I’ll just cut to the chase. The reason that I decided to take on this year-long project was this. When I was in high school, I discovered “The Immaculate Collection” and was drawn to specific songs. The most noteworthy was “Like a Prayer,” which resonated with me because I was going through a conflicted time in my Catholic upbringing. The song just spoke to me on a very personal level. The opening passage was especially moving and by the time that I got into the breakdown where the choir takes over, I was overwhelmed with emotion. Few pop songs have ever felt as spiritual. Even if I never listened to a traditional Madonna album until 2020, I had this moment in my life. I can still recall the shivers, closing my eyes at night and feeling something in my soul. I never could hate Madonna because I knew what she was capable of.
That is the anticipation that came with pressing play on the album “Like a Prayer,” which remains widely regarded as one of the greatest pop records in history. Sure, I knew “Cherish,” but the rest was new material to me. I was excited to discover it all in large part because I knew that this was Madonna’s most religious album. How could it not be with a name like that? The idea of prayer and atonement has become a more enriched experience in my later years, and it feels like fate that I would be listening to the album now.
I am midway through my 30th year and here was Madonna in the same condition. However, she was coming off of a far more eventful period. While her tour was a success, Who’s That Girl? (1987) found her acting career stalling. Even the 1988 performance in David Mamet’s play Speed-the-Plow didn’t inspire anything new in her. At most, she was coming off of a notorious marriage to Sean Penn. When we last caught up with them, Madonna had a pop song called “Causing a Commotion” detailing how Penn’s abusive behavior made her feel manic. Things were in a bit of a fix-up, and Madonna had no choice but to turn to her faith as a form of expression. She even stated that:
Once you're a Catholic, you're always a Catholic—in terms of your feelings of guilt and remorse and whether you've sinned or not. Sometimes I'm wracked with guilt when I needn't be, and that, to me, is left over from my Catholic upbringing. Because in Catholicism you are born a sinner and you are a sinner all of your life. No matter how you try to get away from it, the sin is within you all the time.
While “True Blue” had marked a maturation point in her career, her themes were largely impersonal. For “Like A Prayer,” she was about to confront the demons in her life. She had become concerned about her mortality, now older than when her mother was when she passed. Everything had an urgency now. Even her failed marriage gave her some grief, believing that she wasn’t being a good Catholic. That is why she turned to co-writer Patrick Leonard to produce tracks that would make the basis for her next album.
It’s a powerhouse of an album that mixes religion with sexuality. The album cover featured a crucifix hanging over her midriff (a possible reference to The Rolling Stones’ “Sticky Fingers”). She was going to open up about her entire life over the course of 11 songs. This meant songs about her failed marriage, self-confidence, conflicts with her father, and the ongoing AIDS crisis. With just one album she would defiantly change her image from pop star to artist, though not without provoking people with controversial music videos. This is the Madonna we all know today, and it was the start of her not just making art for art’s sake, but finding something more personal in it as a form of expression.
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It would be easy to just highlight why every song feels groundbreaking in small ways. As a pop record, there is something amazing about how it can shift between darker subject matter and more straightforward pop. For instance, she goes from a mournful song about her mother’s death (“Promise to Try”) into the most upbeat song “Cherish.” It doesn’t feel undermined at all, instead reflecting two sides of a similar subject. Both provide this exploration of love and one informs the other. Because of how precious life is, we should “cherish the thought of always having you.” Similarly, “Dear Jessie” is a song about youthful innocence paired with Madonna’s most personal and searing song “Oh Father.” With the latter being a story of feeling hurt by her father marrying after her mother’s death, it’s a complex look at how we change over time.
Even if this is just a collection of songs, there’s often a duality to the tracklisting that makes it far more clever than any album she’s released before. They all play like a confessional, where she’s asking for our forgiveness. Humanity by nature is flawed and we greatly need to accept that. As she’s stated before, it’s impossible to not feel those demons. Even as we express ourselves in a form of catharsis, there’s a good chance that these moments will give us grief. Even something as simple as Madonna’s final image of her mother, one where her lips are sewn shut, informed the music video for “Keep It Together” and created one of the most disturbing music video images in history.
The biggest achievement of “Like a Prayer” is that every song feels subversive. It’s not just in the genre, but that we haven’t really had a pop record like this before. Nowhere in Top 40 had an artist been accused of pushing explicit boundaries while creating some of the most honest pop music imaginable. The fact that “Till Death Do Us Part” manages to be this upbeat pop record while detailing her experience with abuse alone feels strange, but also reflects a personal divide between what religious standards want and the reality of being in a terrible marriage. Time and again, this plays like the most autobiographical record Madonna will ever release, and in that way, it feels like the singular document you need to understand who she was and why she will always matter.
