Those guys and their unbelievable bands could have *killed* LaP. But they’d never have figured out a way to screw Pepsi out of 5 mill and come up smelling roses. M.’s a dominating, fascinating, so-big-and-famous-that-the-music-almost-doesn’t-matter pop presence at this point, so, really, it’s impressive that the music holds up as well to scrutiny as it does. LaP is a v. good song and record, one that’s grown, improved, acquired depth as time has passed. That doesn’t happen often.

Maybe the idolators understand the magic of pop better than anybody else, even, or especially, the idols they worship; since where the idols can get rattled, depressed, uncertain, pig out on drugs, turn up four hours late for a concert, become negligent with regard to their duties to the Inland Revenue, make crappy records, or die, the idolators will happily accept and embrace all of it; because they are dizzy with unquestionable and unquestioned love for those they choose to idolise, whatever their idols may do, and however painfully they might hurt them. If the new album’s substandard, it’s because we aren’t quite worthy of it, we’re not advanced or close enough to appreciate what drove the artist to extract ten-year-old rejects from their bottom drawers and pass it off as new music. As with football teams, or parents, we stand by them, regardless. Not for idolators the exhaustive, exhausting schemata of the open to and sceptical of everything “critics,” those who can securely classify the differing degrees of their love for different aspects of the same anatomy, the people who just know that the Verve lost something vital when they gained that auxiliary definite article, who are fully aware that Morrissey or Björk are career variables whom the rational would only approach every five years or so. But then, what truck has pop ever had with rationalism, especially when it comes to adding up the total bill for territories gained or souls lost? After all, we idolise idols precisely because of their superhuman status; they can do things we can’t, or won’t. They are never like us; even with the alleged democratisation of punk it quickly became clear that only John Lydon could ever hope to be John Lydon.

From her name upwards, Madonna knew that she had to be worshipped if she were to mean anything, and that another couple of years of “La Isla Bonita”s would lower her perspective to a curious over-shoulder gaze from newly disinterested consumers. So she had to come back with a blockbuster, something that Debbie or Gloria or even Belinda couldn’t have achieved, for all their various reasons. When the single of “Like A Prayer” came out it seemed to stop the rest of pop, momentarily but vitally; as with “Two Tribes,” it made everyone else in the Top 40 at the time seem like trespassers on newly privatised land.

The perspective of Madonna aspiring to God(dess)hood on “Like A Prayer” – she gives a barely perceptible whisper of “God” at the beginning of the track before the backwards guitars flood in and immediately slam, smashed, into a decisive wall of steel in order to suggest that all “rock” had been leading to this – has to be considered in balance with the rest of the Like A Prayer album, which focuses, at times very sorely, on the fallacies and mortalities of mothers (“Promise To Try”), fathers (“Oh Father”), errant husbands (“’Till Death Us Do Part”) and Prince (“Love Song”). Along with Erotica it is Madonna’s most palpably human record.

From the intro onwards – and the song may or may not have involved his active participation, as musician, writer and/or producer – it is also hard to imagine “Like A Prayer” without the immense precedent of Prince to inspire it; here is the dayglo Dadaism familiar from Sign ‘O’ The Times, mixed with peculiar logic into that brew of unquenchable spiritual faith (“The Cross”), although the influence of the Pet Shop Boys (especially “It’s A Sin”) can hardly be discounted. “Like A Prayer” is perhaps the only pop single of the late eighties which could use a gospel choir and get away with it; Andrae Crouch and his Disciples are an indispensable part of the song’s architecture, rather than a tacky addendum. The use of the church organ is as unarguable and definitive as, say, Scott Walker’s “Manhattan” or Arcade Fire’s “Intervention.”

The song itself is all about worship, and Madonna seems intent on arguing passionately against the opening proposal of “Life is a mystery, everyone must stand alone” since she goes on to demonstrate how impossible it is to live a life of any description on one’s own. As the video depicted the tableau of the black saint and the sinner lady, so does Madonna blend spiritual and carnal with a recklessness comparable with the Spencer of Cookham; thus the line “When you call my name, it’s like a little prayer” could have been sung by the Ronettes or the Shangri-Las a generation earlier, but then we get the more explicit “In the midnight hour, I can feel your power” – and the question here is: who is worshipping, and who is asking to be worshipped? Note that it’s the “you” who is calling Madonna’s name but this is enough to get her “down on my knees.” And later, there’s the ambiguous “You’re in control, just like a child/Now I’m dancing” – so again the idol here could be parent as well as, or instead of, lover or God; and really the three (the Holy Trinity!) all merge into one (“Just like a dream, you are not what you seem”).

