The truth about ‘Papa Don't Preach’

I delve into Madonna's back catalogue to relive personal memories and, of course, discuss her hair in the video.

The Madonna diaries is a series of personal essays about Madonna’s back catalogue (hence the name I guess). It’s part of The truth about everything*, a newsletter with a different feature every week – not always Madonna. I talk about TV shows, current affairs, columnists, and share my own thoughts on… well, everything really. You can sign up for free to receive some of the regular updates, or become a paid subscriber to get everything.

They say ignorance is bliss, but I’m not sure that’s quite right. There’s a next stage: that beautiful haze when you hear or see something for the first time and it still appears new, and intriguing, its mystery still to unfold. Like moving to a new neighbourhood and being excited by the unfamiliarity, or the first episode of a TV show where you’re still figuring out the characters. Unfortunately, knowledge is not only power, it’s a jet wash to the senses. We celebrate expertise; nobody ever bragged about being intermediate. What you know cannot be unknown, what you saw cannot be unseen. That short sweet moment, a holding bay between innocence and cognisance, is often forgotten. But I remember it for 'Papa Don’t Preach'.

June 1986. Sunny. Music playing. Although my mum had collected a huge boxful of 45s in her teens, we were not a record-buying household. A) They were a luxury and B) the record player didn't work. Instead, my mum had a radio in the kitchen – a generic plastic/metallic ghetto blaster (single tape) that I can still see now. It was on all day and, at that point in time, always tuned to Radio 1. That radio was like a benevolent professor in the movies who eyes something magical in an underprivileged student, infusing me with my love for pop, always ready with a hit whenever I walked into the kitchen to enjoy my favourite pastime when I was bored: opening the fridge and looking inside, before closing it again. There are so many smashes I heard for the first time on that radio, songs I still play out now if I want a solid singalong hit for the next part of my journey. I heard 'Papa Don’t Preach' for the first time eating breakfast at the small, rickety kitchen table, reading. I was intrigued. It was that sweet spot, the knowing but not quite knowing, not understanding the lyrics, which I interpreted as Madonna not wanting her father to go to church because she had somehow… found a newborn baby? I remember seeing the video for the first time too, on Top of the Pops, my other personal music tutor – although, with its usual casual philistine attitude to the art of the music video, they lopped off most of it. For years I didn't realise it began with flashes between New York street scenes and Madonna pounding the pavements in her (horrible) jeans, instead only joining the video where the grainy faux-home video footage shows a child actress hugging a Pink Panther toy. Fitting, maybe, that it’s the earliest recollection I have of the video, as my own childhood feels a little like that now – something that happened to someone else, on grainy film, playing at slightly the wrong speed, the colours awry.

Although 'Papa Don’t Preach' was not the first Madonna song I’d ever heard (Holiday, probably) or been fascinated by (Material Girl, coming up in the next Madonna Diaries), it was the first time I began to analyse Madonna, look beneath the artifice and tried to work out not only what she was trying to say, but what it meant to me.  The use of ‘preach’ Madonna uses here wasn’t really common parlance in the UK, not where I came from anyway, but I knew what abortion was; I was a prime ‘ear-wigger’ as a child, forever listening in on adult conversations, and I watched soap operas like they were cartoons – in fact, I preferred them to cartoons. Slowly it all fell into place, and I felt very grown up and clever for understanding this wasn’t just a pop song, it was a manifesto – my first taste of a superiority very common among Madonna fans, let’s be honest.

Madonna in a cardigan. An actual cardigan. Incredible.

