JC
Madonna’s music a made an enormous impact. Let’s think about how her songs hit even harder than they might have otherwise because of the world – Ronald Reagan’s America – she lived in.
- MUSIC FOCUS: Madonna.
- ACTIVITY FOCUS: Context study.
- What is the song about? What are the key ideas being presented?
- How would you describe Madonna’s character as revealed by these lyrics?
- How far is your response to the poem informed by the fact that you’re listening to it in 2024?
- Do you think listeners in the 1980s might had a different response to Madonna and the song in the 1980s? Would they identify characteristics of hers that might not necessarily stand out so much in the modern era?
- How do the articles expand your understanding of the time in which ‘Like A Prayer’ was written? Which characteristics/feelings do you think seem more pronounced as a result of your understanding the context?
- Could you compare the criticism to that received by Oscar Wilde after people first read ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray? Compare the ‘pop’ stars’ reactions to that criticism.
- What consideration might Madonna have given to her audience when constructing the ‘Like A Prayer’ project? What messages is she sending to her listeners? What role is Madonna given by the writer of the final Guyliner article? Does her role feel similar to, for example, Wilde’s? Is the artist’s prupose always the same or does it depend on the context?
Madonna: ‘Like A Prayer’
RELEASED IN 1989
Life is a mystery
Everyone must stand alone
I hear you call my name
And it feels like home
When you call my name, it’s like a little prayer
I’m down on my knees, I wanna take you there
In the midnight hour, I can feel your power
Just like a prayer, you know I’ll take you there
I hear your voice
It’s like an angel sighin’
I have no choice
I hear your voice
Feels like flying
I close my eyes
Oh God I think I’m fallin’
Out of the sky
I close my eyes
Heaven help me
When you call my name, it’s like a little prayer
I’m down on my knees, I wanna take you there
In the midnight hour, I can feel your power
Just like a prayer, you know I’ll take you there
Like a child
You whisper softly to me
You’re in control
Just like a child
Now I’m dancing
It’s like a dream
No end and no beginning
You’re here with me
It’s like a dream
Let the choir sing
When you call my name, it’s like a little prayer
I’m down on my knees, I wanna take you there
In the midnight hour, I can feel your power
Just like a prayer, you know I’ll take you there
Life is a mystery
Everyone must stand alone
I hear you call my name
And it feels like home
Just like a prayer (oh-oh), your voice can take me there (oh-oh)
Just like a muse to me (oh-oh), you are a mystery (oh-oh)
Just like a dream (oh-oh), you are not what you seem
Just like a prayer, no choice your voice can take me there
What is the definition of a Madonna?
- : the Virgin Mary. 2. : a painting or statue representing the Virgin Mary.
Like a Prayer — Madonna’s hit teased and tested America’s faultlines on race, sex and justice
The singer’s 1988 song threw everything into the mix — but her sponsors were displeased
You are Madonna. It is 1988. Your career has gone up like a rocket (three rough-and-ready but charming dance singles; the blockbuster of “Like a Virgin”; the role of your life — in multiple senses — in Desperately Seeking Susan) and is now coming down like a stick (Shanghai Surprise). You have just turned 30, which in the 1980s makes you, as a female singer, ancient. Your ration of fame appears to be definitively over.
What do you do?
What Madonna did was this. Based on some musical sketches by Patrick Leonard, her long-time producer, she concocted a single that combined funk, gospel, rock and Catholic guilt. “I’m down on my knees,” she sings, suggestively. The two of them threw everything into the mix: a guitar solo from Prince, a rock trio, church organ and a full gospel choir.
A great single, back then, was worth having — but the pinnacle of fame for a popular musician in the 1980s was to appear in a Pepsi advertisement. David Bowie and Tina Turner took the cola shilling. Michael Jackson’s hair famously caught fire during filming. Madonna signed up to hers in 1989 to coincide with “Like a Prayer”, so that it would give a synergistic boost to the launch of the single, its album and the accompanying world tour.
But just after the relatively saccharine Pepsi commercial started to be shown (during the audience behemoths of the Superbowl and The Cosby Show), she also released her own video. This one was very different: involving police brutality, the arrest of an innocent African-American, Madonna in a church kneeling at the feet of a black saint who then comes to life; a lawn of flaming crosses. Everyone who wanted to take offence, took offence. The black saint was widely misinterpreted as being a black Jesus, which caused even more offence. More explicitly even than the song, the video teased and tested America’s perennial faultlines on race and sex and injustice.
