(1989) Like a Prayer

Madonna

ReleasedMarch 21, 1989 (US); March 20, 1989 (Europe)

LabelSire / Warner Bros.

RecordedSeptember 1988 – January 1989

ProducerMadonna, Patrick Leonard, Stephen Bray, Prince

StudioJohnny Yuma Recording (Burbank), Saturn Sound (Sherman Oaks), Ocean Way (Hollywood), Paisley Park (Chanhassen)

Genres

Primary

Pop

Secondary

Dance-popArt popAdult contemporarySynth funkPop soul

ListenRYM·Apple Music·Spotify

51:01

Side one24:04

1	Like a PrayerWritten and produced by Madonna, Patrick Leonard	5:41
2	Express YourselfWritten and produced by Madonna, Stephen Bray	4:39
3	Love SongWritten and produced by Madonna, Prince	4:52
4	Till Death Do Us PartWritten and produced by Madonna, Patrick Leonard	5:16
5	Promise to TryWritten and produced by Madonna, Patrick Leonard	3:36

Side two26:57

1	CherishWritten and produced by Madonna, Patrick Leonard	5:03
2	Dear JessieWritten and produced by Madonna, Patrick Leonard	4:20
3	Oh FatherWritten and produced by Madonna, Patrick Leonard	4:57
4	Keep It TogetherWritten and produced by Madonna, Stephen Bray	5:03
5	Spanish EyesWritten and produced by Madonna, Patrick Leonard	5:15
6	Act of ContritionWritten by Madonna, Patrick LeonardProduced by The Powers That Be	2:19

week at No. 1

“Like a Prayer”“Express Yourself”“Cherish”“Oh Father”“Keep It Together”week at No. 1

week at No. 1

“Like a Prayer”“Express Yourself”“Cherish”“Dear Jessie”week at No. 1

Billboard 200UK Albums	Debut	Peak	At peak	On chart
	11Apr 8, 1989	1Apr 22, 1989	6 wks	77 wks
	1Apr 1, 1989	1Apr 1, 1989	2 wks	65 wks
Hot 100UK Singles	Debut	Peak	At peak	On chart
“Like a Prayer”Mar 3, 1989dir. Mary Lambert	38Mar 18, 19892Mar 18, 1989	1Apr 22, 19891Mar 25, 1989	3 wks3 wks	16 wks13 wks
“Express Yourself”May 9, 1989dir. David Fincher	41Jun 3, 198910Jun 3, 1989	2Jul 15, 19895Jun 10, 1989	2 wks2 wks	16 wks10 wks
“Cherish”Aug 1, 1989dir. Herb Ritts	37Aug 19, 198916Sep 16, 1989	2Oct 7, 19893Sep 23, 1989	2 wks1 wk	15 wks8 wks
“Oh Father”US only; Britain got it in 1996dir. David Fincher	55Nov 11, 1989—	20Jan 6, 1990—	1 wk—	13 wks—
“Dear Jessie”Britain and Europe; never a US single	—9Dec 16, 1989	—5Dec 30, 1989	—3 wks	—9 wks
“Keep It Together”US and Australia only	56Feb 3, 1990—	8Mar 31, 1990—	1 wk—	13 wks—

CertifiedRIAA 4× Platinum

Billboard's weekly Hot 100 and Billboard 200 for every week of each run, read from the charts themselves and cross-checked against Billboard's own weeks-on-chart counter, which runs unbroken for every run here. The British runs are the Official Charts Company's. The last three singles split by territory: “Oh Father” and “Keep It Together” were not issued in Britain at the time, and “Dear Jessie” was never issued in the United States, so each shows figures for one country only.

In 1989

6 graded notices, averaging 84 of 100 on their own scales

Los Angeles TimesChris Willman · Mar 19, 19893/5
NMEDavid Quantick · Mar 25, 198910/10“Angel Delight,” p. 32
Chicago Sun-TimesDon McLeese · Mar 27, 19893.5/4
Rolling StoneJ. D. Considine · Apr 6, 19893.5/5
QLloyd Bradley · May 19895/5issue 32
The Village VoiceRobert Christgau · Jun 6, 1989B+Consumer Guide

Year-end lists

Pazz & Jop 1989The Village Voice critics' pollNo. 18 of 40235 points from 22 ballots
Pazz & Jop 1989“Like a Prayer”The Village Voice critics' poll, singlesNo. 7 of 2537 votes