1986 was a different planet. Although, as now, the tabloids had their favourite demons – anyone from a minority group, basically – and teenage mothers were among the most pilloried. Only a few weeks before 'Papa Don’t Preach'’s release, EastEnders’ Michelle Fowler had given birth to her daughter, Vicki, not only out of wedlock, but while still at school. The soap was reflecting what was happening in families up and down the country, but that didn't stop an insane amount of pearl-clutching and fear-mongering from the chattering classes. Scandalised moralisers – no doubt with a few skeletons of their own tucked away in an armoire somewhere – accused the soap’s sympathetic portrayal of the realities of teenage pregnancy and its effect on families of encouraging the phenomenon. This was around the time we began to hear the grim, classist trope that young women were getting pregnant only to get themselves a ‘free’ council flat to escape their chaotic family homes. This pervasive slur endured for decades – indeed a horrible date recited it to me as their genuine opinion in 2011 – although has since shifted onto an even more defenceless target, immigrants, since almost everyone now knows someone who had a baby as a teenager. Given this fury over an unflinching, distinctly unglamorous portrayal on EastEnders, you can imagine the furore when Madonna popped up in one of her designer bustiers, skipping about and singing ‘I’m young, pregnant and I’m keeping it, so screw you, Dad, lol!!’ America, especially, lost its mind, thanks to the endemic evangelism of bible-thumping, donation-pilfering charlatans. One journalist called it a 'commercial for teenage pregnancy’, furious that the video ended happily, with her dad supporting her, rather than hoying her out onto the street. It was Madonna’s biggest controversy since, perhaps, she’d sang the word ‘virgin’ a mere eight times just two years earlier. Madonna wasn’t just settling into her imperial phase creatively, she was flicking her first domino in a relentless run of controversies and outrages that would do exactly as intended: to get people talking and, naturally, whisk her to the uppermost regions of the charts every single time.

It wasn’t just the message that made 'Papa Don’t Preach' special. The song itself is a symphony. Think of the strings! Never played in full on the radio, I only learned about that intro when I eventually got the True Blue cassette that Christmas (the first album I ever owned). It is my favourite piece of classical music aside from the theme tunes to Let Them Eat Cake, Felicity Kendal sex comedy The Mistress, and The White Lotus. The first ‘Papa’ – the very first word she sings – that comes out as a croak because, she’s probably crying as she tells her father the bad news. Art! The storytelling itself is one of the strongest narratives of any Madonna song – her credit here is ‘additional lyrics by’, the songwriter Brian Elliot was right to hang onto his major share; it’s a masterpiece. The production is glossy and more muscular than many other hits of this era – like George Michael, Madonna was smart enough to avoid the overly tinny production trend that’s made a lot of ‘80s pop feel weedy and dated.

And then there’s the video. Where shall we start? How about we kick off with the most important thing. The hair, obviously.

Madonna’s locks have long been a fascination for her fans – probably because so many of them grew up to be hairdressers – and the unveiling of the 'Papa Don’t Preach' cut – done for the True Blue album shoot – was the gateway drug to her constant tricological reinventions. This is where Madonna’s hair really gets interesting. They say washing your hair after a bad day can help cleanse your soul and rid you of the days burdens, and Madonna was presumably desperate to obliterate Shanghai Surprise from her consciousness, she went one further than a shampoo and set and reached for the scissors. Flattened down into good-girl wet-look crop for the storytelling parts of the video – very reminiscent of 2001 era Janice Battersby from Coronation Street, sadly – the mop was enlivened for Madonna’s dance sequences in the stark studio, bouffed and primed into the – dare we use the ‘I’ word, I think we should – iCoNic Marilyn-esque sculpted blow-dry we see on the cover for True Blue.

Okay, so either Janice went into Audrey’s salon and asked for a Madonna, or Madonna went into… wherever she goes, and asked for a Janice Battersby.

But we can’t really talk about the 'Papa Don’t Preach' video without highlighting the star of the show – no, not Madonna herself, or the actors in the flashback sequences, or even the hot, vaguely skeevy young grease monkey Madonna ends up getting into trouble with. It’s the T-shirt. You know the one. Black, and what the Mail would call figure-hugging, with a slogan that’s turned out to be one of Madonna’s boldest and most enduring statements: Italians Do It Better. Even though she’s called Madonna Ciccone and spent a good decade or two psycho-bullying catholicism, Madonna never really made that much of her Italian heritage; it wasn’t part of her personality. The ‘Italians’ T-shirt would, eventually, just become another entry in her colossal wardrobe archive, an item easy to copy and wear to her shows – you will always see one, and, indeed during the Re-Invention Tour of 2004, they were on the official merch stand – but in the 'Papa Don’t Preach' video, it was shorthand. A quick way of giving us extra backstory: a strict family, maybe like Madonna’s own, with no mother, and a heavy mist of catholic guilt hanging around the place. I once bought one off eBay, spending ages trying to get one with the correct font, and ultimately failing thanks to a misleading listing. I’ve only worn it in public once, on Madonna’s birthday one year, when I was going to an Italian restaurant with my then-editor. It rained all day. (If someone can point me in the direction of a decent one, with the right fonts, please do.)

