Like a pop song

Reflections on Madonna’s Like a Prayer 30 years later

March 21, 2019, is the thirtieth anniversary of Madonna’s watershed album Like a Prayer. Upon its release, the album was universally acknowledged as Madonna’s greatest effort to date. By and large, that reputation still stands; fans and critics consistently turn to Like a Prayer as the defining testament to Madonna’s pop art potential. In 2017, Maura Johnston at Pitchfork wrote that Like a Prayer represented “just how grand, artistic, and personal a pop star could be at the very height of [their] fame.” This paradoxical conflation of the zeitgeist and the personal has always been associated with Like a Prayer. In fact, the album has always found its most potent meaning through its paradoxical and fragmented narratives. Take the title song’s famous lyrics:  

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. 

At first glance, they seem to detail a spiritual exchange with God. However, they function equally well as an erotic monologue. Or consider the effect of an album called Like a Prayer (by an artist named Madonna) that includes an additional liner note directed to a largely gay fanbase that details facts about contracting AIDS. Or the music video for “Like a Prayer,” which cuts between images of Catholic stigmata and burning crosses. Like a Prayer relishes in these paradoxes of conflating the sacred with the profane, the celebrity with the personal, the commercial with the artistic. As a whole, it sounds like 11 incommensurable fragments of the artist. Madonna moves from sinner (“Like a Prayer”), to motivational speaker (“Express Yourself”), to jaded lover (“Love Song”), betrayed wife (“Till Death Do Us Part”), older sister (“Promise to Try”), starry-eyed romantic (“Cherish”), psychedelic storyteller (“Dear Jessie”), grieving daughter (“Oh Father”), guilt-ridden sibling (“Keep it Together”), and finally, memorialiser (“Spanish Eyes”). Perhaps the chaotic coda, “Act of Contrition,” most accurately represents  Like a Prayer’s paradoxical and fragmentary aesthetic.  

This preamble is all to say that the anachronistic process of reviewing an album on its thirtieth anniversary seems to echo the paradoxes Madonna’s album espouses. Tidily cutting and pasting Like a Prayer out of 1989 and into 2019 would feel like ignoring its compelling challenge to cohesive narratives. I cannot, nor do I want to, listen to this record and present some neat argument on what it might mean to the world, or even to me. Like the album cuts, I have little fragments that hold Like a Prayer together in its most compelling form. They are what follows: a professor’s story, a common gay phenomenon, and a memory. Read them however you’d like. Maybe throw on Like a Prayer while you do—or don’t. In fact, Madonna might prefer it that way.  

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Professor Michael Cobb: What I will always remember about Like a Prayer is that it came out right around the time I got my driver’s license. I was just starting to be a driver and I had this old, kind of used Jeep that was kind of mechanically malfunctioning—wired in strange ways. One of the things I remember about listening to Like a Prayer was that whenever I was going to have to press the brakes, the tape player […] slowed down because that was just the way that kind of malfunction was working, so it would just be like “just like a prayerrreerrrr.”  

 Nate Crocker: I guess I was just compelled by that anecdote because—sorry to close-read your life—but, like, you hitting the breaks […] is kind of a way to register, and thereby control, time? And then, archiving things by 30-year anniversaries is, like, also kind of a way to register time? And maybe praying is too? I just saw kind of a cool parallel there.  

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There are seven or so songs that can come on in any gay club, and within the first five seconds of each one, every single person in that club seems to be screaming along. I don’t know (read: “care”) what everyone else is doing, because I am starring in a music video. I am immaculately lit. I am beat for the gods. Miraculously, I am performing for an audience that worships the diva I am. “Single Ladies,” “Man! I Feel Like a Woman!,” and “Believe” are a few of these songs. “Like a Prayer” is another.  

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I am nine. Some Saturday afternoon in October, my mom picks me up from a play rehearsal. As I slide into the back seat of her Honda Accord, she turns. 

“Look what I got you, hun.” 

From the driver’s seat, she hands me a blue and gold CD. The Immaculate Collection: Madonna.  

“Thanks, Mom.” 

“She’s the lady from Evita.” 

“Oh, cool!” (Two years prior, Evita had been my favourite film.)  

My mom turns up the volume and begins to drive. Beyond Evita, I have no idea who Madonna is. From the speakers, I hear a thin voice singing about a “holiday.” It’s so different from the brash musical theatre voices I am used to; Bernadette Peters, Patti LuPone, Idina Menzel. There is a similar demand to be heard, but it is communicated without singing loudly. I don’t sing loudly. Immediately I connect with “Madonna.”  

For the next year, The Immaculate Collection is all that my mom and I listen to in the car. As hard as it is to pick favourites, I have one. 

“Mom, put on that prayer song again.”