1989 | PROVOCATEUR
MADONNA
BY STEPHANIE ZACHAREK
By 1989, madonna, The scrappy per-
former born Madonna Louise Ciccone,
was already a superstar: she’d whirled
onto the landscape, in a torn-up T-shirt
and two wrists’ worth of rubber brace-
lets, just as America was awakening to
the AIDS crisis, and for young people be-
came a symbol of determination and self-
invention. She had defied our expecta-
tions so many times. How many surprises
could she have left up her lace sleeves?
The bombshell answer came in the
form of a hymn of joyous carnality, “Like
a Prayer,” the lead single and title track
of her fourth studio album. In the video,
Madonna—sending a marvelously mixed
message of purity and seduction in a
1950s-style slip, a discreet cross sparkling
around her neck—spreads her gospel of
joy and erotic ardor within the sacred con-
fines of a country church. A statue of a
saint, presumably Martin de Porres—he’s
a black man locked in his own little cage,
a not-so-metaphorical prison—comes to
life and kisses her gently on the forehead.
This could be the start of a mutual seduc-
tion, but he leaves her. She seizes a dagger
and wraps her fingers around the blade,
though the resulting cuts aren’t the nor-
mal kind: stigmata flower in the palms of
her hands like two bloody pennies.
Pepsi had used “Like a Prayer”—ac-
companied by tamer imagery—in a com-
mercial. But the video cast the song in a
new light, and religious groups were en-
raged. Pepsi canceled her contract in re-
sponse. Yet Madonna’s allegedly blasphe-
mous act of creation carried her all the
way to the bank: “Like a Prayer” spent
three weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard
Hot 100, and the album on which it ap-
peared went on to sell more than 15 mil-
lion copies. Even more significantly, this
close-to-perfect song marked Madonna as
an artist in it for the long haul, one whose
marriage of provocation and pop would
inspire future generations to shape their
careers in her image. She couldn’t be un-
derestimated or circumscribed, least of all
by a multibillion-dollar corporation. She
was a material girl, always, but only on
her own terms.
MADONNA,
PHOTOGRAPHED IN
SAN PEDRO, CALIF., IN
DECEMBER 19891980sHERB RITTS—TRUNK ARCHIVE^77