Unusually for Madonna, the video’s story is a literal representation of the song. It’s not remotely subtle, but it works, mirroring scenes from past and present to show how our relationship to our parents changes over time – Madonna and dad washing up, serving dinner, watching over each other as they sleep. There’s an amazing transition for the ‘the one you warned me all about’ lyric in the second verse, jumping from the flashback version of the dad watching over his sleeping daughter to the crystal-eyed hunk coming into the now grownup Madonna’s view for the very first time.

👉👌

Madonna’s acting has been lambasted over the years but she’s never struggled with a lustful gaze and the coup de foudre between them is undeniable. You believe that they’re in love, but also horny and stupid. There’s a beautiful scene where the young couple are eating churros on the ferry (Staten Island, maybe) and catch an older couple looking on, each pair seeing themselves reflected. (When I was a child, I assumed Madonna was eating chips, but as the video is set in NYC not Huddersfield town centre, I realise now how stupid this was. I literally only saw it was churros TODAY, writing this.) New York, by the way, looks grimy and foreboding, yet alive, proper ‘80s NYC, not the ‘Sephoras as far as the eye can see’ macrobiotic, investment banker version of 2022.

When Madonna’s not in scenes with the titular papa and le babydaddy, she has to do a lot of stomping, climbing an unusual number of staircases for a pop video. But there’s only so much ‘Madonna looking pensive as she walks purposefully past a bodega’ you can take, which may be why we have the chorus interludes of Madonna leaping about in the aforementioned bustier with her lovely blow-dry (see main image). It’s always tempting to say Madonna has never looked better – she has the benefit of being 27 when this video was filmed, after all – but this is arguably when she looked most like the Madonna most Gen Xers envisage when we think of her peak. Well, her first peak anyway. As Madonna fans and freeze-frame pervs will know, so frenetic is the dancing that Madonna’s boob pops out at the end of the first chorus when she throws her head back to mimic her pose on the cover for the song’s parent album True Blue (which came out the same month). It’s only a split second and barely a flash of nipple and we would see a lot more of it, and Madonna in just six years’ time, when the SEX book was released. (Isn’t it amazing to think only six years separate this rather cutesy middle finger to Planned Parenthood and Madge wanting to ‘hit you like a truck’ in the Erotica era.) It’s likely Madonna chose this particular outfit to show off the work she’d been doing on her body. She was leaner, more athletic than her Like A Virgin era form; Madonna’s reinvention of her body has often gone under the radar because of the more obvious superficial changes to hair, wardrobe, or sound but this wouldn’t be the last time Madonna was determined to show us her strength and stamina.

Thankfully the sales of Papa Don’t Preach eventually allowed Madonna to buy a stairmaster of her own. Staircases all over NYC wept with relief.

Some urgent questions before I close:

• Is present-day Dad wearing a grey wig? It looks wiggy in one scene.

• Has the video version ever been available on audio? And can we agree that ending is a rare occasion when a full stop is worse than a fade-out?

• How old is Madonna supposed to be in this video? Young, right? But is she still a teenager?

• Is the leather jacket Madonna wears to go tell her dad he needs to get a Mothercare loyalty card the same jacket she wears on the cover of the True Blue album cassette?

• When Madonna and babydaddy are dancing on the ferry/boat/whatever it is, is the string quartet playing the strings from 'Papa Don’t Preach’?

• Why is Madonna wearing the same Breton top that would be adopted by middle-class dads chasing their adorable offspring round pub gardens from 2011–????

Regardless, hearing 'Papa Don’t Preach' on that radio, and seeing the video, at nine years old, was a watershed moment for me. Emotionally, I’d sliced into my palm and shaken hands with an icon, a blood oath that would carry me through the next three decades or so.

The one they warned me all about. The one they said I could do without. This was it. The deal was done. I was a Madonna fan.

Now I know you’re mine – oh, sorry, wrong song.

If you liked The Madonna diaries, it’s one of a few new features I’m introducing to The truth about everything*, and will come around every month or so, featuring a different song every time. Let me know what you think in the comments or on Twitter. You can see all the other features – or strands, or formats, or whatever, here.

Further reading – I wrote about Madonna’s biggest hits and curated her ultimate ‘best of’ list

Further listening – There’s a great podcast called Inside the Groove which looks at the creative process behind lots of Madonna songs, and is pretty interesting. There’s an episode all about True Blue which features some insight into ‘Papa Don’t Preach’.