Miguel Ríos and the success of his 'Hymn to Joy' 50 years ago
- He was already famous, very famous, when in 1989 he published the album that would run more rivers of ink over it. 'Like a Prayer' was Madonna's perfect play, and not just because it was a good dance music album; its content, which happily put religion and sex in the cocktail shaker, and the music video with which it crowned the 'mischief' - and that made Pope John Paul II react - managed to elevate the work to the top of the lists of sales and the eternal Olympus of pop culture.
Close your eyes and remember how the love of your life had become ruined: that is what Madonna did not stop doing in the summer of 1989. At that time she turned 31 and, with her style of 'rottweiler' with lipstick, the that he believed himself a jabata had discovered himself vulnerable. I was already a superstar with half a dozen great hits; but although it reaped good reviews, they considered it a one-day flower , like the junk bonds that propelled the vertiginous rise of the brokers and their resounding fall on any black Monday.
'La Ciccone' was a candle lit on both sides 30 years ago: he had his head on his new album and the collapse of his marriage to Sean Penn , from whom he had just divorced. On the wild side of the actor he had seen a soulmate who was joined by sexual passion and admiration for some dead poets. For him she had left her boyfriend Keith Carradine and also Prince , her eventual lover. As Sinatra and Ava Gardner , Madonna and Sean were great in bed, the problems began when they went to the bidet, so there were two trains thrown to an open grave in the opposite direction in the same way.
On the day of the wedding at a Malibu estate in August 1985, the paparazzi rented helicopters to photograph the event. They flew so low that the rotor blades disheveled some guests, that looked like 'Apocalypse Now' and was the cover of Time, People and Life. The boyfriend was taken by demons, and that he did not know that it was his wife who mounted the scandal by leaking the secret place of the ceremony to the press . The episode was reviewed in the girlfriend's diary.
Four summers later, newly divorced, Madonna kept reviewing the emotional storms noted in her diary, began to think that love had been the sky of a false religion and from a distance she saw him with shameful nostalgia. In the first months of 1989 he had planned 'Like a Prayer' , his fourth studio album, as a reflection of the turbulent stage of his life with Sean. Composers Steve Bray and Patrick Leonard worked separately to present ideas.
Ever since the singer had become the absolute queen of the show, the royalties from her songs, which were sold as ice cream in the desert, had made Bray and Leonard rich, who maintained a fierce competition to see who placed her more songs. Bray was inclined to pop-dance and Leonard brought a more melodic style, both were indispensable for the sound of Madonna, which encouraged his rivalry: it was good for creativity and business . "I love being stabbed, the smell of blood inspires," confessed the killer. Each contributed their own style to 'Like a Prayer' and the result was a prodigy with which Madonna showed that she had the gift of the alchemist who enriches the uranium of her talent with isotopes of high radioactive power .
On the cover of the album, jeans unbuttoning at the height of the pubis looked like the feminine replica of Bruce Springsteen's machote jeans in 'Born in the USA'. The least was that Madonna taught the navel in the showcase of the album, the impunity was that inside she stripped the soul, still occupied by the sadomass nightmare of her love story with Sean Penn , and by a certain image of her husband who, drunk like a vat and died of jealousy, he had locked her in his car and aimed her with a Thunderbird gun. When he was able to escape, he took refuge in the arms of John Kennedy Junior. They were secretly cited in a cheap motel in Chicago , but their first meeting ended in fiasco because they had no condoms. Or so C. David Heymann tells in the book 'American Legacy', which cites as source Rob Littell , a close friend of John. None of that says biographer Randy Taraborrelli , but the night they gave it their all, John-John covered the singer's body with peanut butter and then licked it slowly. Madonna qualified him: "Nonsense, peanut butter has too many calories. It was low-fat whipped cream."
The album 'Like a Prayer' was an exorcism of family demons. The 'Keep it Together', a funk song he co-wrote with Stephen Bray , explored the ambivalence of hospitable, but suffocating, family ties. In 'Promise to Try' he evoked his mother, who died when she was five years old. 'Till Death Do Us Part' was a bitter open letter to Sean Penn that revealed his hang and disappointment.
Strengthened by a deceptively cheerful keyboard riff, the lyrics spoke of ill-treatment ( bruises will vanish / hit so hard with the things you say / I won't stay to see how your hate grows ) and summed up the devastating relationship with the most important man of your life, or was it Jesus Christ?
Okay, it doesn't matter, that song and almost all of that piece of disk are still simply the best songs Madonna has ever written, super-perfect pop, masterpieces executed with a sweeping cheek and triple sliver.
'Like a Prayer' , the song that gives title to the album, deserved every gram of the morbo it generated. Written in collaboration with Leonard , that funky piece of eighties funky immediately became a powerful irradiation hit.
