My favourite album: Like a Prayer by Madonna

For the record, my nearly favourite album is Discovery by Daft Punk. But after sending my 15th email in one hour debating the merits between that one and this one to the beleaguered editor of this website (oddly, he stopped replying after my seventh email), I caught my reflection in the mirror, hairbrush in front of mouth, and thought, who am I kidding? I'm a woman in her 30s – of course my favourite album is Like a Prayer. Bog off, era-defining dance music auteurs and crank up Cherish.

Any woman my age who claims to have no emotional connection to Like a Prayer is a liar, not my age and quite possibly not a woman. And unlike too many albums to which women are supposed to have emotional connections, this one isn't mopey, self-indulgent, difficult or weird: Like a Prayer is a joyous reminder of just how fun Madonna really did used to be. I was 10 when this album came out and while it wasn't my first modern pop album (that accolade went to the still relevant … Tiffany), it was the one that shaped what I thought, and still think, pop stars, pop music, music videos, love, sex and the 80s were and should be.

It's hard to think of an album cover more evocative of women in the 80s than Like a Prayer, with its juxtaposition of jewels, religious iconography, a bare tummy and high waisted pale denim jeans. This is the ladies' answer to Bruce Springsteen's Born in the USA, replete with denim crotch-area shot. If I'm being totally honest, I still think this is how cool people dress.

Maybe 1989 was a simpler time. Maybe it was just me that was simpler. But I have never since seen anything on MTV as thrilling as that first viewing of Like a Prayer, and yes, I am including any lame video by Kwik-Fit Madonna, Lady Gaga. The obvious courting of controversy (Like a Prayer), the black and white graphics (Express Yourself), the beach-based larks (Cherish): all the best 80s music video tropes captured on one album's videos. (Many a time did I happily think Cherish was about to start on MTV only to realise, grumpily, that it was the similarly ocean-sprayed but deeply tedious Wicked Game by Chris Isaak.)

Not being Catholic, there was no rebellious appeal in the album to me and my parents apparently had no problem with their Jewish daughter watching – if not quite understanding – a music video that featured a woman named Madonna apparently giving a blow job to a black Jesus. I've spent my entire life too busy dancing around and singing the lyrics (incorrectly) to worry that most of my favourite songs are actually about religion (Like a Prayer, You Got the Love.) I'm simply a very shallow person. I like songs that make me dance and make me happy and it just so happens that a song about blowing Jesus has been making me happy for the last two decades.

Although Like a Prayer was not my first album, Madonna was my first music concert. For my 12th birthday I proved my coolness by going with my babysitter to the Blonde Ambition tour and repeatedly expressed bafflement at why people weren't sitting down as I really would have been able to see better. I saw enough. To all parents out there, there is no better way to open your little girl's eyes than packing her off to watch a woman masturbate on stage.

I am always surprised whenever I listen to Like a Prayer how great the songs still sound (which is not something I can say of Tiffany.) Cherish, Express Yourself and Like a Prayer are timelessly euphoric (the key change in Like a Prayer – at 2:38, for the record – still gives me a weird thrill) and still make me sing out loud. Yes, with my headsets on. Yes, on the tube. Yes, to the point that everyone in the carriage moves down to the end that a tramp has been using as a toilet to get away from the tragic woman singing about how, in the midnight hour, I can feel your power.

Keep It Together is amazing, purely for being Madonna's take on Sister Sledge's We Are Family, a concept no one foresaw, and the fact that she later disowned various members of her family gives it, shall we say, an interesting tinge of irony. Pray for Spanish Eyes is, I can say with wisdom attained, excellent singing-in-the-hairbrush fodder as well as being a prime example of Madonna's fondness for pretending to be a tragic historical figure (see also Evita, Wallis Simpson.)

But being a nosey sort and someone who likes songs to have stories, it's the confessional stuff I love most: Oh Father, Promise to Try and, most of all, 'Till Death Do Us Part, about the end of her marriage to Sean Penn, with whom, she has said since, she was deeply in love. The bitterly evocative lyrics ("The bruises they will fade away/ You hit so hard with the things you say/ I will not stay to watch your hate as it grows/ You're not in love with someone else/ You don't even love yourself/ But still, I wish you'd ask me not to go") disprove those who describe her as a cold and blank performer. Even if most of us haven't been married to Penn (thank God), that sentiment – deciding firmly to leave the jerk but wishing dearly he'd ask you not to – is all too universal, and it feels even more extraordinary now to hear Madonna, now untouchably self-controlled, admit to such pain and weakness. But while the song is sad, the music is jaunty, even fun, and about as far away from Joni Mitchell-esque self-pitying noodlings as you can get. This is a break-up song that cheers yet simultaneously consoles. Even Madonna once felt like this. You'll get through it (and hopefully without rebounding with Vanilla Ice.)

The album's one duff point is the duet with Prince, Love Song, which is barely a song, let alone a love one. But even this works in the album's favour because it serves as a reminder of an oft-proven truth: Madonna is always best on her own. This album sums up the best of her: fun to dance to, laughably grandiose, self-revelatory but on her terms.

Unlike many of my friends, I do not have any hangover idolisation of Madonna herself. She personally peaked for me when she humiliated Warren Beatty in In Bed With Madonna. But no matter what she's done to her face, her body and the world of cinema since, she will always be the woman who introduced me to MTV, pale denim and masturbation. And for that, I thank her.

You can write your own review of Like a Prayer on our brand new album pages: once you're signed into the Guardian website, visit the album's dedicated page.

Or you could simply star rate it, or add it to one of your album lists. There are more than 3m new pages for you to explore as well as 600,000-plus artists' pages – so if, for example, you prefer to get your pop thrills from Lady Gaga's Born This Way, or reckon Michael Jackson's Thriller trumps Madge every time, then find their albums and get to work ...