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By the time it was released in 1989, Madonna was already a bona fide superstar. Thirty years after its release, we look back at the album that established her as a meaningful artist

Madonna was already a superstar before she released Like a Prayer, which turns 30 years old this week. She had produced at least half-a-dozen era-defining hits (“Holiday,” “Like a Virgin,” “Material Girl,” “Into the Groove,” “Papa Don’t Preach,” and “La Isla Bonita”), and her previous album, 1986’s True Blue, had sold more than 25 million copies. But, in a way, she was also strangely underrated. When Like a Prayer came out in 1989, six years after she hit the ground running with her infectious debut single, “Everybody,” critics lauded Madonna for changing our conceptions around how a female pop singer could present herself and conduct her career. But they didn’t necessarily regard her as a “great artist.”

“Critics flock to her uneven product the way liberal arts magnas flock to investment banking,” Robert Christgau, the self-styled “Dean of American Rock Critics,” wrote in his review of True Blue. “So desperate are they to connect to a zeitgeist that has nothing to do with them that they decide a little glamour and the right numbers add up to meaningful work, or at least ‘fun.’”

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.

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The opening still gives me chills.

A few seconds of a frenzied guitar, abruptly stopped by a slamming door. A hushed choir and a church organ give way to what sounds like an invocation.

“Life is a mystery

Everyone must stand alone

I hear you call my name

And it feels like home“

Madonna’s “Like a Prayer” album was released March 21, 1989 and forever altered her career and the course of pop music. Thirty years later, it remains a masterpiece and one of her crowning achievements.

The album revolutionized what it meant to be a woman in pop music and created a blueprint that every pop star has since followed. She wrote and sang brazenly about love and sex, religion and racism, family and freedom.

Miley Cyrus, Britney Spears, Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, Rihanna, Beyoncé, Ariana Grande, Taylor Swift, Christina Aguilera, Cardi B, Dua Lipa — they all owe a huge debt to Madonna.

The “Like a Prayer” album has sold 15 million copies worldwide. It was followed by the Blond Ambition World Tour, which kicked off May 4 and 5 at The Summit in Houston. The building now, ironically, is home to Lakewood Church.

It generated five U.S. singles but every song on the album is worth remembering and told its own story.

The title track elicited a firestorm of controversy because of the video, which prompted Pepsi to pull a commercial featuring the song. Madonna reportedly kept the $5 million advance.

The song itself is a whirlwind of religion, sex and a Prince guitar intro — and one of Madonna’s best.

“Express Yourself” and “Keep it Together” drew inspiration from Sly and the Family Stone. The “Express Yourself” video was inspired by the classic film “Metropolis” and at the time the most expensive ever made at $5 million. (Thanks, Pepsi.) They both placed Madonna in front of live instrumentation, a dramatic switch from her previously synth-heavy pop albums.

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To celebrate its 30th anniversary Madonna’s official store offers you a wide range of official Like a Prayer 30 merchandise.

Check it all out HERE

As 1989 began, there was no question that Madonna was already a decade-defining superstar. But no one knew if she, like Bee Gees to the ‘70s or Beach Boys to the ‘60s, would prove a decade-constricted artist whose relevance would wane as a new decade turned over.

Like a Prayer, the magnum opus of her first decade and arguably her defining creative statement, came out 30 years ago today (March 21, 1989) and established that Madonna was not a pop star for her time, but for all time. And in the process, it gave us one of the most unlikely No. 1 smashes of her (or any career) and forced the world beyond her teenage fanbase to acknowledge her formidable vision.

Since history is written by the victors, Madonna maintaining her pop culture dominance well past the ‘80s seems like a historical inevitability these days. But in 1989, that was hardly the case. While she’d netted six Billboard Hot 100 No. 1s prior to Like A Prayer and released five smash albums (three studio LPs, a soundtrack and a remix album), her sound had remained decidedly of the era up until this point. Even as her subject matter deepened on 1986’s True Blue(dedicated to husband Sean Penn, from whom she’d file for divorce in Jan. 1989), the sonic palette was unmistakably ‘80s: bubbling dance-pop for the high-energy numbers, pounding beats and widescreen production for the ballads, and her voice only occasionally stretching for maturation (as on “Live to Tell”).