The record really takes off immediately after the second verse, when the dual basses of Randy Jackson and Guy Pratt make their dramatic entrance underneath the church organ and the intensity of the “Life is a mystery” couplet is doubled; eventually it resolves into an epic call-and-response between Madonna and choir and absolution, or orgasm, is reached – but then recall the end of the video, after the burning crosses and the stigmata, when the black Christ figure is revealed merely to be a prisoner in a police cell; the curtains draw and reopen as Madonna and her cast take a bow (another clue to the future there). Illusion, a six-minute diversion – or can it be mistaken for transcendence?

Despite the hopped-up controversy of the video and Pepsi’s precipitous cold feet, all that Madonna really does with “Like A Prayer” is amplify the age-old conflict between spiritual and carnal in art and attempt to resolve it by sheer force of will and personality. Of course, throughout the record we are kept aware that this worship is “like a prayer” rather than a prayer in itself, rather than, say, “My Prayer” by the Platters – a song and group whose roots both go back deep into an unreachable church. If finally “Like A Prayer” has to take second place to “Running Up That Hill” – not simply because Kate Bush is, in the end, the greater and profounder talent, but also because where “Like A Prayer” compares to God (passive), Bush is intent on making a deal with God (active). And it was far from the only radical single in the charts of the period. But it was, by necessity first and desire second, the biggest; it possesses a grace which “Hey Jude” couldn’t quite grasp, it drops the mask, just as Madonna drops the blonde in the video, and reveals its singer as someone who feels, breathes, cries and shits just like the people who idolise her. Pop was obliged to take a breath, and count again.

After being over-exposed for almost the whole period of 1984 to 1987, she went away and came back as ‘artist’, hence this single and the album was an Event back in 1989. I remember the hippy rumours : the album sleeve smelt of patchouli oil and she did a few hippy-ish photoshoots (long Woodstock red hair).

This is where Madonna began fusing her media manipulation savvy with a Bowie-esque set of identities over the decade – she started hanging out with Sandra Bernhard etc, doing an ‘are we/aren’t we?’ interview on Letterman. I remember Martin Amis, at the time the ‘Sex’ book came out on 1992 commenting how, given the nudity, the stuff about her marriage etc, the one thing Madonna never revealed about herself was the creative process – as someone else said above, the music was something to hang the star persona on.

But this is about the music: it’s a great pop song, off a great album, which maybe in retrospect seems just a little too calculated, with not a chord, word or beat out of place, so I give it a 9.

Btw that link/comparison with Running Up That Hill (which came out 25 years ago this month…) is inspired.

@28, 30. But ‘Running up that Hill’ isn’t a relig. song as such, right? It’s about men and women not understanding each others’ perspectives. God just enters as a strictly hypothetical, magic amulet to effect the desired understanding. Kate could just as easily have said something like “If I only could/click my red shoes together/and get us to swap our places…” No genuinely active deal-making is anticipated, and, goodness knows, a gospel choir on the track would have been farcical. So the comparison doesn’t work.

I understand that the point’s a tricky one, after all ‘God only knows’ isn’t officially a relig. song either, the endlessly repeated word ‘God’ notwithstanding. And yet and yet there’s an overall hymn-like, gloriousness to that tune and its backing so that some quasi-religious feeling sneaks in after all!

XTC’s Dear God was a pretty big ‘college radio’ hit in the US throughout 1988 and 1989. And go here for what the President at the time (Bush I) thought about atheists.

Wonderful reviews from Tom and punctum, which have me dithering over my score even as I write. “Like a Prayer” was certainly a watershed moment in my own appreciation of Madonna, whose work held less and less interest for me in the late 1980s. This demanded attention, though, and when I shared a flat in 1991 with a Madonna fan it became my clear favourite.