In those days the Catholic church still wielded immense cultural power, as Sinéad O’Connor would find four years later when she tore up a photo of the Pope on television and received threats of violence from everyone from Frank Sinatra downwards. The video for “Like a Prayer” sparked calls for a boycott of the singer (to which the Pope himself added his name) and of Pepsi. The company dropped Madonna like a hot potato, allowing her to keep her $5m fee. Taking the money and retaining her credibility must have felt like heaven.
‘Like a Prayer’ Was Madonna’s First Masterpiece
Like a Prayer certainly confirmed Madonna’s flair for fun; with its kindergarten-friendly lyrics about “pink elephants and lemonade” and treacle-sweet, Beatles-y psychedelia, “Dear Jessie” remains one of her most charming singles. But the album as a whole, Madonna’s first undisputed masterpiece, also proved once and for all that she was a meaningful artist, not just an uncommonly savvy and driven pop star. She bared her navel on the album’s cover, and her soul in its songs.
Even three decades later, it’s difficult to separate the album from the scandal that surrounded its release. When the brilliantly provocative “Like a Prayer” video debuted in February 1989, just a day after the release of a high-profile Pepsi commercial starring Madonna, the Vatican and various religious groups condemned the clip for including allegedly blasphemous imagery. Here was Madonna dancing in front of burning crosses, kissing a Black Saint, and displaying what looked like stigmata on her palms.
As the video continued causin’ a commotion, Madonna stood by it, telling the New York Times that “Art should be controversial, and that’s all there is to it.” Pepsi bosses were so keen to distance themselves from the button-pushing singer that they pulled the commercial without trying to take back her $5 million fee.
Today, Madonna still seems fabulously unbothered by the whole thing. She breezily celebrated the anniversary of the “Like a Prayer” furor on Instagram earlier this month, writing: “Happy birthday to me and controversy.” Atta girl!
The truth about ‘Like A Prayer’
A semi-deep dive into Madonna’s first big comeback banger.
1988 was a very tough time to be a Madonna fan. Personally, it was a tough time to be anything. For most of it, I was 12, a non-age where mentally you’re detaching from the child version of yourself and trying to mature into your teenage phase, with all the grace of a rhino trying to parallel-park a Vauxhall Astra. But worst of all, 1988 was, pretty much, a Madonna-free zone. No new music, and only the disappointing Who’s That Girl soundtrack or a half-hearted remix album as your most recent memory. Truly, Smash Hits was parched, resorting to reviewing Madonna’s Broadway debut in Speed The Plow to keep fans sated. The only silver lining to this interminable thundercloud was Kylie’s ascent and, as 1989 dawned, one week after I turned thirteen, it was blu-tacked posters of Kylie that dominated my bedroom walls.
Then Madonna came back!
Back!!
BACK!!!
Artistic and visual reinventions between albums and eras are commonplace and even back in 1989, they weren’t exactly news – Bowie, for example, could release two albums a year with completely different personas and sounds – but 1989 Madonna was not just a rebirth, she was a transformed being beamed from a strange planet. And she was brunette.
Let’s be clear, this was not the Madonna I knew. The face may have looked similar, but the expressions had changed, the voice was laced with experience. While out of our eyeline, Madonna had turned thirty, she was in the process of getting divorced; this version of Madonna had been taken, perhaps involuntarily, to places she’d always run from, and truths she’d determinedly refused to uncover. Madonna had grown up and, if ‘Like A Prayer’ was anything to go by, it hadn’t been the easiest of transitions.
1989 would turn out to be a strange year for me. That September, I would leave middle school and move on to upper school, where my life would become incredibly miserable and difficult. I looked about eight, talked ‘like a girl’, and was from a modest background. When I was writing this I thought back briefly to those times and realised, just how strong I must have been to get through it every day. Much stronger than I felt at the time. No matter, at least I had ‘Like A Prayer’ in my life. Everyone must stand alone, just like she said.
‘Like A Prayer’ was a game-changer for Madonna. Ironic, really, that her biggest protest against Catholicism yet has such religious and celestial qualities. An acknowledgement from Madonna, perhaps, that the iconography and melodies of organised religion are all too alluring, yet there is darkness beyond.
Brunette Madonna often gets lost among her own iconography, probably because she usually very quickly switches back to blond. Perhaps being dark-haired reminds her of where she came from and she’s not keen to revisit. Relatable. The look for the ‘Like A Prayer’ video is uncharacteristically understated – yet again, perhaps to show that Madonna wanted the music to do the talking here. Madonna’s dark curls frame her face, which feels under made-up both for Madonna and the time period. It’s interesting that for the Like A Prayer album cover, Madonna chose not to show us her face, so we were denied a brunette Madonna album sleeve.
