Aretha Lives

Robert Lashley
Sep 7, 2018 · 8 min read

For me, it began with the record cover. The central image: a bright, colorful poster of her on a concrete wall. A 12 by 12 feet laminated red and yellow picture of her on a concrete street and block. And the people around the poster: a sister skipping jump rope and a couple getting cozy around a boom box. The picture was grounded, relatable, and without airs. It was organic and rooted at a time when almost everything on pre-quiet storm black radio was contorting itself for crossover taste. It was the first time I saw a record cover of a black people who looked like the ones I knew.

And the album’s signature song! Freeway of Love, a tight, in the pocket, exquisitely crafted piece of electro funk, a song that bounced more than almost anything on the pop charts at the time. And her voice! Raspy but exquisite, full of feeling like I never heard, riding the beat perfectly for three minutes. Was it “off peak?” I didn’t know. I was 7. What I did know was that it, like everything about the single and album it came from (Who’s Zoomin Who) resonated with me in a way I didn’t understand.

And how she made the women who raised me so happy (For anything that made them happy I gravitated toward.) Between 1985–1988, I remember how they responded to WZW and Aretha Franklin’s comeback singles more than any piece of art in life. I can still see their smiles when they played them, their points in recognition, their dips and sways whenever Aretha “saiyyyd something”. Even though I didn’t know what they were connecting to, I recognized that they were connecting; and from that I realized that connecting with people meant something.

These memories-my first of art and some of my first of life-console and linger after Aretha’s Franklin’s passing and funeral. The outpouring of grief from black America in the last 3 weeks gives exhibit witness that Aretha was the most important artist in African American history. The mixture of rage, bewilderment, and sorrow over her funeral is witness to how it was one of pop culture’s ugliest moments. From Farrakhan’s involvement( not a lick of proof on this earth that they had a relationship), to Rick Scott’s involvement( after she was the most vociferous critic of his flint water policies), to Bishop Ellis sexually assaulting Ariana Grande in broad daylight on her eulogy stage, to Jasper Williams’s sickeningly bizarre diatribes about single mothers and the LGBT community; the funeral had less of a feeling of a home going than an erasure. The day after it, I went home to gauge the response of church elders; and their response was that it made them consider atheism.

It was church elders-specifically my grandmother and my aunts-where I learned Aretha 101. When I got older and became their personal DJ, they taught me that her roots ran as deep as centuries. They explained to me that her art is rooted in hundreds of years of alchemized musical forms, ranging from the kinetic cadences of Muslim chants to the staccato phraseology and haunting symbolism of the work and sorrow songs. They told me how these forms were the primary way we could express ourselves for hundreds of years and were the basis in which we created a culture to survive the horror of our history. In painstakingly processed language, they also told me this culture, music, interlined language and myriad of forms were buried in popular discourse for almost half a millennium.

They also taught me that-next to Mahalia Jackson- no artist did more than Aretha to unearth, alchemize, and bring them to the world. When her tortured, breathtakingly powerful gospel singles sold millions of records in black America, Jackson opened the door to a people finding a beauty in folk roots of their history. In bringing that to popular music along with the most gorgeous vocal range, power and command, then expanding the humanistic and universal axioms of gospel at it’s very best, Franklin kicked it that door down. In her string of classic soul records( ranging from 1968–1974), and the rollicking modernist gospel masterpiece where she seemed to go beyond herself( 1972’s Amazing Grace), she broadened the range in which black people could express themselves more than any artist before or since.

They also taught me how her comeback came to matter as well. Aretha’s peak was as matchless as any artists this or any nation has brought forth, but it ended for complex reasons. By 1975, she was without her gospel soul bases as an artist. The muscle shoals’ sidemen who provided the foundations of her classics were either burnt or liquored out. King Curtis, the collaborator of her second great band was shot to death. Donny Hathaway and Billy Preston, her right-hand Hammond men, were descending into an agony of mental illness and drug addiction. Black media, in the belief that we were overcoming as a people, did her no favors by anointing her a feminist alexander, a pristine goddess with no soul worlds to conquer. Her losing almost half her body weight in the mid 70’s was one of the biggest black media stories of the decade, and almost all of the focus on it was grotesquely sexist. Anointed the greatest artistic figure of her people and age, black media demanded that she pivot from her down-home roots and become a more “glamorous” figure.

