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Weve only ever seen about a minutes worth of footage ofBetty Daviss live show.
Betty Davis came on strong.
I project what the music is saying, Davis, famously terse, explained in a 2018interview.
The music spoke volumes.
The brilliance and complexity ofBetty Davisare apparent everywhere from cover to credits.
The groove is heavy, a fusion of the hard-rock swagger of MountainsMississippi Queenand the heady psychedelia ofFunkadelic.
Davis was coolly inverting modern musical, racial, and gender conventions, objectifying and infantilizing men for once.
Films likeCoffyandFoxy Browngave power to Black female protagonists, though not without complaints about the sensuality on display.
For some, Davis was little more than a pornographer selling raunchy sex.
What Davis was really selling was agency.
The protagonist wrecking her career in Steppin in Her I. Miller Shoeschoseto be nothing, the chorus says.
That this art would confound and offend makes sense.
Feminism terrifies those who see it as a threat to their existing power dynamics.
It has been made into the confused, the trivial, the psychotic, the plasticized sensation.
When we say people are ahead of their time, we are describing our own inability to understand them.
She dared to deliver it using a gritty, horny tone, to perform in outfits that werent demure.
Now we sayweredifferent, but are we?
