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Like a prayer, Granta, Paula Deen

Listen: Like a prayer, Madonna, 1989

I was born in 1981 to a pair of classical-music crazed journalists. My dad proudly stated the only rock band he had ever really enjoyed was Bill Hayley and the Comets (last popular in the mid-1950s) and my mother reckons she just never ‘got’ pop music (this despite being a teenager in the early 1960s). What I am saying is, as a child in the greatest decade for pop ever, I lived a straightened existence, my friends providing my only window to the excellent synth-driven world outside. ‘Like a prayer’ came out when I was eight; I have vivid memories of dancing in front of the TV to ‘Cherish’ with one of my best friends. So it might surprise you to know that I have only heard the whole album through recently, and my god people, have you ever listened to this thing? ‘LIKE A PRAYER’. ‘EXPRESS YOURSELF’ (clip by David Fincher, of all people). ‘CHERISH’. ‘DEAR FATHER’. Also, ‘Dear Jessie’ which is about childhood dreams and bubble gum and elephants, and what the hell it is doing on this album I have no idea, but I can completely recommend listening to it on a sunny morning as you skip to work (this also works with ‘Til death do us part’, a sparkly number about a collapsing relationship). This album has a duet with Prince on it, ‘Love song’. Prince. No-one ever told me about this. It is like a great big musical gap in my heart has been filled.

Watch: Paula Deen cooking videos

Paula Deen is the big-haired Foodnetwork queen of southern cooking. Anthony Bourdain thinks she’s terrible and responsible for Americans having diabetes and the obsesity crisis, and also he said her ‘food sucks’, (she responded by saying he needed to ‘get a life’, so you can see this was an intellectual debate). Anyway, Anthony Bourdain needs to maybe live a little, and by that I mean lie back and let the dulcet tones of Ms Deen, (‘People think I eat fried chicken and two sticks of butter every day of my life. Oh, and plus a cake.’), wash over him while he learns how to make, for instance, a peach cobbler.

Read: Granta: The magazine of new writing

I guess you could buy Granta, the British-based quarterly literary journal, whenever a new issue comes out, but I somehow never have. I like my Grantas second or third-hand, preferably passed on with an urging to read a specific article. The one I am currently reading is Number 98 – Summer, 2007, and it was given to me several months ago by a friend who thought I might find Jackie Kay’s story, ‘The last of the smokers’ interesting, given I had just given up the gaspers. I did find it interesting (the emotional connection to cigarettes is something I think every smoker feels) but like all Grantas, I found other things too: a lovely article on the cricket fighting renaissance in Shanghai by Hugh Raffles, and Paul Theroux’s uncomfortably honest and lovely portrait of his now deceased father, who never read a word his son wrote. I too will pass this copy on though, to my mother, who I think will enjoy Louise Carpenter’s history of Ida and Louise Cook, two opera-obsessed sisters who used the royalties from a successful career writing for Mills & Boon to spirit Jewish refugees out of Germany during the war. What my mother will find to press on someone else, who knows?

 

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