Like A Prayer

This was the first Madonna record I bought new right on release. I'd read her interview in Vanity Fair shortly before it came out, and that's where I realized she was definitely going to be transcending her earlier work with this album. A buddy of mine said she was going to be grabbing her crotch in one of her videos - Michael Jackson style - based on a shot he'd seen somewhere, but I thought he was nuts. Well...

Statues coming to life, stigmata, burning crosses, making
out with a black guy...yeah, the haters went totally apeshit.

"Like A Prayer" of course was a controversy-driven monster the likes of which nobody had seen before on the pop charts. Introduced via a little morality play of a video, it functioned as a pretty good test of who was bright enough to understand what a metaphor is and who wasn't. More importantly for Madge though, the song itself was unlike anything she'd done before. Improbably gospel inspired, and with that blistering guitar intro from Prince, it was also lyrically far more sophisticated than any of her earlier work, and deftly mixed R&B and pop in a way Madonna just hadn't done before. For a lot of people, it remains their favorite Madonna song.

Life is a mystery

Everyone must stand alone

I hear you call my name

And it feels like home

Gotta hand it to her, she collected a big fat paycheck ("selling out"), filmed a by-the-numbers crappy rock star music video commercial, and then rendered it completely unusable within a single day. That was some brilliant shit!

I am laughing at you stupid Pepsi bitches. Fuck you, and thanks for the money!

And that theme - gospel and R&B inflected pop - continued on the record's next track and second single "Express Yourself". With an exquisite, David Fincher-directed, Metropolis-inspired video (featuring a cross-dressing Madonna and that crotch grab), she really outdid herself on this one by releasing videos with two different mixes of the track. One edition, played on VH1 as I recall, used the more pop album mix of the song, while the other version of the video used a more dance/club oriented, technoized mix (my favorite). Critics were all over her for appearing in chains in the video, but as Madonna pointed out, the chain isn’t held by anybody - indeed, in the video it seems to function more as a lure. The lyrics meanwhile are all about empowerment - it’s no coincidence that Gaga cribbed from it a quarter century later for “Born This Way”.

Don't go for second best baby

Put your love to the test

You know you know you've got to

Make him express how he feels

And maybe then you'll know your love is real

'30s glamour, naked on a chain and a crotch grab. Michael Jackson suddenly looked kinda pathetic in comparison.

The most expensive video ever shot at the time of its release, the back to back monster hits catapulted Madonna straight to the top of the music industry hierarchy, eclipsing a fading Michael Jackson and increasingly erratic Prince. Probably for the first time since Dinah Shore dominated the airwaves in the ‘40s, the music business was ruled by a queen and not a king.

And while we’re talking about royalty and Prince, we get her widely-anticipated duet with the Purple One on "Love Song", the record's first - and by far largest - dud. I think pretty much everybody was shocked by how lazy and half-arsed this track is. My suspicion has always been that Prince, with his star descending, had no real interest in helping Madonna out too much, and so deliberately delivered a crap track. Madge went ahead and used it anyhow, in hopes of establishing some artistic cred. And for the most part that worked for Madonna - critics certainly heaped a bunch of praise on her for "growth" with this album. Meanwhile, if Prince thought delivering a dud would hurt her then that plan spectacularly backfired, because pretty much all of her material on this record is better than this P.O.S., so "Love Song" just ends up making him look like a hack.

Gee, I wonder what inspired this, Sean...

Madge had never revealed too much about herself prior to this record, so "'Till Death Do Us Part" came as a tremendous surprise, a clear journal regarding her failed marriage to Sean Penn, with a genuinely chilling end. This was way less "True Blue" and much more in keeping with the increasingly serious, decreasingly electronic tenor of pop music at the end of the '80s, and the rise of acts like 10,000 Maniacs, Suzanne Vega and REM, who were themselves just starting to become major pop stars at this time. There are a slew of guitars all over Like A Prayer - electric, acoustic, steel (as on this track), you name it - representing a massive shift in Madonna's sound. The remarkable thing is, she pulls it off without a hitch - nothing sounds especially strained or unnatural.

Speaking of REM, "Promise To Try", an homage to her late mother, isn't all that different from pop ballads to come from that act, like "Nightswimming". I didn't love this cut at the time, although I respected it, but in hindsight it was a really effective snapshot of where the market was going and if anything demonstrates she was riding the bleeding edge and not just following the crowd with this album.

Erotic but (surprisingly) sweet - almost cherubic

She could keep it sweet without producing pap, too. "Cherish" is one of her most infectious tunes ever, an earworm with great pop lyrics, including one of the most-perfect little couplets I've ever heard in a song ("Romeo and Juliet, they never felt this way I bet..."). The video was a Herb Ritts delight as well, Madonna the mermaid frolicking in the surf and sand complete with a cherubic child. This kind of uplifting track would become an increasingly rare component of her output going forward, which is too bad as I feel that "Cherish" - unlike some of the preceding album's lighter tracks - is a perfectly crafted little jewel that's simply transcendent.

