Life Is A Mystery

Madonna “Like A Prayer”

A lot of art about growing up Catholic tends to be about related trauma or being indoctrinated into a culture of guilt so young that it becomes unshakeable whether you stick with the Church or not. You can find some of that in the subtext of “Like A Prayer” but the lyrical focus of the song is more on how aspects of Catholicism can imprint on you in a way that leads to interpreting all kinds of heavy emotional experiences through its profound iconography and mysticism. You can take the song to be a love song to a man or a love song to God, I hear both at the same time. She transubstantiates this man through her lust, she’s experiencing communion through sex. She’s allowing herself to feel everything on a deeper and more profound level by exalting him and submitting to his will. To paraphrase another brilliant pop provocateur a few years down the line – her whole existence is flawed but he brings her closer to God.

Madonna wrote “Like A Prayer” with Patrick Leonard, one of her all-time best collaborators. Leonard, a jazz and prog guy when left to his own devices, came to work with Madonna on a work-for-hire songwriter. They were a bit of an odd couple but had an incredible chemistry as a songwriting duo, their respective tastes and tendencies resulting in very accessible but subtly sophisticated songwriting. Leonard’s taste for interesting chords and complex harmony made songs like “Live to Tell,” “La Isla Bonita,” and “Cherish” sound totally unlike anything else on the radio at the time, and even if people weren’t consciously registering the elegance of his compositions people could intuit a certain prestige in this music which indicated that Madonna was a cut above her direct competition.

The structural genius of “Like A Prayer” is that it moves between verses rooted in the dour musicality of Catholic psalms and choruses in the tradition of ecstatic Black gospel music, both parts rendered with the rich tones of jazz chords. The melding of two very different approaches to Christian church music makes the song wildly dynamic and thematically dense, opening up discourse on the differences between these expressions of faith while allowing Madonna to indulge in the best of both worlds. The Catholic parts of the song are full of loneliness and melancholic longing, the gospel parts emphasize joy and connection with others. It’s a continuum of feeling, a personal emotional and intellectual journey leading to a collective catharsis.

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