The canon since

Rolling Stone 500 Greatest Albums 2003No. 237 of 500
Rolling Stone 500 Greatest Albums 2012No. 239 of 500
Rolling Stone 500 Greatest Albums 2020No. 331 of 500
Apple Music 100 Best Albums 2024No. 77 of 100

Later verdicts

4 graded notices, averaging 91 of 100 on their own scales

BlenderTony Power4/5
Spin Alternative Record GuideRob Sheffield · 199510/10
Entertainment WeeklyJim Farber · Jul 20, 2001A
PitchforkMaura Johnston · Aug 16, 20179.0/10

Grades as each outlet printed them. The NME and Q ratings are print-only and are taken from Wikipedia's citations for those issues, not read at source; the rest were read at the outlet or in its archive. The Pazz & Jop placings, points and ballots come from the poll's own results page at robertchristgau.com, and the list placings from the lists themselves — Rolling Stone's three editions of its 500, Slant's and Pitchfork's decade lists, and Apple Music's 100.

Musicians

Bruce Gaitschacoustic guitar, guitar
Chuck Findleyarrangement (horns), brass
Donna de Lorybacking vocals
Lynne Fiddmontbacking vocals
Madonnabacking vocals, synthesizer (additional)
Marcos Loyabacking vocals, requinto guitar
Marilyn Martinbacking vocals
Nadirah Alibacking vocals
Niki Harisbacking vocals
Rose Banksbacking vocals
The Andraé Crouch Choirbacking vocals
Guy Prattbass
Randy Jacksonbass
David Boruffbrass
Dick "Slyde" Hydebrass
Steve Madaiobrass
Larry Corbettcello, soloist
Geary Lanierclavinet
Suzie Katayamaconcertmaster
Jeff Porcarodrums
John Robinsondrums
Jonathan Moffettdrums
Joe Meyerfrench horn
Richard Toddfrench horn
Chester Kamenguitar
Dann Huffguitar
David Williamsguitar
Joe Porcaromarimba
Luis Contepercussion
Paulinho da Costapercussion
Patrick Leonardpiano (acoustic), organ (b3), clavinet, synthesizer
Jai Windingsynthesizer
Stephen Braysynthesizer
Sandra Crouchtambourine (spanish)

Production

Bill Meyersarrangement (strings), conductor (strings)
Ivy Skoffcoordinator (production)
Michael Vail Blumengineer (additional)
Bob Salcedoengineer (assistant)
Joe Schiffengineer (assistant)
Stacy Bairdengineer (assistant)
Eddie Millerengineer (at paisley park)
Heidi Hanschuengineer (at paisley park)
Stephen Sheltonengineer (at paisley park)
Bob Ludwigmastering (dmm)
Bill Bottrellmixing, engineer
Harry McCarthytechnician (drums)
John Goodtechnician (drums)

Sleeve

Jeri Heidenart direction
Margo Chasedesign (logo)
Herb Rittsphotography

Credits as the sleeve prints them, transcribed on the album's Discogs entry for the Europe edition (release 116237); the per-track writing and production credits from release 116237.

Like a Prayer is the fourth studio album by Madonna, released on March 21, 1989, by Sire. She wrote and produced it with Patrick Leonard and Stephen Bray between September 1988 and January 1989, on the one-a-day method the two of them had settled on True Blue, with one song written and recorded with Prince. Its subjects are her mother’s death, her father, her Catholicism and the collapse of her marriage to Sean Penn, and Leonard’s name for it while they were making it was the divorce album.

It reached No. 1 in America and held six weeks of a seventy-seven-week run, entered the British chart at No. 1, and has sold somewhere above fifteen million copies. The title song became her seventh American No. 1, and its video, in which she kisses a Black saint and dances before burning crosses, cost her a five-million-dollar Pepsi campaign within weeks of signing it. The reviews were the most serious of her career to that point and have aged into consensus: it is the record that shifted the argument from whether she was any good to what she would make next.

