Controversial Music Video

This is Madonna's music video to the song 'Like A Prayer'. This is a well known controversial music video. 2 reasons for this include: the use of the Catholic church scenes with relation to sex and also the way she shows the injustice of the black man in the situation of the attack. In the time that the video was released, this would have been offensive to many people but she decided to not aim at the target audience, and release a conceptual video with a much deeper meaning about things other people didn't want to discuss or were too afraid to talk about. This actually helped catapult its popularity as it was so talked about. Then a lot of people respected her for standing up for what she believed it and what was right. The issue of segregation was still fresh in people's minds and was still a much talked about issue. Then with the mix of the church and sexual scenes, this was seen as extremely controversial at the time and still today. These two factors made this video so controversial in the society of the 1980s and it is still seen as controversial today because of the rebellion needed for her to be brave enough to release the video. This is definitely something that needs to be considered when making our own video as what makes something popular is how different it is from what else is being released at the same time. Also, the defiance made it popular as it opened people's eyes to real issues and then the appreciation they had for her grew and made the song more approved of.
Although this video stands out compared to others of its time, there are features from Goodwin's seven that feature in the video. There is frequent reference to the notion of "looking" at the female body. This is a common feature of music videos especially of the pop genre which this is. This will attract male attention to the video which is a way of targeting the target audience. Also there are many close ups of the artist which are demands of the record label. This gets the audience familiarised with the artist which is important for promotion of the artist.