The truth about 'Like A Prayer'

A semi-deep dive into Madonna's first big comeback banger.

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.

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.

‘Move over Kylie, I’m back!’ screamed the cover of Number One magazine in early 1989 as Madonna prepared to unleash the Like A Prayer era on a thus-far unsuspecting public. The first I knew of it (I think) was a tiny column in Smash Hits’ ‘Bitz’ section at the front of the magazine, that announced Madonna’s new song would debut in an extended commercial for Pepsi, on an upcoming Thursday night. This was, I’m afraid, devastating news for me. I was 13, for one, which meant I had zero power over the remote control, BUT I would be staying at my nana’s that night and she generally wasn’t bothered what was on, HOWEVER, worst of all, she only had a black and white TV. Yes, people under 30 who are lost and somehow reading this, once upon a time, some people could only afford black and white televisions – it made the licence fee cheaper and they were also less expensive to rent. Yeah, rent. Buying a TV was just NOT a thing in my family – we had to rent them. Never believe those right-wing gonks who tell you the world was a better place when your bedroom windows iced up on the inside – the past is SHIT.

Not to tarnish my Madonna stan credentials, but I remember being very disappointed by the ad. Madonna looked weird – brunette but with a strange blond streak at the front, a look she would ditch within seconds – and the advert’s storyline was lame. Madonna gets sucked into the… 60s? (it teems with anachronisms) and dances around a bit while a child version of her – who looked nothing like the actual kid version of Madonna, whose photo was imprinted onto the brain of any self-respecting fan – was teleported into the present. One upside: it was mostly in black and white so I didn't miss any spectacular effects. Actually two upsides, the other being: the song.

It’s funny how the advert would soon be whipped off air – thanks to the imminent explosion of controversy over the video proper – because even as a 13-year-old I opted to disregard this cheap-looking, capitalist tat (which cost more than the actual video) and instead focused on what I knew was going to be something incredible. Yes, even then, I was the best and worst of stan Twitter.

I knew Madonna wouldn’t be giving all the good stuff to the inferior cola company; something much bigger was coming to accompany this gritty, gnarly, yet euphoric sound.

Because, 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.

A jangling guitar kicks us off – Prince, apparently, maybe, not sure, I know you all know that he’s on this record somewhere but it’s federal law that any man writing about this song must mention that. Then a slam – a church door, maybe, something weighty and ancient, a relic making its presence felt. The first voice we hear is… not Madonna, but the ominous harmonies of a choir, haunting the song like a howling, yet tuneful, storm. What does it mean for Madonna to cede the opening of her comeback single – and arguably her most celebrated song – to someone else? That she’s realised she’s not the most important person in the universe, perhaps? She leaves us no time to contemplate because, a mere cigarette paper of a millisecond later, there she is. ‘Life is a mystery,’ she tells us, ‘everyone must stand alone’. Thirty, first marriage over, yeah, you can kind of see where she’s coming from here with this goth teen energy.

Lyrically, LAP is not complicated or highbrow; its metaphors require little decoding (despite a general view, which I’m not particularly convinced by, that the song is about fellatio). Yet somehow the plainness in its telling makes it all the more moving. Madonna is in the driving seat yet allowing herself to be swept along by something much bigger than her. The much-admired bassline, the euphoric choir – even the step-out ad libs later on come from a much more technically gifted singer than the star of the show herself. Madonna is both leader and passenger, student and teacher, son and holy ghost. The song’s apparent simplicity is contradicted by its structure which, frankly, is bonkers. Shall we go full friendless geek and break it down for a closer look? YES, great idea.

(Timings are the original album version, as appears on Celebration; the 7” single edit has a slightly shorter intro and outro and may even be sped up the tiniest amount.)

00:00 After our jangly guitar (Prince, btw), and the door slam, we start with verse 1, ‘Life is a mystery’ and all that, with only the choir backing Madonna.
00:36 The chorus, where full percussion kicks in.
00:55 Verse 2: ‘I hear your voice…', and the percussion drops out.
01:29 The chorus, and the percussion returns.
01:47 Verse 3, ‘Like a child…’, and the percussion has sodded off again, save for a few wind chimes – meaning it is almost impossible to dance to this song without looking insane. We end on ‘let the choir sing’ before…
02:21 The chorus yet again, the drums are BACK, baby, and the choir, having been bidden to sing by Madonna, is STRONG.
02:38 The chorus is repeated, with a (very exciting) alternative melody (which builds tension)
02:56 Next, the bass guitar starts going wild (it’s not Prince this time), and the choir sound incredible and increasingly frantic, as Madonna repeats the first verse in a different key, and it sounds like we are building up to something very important, and urgent, and all those other words people use when they’re blurbing a memoir by some posh person. Here it comes…
03:21 Nope, not the chorus, we will never hear it again, instead a bridge, or a middle eight, whatever. I’m not sure of the technical term, but although it reuses lyrics from other sections of the song, it’s brand new, with an energy that’s pushing, pushing, pushing us forward. The choir are going NUTS because they know what’s coming next.
03:40 Another middle eight (?) as the choir take over, with those famous, incredible ad libs. If you don’t know these ad libs off by heart, I am so, so sorry for you. It is thirty-three seconds of HEAVEN. No drug could compare*
04:14 That first bridge again (twice) with response from choir. Madonna sounds at her best right here.
04:50 The refrain, with Madonna noping out after a couple of lines and leaving the choir to do their thing before we fade out.

