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Respect

Aretha Franklin

Listen to Otis Redding:

Respect There are hundreds of reasons to praise the talents of Aretha Franklin, but what impresses me the most is the extraordinary range of her emotional palette. With equal conviction, she can portray the ultimate victim of love, i.e., someone who is at the total mercy of an abusive partner, or the self-assured and dominant vixen queen. Both are well within her grasp, and she can move from one to the other without any sense of contradiction. She made this obvious right off the bat, once she signed to Atlantic Records. Her first hit single, "I Never Loved A Man (The Way I Love You)", portrays her as a woman trapped by her heart (or maybe her libido) while her second single, "Respect", has her fully in control of the situation with a confidence that was startlingly frank for a mid ‘60s female. It was powerful enough when sung by its author, Otis Redding, but once Franklin sang it from a woman's perspective, the lyrics resonated with an undercurrent of additional meanings. In her version, respect means much more than reasonable consideration. The way Franklin sings it, her demand for respect is more than simply economical, it is also sexual. What else could it mean when she tells her hapless lover to "whip it to me when I get home"? The chorus of "sock-it-to-me, sock-it-to-me, sock-it-to me, sock-it-to-me" leaves little room for misinterpretation. She is requesting - no, demanding - sexual equity. The climactic moment is the break that was not even part of the equation when Redding recorded his version. "R-E-S-P-E-C-T. Find out what it means to me. R-E-S-P-E-C-T. Take care of TCB." Good God, her lover had better be prepared to take care of business. Her forwardness is both entertaining and intimidating, not to mention that it may have single-handedly fast-forwarded the women's movement by a decade. Add to this the civil rights repercussions, and you've got one hell of a provocative song here. I haven't even mentioned yet that this is probably one of the most exciting and brilliant performances of the ‘60s, bar none. With her track record of more than three full decades of chart history, Franklin has surely risen to the pinnacle of pop superstardom, but I'd bet that even if "Respect" was her only hit, her status as the reigning “queen of soul” would remain.