Read full article at Billboard

If released in 2019, Madonna‘s “Like A Prayer” video would have ignited a different controversy than the one it stirred up in 1989. Throughout the clip, broadcast in advance of the album of the same name, the singer dances in a field of burning crosses, the instantly and viscerally recognizable motif of the Ku Klux Klan. It’s not exactly her symbol to appropriate. A generous reading of the video suggests she is deploying the inflammatory image toward a commentary on racism in the United States. In the video’s narrative, a black man is arrested by white cops for a crime he did not commit. It’s the same old story: He witnessed a gang of white men assault a white woman, ran over to help her, found himself the one in handcuffs. The stories nursed by white supremacy insist he must be responsible for the violence, so into the can he goes. And then there’s Madonna, dancing in front of the KKK’s crosses, hinting at a link between the racists in uniform and those cowering under white hoods. She presages Rage Against The Machine’s 1992 refrain: “Some of those who work forces / Are the same who burn crosses.”

Thirty years ago, Madonna came under fire not for flashing the burning cross and not even for suggesting that the police are racists but for being horny for God. Before you see the video’s instigating event — the assault, the arrest — you see Madonna rushing into a church, distraught. She finds a wax saint in a cage. He weeps and comes to life, and she falls for him, taking him into her arms until he becomes a real boy. By today’s metrics, it’s a benign enough image, but in 1989 it was enough to send the American Family Association into a tizzy. Madonna had an advertising deal with Pepsi, and the AFA, along with other right-wing Christian groups, furiously called for Pepsi boycotts. Reagan had just left office, succeeded by Reagan-lite (George H.W. Bush). Pop stars couldn’t simply f*ck saints without repercussions.

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Provocative and – at the time – shocking, Madonna’s fourth album ‘Like A Prayer’ rocked the establishment, and set a new template for self-empowered women in pop. The Blond Ambition world tour that followed, meanwhile, changed the face of live music forever. On the 30th anniversary of the album’s release, El Hunt tells the story

Some albums are worth judging by their cover. With two thumbs poked defiantly into a denim waistband – like a bedazzled answer to Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Born in the USA’ – the artwork for ‘Like A Prayer’ is the perfect visual for Madonna’s audacious, unflinching fourth record. Released on March 21, 1989, this daring exploration of catholicism, desire, bereavement, superstardom and pleasure is an unparalleled totem of pop music 30 years on.

Arriving three years after ‘True Blue‘, a record of bright, loved-up bubblegum pop gold, ‘Like A Prayer’ is abrasive and raw. Moving the focus away from presenting a collection of immediate wall-to-wall bangers, Madonna’s 1989 release feels more concerned with exploration instead. Hulking great ballad ‘Oh Father’ cleverly alludes to her fractured relationship with her father and god at the same time; not your typical album fodder. ‘’Till Death Do Us Part’ also nods toward her split from her then-husband. “I’m not your friend, I’m just your little wife,” Madonna sings, atop jaunty, fidgeting melodies.

Read more at https://www.nme.com/features/sex-religion-death-conical-bras-madonnas-like-prayer-blond-ambition-tour-30-2463908#OzP2UMoql3val37H.99

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Hans decided to spent the night in front of a local record store to camp out and be the first to be Madonna’s brand new album ‘Like a Prayer’ back in March 1989. There had been a load of negative publicity in Dutch press regarding the Like a Prayer video and Pepsi withdrawing their commercial and promotional campaign, so Hans wanted to turn things around and try to do something positive.

Well he did make the newspaper the next day but not really how he had planned it. Hans spent the entire night in front of the record store only to find out the very next morning that the album had been on sale since 4pm the previous day.

In the end he wasn’t the first Dutchie to buy the album, but he did succeed in creating some positive press for Madonna!