The main thrust of the controversy appeared to be that Madonna was intimate with ‘Black Jesus’ – whether it was because he was Black or was Jesus depended where on the bigotry spectrum you landed. It was catnip to christian conservatives – the Pope himself was most upset by this scene, tellingly, because it happened inside a church. A fake church. The rest of it, he was fine with, I assume. Lest we forget, Madonna also toyed with stigmata – the song was released only three weeks before Easter – and showed the violent murder of a woman, and the arrest of an innocent bystander for the crime. In showing a Black man to be immediately arrested for the white woman’s slaying while the real (white) perpetrators fled and confidently thumbed their nose at the witness, Madonna was reflecting the harmful, devastating stereotypes still present today when any person of colour comes into contact with law enforcement. People do not like to be shown who they are and, in the 1980s especially, Madonna was often cloaked in mirrors. Plus, there’s the burning crosses, originally a declaration of war along Scottish clans (note the ‘c’ in clan) before being co-opted in the twentieth century by a very different kind of Klan.
Does the message in opening section of this video feel relevant to the discussion we’ve been having?
Madonna: ‘Papa Don’t Preach’
RELEASED IN 1986
Papa, I know you’re going to be upset
‘Cause I was always your little girl
But you should know by now
I’m not a baby
You always taught me right from wrong
I need your help, daddy please be strong
I may be young at heart
But I know what I’m saying
The one you warned me all about
The one you said I could do without
We’re in an awful mess
And I don’t mean maybe, please
Papa, don’t preach, I’m in trouble deep
Papa, don’t preach, I’ve been losing sleep
But I made up my mind, I’m keeping my baby, hm
I’m gonna keep my baby, hm
He says that he’s going to marry me
And we can raise a little family
Maybe we’ll be all right
It’s a sacrifice
But my friends keep telling me to give it up
Saying I’m too young, I oughta live it up
What I need right now is some good advice, please
Papa, don’t preach, I’m in trouble deep
Papa, don’t preach, I’ve been losing sleep
But I made up my mind, I’m keeping my baby, hm
I’m gonna keep my baby, ooh ooh
Daddy, daddy if you could only see
Just how good he’s been treating me
You’d give us your blessing right now
‘Cause we are in love
We are in love (in love), so please (so)
Papa, don’t preach, I’m in trouble deep
Papa, don’t preach, I’ve been losing sleep
But I made up my mind, I’m keeping my baby, hm
I’m gonna keep my baby, ooh ooh
The song’s origins begin outside of Elliot’s recording studio where he allegedly overheard gossip on the street from girls at a nearby high school. Elliot would often see students standing outside the front window of his studio that they’d use as a mirror and hang-out spot, sharing gossip and stories from school. Elliot used this as inspiration for the song about a teenage girl who winds up pregnant, begging her father for compassion and assistance as opposed to judgment.
“I saw it as a sensitive plea for compassion and understanding about a young girl who found herself at a crossroads in life and didn’t know where to turn,” Elliot explained to the Los Angeles Times in 1986, describing “Papa” as “a love song, maybe framed a little bit differently.”
Elliot intended for the song to be recorded by another artist he was producing at the time, Cristina Dent. But when Michael Ostin, the A&R executive at Madonna’s label Warner Bros., heard the song, he asked to pitch it to Madonna instead. The superstar says that she was drawn to the confident nature of the song, as the young woman stands up to her father and friends, making it clear that the choice about what to do about the pregnancy is her own. Papa don’t preach I’m in trouble deep/Papa don’t preach, I’ve been losing sleep/But I made up my mind, I’m keeping my baby, she sings in the chorus.
”’Papa Don’t Preach’ is a message song that everyone is going to take the wrong way,” Madonna told Rolling Stone in 1986. ”Immediately they’re going to say I am advising every young girl to go out and get pregnant. When I first heard the song, I thought it was silly. But then I thought, wait a minute, this song is really about a girl who is making a decision in her life. She has a very close relationship with her father and wants to maintain that closeness. To me, it’s a celebration of life. It says, ‘I love you, father, and I love this man and this child that is growing inside me.’ Of course, who knows how it will end? But at least it starts off positive.”
The singer’s predictions were right. The song drew critical acclaim, while also having a polarizing impact at the time, as some critics felt like she was supporting teen pregnancy, while anti-abortion groups felt as though the song was in line with their views. “It just fit right in with my own personal Zeitgeist of standing up to male authorities, whether it’s the pope or the Catholic Church or my father and his conservative, patriarchal ways,” Madonna said to Rolling Stone in 2009 about why the song was a natural fit in her repertoire. “There have been so many fallouts, they all get confused. But for ‘Papa Don’t Preach,’ there were so many opinions, that’s why I thought it was so great. Is she for “schma-smortion,” as they say in Knocked Up? Is she against abortion?”