Aretha Franklin Had Power. Did We Truly Respect It?
Officially, “Respect” is a relationship song. That’s how Otis Redding wrote it. But love wasn’t what Aretha Franklin was interested in. The opening line is “What you want, baby, I got it.” But her “what” is a punch in the face. So Franklin’s rearrangement was about power. She had the right to be respected — by some dude, perhaps by her country. Just a little bit. What did love have to do with that?
Posted — UpdatedDepending on the house you grew up in and how old you are, “Respect” is probably a song you learned early. The spelling lesson toward the end helps. So do the turret blasts of “sock it to me” that show up here and there. But, really, the reason you learn “Respect” is the way “Respect” is sung. Redding made it a burning plea. Franklin turned the plea into the most empowering popular recording ever made.
Franklin died Thursday, at 76, which means “Respect” is going to be an even more prominent part of your life than usual. The next time you hear it, notice what you do with your hands. They’re going to point — at a person, a car or a carrot. They’ll rest on your hips. Your neck might roll. Your waist will do a thing. You’ll snarl. Odds are high that you’ll feel better than great. You’re guaranteed to feel indestructible.
Franklin’s respect lasts for 2 minutes and 28 seconds. That’s all — basically a round of boxing. Nothing that’s over so soon should give you that much strength. But that was Aretha Franklin: a quick trip to the emotional gym. Obviously, she was far more than that. We’re never going to have an artist with a career as long, absurdly bountiful, nourishing and constantly surprising as hers. We’re unlikely to see another superstar as abundantly steeped in real self-confidence — at so many different stages of life, in as many musical genres.
The song owned the summer of 1967. It arrived amid what must have seemed like never-ending turmoil — race riots, political assassinations, the Vietnam draft. Muhammad Ali had been stripped of his championship title for refusing to serve in the war. So amid all this upheaval comes a singer from Detroit who’d been around most of the decade doing solid gospel R&B work. But there was something about this black woman’s asserting herself that seemed like a call to national arms. It wasn’t a polite song. It was hard. It was deliberate. It was sure. And that all came from Franklin — her rumbling, twanging, compartmentalized arrangement. It came, of course, from her singing.
Because lots of major pop stars now have great, big voices, maybe it’s easy to forget that most Americans had never heard anything quite as dependably great and shockingly big as Franklin’s. The reason we have watched “Showtime at the Apollo” or “American Idol” or “The Voice” is out of some desperate hope that somebody walks out there and sounds like Aretha. She established a standard for artistic vocal excellence, and it will outlast us all.
She, along with Sam Cooke, Ray Charles, Otis Redding, Tina Turner and Patti LaBelle, changed where the stress fell in popular singing. Now you could glean a story from lyrics but also hear it in the tone of the singer’s voice — agony, ecstasy and everything beyond and in between. Roots, soil, pavement on one hand, the stratosphere on the other.
The song starts, “I don’t want nobody always sitting around me and my man.” You could bake a pie in the pause between “nobody” and “always.” And when she gets to “sitting,” she takes a deep, five-second drag on the “s” so that it sounds less like a consonant and more like a lit fuse. The remaining 6 1/2 minutes put you in exhilarated suspense over when her top’s gonna blow.
There are so many things to love about this performance: its sexiness, its playfulness, its resolve, all the space in the arrangement for Franklin’s singing to stay low until it takes off high, the way that once she finally connects with Dr. Feelgood himself, the crowd audibly connects with the song or, really, just more deeply connects, since people had been shouting stuff like, “Sing it, Aretha!” between her pauses. You can feel in that moment the hold Franklin had over anybody who ever saw — or heard — her sing. She worked with bottomless reserves of swagger.
We tend not to think of Franklin that way — as an artist of bravado and nerve and daring, as a woman with swagger. We tend not to think of her this way even though nearly every song she sang brimmed over with it. (She sang about taking care of business — the old “tcb” — and, consequently, having her business taken care of, as much as she sang about respect.) Swagger we left to the Elvis Presleys and James Browns and Mick Jaggers. But “swagger” is the only word for, say, her approach to the music of other artists.
It didn’t matter whether it was a Negro spiritual or something by the Beatles. It was all wet clay to her. The Supremes, Frank Sinatra, Leonard Cohen, Adele, Simon and Garfunkel, James Taylor, ? and the Mysterians, C & C Music Factory: She oversaw more gut renovations than a general contractor. In 1979, she took the occasion of B.B. King’s “The Thrill Is Gone” to allow her backing singer to exclaim that she (and they) were “free at last.” Toward the end of her funked-up, very fun version of Sam & Dave’s “Hold On, I’m Comin’,” from the 1981 album “Love All the Hurt Away,” she tossed in some “beep-beeps” and a couple of lines from “Little Jack Horner” because she knew she could make it work. If good soul music is like good barbecue — slow cooked, falls off the bone — by the 1980s, she’d become a pitmaster, yelping and barking and wailing, but also talking in songs, sermonizing. You know the char and gristle, the bits of sugar and salt and fat on, say, a perfectly done slab of ribs? Most of this woman’s songs were blackened that way. Yet if Franklin told you she was going to take a classic R&B song and throw in a little nursery rhyme, you’d be nervous. Did 1986 really need a cover of “Jumpin’ Jack Flash?” Probably not. But she did it anyway — and robustly — and threw in a “hallelujah” while she was at it.
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