Aretha Franklin died today.
All our idols are dead and our enemies are in power, as it’s said in the memes that seem to be our only shared language anymore; and as always happens when someone of such greatness and depth goes away for good, we find ourselves struggling over what, if anything, we should say, and how we should feel. It is something of a wonder that we live in a time when we even have the opportunity to feel something about the death of someone we have never met, and we never have quite got the hang of it. Do we say that she had been in ill health for a long time and that her death was not unexpected? We all die, but it doesn’t take the edge off of death. Do we note that, at 76, she lived a long and rewarding life? Maybe that makes it better, and maybe it doesn’t; a happy life is more tragic for ending. The older I get, the more real mortality seems to me, the more I return to what Marlene Dietrich’s Tanya when she heard of her corrupt, ruined ex-lover’s death in Touch of Evil: “What does it matter what you say about people?”
But Aretha Franklin mattered. She mattered to so many people, for so long, and in so many ways, that it’s hard to believe that she’s gone, and even harder to believe that her incredible voice and presence have been stilled after over sixty years. She might not have mattered; in some ways her childhood set her up to succeed, with a musically accomplished mother and a father who was a celebrated traveling preacher who had the chance to expose her gifts to the world. But she could easily have gone nowhere if she didn’t embody so many amazing qualities, from her determination and pride and quiet cool to her ability to make the most out of whatever material she was given to a true survivor’s mentality that allowed her to weather personal and professional storms that would have wrecked a lesser woman. Most of all, though, she had a gift that she acquired from birth, honed by constant effort, and perfected through a restless determination to explore every one of its qualities and never be satisfied with what she already knew it could do: her astounding voice, one of the great instruments in all of modern music and the weapon that allowed her to cut through American culture like she was solving a Gordian knot of race, class, and genre.
There have been singers with more technical prowess, and there have been singers with more precise instincts for material, and there have been singers who were more subtle and more powerful and more natural, but no singer alive or dead, man or woman, has ever combined all those qualities in as perfect a package as Aretha. Her voice was an instrument in the truest sense, and no one made more out of their voice than she did; it is as easy to identify in even a short burst of a few seconds as a Jimi Hendrix guitar solo or a Keith Moon drum fill, and even more likely than those to raise the hairs on your arms at the sheer thrill of what she was causing to happen. Starting as a gospel singer who seemed almost meek, she exploded into a performer who generously connected every strain of what was happening in popular music for close to forty years. In particular, she bridged the sleek, accomplished presentation of Motown with the blunt, earthy groove of its Southern soul opposition and synthesized them into something completely her own. Equally at home with vulnerable, heartfelt love ballads and brassy, powerful demands for respect and recognition in up-tempo shouters, she could switch from one mode to another without missing a beat from her always-proficient bands. As she got older, every genre tried to claim her — pop, R&B, soul, gospel, rock ‘n’ roll, jazz, and the blues — and for once, they were brawling over someone who genuinely believed in, and moved effortlessly between, all of them.
A single stretch of her voice was enough to establish her greatness, but she gave every song she ever recorded more than that, even when the song didn’t deserve it. Franklin’s inheritors are many and varied; we will hear from many of the great ones today, but they are likely too many to number. Many of them, especially in the worlds of soul and R&B, took the wrong lessons from her career, taking her ability to shout out a heartfelt passage as the end-all of her style and wringing into a pure demonstration of technical ability. But Aretha Franklin was the Queen of Soul, and soul was her kingdom; she knew what she had to give to a song in terms of emotional commitment, not just sheer note-wrangling ability, in order to get anything back from it. Listening to, for example, “Think” followed by “I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You)”, it seems impossible that the same singer could make them both work; and yet they are both indelibly and unmistakably Aretha Franklin.
She was, of course, a human being and not just a delivery system for gorgeous music. She was a woman given to deep and dizzying romances, but determined to let no man consume or control her; she was a parent of children who circumstances did not allow her to raise the way she should have, but who were loved beyond reason. Her health played havoc with her career, but she never stopped wanting to be up on that stage, giving strangers a chance to hear one of the great voices in musical history. She was acutely aware of her status as a black person, as a woman, as a black woman, and as a person who was expected to do meaningful things because of those identities, and she managed a balancing act between her art and her life that few other people of her or any subsequent generation could have equalled. But the one constant was always up there, always moving, always letting that pure goodness leave her body and settle on to the crowd.
This morning, after we heard the news, my partner put on our vinyl copy of her first live album, Aretha in Paris. It’s an underrated record, highly recommended, with Aretha putting her imprint on a wide range of songs and styles, moving as she did with lightning speed between deliveries and attitudes, demonstrating an adeptness that belied her incredibly consistency. I couldn’t help but note, because I am who I am, that it was recorded (at the Olympia Theatre) on May 8, 1968 — placing it precisely in a rare lull in the student and worker protests that were about to consume all of France, protests that would detonate into a near revolution in only two days’ time. Many of the people at the concerts were students involved in those protests, who would leave the venue and return to the barricades they were constructing all over the city. For seven decades, it was a certainty that no matter how much the world raged outside in turmoil and chaos and unpredictability, we could always count on Aretha Franklin being there, on a stage somewhere in the world, demonstrating grace and power by gifting us with an interpretation of some song that she made definitively hers with an irreproducible combination of craft and emotion. That’s no longer the case, and I don’t know where we’ll go from here.