Background

For most of 1988 she put out nothing. The gap between “Causing a Commotion” and the next single ran eighteen months, the longest of her career to that point, and Billboard’s Paul Grein read it as strategy in the week the title song entered the chart. The two singles before it had been hits that drew scattered complaints she was repeating herself, and rather than risk burnout she had waited, in his words, “until the record-buying public had a chance to miss her.” Grein also named the competition. She was thirty, which the trade of record called a veteran, and the No. 1 album and single that week both belonged to the eighteen-year-old Debbie Gibson.¹

The year away was not idle. Speed-the-Plow opened at the Royale on May 3, 1988, David Mamet’s play about two Hollywood producers and the temporary secretary who comes between them, directed by Gregory Mosher, with Joe Mantegna and Ron Silver in the men’s parts and Madonna as Karen. It ran 279 performances and closed on the last day of the year. Silver took the Tony for best actor and the play was nominated for best play; the production sold on her name and the critics went after her performance. Jonathan Lieberson, in The New York Review of Books, found her “sexually attractive but whiny and uncertain in the delivery of her lines,” and thought that in failing to hold the part against the two men she exposed a speciousness in the play itself.² Her own account of the run is of failing on purpose, nightly. The character was the scapegoat, which was what had drawn her to it, and the arithmetic of that wore through: “To continue to fail each night and to walk off that stage crying, with my heart wrenched … It just got to me after a while. I was becoming as miserable as the character I played.”³

She turned thirty that August, the age her mother had been when she died. On December 28 a complaint against Sean Penn was filed with the Malibu sheriff’s office and withdrawn days later; Penn denied the allegations, and she declined to discuss them beyond saying the tabloid accounts were inaccurate. Divorce papers were filed on January 5, 1989, thirteen months after the first set had been filed and rescinded.⁴ The album is dedicated to her mother’s memory.

Warner had a great deal riding on what she did with all of it. WEA spent more than two million dollars launching the record, its largest campaign to that point, and had shipped two million albums into Europe before release; the president of WEA Europe told Music & Media that a broadcast ban would be self-defeating, because forbidden fruit “all adds to the charisma.”⁵ The label’s publicity chief said on the record that the album was deep stuff but “not obscure or gratuitously arty,” and Bray told a wire reporter eighteen days out that anyone expecting to get up and boogie would be most disappointed.⁶ The collaborator with the most to prove was Prince, whose Lovesexy had been Billboard’s disappointment of 1988, the lowest-charting album of his career since 1981 and his first to miss gold in a decade.⁷ She had co-produced True Blue with Leonard and Bray, and she settled any remaining question about who was in charge in one gesture: after an argument in the sessions she held up the True Blue sleeve and asked whose picture was on it, and the feistier conversations stopped.⁸

In January 1989 Pepsi signed her for five million dollars, for a commercial built on the unreleased title song and sponsorship of the tour that was to be named after the album.⁹ Her reasoning was not defensive: she called it a challenge to make a commercial with some artistic value, said she liked merging art and commerce, and pointed out that a video is a commercial too and that no label could buy publicity on that scale.¹⁰

Recording

The write-it-in-a-day method was True Blue’s, carried over intact, and Leonard has described the shape of a day precisely. He got to the studio at seven or eight in the morning, worked out in the gym he kept there, and by the time she arrived around eleven he had a chord progression, a drum pattern and a bass line waiting on a sequencer. He would play it and say what he had; she would listen, and often reverse him. “Oftentimes I’d say, ‘here’s the verse, and here’s the chorus,’ and she’d say, ‘no, it’s the other way around, switch ‘em.’ So I’d switch ‘em. This thing is an hour old, it’s not etched in stone.” She wrote the lyric in about the time it had taken him to write the music, and the take she sang that afternoon was usually the one that shipped.¹¹ By her own account many of the kept vocals are first takes, and she thought them more spontaneous for it.¹²

The partnership worked on opposition and both of them knew it. Leonard had started piano at three and studied music his whole life, where for her, he said, “it’s much more just about creativity, and a natural gift, what the impulse says is right.” What they shared was where they came from: two people from Michigan, raised where it is thirty below for a good part of the year and blue-collar habits attach to everything. “So we shut up and we did the work.”¹³ Bray pulled the other way, in a more kinetic dance-floor register while Leonard chased melody, and Madonna let the two of them compete without refereeing, on the theory that the tension was good for creativity and for business.¹⁴

What was new was what she put into the songs. She told SongTalk that she had not tried to sugar-coat anything or make it more palatable for mass consumption, and had written what she felt because that was what was coming out of her.¹⁵ Leonard named the sessions for what they were. “We called it the divorce album,” he said. “Everything took four or times longer to do as she kept breaking down in the studio.” He remembered days when she wore sunglasses in the studio from morning to night.¹⁶

The often-repeated claim that this was her first record with live musicians is her own, and narrower than the paraphrase: she had worked with live players before, but this was the first time they were all in one room together, and playing with her changed how she sang.¹⁷ Leonard had been arguing for it. He had been musical director on the tours, knew which players to call, and describes the pipeline as demos made by the two of them alone, then “replacing the drum machines and the percussion with real people and getting background singers in and having guitar players come in and do parts.”¹⁸ The result is less wholesale than the story suggests. Most of the bass on the record is synthesized and most of that is Leonard, with Guy Pratt and Randy Jackson added where a part wanted a player; on the title track Pratt’s electric bass is doubled by a Minimoog, and the seven-inch edit carries a different Jackson part altogether.¹⁹

