The funk-rock diva Betty Davis died yesterday at age 77. Revisit Emily Lordi’s 2018 review of “Betty: They Say I’m Different,” a documentary about Davis’s pioneering life and art.
.” “He Was a Big Freak,” while best remembered for its startling opener—“I used to beat him with a turquoise chain”—displays her deftness as a writer by matching language with role play. “When I was his princess, silk and satin and lace I’d wear for him,” Davis sings, a grammatical inversion that evokes a courtlier courtship tradition. Onstage, she sported a glorious Afro while shouting, strutting, and crouching in thigh-high platform boots and sequinned bikini tops.
Several commentators in “They Say I’m Different” speculate about her disappearance, pointing to the death of her father and her battles with the music industry as likely causes. There are also hints of mental illness, and of the intimate abuses that, as the #MeToo movement has revealed, have debilitated countless women. “After we did the first record,” Errico says, “her life seemed like it was changing, and things were getting intense. And then years went on, and she disappeared.
Meanwhile, the camera pans through a modest yet meticulous apartment—beige carpet, clear plastic storage bins neatly stacked against the wall. Here, one sees Davis herself—mainly, her manicured hands. She writes in a notebook and lights incense, her robin’s-egg-blue nails and silver cuffs providing hints of lasting glamour.
Davis is seldom listed among Janelle Monáe’s many influences , and certainly the younger singer’s high-tech concepts, virtuosic performances, and meticulously produced songs are far removed from Davis’s proto-punk aesthetic. But, too, is an ambitious child of the working class who left a midsized American city to develop a fierce alter ego and to curate a formidable musical crew ; like Davis, she also is closely linked with a visionary male mentor .
Monáe is understandably discussed in terms of the future, but her new work also raises the spectre of the past—not only those figures upon whose legacies she builds, but also the obscured artists who, had they succeeded, might have given her even more traction. Especially in light of the erasure of memory that “Dirty Computer” depicts and resists, we might ask how much freer Monáe and her constituents might be if Davis had thrived.
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