Compared to What?by Mark Anthony Neal
A few years ago, after the release of Cookie: The Anthropological Mixtape, I made the point that MeShell Ndegeocello—revolutionary Soul singer—was the artistic progeny of Eugene McDaniels. To many, McDaniels is still an obscure figure, though his composition “Feel Like Making Love” is one of Roberta Flack’s most well known hits. Unfortunately McDaniels was not too obscure for former Vice President Spiro Agnew, who was rumored to give Ahmet Ertegun, the late founder of Atlantic Records, a call in the early 1970s to complain about the criticisms of the Nixon administration that McDaniels lodged throughout his underground classic Headless Heroes of the Apocalypse. McDaniels was dropped from the label shortly thereafter.
Ironically, McDaniels’s most stinging critique, “Compared to What?”, was not even on Headless Heroes, but was recorded a few years earlier by the aforementioned Flack (on her debut First Take) and Eddie Harris and Les McCann, who recorded a live version at Montreux in 1969. Lyrics like “The President, he's got his war/Folks don't know just what it's for/Nobody gives us rhyme or reason Have one doubt, they call it treason” were just as politically relevant in 2003 when the Coca-Cola company remixed to song for their “Real, Compared to What?” campaign, which featured Common, Musiq and Donnie, among others. I can’t imagine that McDaniels was happy about his artistic legacy was being reduced to selling brown caffeinated fizz.
Read the Full Essay at Critical Noir @ Vibe.com
No comments:
Post a Comment