The '60s psychedelia and revisionism of "Dear Jesse" isn't quite as successful - Tears For Fears and others (Prince!) had already beaten her to the punch here leaving "Jesse" feeling perhaps a bit stale. The song has grown on me over the years though, and the chorus was always a particularly memorable passage. She was at least aiming for something timeless here, even if it isn't entirely successful.

“Oh Father" featured another brilliant Fincher video, this time cribbing from Citizen Kane instead of Metropolis. It's a beautiful, stark piece crafted for a beautiful, stark song, one that gives us insight into just how badly the loss of her mother and distance of her father traumatized her, leaving her something of an emotional void that can never be completely filled.

Maybe someday

When I look back I'll be able to say

You didn't mean to be cruel

Somebody hurt you too

But the song unfortunately bears more than a passing resemblance to the superior "Live To Tell" off Like A Prayer’s predecessor, and that's a pity, because lyrically this thing feels even more charged - and as sincere - as "'Till Death Do Us Part". Unfortunately I think it'll always be destined to dwell in the shadow of "Live To Tell" and come up a bit lacking as a result.

She certainly looked the part of the glamorous superstar.

It isn't the only track that looks backward stylistically, either. The end of the record harks back perhaps a bit too strongly to Madonna's past - it doesn't push forward nearly as hard as the first half. If "Oh Father" recalls a single song from its predecessor, "Keep It Together" recalls her whole oeuvre prior to this album. Which perhaps isn't surprising, since it's one of the two Stephen Bray tracks on the record, but while I like it and its production meshes well enough with the rest of the record - and its personal themes are much richer than what she'd usually reveal before - it seems a bit more by-the-numbers than the album's other hits.

There is a touch of Sly to this cut though, and to her credit Madonna got on the '70s retro bandwagon really early on. I always thought Lenny Kravitz with "Let Love Rule" and Edie Brickell with "What I Am" were the ones who really kicked that into high gear, but Madonna was cribbing from the ‘70s - in a more subtle way - at around the same time.

"Spanish Eyes" is another dip back into the "La Isla Bonita" faux-Latin well, featuring her worst vocals on the record. They aren't quite botching "Love Don't Live Here Anymore" bad, but it's close in spots, strident and pitchy. I've always thought lyrically it was a somewhat presumptuous attempt to comment on the then-epidemic of gang violence in Los Angeles, wedded to a somewhat bland, stereotypical melody. Sonically, this cut is also a throwback to True Blue, and doesn't quite fit in with the rest of the record, which perhaps is why it was exiled toward the end.

Finally, we get the off-the-wall, eclectic "Act Of Contrition" to close the album, by far the most experimental thing Madge had dared to place on a record up 'till this point. Featuring more guitar squalls courtesy Prince, it's an amazingly loose, self-mocking and totally surprising cut that almost makes up for Like A Prayer's eleventh-hour artistic retrenchment. It’s also smarter than I originally gave it credit for - I initially took the lyrics literally, ‘till I realized recently the bit about the “reservation” at the end of the track doesn’t pertain to a hotel or restaurant, but instead (in Prince-like fashion) depicts somebody who thinks they’re getting into heaven, only to learn they aren’t on the list. Clever girl!

Fly, bitch!

From a sound quality standpoint, the album is crisp, with the mixes somewhat more transparent than on True Blue (no doubt due to it being a digital recording), but there's also a dryness and a creeping brittleness - common with a slew of records from this era. There's deep bass here, but the midbass feels anemic and thin in many spots - intentionally, clearly. It isn't an unpleasant listen by any means, but I don't find the sound of the record to be nearly as enjoyable as on her debut or Like A Virgin, although perhaps the naturalness of some of it, the increasing amount of acoustic instruments, and the clarity makes it somewhat more interesting to listen to than True Blue.

Madge lets her inner hippy freak flag fly

The patchouli-scented cover (mine still faintly smells of it) was a departure for Madonna as well - no face, just hands, jewels and a belly button. Involving another of the senses - smell - was just a brilliant move on her part, immediately casting the record as something far more earthy and organic than anything she’d produced before - clearly, she was leaving that past behind. Plus there was one other unusual and telling inclusion - an insert slipped in with the liner notes, giving listeners “The Facts About AIDS”:

If there was any question after the “Open Your Heart” video whether Madonna was a friend to the ‘mos, this pretty much answered it. Love her or hate her, this was a fantastic thing to do and something we should never forget (and yet, I couldn’t successfully Google the full text of it and was lucky to find this image, so…).

With the massive commercial and increasing critical success enjoyed by this record, you'd think she'd have spun up Like A Prayer Vol II within twelve months or so. But Madonna had other plans, and her film career would drive her to deliver her biggest departure yet, an album that was something of a commercial and critical flop - the first really of her career - but that also produced one of the biggest hit singles of all time and arguably her signature tune.

Well, she was always full of surprises, wasn't she?

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In case you missed 'em, here are overviews of Madonna, Like A Virgin, True Blue. and Who's That Girl / You Can Dance.