I never thought of it as a 10, though, but now I know why: like Billy @5, I’m amazed to realize that I’ve been listening to the wrong version all along, thanks to my non-fan impulse to get the compilation rather than the original album. The single mix (on the video) is clearly superior, and has to bump up the 8 I was considering giving it.

I’m still shy of a 10, I think. In comparison to many of the late-’80s number ones, it clearly stands out, but something about it just doesn’t push my personal 10 button. So, a 9 for now.

#32: Why do you always have to be one of these people who searches to find the one wrong thing in any argument?

An excellent post and lots of excellent comments, worth the wait! Nothing to add other than, re-listening to the album right now, it’s extraordinarily varied (as Punctum points out, prob. influenced by Sign O The Times’ omnivorous appetite) and high end from start to finish. True Blue really pales alongside it.

Speaking of pale, I’m sure other blondes had gone to the dark side to show their serious intent before this, but can’t think of any off the top of my head.

Quoting “a little prayer” might be Madonna positioning herself alongside Aretha and strong women, but by singing “in the midnight hour” two lines later I’d guess she’s more likely to be signposting a switch to soulful ie serious pop, in the grand/dying 80s tradition.

Re: 38. The first blonde to follow Madonna’s lead and go dark to signify a change of intent was, of couse, Tracy Tracy of The Primitives that summer, as ‘Sick Of It’ failed to capture the public imagination. I wonder if Chris Roberts was disappointed…

#38/40 Long preceding Madonna was Debbie Harry for the disastrous “Koo Koo ” solo LP in 1981. When that went down the tube she grabbed a blonde wig for the cover of Blondie’s next LP “The Hunter” but it was too late.

Great write-up Tom – especially considering that it’s something of an impossible task to sum this song up in such a short space, it’s weirdly hard even to write a comment that feels adequate. So much packed into it – the most impressive aspect of it, in terms of craft, is the ease with which it reflects its themes of religious and sexual rapture in its own sound – even more so than the inevitable (but gloriously so) gospel choir, it’s moments like that amazing key change entering the bridge.

It’s one of the Madonna songs that I find most emotionally affecting – it’s almost cathartic, this huge resolution of all that sex/religion tension. So dismissing it as attention-seeking controversy isn’t quite the right angle for me, though obviously it’s part of it; what I hear isn’t Madonna starting (or continuing) beef with the Catholic Church, but her laying to rest the beef it started with her, freeing herself from the hooks with which it trapped her as a child. I hear it partially as revenge: a woman who knows that all eyes and ears are on her, and using her voice to conflate religious worship with oral sex in all those minds. And, from a more generous angle, affirming the purity and holiness of sex and sexuality, completely exploding the Church-fuelled idea that it was something to be ashamed of or guilty about. And I don’t hear this as mere controversy-seeking; taking on an institution in this manner is brave and gutsy, no matter how famous you are yourself.

So, the song gets an easy [10]; the album, though, I find totally overrated. It has its moments – I love “Oh Father” particularly – but a lot of it lives in the shadow of the title track; it definitely feels like it got critical props because of a) critics making up for previously underrating or dismissing her, b) its defining characteristics being serious, critic-friendly ones. I’d put it beneath Erotica, True Blue, Madonna, Bedtime Stories and maybe even Ray Of Light.

Tom also OTM about The Immaculate Collection; it was my introduction to all of M’s ’80s hits, and I loved them from the off so it couldn’t have botched them to the point of total wreckage, but compared to the originals those remixes really are travesties. So wrong that it’s the default entry point to her back catalogue.

#45 I think the UK response to all that stuff was a bit muted after Ken Russell, Life of Brian et al; it didn’t have that sort of impact. We had moved on to the Rushdie controversy at this point in time.

yes i agree the battles had largely already been fought, what i mean is that there was a pleasure in they’re having been safely won over here — in our place for our times — as opposed to an active “bored now, this is old news” response, which seems a jadedness too far…

I like this but only up to a 6 or 7 as I’m another who finds it to be more than a bit overcooked as Madonna falls prey to “superstar comes back with BIG single” syndrome and does far more than she needs to with it. But, as the teachers say, full marks for effort. She does sound good on it though and I loved the LAP album (and wish I still had my copy with the perfumed inner sleeve)