Express Yourself

Madonna and Stephen Bray wrote and produced it, the first song they worked on for Like a Prayer, as a tribute to Sly and the Family Stone. Madonna said the idea behind it is that if you do not say what you want, you will not get it. The lyric urges women never to go for second best. Shep Pettibone remixed it into a house song, and Pitchfork noted that his single remix foregrounds the cowbell.

It came out on 9 May 1989 with The Look of Love on the B-side. It peaked at number two on the Hot 100 for two weeks, topped the charts in Canada and Switzerland and reached number five in the UK. Lucy O'Brien called it a feminist call to arms.

David Fincher directed the video in April 1989 at Culver Studios. Inspired by Fritz Lang's Metropolis, it had a budget of 5 million dollars, the most expensive music video made until then, and used the epigraph, without the heart there can be no understanding between the hand and the mind. On 6 September 1989 Madonna opened the MTV Video Music Awards with it, joined by Donna De Lory and Niki Haris in a voguing routine. She has played it on four of her world tours.