In her re-authoring of Otis Redding's ‘Respect’, Aretha Franklin's seminal 1967 recording features striking changes to melodic content, vocal delivery, lyrics and form. Musical analysis and transcription reveal Franklin's re-authoring techniques, which relate to rhetorical strategies of motivated rewriting, talking texts and call-and-response introduced by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. The extent of her re-authoring grants her status as owner of the song and results in a new sonic experience that can be clearly related to the cultural work the song has performed over the past 45 years. Multiple social movements claimed Franklin's ‘Respect’ as their anthem, and her version more generally functioned as a song of empowerment for those who have been marginalised, resulting in the song's complex relationship with feminism. Franklin's ‘Respect’ speaks dialogically with Redding's version as an answer song that gives agency to a female perspective speaking within the language of soul music, which appealed to many audiences.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0261143014000270

‘Find out what it means to me’: Aretha Franklin's gendered re-authoring of Otis Redding's ‘Respect’

The release of Kanye West’s Yeezus was indelibly marked by the provocation of his hit song entitled “New Slaves,” which introduced a pessimistic terminology to capture the paradoxical condition whereby Black freedom from enslavement only resulted in the capturing of Black people psychically in the neo-liberal entanglements of poverty, servitude, and corporatism. His analysis, not unlike currently en vogue theories of Afro-pessimism or Critical Race Theory’s (racial) realist lens, maintains that despite all the rhetoric and symbols of progress to the contrary, Black people are simply not free in America. West’s performance of “New Slaves” on Saturday Night Live was only amplified by the “Not For Sale” insignia projected behind him.1 West’s “Not For Sale” insignia was a symbol of independence, as well as a public declaration of his anti-corporatism. It signaled West’s resistance against commodification, and announced his confrontational posture toward the rap industry; a posture that ignited the Hip-Hop community and academia alike over this artistic radicalism. However, such a provocation, despite its rhetorical flare and allure, was immediately cast as disingenuous and inauthentic. Kanye West is a Black man torn: at moments by his brilliance and at times by his banality. The lack of attention to his discography in Hip-Hop studies and his performances in philosophical aesthetics is not because his work is not worthwhile; to the contrary, West’s analyses of anti-Black death, corporatism, and neo-liberal aspiration are enough to warrant more than one serious study of his art. The refusal to study West is not at all due to his lack of correctness about the world around him. In reality, West is not studied because his body, his Black male body, lacks the symbolic currency to motivate reverence for his thinking. Regardless of his popularity, West’s ideas,

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/pluralist.9.3.0018

Pessimistic Themes in Kanye West's Necrophobic Aesthetic: Moving beyond Subjects of Perfection to Understand the New Slave as a Paradigm of Anti-Black Violence

The article is a study of correlation between stardom and high fashion (haute couture) in postliberalized India Apart from its well-documented implications on the Indian economy, the phenomenon of liberalization also impacted the way Hindi film stars became vehicles for international brands, on and off screen My aim is to understand the iconography of actor Sonam Kapoor who is the face of a global brand of cosmetics, and also a fashion icon of Hindi cinema, a perfect embodiment of the aspirations of the upwardly mobile, urban youth The article conflates theories of fashion, star iconography and celebrity culture It predominantly tests Richard Dyer's contention, ‘Star images are always extensive, multimedia, intertextual’ (Heavenly Bodies, 2011, 3); Stella Bruzzi's conclusion that ‘where the fashionable, too beautiful woman is concerned the issues of identity and identification become problematized, as the focus has shifted away from the woman herself to the art and spectacle of her clothes’ (Undressin

Bill Robinson

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