“Oh Father” took persuading; Leonard filled the room with nine people and had to talk her into it, promising it would not be painful.²⁰ “Promise to Try,” her song about her mother’s death, went the other way and lost the room entirely: Leonard played piano, she sang at his shoulder with no headphones, and the record button was pushed twice.²¹

Building the title track

The title song was written first, and its architecture is a subtraction. She wanted the instruments stripped back to a voice and an organ with a choir on top, and the arrangement’s original bongos and Latin percussion came off to make room.²² Andraé Crouch brought the choir and vetted the lyrics before agreeing, saying she had wanted something very churchy and he had tried to make it as powerful as he could.²³ What she was chasing in the room was less doctrinal. She told everyone present to surrender to passionate abandon, and Pratt, whose improvised bass figure runs through the track, described an out-of-body experience in which she called for more until he ran out of licks and started his part again from the beginning.²⁴ Leonard heard the chorus’s central line as a description of oral sex and asked her to take it out. She refused, and the song keeps the ambiguity.²⁵

The one song built with Prince is the album’s least defended, and its route to the record was slow. They had met in Minnesota the year before to try writing a musical together, finished nothing, and put it aside; he came to see the play, brought her a rough mix of something they had started, and she called him after the run closed to ask for it. They finished “Love Song” by mailing tapes between Los Angeles and Minnesota and playing parts down the phone, a way of working she said she loved.²⁶ Bray was asked in and turned it down, and has called it one of his few regrets.²⁷

Music

Like a Prayer is a pop record, and the word every carrier agrees on is the plain one. Its texture is what Kenneth Partridge later described as classic psychedelic rock bent into then-current synthpop: real drums and guitars and an organ, sitting inside programmed arrangements, with strings and a choir where the songs call for them.²⁸ Published arrangements exist for five of the eleven tracks. The title song is in D minor at 120 beats per minute, “Express Yourself” also at 120, “Cherish” at 130 in D major, and “Dear Jessie” at 120 in D major in common time, shifting into 3/4 after its second chorus.²⁹

She named her own sources twice that spring, and the two lists do not match. To Rolling Stone she said the album drew on past influences rather than current ones, and assigned them by song: “Keep It Together” and “Express Yourself” were tributes to Sly and the Family Stone, “Oh Father” a tribute to Simon and Garfunkel, and the emotional weather of the whole thing came from her own growing up.³⁰ To Billboard, in a songwriters’ feature that ran the same fortnight, she named Karen Carpenter and Nancy Sinatra, and was specific about what she took: “Karen Carpenter had the clearest, purest voice. I’m completely influenced by her harmonic sensibility.”³¹ Sly Stone and Simon and Garfunkel in one magazine, Carpenter and Sinatra in another, from an artist the trade still filed under dance-pop.

Six of the eleven songs leave pop behind in a nameable direction. The title track is gospel, with a working church choir singing church changes and the organ and hand claps left audible on a number-one pop single. “Express Yourself” and “Keep It Together” are funk and soul records, Bray’s two. “Dear Jessie” and “Oh Father” are baroque pop, the first with the kaleidoscopic orchestration J.D. Considine compared to Sgt. Pepper. “Cherish” is a doo-wop shuffle. “Pray for Spanish Eyes” is a Latin ballad, and “Act of Contrition” closes the album as a studio collage, a backward tape of the choir with a recited prayer over it.³²

The singing is the least fixed of any of her records. She moves between a girlish upper register and a chest voice she had not used much before, and she lets takes stay rough where the lyric is rough. The lyrics are the most directly autobiographical she had written, and she was willing to say what each one was for. “Till Death Do Us Part” she described as a marriage curdling into damage, drawn from her life and then fictionalized into a cycle that ends only in death, and she wanted it to be shocking. Penn had heard it and, she said, liked it.³³ “Promise to Try” is addressed to her mother and is about letting the wanting go: “It’s about a yearning to have her in my life but also about trying to accept the fact she’s not.” “Oh Father” is addressed to a man who could not say things. “You know, my father is not an incredibly verbal man, and that’s been my frustration,” she said. “More than anything, I want my father’s approval, whether I want to admit it or not.”³⁴ Asked whether she had noticed how many of the songs take a hard line on men, she said she had not, and then agreed the record has a strong feminine point of view.³⁵

