As the auction block of Madonna’s personal items continues to be underway thanks to the rather backstabbing former art advisor Darlene Lutz’ selling of personal “ephemera” like Madonna’s hairbrush and a handwritten breakup letter from Tupac Shakur during a stint in prison, it bears noting that some producers (and friends) are ride or die. Like M’s longtime collaborator Patrick Leonard, who, seeking to devalue the items Lutz is attempting to profit from, has released a trio of demos from a tape that’s also up for sale to the public against the pop star’s wishes.
Among the previously unreleased demos are the already beloved “Like A Prayer” and “Cherish,” as well as one previously unreleased cut called “Angels With Dirty Faces,” featuring a sound more in the vein of “Supernatural” (a bonus track from Like A Prayer). Both a little bit cheeky and little bit emotional, “Angels With Dirty Faces” is an artifact in the study of Madonna’s transition from the gamine of True Blue to the dark-haired ethereal girl of Like A Prayer (that would also resurface in a honeysuckle hue for Ray of Light and again in a full-fledged dark hue for American Life and Madame X).
Insisting, “Life is a game” (just as it is a mystery and a circle), she adds that “it’s a perfect place for angels with dirty faces.” The metaphor most fittingly applied to politicians (particularly of the 1980s) who at least once pretended to have squeaky clean records as a front for their corrupt diabolicalness and predilection for “grab(bing) ’em by the pussy.” But every angel is damned to fall (and fail in virtuousness), as Madonna seems to make clear in the narrative of this song. And in that falling, they possess a certain determination to make others fall with them.
Hence, in their gift for glittering cherubic distraction, they “made men forget just what they were running after/They laugh without any purpose”–other than the sheer joy of getting their fellow man to lose their principles with just as much abandon and carefreeness. For once you become an angel with a dirty face, life is so much easier–unburdened by the trouble of keeping one’s nose clean (that was also a light reference to 80s cocaine usage). That these angels with dirty faces also “taught them to trust their feelings beneath the surface” infers that the natural inclination of man is to do evil, to engage in debauchery. At this point in M’s life, of course, there was the presence of Sean Penn to take into account. Not only violent and irascible, but also himself in a number of “gangster” movies, the motif of the song seems to be a product of Madonna’s studies of the genre. One that she seemed to take a shine to in her own exploration of older gangster films like White Heat (which would become the title of a song on True Blue) starring James Cagney. And, of course, the song itself alludes to the 1938 Cagney movie…Angels With Dirty Faces.
Thus, her ability to hone in on a specific style from any period in time and make it her own is very much apparent on this rough demo that, while rightly left out of the final version of the Like A Prayer album, provides profound insight into the process of one of her famed reinventions. And, to boot, it works rather well when applying it to Lutz, once an angel to Madonna as her art advisor now turned to one with a very dirty face indeed. In any case, maybe it’s best she never officially released the song as it also happens to be the title of a Sum 41 offering as well.
