ARETHA FRANKLIN
“Respect” ATLANTIC, 1967
I suppose I was 13 or 14 when I first heard it. It was a revelation to me because she wasn’t like all the other black women who were around at that time in groups like The Supremes. She was a fully formed woman in all respects, and she was just so challenging. She’d taken an Otis Redding song, which is really just unrequited love nonsense, but somehow she imbued it with the time she was living in, when feminism was first coming to the fore and black women were becoming more visible. That opening line, “” – she makes it confrontational.