The sleeve assigns no instrument to any track, only writer and producer, so the per-track personnel that circulate come from later sources, not from the jacket.³⁶ What the publishing does show is how closed the room was: three publishers across eleven songs, Leonard’s, Bray’s and Prince’s, and nobody else.³⁷

Title and artwork

The cover, shot by Herb Ritts, is the first of her career not to show her face: hips, hands, beads and jeans. Lucy O’Brien reads it as a nod to the mother, a devout Catholic who covered the family’s Sacred Heart statue whenever a woman came to the house in zip-up jeans.³⁸ First pressings were scented with patchouli oil, and Warner ran the scent through the campaign, printing a patchouli-soaked photograph of her bare midriff in Billboard under the slogans “It Shall Be Released” and “Lead Us Into Temptation.” More than two million dollars went into selling a record about her dead mother, her father and her Catholicism.³⁹

What it inherits and what it introduces

The gospel debt is paid in full rather than gestured at: a working choir, church changes and a church arrangement, on a pop single that went to No. 1. The method is True Blue’s, unchanged, and the studio habits are the ones she and Leonard had built on tour. What is inherited from further back is the Catholicism, which she had used as costume for six years and here uses as subject. The imagery on Like a Virgin was a rosary worn as jewelry; here it is a woman who says that once you are Catholic you are always Catholic, “in terms of your feelings of guilt and remorse and whether you’ve sinned or not,” and who says the religion is painful rather than soothing.⁴⁰

What the album introduced was a permission. A pop star at maximum commercial altitude made a record about her dead mother, her father, her failed marriage and her religion, and her audience followed her into it without any drop in scale. The two effects are hard to separate afterward, because everything that came later depends on the audience having said yes here. “Express Yourself” put the argument in the imperative and kept it there; Bray’s account is that they did not invent feminism but that the song was a call to action.⁴¹ The other introduction is procedural. She had produced with these men before, but this is the record where the songs arrive from her life instead of from a brief, and every subsequent Madonna album is answerable to that standard, including the ones that decline it.

Release

Like a Prayer was released on March 21, 1989. The commercial came first. “Make a Wish,” a two-minute spot directed by Joe Pytka, premiered on March 2 during NBC’s The Cosby Show and rolled out through forty countries; Pepsi expected 250 million viewers, and Advertising Age put it at around 500 million eyes. In it Madonna watches home movies of her own childhood birthday party and trades places with the girl in them. She never holds the can.⁴²

Mary Lambert’s video for the song reached MTV the next day, and the two were nothing alike. Pepsi learned of the premiere the day it happened; its spokesman called it “almost akin to two planets colliding.”⁴³ The video’s plot is a courtroom errand: Madonna witnesses a murder, watches a Black man wrongly arrested for it, and testifies to free him. What drew the objections was everything in between, the stigmata on her hands, the field of burning crosses she dances before, and the Black saint she kisses.⁴⁴

The sequence that followed is tidier in memory than it was at the time. Pepsi did not pull the campaign; for five weeks it defended it. Reuters reported a withdrawal on March 6, quoting a spokeswoman saying the video could be read as offensive, and Pepsi repudiated the report two days later, calling the response overwhelmingly positive and saying it would probably run the spots again when the song reached No. 1. MTV never wavered, and as of March 7 neither the network nor Warner had taken a single call protesting the video.⁴⁵ Rev. Donald Wildmon of the American Family Association had by then told the Los Angeles Times, without having seen the clip, that it was offensive but that “we don’t plan on making a crusade of it.” Two days later he called a boycott in a magazine with a circulation of 380,000, and a bishop in Corpus Christi called another.⁴⁶ Pepsi canceled the ad on April 5, and gave as its reason not the boycott, which Wildmon had already called off, but that consumers could not tell what the company had and had not sponsored.⁴⁷ She kept the fee, and the tour lost its sponsor and its name.⁴⁸

Her own telling has tidied since. Posting in 2023, when Pepsi finally re-aired the spot, she wrote that the commercial was canceled immediately when she refused to change the scenes with the saint and the crosses. The record is messier than the memory: the campaign ran for weeks before it was pulled, and no contemporaneous account has Pepsi asking her to recut anything.⁴⁹

