— William Shaw
It was in the early part of 1989 that Madonna was back (BACK!!) after what seemed like a lengthy sabbatical of making movies no one liked (or so I've been told: I'm quite sure that I've never seen a single Madonna picture) and breaking up with Sean Penn. The hits from Michael Jackson and George Michael's blockbuster albums were finally beginning to dry up, people were starting to tire of U2, Prince was losing the plot a bit and the time was right for a Madonna comeback. The public was ready to welcome her back with open arms and, as William Shaw implies, she could've offered up a steaming pile of dung for a single and the punters would've been pleased to have her back (BACK!!).
A slew of singles followed over the course of the year but it wouldn't be long before she was back (BACK!!) yet again in 1990. I'm Breathless was a relatively low-key release used to promote the Dick Tracy movie (a rare Madonna vehicle that critics didn't despise) but the "Vogue" single quickly became one of her career defining moments. A long-awaited greatest hits, The Immaculate Collection, was released closer to the end of the year and it was an event. She didn't take the easy road of titling it The Very Best of Madonna or The Singles or something similarly trite and she even took the bold step of leaving some of her biggest hits off of it. (It is probably for this reason that records like "Gambler", "Angel", "Causing a Commotion" and "Dear Jessie" have felt like second division Madonna songs)
Those fifteen established tracks that made the cut for The Immaculate Collection were all remixed. While the likes of "Lucky Star" and "Into the Groove" sounded pretty much the same as they always had, a pair of more recent hits, "Like a Prayer" and "Express Yourself", were radically different from what they had been like just a year or so earlier. Then, in a bout of collective amnesia, everybody seemed to forget all about the originals and accepted that these revamped cuts had never been changed at all.
Therefore, it comes as something of a shock to discover that the 1989 "Like a Prayer" is an altogether different beast from what ended up on The Immaculate Collection eighteen months later. (We'll get to the sorry state of "Express Yourself"'s status before long) It should be said that as remixes go, it isn't awful. The song is too good for Shep Pettibone or whoever it was to ruin it completely. The acid house-esque squelching suits the tune well enough and there's a nice dramatic build up that is a little harder to identify in the original. Nevertheless, there's far too much hi-hat, the 'Yea! Whoa!' is cliched and the breakdown is utterly pointless.
There's nothing to quibble over with the original single version though. Prince pounds out a mad guitar riff to open before the ethereal sets in. But that soon gets swept away by a chugging and infectious gospel beat. It could almost be a Motown song and Madonna's debt to sixties' black pop is emphasised by quoting from Wilson Pickett ("in the midnight hour, I can feel your power") and Dionne Warwick ("like a little prayer" and "I say a little prayer") Rising to the challenge she set for herself, Madonna sings as beautifully as she ever has. She smartly avoids the vocal tricks that frequently grate (her occasional husky-voiced bursts can be funny but they do her no favours) and manages to employ a fine balance of feeling and joy. She isn't typically regarded as a technically brilliant singer or anything but it would be hard for anyone to top her performance here.
Then there's the choir. I would soon get sick of the use of gospel choirs in pop (it often felt like they were there to provide meaning in otherwise meaningless songs) but "Like a Prayer" shows how effective they can be in the right hands. As I just mentioned, Madonna doesn't have the strongest voice and she rightly stays out of their way perhaps knowing that she'll be exposed in their presence. ("Let the choir sing" is a lyric that doesn't need to be there but it's a good way for a woman with a supposedly gigantic ego to shine the spotlight elsewhere; the 1990 remix undercuts this a bit by featuring the choir prior to Madonna's introduction)
"Like a Prayer" became a massive hit around the world but it doesn't sound like much else from 1989. Being a masterful hybrid of black pop, it has a timelessness about it that you don't come across everyday. Yet, it was too timeless a year on and had to be transformed into a product of the late-eighties to fit better with Madonna's vision for her first greatest hits set. It's not everyday you get someone taking something timeless and willfully choosing to make it dated.
What the revamped version of "Like a Prayer" ended up doing is that it unknowingly opened the door to the second phase of Madonna's career. She was no longer translating the sound of the New York clubs that was in her heart into her records, nor traces of new wave, disco and glam rock she grew up on; from here, she was content to let her producers and remixers take the lead. This being Madonna, it still worked though not on as consistent a basis as in her eighties' imperial period. Ironically, it was in the nineties that people started praising her for being "clever Madonna" but I'd say she was much smarter back before everyone began figuring her out.
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Also Reviewed This Fortnight
Roachford: "Family Man"
It had only been thirty years since the heyday of Chuck Berry, Larry Williams and Little Richard but somewhere along the line the idea of black rock music had become a novelty. Andrew Roachford had as soulful a voice as anyone (and probably still has; he now sings with Mike + The Mechanics which makes me wonder how nice his delivery of "you can whistle as well as you hear" must be) which makes his decision to rock out admirable when he could've easily gone the R&B Romeo route. The power of his voice works well with the rockist sounds of his band but "Family Man" has always felt more like an album cut than single material to me. "Cuddly Toy" had hooks aplenty and it rightfully gave him a memorable Top 5 hit at the start of the year. Its follow-up was more of the same but less immediate and more forgettable. Good stuff but there's a reason it stalled outside the Top 20. And with that, Roachford's career seemed to stall a bit. He's had a fine career but it always seemed like he was going to be bigger. But how about a second opinion?
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