This pressure to be everything but herself, redoubled after she gained weight like a normal human being, was the subtext behind her decade string of failed/underwhelming records. Lamont Dozier and Marvin Hamlish would awash her in strings and take her voice from the church roots that grounded it and gave it context. Van McCoy was by all intents and purposes a decent man, but who was grounded in the saccharine schmaltz of 60’s AOR radio and had as much business producing her as me after a pot brownie. Most disappointing of the bunch was Curtis Mayfield, who-after a remarkable run of music on his own-was a raging cocaine addict by the time he produced her and gave her startlingly slight work.

Aside from her got-disco-right-but-too-late masterpiece that was her cover of “Can’t Turn You Loose”, the only difference between her records with Clive Davis and her 70’s string slop was that the production values are a little more professional. Her records with Luther Vandross were and improvement but were wildly uneven overall. Vandross has a hallowed place in my heart as one of the greatest singers to walk the earth, but as a producer he was a tyrant-prone to terrible tantrums when his divas told him the world “no”- and a cursory re listen to his records with Franklin shows her trepidations about their quality. There are gorgeous moments in them, but ones in chords, symbols and signals that Luther had already done before, and one has a hard pressed to hear just exactly where Aretha was in them.

That tension with Vandross, that break that was so big in black media in the early 80's’, serves as interesting preamble to Who’s Zooming Who. For instead of leaning on an overbearing producer or distant star in her next album, Aretha got a gritty club kid who also cut his teeth in Jazz fusion bands. Narada Michael Walden was a relative unknown, but was bold, sassy, and salty enough to fit in with Aretha and became more a collaborator than a hired hand. Instead of a “media respectable narratives”. they wrote songs that were blunt, neighborhood, and-verboten in the 80’s black sex wars-assertive in their demand for respect again.

You can hear their mojo in the album’s radical, classic title track. It was almost shocking to hear a woman all but say “No, buddy, you’re not fucking me. I’m fucking you” in R&B radio in 1985. (the entendre of Zoomin). What made too powerful for radio to ignore, however, was the electric piano, the church touch that her music screamed for since Hathaway lost his faculties. That and-in the modern yet traditional pockets of Walden’s songs, Aretha’s voice got breathtaking again. Her beyond gorgeous vocal runs- lost in the strings and processed pop of a decade before-found a new home, meaning, and power in Walden’s electro funk, yet still could reach for its roots.

WZW was one of her greatest records on account that she had reached deep into herself to create something that was both idiomatically her and of a quality to reach her (and all) people. It was later when I began to understand what this particularly meant. I began to understand that the women who would play Aretha’s records did not have a place in the world where they weren’t considered black America’s villains. From nationalists to black Christians to white Christians to conservatives to the media to your garden variety ain’t shit hoodlums, there was not a place in the world where they weren’t considered the dammed or the pray.

Except in Aretha’s R&B records. In an era obsessed with modulating blackness-particularly the blackness of black women- for white approval, Who’s Zooming Who’s great theme that there wasn’t a damn thing wrong with them (or black women who were like them). That the race wouldn’t collapse if they fucked who they wanted to fuck. That the gates of the promised land wouldn’t close if they were street. That they could cuss, be curvy, be assertive and have an attitude, and live their best life. Though not selling the crossover numbers of Lionel Richie or Whitney Houston, she had reestablished herself as a multiplatinum force and she had done it with a record that told her base that they were important as they were.

This Aretha Franklin-sexy, bad ass, profane, brave beyond the measure of the definition-will not go away no matter how many respectability politic pimps want her to. Her records live in that plane where great art lives- in that place in the conscious above pretense and propriety, in the actual changing same of the soul that all humans have, with its constitution of shared truths that bind us no matter how much we deny then. That she could go so deep into that plane and also shine a light so deeply into the culture of black people is the reason why she is an artist that comes rare in a millennium. Put those records on. In either Spotify, YouTube, CD, or neo-classical record player. Put them on and hear what the truth that will last as long as people have ears and as long as the earth has people: Aretha Franklin lives. Dear god, Aretha lives.

Robert Lashley

Written by

Welcome to a place where words matter. On Medium, smart voices and original ideas take center stage - with no ads in sight. Watch
Follow all the topics you care about, and we’ll deliver the best stories for you to your homepage and inbox. Explore
Get unlimited access to the best stories on Medium — and support writers while you’re at it. Just $5/month. Upgrade