"Why Labelle Matters" (And Why Your Dislikes Don't)
To anybody but you and your friends, anyway
"Mr. Pater's essays became to me 'the golden book of spirit and sense, the holy writ of beauty.' They are still this to me. It is possible, of course, that I may exaggerate about them. I certainly hope that I do; for where there is no exaggeration there is no love, and where there is no love there is no understanding." – Oscar Wilde, in a review of Appreciations by Walter Pater, 1890
In 1975 an alienated queer white teenager — or maybe barely 20 — who had, earlier, run away from an orphanage, and who was dressed in glittery silver glam regalia in homage to her idols, hung around by the exit door after a Labelle concert, hoping to meet the singers. She caught their eye as they left the building. "Are you a boy or a girl?" asked lead singer Patti LaBelle. "Um, both?" answered the awestruck fan. As they stepped into their limo the three women of Labelle laughed. They didn't laugh derisively; it was an affirmative, joyful laugh of surprise leavened by recognition and acceptance. Writing years later, the boyly-girl said she "stood rooted to the spot, freezing the moment in time forever."
After that moment, the teenager, Adele Bertei, found recognition as a musician, playing guitar in bands with Peter Laughner and James Chance, singing backup for Culture Club and Tears for Fears, writing songs for the Pointer Sisters, Sheena Easton, Thomas Dolby, and Matthew Sweet, and making her own records. And she wrote books. She opens Why Labelle Matters (2021) with the anecdote by the limo — a banger of an opening.
Stories like this persuade me: Labelle Matters. And Bertei's book shows me much more than I had known or would have guessed. Their stage craft, costuming, and original songs influenced George Clinton and P-Funk, Earth Wind and Fire, and subsequent Afrofuturism. Having started in the early 1960s as the conventional girl group Patti and the Bluebelles, a decade later the vocal trio Patti LaBelle, Nona Hendryx, and Sarah Dash became a futuristic funk-rock musical and fashion powerhouse. Bertei's zippy, propulsive version of the story brings her joy in the music, and the details, with personal flair.
Eventually we learn why Labelle matters so immensely to Bertei, as she reveals the powerful and deeply personal reasons at the book's closing, and which I won't divulge. I will say that I can't think of a more eloquent testimonial to the power of music.
In this short "critical biography" that sketches the lives while detailing the careers of LaBelle, Hendryx, and Dash — three heavyweight champion singers — Bertei describes how the trio took the girl group genre into the space-age funkasphere, from their teenage doo-wop beginnings in the early 1960s to near the end of the first quarter of the twenty-first century. Album by album, song by song, Bertei brings boundless enthusiasm and her experience as a musician to her analyses and descriptions. And though she grounds the book in her own personal experiences as a fan and a singer, she makes no mention of her own interesting career — I looked that up after finishing her book. The only group she mentions having sung with is the orphanage gospel choir she sang with as a young teen.
Bertei's marvelous book makes a perfect contrast to a recent art-critical brouhaha.
In October an art critic named Ben Davis published a review of the debut "formal" art show of Devon Rodriguez, a portrait artist who had found fame on TikTok posting videos of himself surreptitiously painting or drawing portraits of subway riders, giving the sitters their portraits, and filming the reactions. While largely admiring and sympathetic toward Rodriguez, on the whole Davis's attitude is skeptical, ironic, condescending. He disses the publicity hype of Davis's gallery, admitting that while Rodriguez is "an excellent technical painter . . . [the] brushstrokes are determinedly inexpressive," and that while "Rodriguez’s subject matter has pathos: subway riders lost in their own worlds . . . it is somewhat conventional as well."
And Davis does that critical-esque thing that bugs me – he couches a slam in a quasi-witticism. Discussing Rodriguez's largest painting in the show, a fascinating, terrific self-portrait in a crowded subway car, and caviling about Rodriguez's depiction of another person's hand, Davis says, "It looks like a small rotisserie chicken." Reader, the person's hand looks nothing like a chicken of any sort or variety. Davis thinks he's being funny as he shares his personal taste at Rodriguez's expense. "If I had this painting on my wall and had to look at that mitt every day, it would start to bug me."