Can you imagine the little explosions happening inside my tiny teenage head when I heard this for the first time in 1989? Fireworks. Palpitations. Joy.

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.

Obligatory joke about looking for a contact lens.

‘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.

Hang on.
We haven’t even done the video yet. Holy hell.

The controversy around this video has been written about time and time again. Madonna doing the school disco shuffle in front of burning crosses, watching a young woman get murdered, and, most importantly, kissing a ‘saint’ assumed to be Martin de Porres – no, not ‘Black Jesus’, apparently, although the video’s director Mary Lambert said, thirty years later, that’s exactly who it was supposed to be; the character has mostly been referred to by Madonna’s biographers as ‘the saint’. I worked out that unless it was shown from start to finish once on Top of the Pops, which it may well have been, I wouldn’t have seen the full version of the video until December 1990, when I got the Immaculate Collection VHS of all Madonna’s videos (except Justify My Love, obviously). Can you imagine waiting almost two years to see something in full? Luckily, the video was feverishly documented in Smash Hits with screen caps and there were snippets shown here and there, so I wasn’t left totally wanting.

The look

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, even though there were numerous shoots to accompany the album, which all eventually became Smash Hits posters anyway. We’d have to wait until 2003 before a brunette album cover, on American Life. Hmmm, maybe she was right not to jinx Like A Prayer.

The controversy

For the love of you-know-who could someone turn the central heating down?!

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.

Madonna managed to annoy just about everybody; although she claimed she was speaking out against racism, there was a definite feeling from many that she was using the already harmful racial profiling of young Black men for shock value rather than making any serious commentary. At the time, watching as a young white boy, it seemed daring, but encouraging, and certainly reflective of the world around me – my mum’s boyfriend was Black and that had set a few tongues wagging along the more tiresome and narrow-minded in our immediate neighbourhood. Now, as an adult, I’ll concede some of the messaging is clumsy and, at times, feels exploitative, while painting Madonna as the great saviour at the end perhaps comes off cynical all these years later. It was meant to provoke, which it does, for better or worse.

The theme

The video is, as the song suggests, ‘like a dream’, shifting in tone and between the hyper-real and the fantastical. One minute the saint is real, the next he’s an effigy again. Madonna picks up a knife and stigmata appears. The saint leaves the church, and then he (or a version of him) is back. The jail where the suspect is held appears to be inside the church. The suspect is the saint. Madonna lies down and kisses him and then she realises he’s gone and the church is now emptying. Madonna dances in front of the Klan’s torched crosses. It’s unnerving and disorienting, you’ve no idea what’s going to happen next.

There’s not much choreography to speak of, although Madonna does dance, it’s more of a random shuffle. There’s a good bit where she loses her inhibitions and sinks to her knees, paying homage to the euphoria and hysteria of evangelicalism, during the choir’s main performance.

There are too many creative highlights to mention, and it’s all giving 100/100 all the way – well, almost all the way. I’ve never liked the ending, where the set becomes a stage, and breaks the fourth wall, the actors take a bow, and the curtain falls as ‘The End’ unfurls across the screen. Obviously, it fits in with the video’s illusory storyline but I wonder if this was added in to take the sting out of some of the video’s darker themes, or perhaps to show that the ‘happy ending’, where the Black man is released from police custody once Madonna explains what she saw, would be much less likely in real life.

Some urgent questions before I close:

• Why does Madonna not lip sync along until the second verse? Too busy running from the murderers, I assume.

• The choir singer who catches Madonna as she tumbles from the sky in the second verse… she’s very keen to throw her away again, isn’t she? More of a Kylie fan, maybe?

• Where is Madonna leaving when she happens upon the murder? It looks like an enclosed courtyard and she’s coming out of a fire exit. Very strange.

• Why is there more choreography in the (abysmal) Pepsi advert than the video? (I think I know why – watching Madonna do the cutesy dancing with the guys in the street changes the tone of the song completely.) She will go on to reuse some of this choreo on the Blond Ambition tour.

• The woman singing the ad libs in the Pepsi ad is not the same woman singing them in the official video. Which one is the real singer? Is it neither of them? (The singer of these step-out vocals is not, as was often assumed, her regular backing singer Niki Haris, but a member of the Andraé Crouch Choir.)

• Is the man she kisses when lying down on the altar the ‘arrested man’ version or the ‘saint’ version? (Looks to me like he’s wearing the same clothes as the guy who’s been arrested, not the saint.)

• Who decided no church set would be complete without a pedestal fan from Argos?

Madonna, I’m your number one fan.

• How does she manage to kiss the saint’s feet before she opens the gates? 01:35 in video

• Is this (EXCELLENT) performance of ‘Like A Prayer' from 2003 the only time she does it live as a brunette?

Thank you, once again, for reading. It’s… like an angel sighing. Maybe.

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