It’s difficult to not just make this about the song “Like a Prayer” because there is so much to get into there. I will always love the opening lines:
Life is a mystery
Everyone must stand alone
I hear you call my name
And it feels like home
Who is she talking about? According to Mary Lambert, who directed the music video, it’s more of a statement of ecstasy. However, there’s enough religious imagery to make it work both ways. The choir featuring Adrea Crouch just moves you to your soul. Prince is there on guitar and the whole thing is a beautiful collage doing its best to “take you there.”
Whether you think the song is spiritual or sexual, the music video went down as one of Madonna’s most notorious moments. Was she improperly using Catholic images when she paired the sight of burning crosses with her love of a black choir singer? Some say they trivialized the KKK’s hate symbol while she claims that art was supposed to provoke. When the altered version used in a Pepsi commercial met the eyes of Pope John Paul II, he had the power to get Catholics to ban the soft drink as well as various carriers. Yes, Madonna got people to not go to KFC and Taco Bell. What have you done in your 30’s?
It was a bold record not only in how she came to terms with her own life but in how she saw the world. “Pray for Spanish Eyes” was another bold call. The late-80s saw a rise in the AIDS crisis where many of her close friends were starting to die. Feeling passionate about the pandemic, she became a spoken advocate for research. Considering how the rest of the album grapples with her mother’s death (such as in the previous song “Keep It Together”), it didn’t feel like a belabored charity track. It was just another part of her life that she felt like expressing. As a vision of what it meant to be a woman conflicted with her own faith in the world, “Like a Prayer” proved to be a towering record.
Even on the shortest track, “Act of Contrition,” she can’t help but push buttons. Whereas every song before had a polished quality, here was a moment of chaos that maybe says the most about how she’s still conflicted with faith. It starts with her quietly praying. Suddenly a guitar rudely comes in. There is a warped version of Andrea Crouch’s choir from “Like a Prayer” playing. Is it back-masking? It definitely has a reversed quality that maybe recalls Madonna looking back on her life as she says a prayer for forgiveness.
The abrupt ending is immediately jarring and also insightful on how Madonna sees her life. Having atoned for her sins over the record, she is telling someone “I have a reservation. What do you mean it’s not in the computer?”
That’s how the album ends. Considering how hallucinatory the rest of the track is, to have Madonna’s gruff voice cry out in frustration makes one wonder what she’s mad about. Is she mad about not getting into a restaurant, or is this the afterlife? Either one presents a conflict of spirituality. If it’s the former, it’s Madonna’s quest to live a better life. If it’s the latter, it’s her at the gates of heaven discovering that her atonement wasn’t enough. Even as you feel the catharsis of the past 52 minutes, you’re left with the feeling that maybe religion isn’t perfect.
She is the premier provocateur and she was ending the decade with her most triumphant statement. Early pressings of the record were dabbed in patchouli oil to smell like incense. They also came with safe sex guidelines in relation to the rise of AIDS. The album would go on to sell 15 million worldwide and her single “Oh Father” would earn her a Grammy Award nomination.
The additional Blond Ambition World Tour was also complete success and continued to find her playing around with her style. Along with the cheeky name (blond, in French, is a masculine term), her concerts became lavish art projects featuring sets that recalled German Expressionism, Catholic imagery, cabaret, comic books, and Art Deco. During the “Like a Prayer” number she would dress up with a crucifix as her back-up dancers dressed like nuns and priests. Much like everything else, it was considered to be pushing boundaries and upset the church. Some saw her decisions as bending gender stereotypes. The Pope went so far as to get one of her stops in Italy canceled. Still, nothing was going to stop her. During her MTV VMA performance, she became one of the first artists to perform the dance style vogue.
No matter how much time has passed and whatever antics Madonna has gotten up to, she has cemented her place in pop culture with “Like a Prayer.” Both the song and album have continually been cited as influencing generations of artists. Rarely had there been an album made by any woman that was as open and vulnerable as this. Was she being vulgar at times? That’s probably true. However, the way she looked beyond the taboo and found this deeper sympathy for human expression inevitably is the sticking point going forward. She will only continue to push more boundaries in the years ahead.
Her next album would find her expanding in a more reassuring direction. Having had multiple failures as an actress, she would return to film with a neo-noir movie directed by Warren Beatty. It was going to be the hit of the year following Batman (1989) reviving comic book movies. With Dick Tracy (1990), she would return with her first film since Who’s That Girl? and bring with her collaborators like renowned Broadway icon Stephen Sondheim. With an Oscar-winning song now to her credit, things were turning around. Her career was on the upswing, and all it took was a little “prayer.”
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