Aretha - Respect

The poignancy of death is remembrance but the poignancy of remembrance is how that remembering transforms us, and the kind of respect that Aretha Franklin sang about is not simply skin deep - it is a whole mind, spirit and body experience.

In time relative age 76 is no longer old and thus when David Bowie died at the age of 69 - that too is relatively young compared to life expectancy today.  The difference between the two is that Aretha died of pancreatic cancer and Bowie died of liver cancer.  Unlike Bowie, Aretha Franklin's real name was Aretha Franklin - and that is ultimately what many people who knew her very well comment upon - her authenticity as a person.  David Bowie knew he was a character or more to the point "characters" and he had the most professional existence imaginable over decades of fame, even extending his artistry to his own death.  Just because David Bowie used a different name, it was because his real name David Jones was already the name of singer Davy Jones of the Monkees fame.

Both David Bowie and Aretha Franklin had powerful artistic presence over many decades and both transformed different aspects of culture - but in far different ways.  For Aretha's songbook - it grew hand in hand with tumultuous times and freedom struggles.  It is the reason why three Presidents wanted her to sing at their inauguration ceremonies.  The ultimate standard for Aretha Franklin is her song respect :

Unlike Cooke - Aretha Franklin was around to see the full arc of the struggle for civil rights and all the way to the day her voice welcomed in the first African-American President of the United States.  Cooke was shot in a motel aged just 33 years old.  We will never know the music Sam Cooke would have produced had he lived a full life, but we certainly do know the life works of Aretha Franklin.  It is a body of work that is what makes certain people live on, while we may send our respects or condolences to many artists, who then begin to fade from our memory.

It is not about the talent we are born with or the talent we shared but the life that such talent resonates, not simply in leaving a legacy but in timeless resonance.  That is the great gifts that people like Aretha Franklin bestow because as history changes, it is a sure fire bet that the voice of Aretha Franklin will live on in and for totally new contexts.  As much as cancer takes away in terms of a life, there is a point where the spirit of a being takes upon a life of its own.  That is what I see here - timeless resonance and a life therefore that is well worth examining.