Black Romantic Lead
The cryptic hubris of male divas is foiled by the often distressed adventurousness of the women who we call divas and mean they are divinity visiting earth. Betty Davis, who was born Betty Mabry and earned the Davis through a tumultuous one year marriage to trumpeter Miles Davis, used the raunchy seductive quality of her blues streak to access the divine through song and style. When she was a child her family made the familiar migration from the South to Pittsburgh, in pursuit of better wages and the idea of a better quality of life. From the indulgent ease of gut bucket blues rhythms to the crass clashing sense of time humans have to adapt to in order to perform industrial labor— you can hear these two worlds compete for dominance in her consciousness when she sings, dragging her vocals across her iron will, restless but full of clarity and displaying vulnerability but unflinching in her lust for substance and challenge. With the release of her first albums in 1973/4, she raised the stakes of what it meant to be a woman and therefore displaced herself from the status quo power dynamics. She became one of those willful exiles from the old world who would watch it disintegrate to accommodate her expansive stature, and swerve the past’s abominations, and already be beyond the next version of the world when it arrived, solemnly ecstatic about forging ahead alone. Let’s call this maverick impulse romantic and release any associations to trauma it might have before the theorists try to turn another miracle tragic, before we try it.
Anti Love Song
Is true love involuntary? In her “Anti Love Song” (1973) Davis lists all of the reasons a potential lover is inadequate: his transparency, his possessiveness, his neediness, his skittishness, his terribleness, his proclivity to abandon his passions. This man she doesn’t want to love is trifling and stifled and a mirror for all of her worst attributes, some kind of disastrously romantic karma that compels two souls meet to instill yearning in one another that can never be fully satisfied and can never be unraveled except through satisfaction. This is the skeleton of the story of that compulsion beyond temptation, wherein two people are drawn to one another because they need to meet themselves, and any refusal amounts to an equally auto-erotic denial of the self, a disassociative tantrum. Then again, in a world that treats love at once dismissively and like the only reason to sing, an anti-love song becomes a song of mystical devotion to the self, a baptism in one’s own spiritual power. It does not reject romance, it rejects projection and provocation, or the kind of desperate latching on that counts for love among people who have never known true love, which is more about liberation of souls than eternal bondage to just one other soul. Radio is overrun by distraught, scorned, pitiful, swooning, blissful, idyllic, imbecilic, sex-obsessed love spells for every occasion. Where are the anthems dispelling the myth that romantic or erotic love will absolve you of all introspection, and all suffering, and serve as a fount of endless wonder, the happy ending we’ve all been waiting for?
So much great love is difficult, temporary, and inevitable, the kind you wouldn't trade away even if an oracle told you it might fade to blues or come thorned with a paradox that draws as much blood as it gives sucre. Sobriety against these drunken escapades is what makes “Anti Love Song” so invigorating, like a blank slate for how we bond, proving we can bond in refusal. I hear a similar though more delicate set of reservations when Johnny Hartman sings “Lush Life”(1963), a song that disavows the agony of unions of souls, promising I’ll live a lush life in some small dive, but really meaning, as Sun Ra puts it I’ll wait for you. Rihanna channels this turning from loyalist to soloist in “Needed Me”(2014) quipping fuck ya white horse and ya carriage. Her whole Anti album on which “Needed Me” is a track, seems like call and response with Davis, her saying yes to the ethics of sublime refusal as a manner of loving. Tina Turner approaches it from a more lighthearted vantage in “What’s Love got to do With it?” Nina Simone changes her mind and the tone, deciding he needs me, he doesn’t know it but he needs me, I oughta leave him but he needs me, choosing to be possessed by an ungrateful lover, deciding he is ungrateful yet not undeserving.
Perhaps this is where Betty Davis returns and we need her to help us back to our senses, to rediscover that neglect is not romantic. What separates Anti Love Song is that it’s preemptive. “Lush Life” describes someone in a cycle of numbing the pain before and after a break up by spending all their time in bars and clubs, “Needed Me” describes a quick passion that refuses to become beholden to its thrills, “What’s Love Got to Do with It” is the song of someone afraid of opening their heart for fear it could be shattered or dismissed and choosing to get emotional about loveless love. Billie Holiday sings love oh love of careless love and wants it to care, Nina demands that her care be enough for two in “He Needs me.” Betty Davis just says no to love as if it’s an obsession she intends to beat even if she has to deny herself in the process and become a little ascetic, a little alone as the Fred Moten refrain in his book B Jenkins teaches us is not a small amount of aloneness but a harrowing chasm between the strongest bonded other and the self. Davis’s mood is stubborn, unsustainable, but determined. The song feels like it might be exploiting the allure of its bold claims in order to arouse even more magnetism when the singer capitulates and does love the person she does not want to love; it’s her version of foreplay and playing with fire offered to us as sensible escapism. It’s also her honest reaction to an opportunity to swoon: no. And her version of no is its own swooning, its own ache.
Entreat/Retreat
Like most great manifestos what must follow is either failure to live up to its declarations or retreat into a pretend utopia of total privacy where its declarations become superfluous and distant, as if they were made solely in the realm of myth. “Anti-Love Song” is a kind of creation myth; it creates the feminine archetype who is confident enough to voice and act upon her aversions, who will not just assume the weight of another’s ego and feel special to carry it. This mythic hero says no to those burdens and yes to herself. Unfortunately or not, many of the grand divas who accomplish this, retreat afterwards, almost disappearing themselves and their brave assertions.
Betty Davis ended up back in Homewood, Pittsburgh, and mostly stopped recording after the 1970s. When asked why she turned away from life as an entertainer her response was “well it was nice talking to you.” Maybe the propensity to say no to unfulfilling offers of love carries over into an ability to reject the unfulfilling and downright maniacal fanaticism and meddling of one’s audience, an ability to retreat but not in resignation. Davis’s manifesto is as anti fame as it is anti love. There are a lot of things I would refuse to love if I had to love them on stage in front of an audience. There are people and concepts I’ve turned away from because the cost of loving them was too high and I don’t regret that. Our true loves might be the ones for whom we have a long list of the reasons we don’t want to love them, and yet never feel depleted by choosing to love them anyways. What’s refreshing about the tradition of anti love songs and its most flagrant masterpiece by Betty Davis, is its relative peerlessness outside of the blues sensibility that can talk about walking away and returning casually without much psychodrama, just matter-of-fact living at the pace of truth and feeling. The over-represented trend in other genres of song is to depict love and its subjects as either flawless or unworthy, here forever or gone into oblivion, no fray, no ambivalence. Love that cannot be critical of itself is just propaganda; love that cannot go against itself and win will wilt as fast as infatuation.
Just wanted to say thank you for the wonderful posts. The topics and your perspective on them are fantastic and I discover new artists (or new songs/albums from artists I was already familiar with) every time.