Five singles followed the album and a sixth went only to Britain. “Like a Prayer” came in March, “Express Yourself” in May with a video by David Fincher, “Cherish” in August with one by Herb Ritts, “Oh Father” in October in America only, “Dear Jessie” in December in Britain and Europe only, and “Keep It Together” in January 1990 in America and Australia.⁵⁰

Reception

The reviews engaged her as a writer, which was new. J.D. Considine, in Rolling Stone, called it far and away the most self-consciously serious album she had made, found her brutally frank about the dissolution of her marriage, and warned readers that the record was more interested in exorcising demons than entertaining fans. He heard the title track open on a sudden blast of stun-gun guitar, judged the Leonard collaborations stunning in their breadth, and singled out “Dear Jessie” for its kaleidoscopic Sgt. Pepper-isms.⁵¹ Stephen Holden reviewed it for the New York Times two days before release under the headline “Madonna Re-Creates Herself — Again,” and Robert Christgau graded it B+.⁵²

The verdicts split on how much credit to give the seriousness. Billboard’s unsigned notice called the album less accessible than her previous efforts and ultimately her most satisfying, lyrically and musically. Barry Walters, in the San Francisco Examiner, wrote that the record covered more stylistic and emotional ground than anything she had done and went past “being merely a great assembly of future singles,” and closed by calling it the album where she crossed the boundary between craft and inspiration. Don McLeese in the Chicago Sun-Times gave it three and a half of four and made the backhand explicit: this was her best album, and for anyone who thought that faint praise, it was a very good album by the standards of any popular artist.⁵³ The dissent was thinner but it existed. Chris Willman in the Los Angeles Times headlined his three-star review “Like a Prayer represents a leap, but not very far,” and Peter B. King in The Pittsburgh Press dismissed the whole thing as image over substance and uninspired dance-floor fodder that went down like flat Pepsi, eighteen days after the ad was pulled.⁵⁴ Wikipedia’s summary that the album met universal acclaim rests on two retrospectives written thirty years later; 1989 was warm and not unanimous.⁵⁵

The numbers matched the notices. The album reached No. 1 on the Billboard 200 and held six weeks across a seventy-seven-week run, entered the British chart at No. 1 and stayed sixty-five weeks. It was her third consecutive American No. 1 album and it climbed fastest of the three. “Like a Prayer” became her seventh American No. 1 single with three weeks at the top; “Cherish” and “Express Yourself” both stopped at No. 2. Then “Oh Father” broke the run at No. 20, ending a streak of sixteen consecutive American top-five singles, before “Keep It Together” restored the altitude at No. 8.⁵⁶

Legacy

The album is the hinge in the standard account of her career, the point at which the argument shifted from whether she was any good to what she was going to make next. Considine’s closing verdict in 1989, that hers was one of the most compelling voices of the eighties, has aged into consensus.⁵⁷ The critical record has moved since without settling. Rolling Stone placed it at No. 237 in the first edition of its 500 Greatest Albums, held it at 239 in the second, and dropped it to 331 in the third, while Pitchfork put it at No. 78 among the albums of the 1980s and Apple Music at No. 77 of all time; the reassessments have been kinder than the rankings.

The controversy did the album no harm and Madonna said so from a stage. “Like a Prayer” won Viewer’s Choice at the 1989 MTV Video Music Awards, on a broadcast Pepsi sponsored, and she used the podium to thank Pepsi for causing so much controversy.⁵⁸ J. Randy Taraborrelli’s reading is that the affair only enhanced her standing as someone who knew how to sell a concept, and he notes what the tape shows: she never once holds the can.⁵⁹ Pepsi ran a thirty-second cut of the spot again in September 2023, during that year’s Video Music Awards, ending on a line about forty years of disrupting the status quo.⁶⁰

The smaller thing in the sleeve has aged better still. The Christian organizations had been pressuring Pepsi over the video for weeks by the time the album reached American shops, arguing with a record they had not heard. It shipped with a card telling millions of teenagers that AIDS is an equal-opportunity disease and that people who have it deserve compassion and support, the first such insert to accompany a mainstream commercial release.⁶¹

rhapsode

Explorer

Like a Prayer

In 1989

Year-end lists

The canon since

Later verdicts

Musicians

Production

Sleeve

Background

Recording

Music

Title and artwork

What it inherits and what it introduces

Release

Reception

Legacy

Further reading

See also

rhapsode

Explorer

Like a Prayer

In 1989

Year-end lists

The canon since

Later verdicts

Musicians

Production

Sleeve

Background

Recording

Music

Title and artwork

What it inherits and what it introduces

Release

Reception

Legacy

Further reading

See also

Footnotes