Understandably, Rodriguez took umbrage at Davis's condescension and unkindness. And he said so on social media. And – here's where the controversy kicked in – his followers took to social media to slam Davis, with hundreds of cruel messages, threatening to get Davis fired, and many of them urging Davis to kill himself.
Not OK.
Eventually Rodriguez backed off, and the firestorm died down. Davis wrote another essay about the experience, which went viral, which is how I heard of it — and how I first heard of Rodriguez.
Everybody was sympathetic toward Davis, and rightly so, but still — his original essay was bad. And he wouldn't cop to that.
It wasn't just that Davis's use of insulting similes is unhelpfully hyperbolic. It wasn't just his condescending attitude. His essays made me curious — who is this guy? And I read his previously most-famous essay, "9.5 Theses on Art and Class." It's a much more interesting piece of work. An interesting tidbit: He declares a disinterest in personal taste as an element of art criticism. "'I like it' is a legitimate opinion, but it is not criticism that is serious, interesting, or useful." Nothing in the essay suggests that Davis would exempt "I don't like it" from that stricture.
And yet, that "rotisserie chicken" is the most memorable bit in his Rodriguez essay. I agree with the earlier Davis, though. Personal taste is not criticism that is serious, interesting, or useful.
With this, for me, exception.
I love enthusiasm.
For the reasons Oscar Wilde said in the epigraph at the top. "Where there is no love there is no understanding."
I do thank Davis for pointing me to Rodriguez's work. I love it. Davis dismisses Rodriguez's typical approach as "meat-and-potatoes photorealism." If you watch the TikToks of Rodriguez at work, though, you might come away with a different impression, as I did. Rodriguez, instead of drawing or painting near-photographic two-dimensional representations of what he sees, does what high-priced portraitists out of the European tradition have done for centuries. Rodriguez subtly flatters his subjects, making them look more cheerful and contented than they might have looked in a photograph. And — here's the amazing part, which Davis, to his credit, admires as well — Rodriguez then gives the portrait to the subject. For free. These acts of love, joy, beauty, and generosity — and expert skill — made Rodriguez a social-media star.
That he has parlayed his fame into high-paying gigs at private events — good for him. Rock on. I'm happy to see love, joy, beauty, expert skill, and generosity rewarded.
None of which excuses the hate that Rodriguez's fans sent toward Davis. Much as I disliked Davis's essay, I wouldn't wish such hate on anybody. And I understand that my distaste might be an example of [meta-]criticism that is not serious, interesting, or useful. I hope it's useful, though, in that it might help Davis, or his fans, understand how Davis's condescension (of which he does not seem to have been conscious) could irk his subject.
Love, joy, beauty, and generosity bring us back to Labelle. I loved Adele Bertei's book; if you're interested in Labelle, or in the history of glam, Afrofuturism, fashion, or pop music, you might like it too. Here's to it — here's to love, joy, beauty, generosity — and enthusiasm.
Notes:
Here's Davis's original review of Rodriguez's work. It includes a photograph of Rodriguez’s self-portrait, titled “Underground,” which features the allegedly chicken-like hand. The title refers not only to Rodriguez’s “underground” career, but also to the subway in which he works and in which he depicts himself in this painting. He centers himself in an allegorical pose, looking at the viewer, surrounded by riders either lost in thought or looking at their phones, unaware of the viewer. I love it, and I immediately thought of Gustave Courbet’s self-portrait of 1854 - 1855, titled, “The Painter's Studio: A Real Allegory Summing Up Seven Years of My Life as an Artist.” An engaged essayist might explore the parallels and contrasts between the two allegorical self-portraits. I’ll leave those comparisons to your observation. You can see a tiny reproduction of Courbet's painting here.
Here's Davis's essay about the hate that Rodriguez's fans sent his way. I’m very sorry that Davis had to go through that.
I love this, although there are so many facets to it that enthusiasm on my part might cause it to implode. I enjoyed a lot of disco despite being a high school pothead and dilettante antidisco homophobe into the bargain. However, gay kids in my High School and at my job as pizza boy at Checker Barbecue eventually set me straight, or rather, bent.