The lyrics were from a passionate aunt who falls in love with God and ends up taking him as a man. It would be sacrilegious like the Chants of Maldoror de Lautréamont if it were not mystical like the verses of St. Teresa. Full of eucharistic and carnal references, it seemed a mystical celebration of love ... but love for whom? For God or for an uncle? With reverence and devotion, as if evoking something divine, Madonna sang: When you call me, I kneel, I want to take you there, at midnight, I can feel your power, it's like a prayer. For all saints, what the hell did that mean? Of course, no matter how much spiritual gospel he put in, that prayer suggested the scene of ... anyway. When Madonna put on, nothing was put in front of her, she was the last resistant of art understood as desecration and had the perverse ability to inspire strong emotions in conflict by letting the listener scratch his head and decide where to throw.
The double meanings of the letter evoked religion, but suggested the sexual climax; although the same goes for Santa Catalina de Siena: the red stripe that separates the ecstasy of the soul and those of the body is very thin. "Like a Prayer is about the influence of Catholicism in my life and the passion it provokes in me," said Madonna, who as a teenager wanted to be a nun and identified with Mary Magdalene because she was convinced that she was sleeping with Jesus Christ. Already curdled, he declared with Mae West's vulgarity that if he liked crucifixes it was because they seemed sexy: "In them there are naked men."
Can you shock more? You can, and demonstrated in the video of the song, a sacramental car more tantric than Calderonian that left in shock mode to all Christ: priests, parishioners and Pepsi executives, who were their sponsors. In chilling sequences we see Madonna dancing in front of burning crosses and showing stigmas on her palms.
As a child, to attract attention in her large family, in addition to making numbers to what Shirley Temple already caused injuries or burned her fingers. In the video clip he seduced on the altar of a church the effigy of a black saint, who cried tears of blood when he saw his bodice tight to his body. The director of the video, Mary Lambert, revealed that "Madonna insisted on making love on an altar because it was a song about ecstasy, specifically about sexual ecstasy and its relationship with religious ecstasy."
Faithful from various religions around the world first put their hands to their heads in stupefaction, then ragged their clothes and protested against blasphemy, finally decreed the boycott of Pepsi, including their fast food chains Kentucky Fried Chicken, Taco Bell and Pizza Hut The Vatican considered the use of Catholic iconography sacrilegious and John Paul II joined the boycott and called for a ban on any appearance of Madonna in Italy. He succeeded halfway: Pepsi, of the nerves, denied the video, giving up the five million dollars he had paid to the singer; but the Streisand effect that multiplies the appeal of the forbidden worked and the single became Madonna's seventh number one and the album was a bombshell that placed five songs on the Billboard list. The iconoclast to which the clamp was going was consecrated.
Since his teens, a single paranoid design had inhabited his imagination: to be as famous as Jesus Christ, whom he would use in the alchemy of his sinful marketing. He was not, by any means, the only man turned by the star on the steps of his ladder to glory: I don't care if I have to live on the street, I don't care if I have to eat garbage from the garbage. I will do it if there is no other remedy for success. I am ambitious, I am stubborn and I know what I want, if that makes me a whore, well I agree, "said the bighead.
He planned his career as Napoleon his wars, tore his scruples like someone who removed a pimple and became a prodigious balance of sex and brain. At the age of 15 he gave his virginity to his high school partner Russell Long , who had the lifetime honor of having uncorked a myth. In the burning darkness of a blue Caddy, she took off her bra and snapped at her without anesthesia: "Are we going to do it or not?" "Yes, of course," he said. "Well, what are you waiting for?" She urged. That disinhibition gave him a reputation for dominance among the boys in his neighborhood in Michigan .
When he arrived in New York to be an artist he met Dan Gilroy , drummer of the Breakfast Club band, and he hurried to throw the yew, attracted him to her and died. It was the toll, so he managed to enter the band as a singer. "You are so aggressive, so uninhibited ... You make love like a man," he said. "I always wanted to be a man, take off my shirt in the middle of the street, like a bricklayer," she replied. In the Breakfast Club, from the desert of anonymity, I was glimpsing horizons not so distant that the angels of universal notoriety promised. Then, his favorite song was I Will Survive, by Gloria Gaynor, and not only did he survive, but his apotheosis was an example of a book that shows talent in destiny, but not as much as character.
He began dating editor Steve Newman and thus achieved his first cover. With the mission accomplished, Madonna laid land in between. "Steve," he said, "face the facts. You are a nobody, no money. Right? But I am Madonna. I mean I earn a quarter of a million dollars a year. And next time I will earn 10 times more. You will remain a nobody. " A stupefied Newman just managed to reply: "Is that all you want? Money and success?" "Exactly," concluded the genie.
All great artists have a magical moment in their career, for Diana Ross , the soundtrack of Lady Sings the Blues; Michael Jackson had two, Off the Wall and Thriller; Madonna Like a Virgin and Like a Prayer. 30 years have passed since that libertine miracle and it is still debated whether that holy golfa was going to leave the pot or was touched by divine grace. Sometimes genius and madness overlap.
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