I'm a child of 80's music. With that said I never really listened to Madonna for most of that decade. I started with Rock and got caught up on all the classic rock from the 60's and 70's. I then graduated to heavy metal. Not so much the hairbands of the mid to late 80's but the New Wave of British Heavy Metal like Iron Maiden, Judas Priest and Scorpions. Then around 1985 I was introduced to Hard Core Punk. I loved this music and still do. It made me feel like I was part of something small yet special. Of course in recent years there has been books and documentaries produced that claim that 1985 was when Hard Core punk ended. That may be the case and in hindsight I'm sure I missed the true hey days of the scene, but I still cherish my few years of discovering and enjoying that music from 85 to about 87. I moved away from the hard core toward the end of the decade and got into a lot of the indie rock bands like Jane's Addiction, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers as well as many of the early hip hop artists like Public Enemy, Eric B and Rakim, EPMD to name a few. I also realize looking back that it wasn't so much that I moved away from Hard Core as much as the whole scene just sort of disappeared. So as you can gather from this brief history you can see why Madonna didn't really fit in there. But you can see that I wasn't stuck to any one thing and I was open to new music. So when Madonna released the album "Like A Prayer" in 1989 I remember hearing "Express Yourself" on the radio. I was in a car with a bunch of my skater buddies and it came on the radio. For some reason we left it on. I think it was because my friend Neil was driving and he was the kind of guy who marched to his own drum beat. he didn't care what people thought and so even though Madonna wasn't what any self respecting skater should be listening to he did. Anyways I remember thinking at the time that Madonna was doing something different. I think at this point in my life I had gone to a few clubs and was getting into dance club music. I thought this was a great dance track. From that day on I thought of Madonna in a different light. I didn't go out and buy "Like A Prayer", but I did get the Vogua cassigle the following year. Yes I said cassingle. I was somewhat late to the whole CD thing. Again she had keyed into something new. Vogue tapped into the house music that was already very prevalent in Chicago at the time. I had been listening to it on WNUR the Northwestern College station out of Evanston, IL for a few years now, but it was pretty underground up to that point.
The next thing I ever bought from her was a CD single of Like A Prayer. It had some great remixes on it. I'd put those mixes on mix tapes played that CD to death. Then in recent years I came across this 45 and saw that it said 7" mix. I thought I love the song. If ever I have a jukebox I'd want this song in it. It would be perfect for a party. I also knew I didn't have the 7" version of the song. Well, after getting the record I can say the whole 7" mix thing isn't that big a deal. A casual listener won't even know what the difference is. It's about 23 seconds shorter than the album cut, but other than that I don't even know what where the cuts are. Maybe you can identify them and let me know. I'm just not anal or patient enough to analyze the two version.
Side two is the weird "Act of Contrition" which sounds like what a B-side should sound like. The funny thing is that it is actually on the album "Like A Prayer". It closes out the record. I think it sort of foretold the future for Madonna who was going to explore all sorts of other genres and would experiment herself.
So get on your dancing shoes, get your rosary beads out of the closet and get ready to dance.
Enjoy!
01 Like A Prayer (7" Version).m4a
02 Act Of Contrition.m4a
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