Composition
'The album "teems with 60's and early 70's echoes – of the Beatles, Simon & Garfunkel, and Sly and the Family Stone – all pumped up with a brash, if occasionally klutzy, 80's sense of showmanship." A press release said the album includes "a number of hot dance tracks" but noted, "much of the material is of a personal tone."
Madonna drew from her Catholic upbringing, as seen in the album's title track and lead single "Like a Prayer". She described it as "the song of a passionate young girl so in love with God that it is almost as though He were the male figure in her life. From around 8 to 12 years old, I had the same feelings. I really wanted to be a nun." The lyrics deals with themes from Madonna's childhood and adolescence, such as the death of her mother in "Promise to Try", the importance of family in "Keep It Together", and her relationship with her harsh father in "Oh Father". Madonna also preaches female empowerment in "Express Yourself", "in which Madonna expresses a 30-year-old's view of life unshadowed by rebellion and lingering lapsed Catholic pain." "Til Death Do Us Part" is about the violent dissolution of Madonna's marriage to Sean Penn. The song was described as "an anxious jumpy ballad that describes a marriage wracked with drinking, violent quarrels and a possessive, self-hating husband. Its ending finds the couple locked by their unbreakable marriage vows into a miserable cul-de-sac." Madonna noted that could have happened to her and Penn had they followed the Roman Catholic doctrine and not filed for divorce. "Dear Jessie" was inspired by Patrick Leonard's daughter. It was described as "a musical fantasia about pink elephants, lemonade and the land of make-believe, offers a stylish swatch of late Beatles-style psychedelia." The album also includes themes of love on "Cherish" and "Love Song", "a yowling come-hither duet" with Prince. "Spanish Eyes" is said to have "confronted the still-taboo issue of AIDS." Stephen Holden of The New York Times noted, "The songs, which deal directly and very emotionally with her failed marriage to the actor Sean Penn, her family, and her Catholic girlhood, transcend the brassy dance-pop of her three previous records to reveal Madonna as a vulnerable human being." Jon Pareles of the same publication mused that the album "is largely a meditation on male power and love, from paternalistic religion to parents to partners."
Read more about this topic: Like A Prayer
Famous quotes containing the word composition:
“Pushkin’s composition is first of all and above all a phenomenon of style, and it is from this flowered rim that I have surveyed its seep of Arcadian country, the serpentine gleam of its imported brooks, the miniature blizzards imprisoned in round crystal, and the many-hued levels of literary parody blending in the melting distance.”
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“Give a scientist a problem and he will probably provide a solution; historians and sociologists, by contrast, can offer only opinions. Ask a dozen chemists the composition of an organic compound such as methane, and within a short time all twelve will have come up with the same solution of CH4. Ask, however, a dozen economists or sociologists to provide policies to reduce unemployment or the level of crime and twelve widely differing opinions are likely to be offered.”
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“If I don’t write to empty my mind, I go mad. As to that regular, uninterrupted love of writing ... I do not understand it. I feel it as a torture, which I must get rid of, but never as a pleasure. On the contrary, I think composition a great pain.”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)