#likeaprayer

Top 100 Best Music Videos of All-Time

48. LIKE A PRAYER

MADONNA

1989

The highly controversial accompanying music video for "Like a Prayer" was directed by Mary Lambert and was filmed in January 1989 at Raleigh Studios in Hollywood, California, and at San Pedro Hills in San Pedro, California. Madonna wanted the video to be more provocative than anything she had done before. She wanted to address racism by having the video depict a mixed-race couple being killed by the Ku Klux Klan, but on further thinking she chose another provocative theme to maintain the song's religious connotations. Madonna would play the song over and over again, and wanted the visuals to display:

[T]his story of a girl who was madly in love with a black man, set in South, with this forbidden interracial love affair. And the guy she's in love with sings in a choir. So she's obsessed with him and goes to the church all the time. And then it turned into a bigger story, which was about racism and bigotry.