Aretha Franklin

Yes, it's just air - air forced across the fallows and folds of the anatomy. But that simple fact does not diminish the astonishment at Aretha's voice. On the contrary, to think that each of us also forces air from our lungs and forms it into pitched syllables. And yet none of us - no other singer who has ever sidled up to a microphone - could make air do what Aretha made it do. In the depths of her lungs, common air is transformed into a kind of electricity. It is fast. It rises out of nothing. And before you can hear it as a voice or a sound or as music, it is already doing its work. The ear pleads mercy before it drops to the earth in acquiescence and approbation. The ear is not worthy. It can't keep up. It has nothing to offer in return. So it simply submits.

Certainly, her voice is the irreducible fact of who Aretha was - or at least, of who she was to we who listened to her, we who listened to her voice. But there's something else that accompanies Aretha's life and her voice as a kind of fact; something else that makes her who she is in the collective imagination of millions. As with everything we're prone to call "genius," the fact of Aretha is a fortunate confluence of time and events and consciousness as they come up against a talent and sensibility appropriate to their import. Aretha's voice was a voice that we needed to hear. The anger and righteousness of Black Americans' demands for justice rose with the force and speed of a flash flood. Of course, such energy is never sudden, but always the result of pent up power deprived an outlet. Aretha's voice is the correlate of this anger and righteousness, this force and speed. Her voice, in the space of a vowel or a soft consonant, could go from lying down to standing up. It could fill the space of its container. Moments later, in mid-verse crescendo, it could devastate that container, like an Ali punch from the inside.

Earlier today, a friend posted an article from a 1970 issue of Jet Magazine which reports that Aretha offered to pay the bond of Angela Davis, who was then jailed on a fabricated murder charge. In the article, Aretha says,

“Angela Davis must go free. Black people will be free. I’ve been locked up (for disturbing the peace in Detroit) and I know you got to disturb the peace when you can’t get no peace. Jail is hell to be in. I’m going to see her free if there is any justice in our courts, not because I believe in communism, but because she’s a Black woman and she wants freedom for Black people. I have the money; I got it from Black people – they’ve made me financially able to have it – and I want to use it in ways that will help our people.”

It's often said that Soul music is secular Gospel; a music which replaces religious faith with romantic love. And much of Aretha's music of the late-60s could be described this way. But reading about Aretha's passionate support of Angela Davis made me think differently about the content of her songs from the late-60s (when Aretha was just in her mid-twenties). Rather than a swapping of romance for faith, Aretha's songs merely depict earthly enactments of the great moral demands of religion. When Otis Redding sang "Respect," it was about a working man coming home at the end of the day and expecting love and dinner and sex and a specifically submissive expression of respect from his woman. When Aretha sang it, it was about something else, something bigger. It was not a plea from the empowered to be recognized as such, but a demand from the disempowered - woman, African-American, colonized, enslaved - to be recognized at all. Aretha's "Respect" is about dignity and justice.

This theme recurs again and again in Aretha's late-60s recordings, often in places where we aren't prone to hear it. "Chain of Fools," is a swampy vamp, combining Pops Staples-tremolo with a vicious funk born of a New Orleans second line. Musically, it is plaintive and bitter and just about ready to burst. At first blush, the lyrics might be taken for the doleful admissions of a mistreated lover. But, given the historical context (the song was released in 1967), how can we ignore the fact that the song begins with the word "chain" repeated 19 times? The singer complains


You got me where you want me
I ain't nothing but your fool
You treated me mean
Oh, you treated me cruel


Of course, this could be the grievance of an abused lover. But it also reflects contemporaneous race relations in the United States. As the song continues, one begins to hear a description of the structural power dynamics of American racism, Blacks forced into weak positions upon which White strength is established.


Every Chain
Has got a weak link
I might be weak, child
But I'll give you strength


The last verse offers a portent. This situation is untenable and "one morning" it will collapse. But, in the meantime, to spite the unconscionable malice of the oppressor, the oppressed will absorb all the punishment, all the degradation.


One of these mornings
The chain is gonna break
But up until then, yeah
I'm gonna take all I can take

The implication, buried not so deeply in the words themselves, is even closer to the surface of the raw wound in Aretha's delivery. She digs in to these lines. In the studio, she has to step back from the microphone in order not to overdrive the helpless diaphragm. As a result, she sounds slightly more distant, yet at the same time, a distortion is introduced - if not of the diaphragm, of the very air itself?

Another song, "Think" - one of the very few that Aretha wrote - also lends itself to this double-reading: on the one hand, that of the jilted lover, on the other, of those systematically disenfranchised and degraded. The lyrics echo Du Bois who said that anti-Black racism provided a “public and psychological wage,” for poor Whites who were "compensated" for their own disenfranchisement by being able to think themselves superior to Blacks. Aretha sings, "Let's go back, Let's go back / Let's go way on way back when." So this is a developmental diagnosis. It's been there since the start. And while Aretha confesses, "I ain't no psychiatrist / I ain't no doctor with degrees." She also declares, "But it don't take too much high IQ / To see what you're doing to me."

The song then pleads with its listener to reject the restraints of the past, of history, of nation, and race, and privilege:

You better think (think)
Think about what you're trying to do to me
Yeah, think (think, think)
Let your mind go, let yourself be free


And just as "Chain of Fools" wouldn't allow us to miss the point, repeating "chain" nineteen times consecutively, "Think" hammers home its key idea, repeating the word "freedom" twelve times in a row.

The freedom the song demands isn't just her own. She implores the listener to think. Because freedom can't be granted it must be achieved. Blacks' lack of freedom isn't a Black problem. As James Baldwin said,

"We have invented the nigger. I didn't invent him. White people invented him. If I am not the nigger, and if it's true that your invention reveals you, then who is the nigger? Well, he's unnecessary to me, so he must be necessary to you. I'm going to give you your problem back: You're the nigger, baby, it isn't me."


Trying to make other people lose their minds
Well, be careful, you're gonna lose yours


Aretha's demands don't rest principally in the words in the way that I can present them here. Again, it's in the way she pours her astonishment and her outrage into the words, into the elasticized contours of the syllables and slurs. How can White America think that this situation could possibly be right? How can they think it's sustainable? How can they not understand that sooner or later the whole fetid excrescence is going to explode in their throats, denying them the air that Aretha takes and gives more powerfully than they could ever dream of?

Aretha is the Queen of Soul. She made Soul in her image and in the image of the struggle. She made it about demands for equality. Hers is not faith replaced by fantasies of romantic love, but about sacred justice brought to bear upon the profane exigencies of her time and place, about America in the twentieth century and about overcoming.