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Monday, August 28, 2006
HE WAS A BIG FREAK
Betty Davis
They Say I'm Different
Just Sunshine : 1974
[Buy It]
NASTY GAL
Betty Davis
Nasty Gal
Island : 1975
[Buy It]
People, it's a new week and I'm still in love with last week's woman, she who made "freak" the central category of funk. If you'll recall your Rick James: a freak is "a very kinky girl / The kind you don't take home to mother." Betty's kinky all right, but not in the somnolent manner of a porn star, rotating obligingly through positions for the convenience of the home viewer. When Betty gets her freak on, everybody sweats. No false nonchalance. No one-way glass. She gives all to get all -- every sweaty, smelly, ugly, nasty bit of you.
This is scary stuff, as I'm reminded every time I find myself staring down at that discouraging deer-in-the-headlights look. Back in the day, folks weren't quite up to the Betty challenge. Her records were cult favorites, but she never hit it big. She made three killer records in the mid-70s, but had disappeared altogether by the end of the decade. According to James Maycock, the only guy to interview her in the last 20 years or so, she's now living the quiet life somewhere around Pittsburgh, eking out a living and watching the soaps. Very scary stuff.
He Was a Big Freak
The rumor about this tune is that it's about Hendrix, one of Betty's pals and her alleged lover (ex-husband Miles Davis being the alleger). Betty says she never slept with Jimi, but I hope she's lying. Rhythmically, this song is like the Arthur Murray of fucking: Forget the diagrams, just kick up the subwoofers and channel the bass through your hips.when I was his housecat
I'd scrub him, I'd love him, I'd cook his meals
when I was his geisha
I got down, I'd hug his heels
when I was his flower
I'd answer to the name of Rosy Mae
he was a big freak
I used to say all kinds of dirty things Notice there's a whole lot of objectifying going on here, but this is no subjugation narrative. She gets him off for the payoff.I used to tie him up
he couldn't get enough
he'd be on the floor
beggin me for more Sweet emotion! The whole song is a performance of her power over him. And when I say her, I don't mean Betty, but the Betty persona. As Maycock points out, the Betty back story is so good, it's tempting to read all of her songs as thinly veiled autobiography. I find Betty's own account of her songs impossibly anodyne, about as convincing as Tina Turner's assertion that she never liked those nasty songs Ike made her sing. But Tina's a great argument for strict separation of artist and persona and so I endorse Maycock's point. (BTW, you can find his article in the Rock's Backpages library, here.)
Nasty Gal
"I was hanging out with people who had a lot of class, but Betty wasn't comfortable around those kinds of people."
-- Miles: The Autobiography Check those sick guitar vamps, like gonad adrenalin. This is seriously sinister funk. And forget what I was saying about the fallacy of memoir in Betty's songs -- doesn't she sound pissed? Miles published the autobiography in 1990, 15 years after "Nasty Gal." Yet I kept hearing the song as her response to his Iceberg-Slim-style narrative of their breakup: After that, my relationship with Betty just went downhill. . . . I asked her for a divorce--I told her I was getting a divorce. She said, "Naw, you ain't either, fine as I am, you know you don't want to give up this good thing!"
"Oh yeah? Well, bitch, I'm divorcing you. . . ." In the song, when Betty says, "I ain't nothing but a nasty gal," there's a double entendre. Yes, the woman has appetite (and since when is that a crime, anyway?) I used to love it
when you did it to me real good
you know you did it to me so good but what this song's really saying is "Stop talking trash about me, you weak-ass man. I've seen you naked and mewling and don't you ever forget it." you dragged my name in the mud
all over town, I'm going to tell em why
you said I didn't treat you, I didn't know you, I didn't love you well
but you know you lied, yes you did
I used to leave you hanging in the bed by your fingernails
screaming A guy's equivalent might be "I've been in and out of you, girl," which is how this guy I knew in college dismissed an ex-girlfriend who got above herself.
In fact, thematically this song reminds me of Nina Simone's Blues for Mama. And in a weird way, of Dylan's I Don't Believe You. They're all about being spurned.
All this and more tomorrow.Labels: funk, megan
posted by Megan
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