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Betty Davis, mid-seventies: »Gifted as a motherfucker«
Photo: Fin Costello/Redfern's Getty Images
There are artists who are so far ahead of their time that they cannot really be noticed at the moment of their creative peak.
Because they're just too
far out
.
Not fitting into a grid that would give them the fame they deserve.
Betty Davis was one of those.
She released three albums between 1973 and 1975.
No longer.
Wacky, psychedelic, sex-obsessed, insanely funny funk records – which basically were no more over-the-top than the works of their male colleagues, after all it was the era of sexual liberation and funk in particular was about little else than sex.
But that a woman could sing about getting what she wants and being as confident as Davis: apparently that was too much.
Then, ten years later, Madonna was able to do it.
Female rappers like Lil' Kim in the '90s or Cardi B. today.
Or the Canadian-German performer Peaches in the noughties.
In fact, Betty Davis initiated it.
And then had to watch how others had the success that was denied to her.
She came to New York from Pittsburgh to study fashion.
Her name was Betty Mabry at the time, she was 17 years old.
Ambitious and stylish, she managed a club to pay for her studies, worked as a model and threw herself into nightlife and music.
In 1967 she wrote the song "Uptown" for the folk soul band Chamber Brothers.
She also recorded a few tracks of her own.
Too much for Miles
In 1968 she met jazz trumpeter Miles Davis, who was dissatisfied with the music he was making and was looking for new directions.
They married quickly, she was 23 and he was 42. Betty introduced him to the likes of Sly Stone and Jimi Hendrix, who were reinventing pop and black music - in fact, at this point Miles wanted nothing more than to be a part of that movement to be.
Getting rid of jazz and making music for a new generation.
She would take him, famous for his tailored suits, to the boutiques of Greenwich Village and dress him up again, bagging his old clothes and throwing them away.
Miles had Betty included as the cover girl on his album »Filles De Kilimanjaro« and dedicated the central track of the record to her.
But the relationship was turbulent, Miles was a drug addict, he accused her of having an affair with Hendrix, she accused him of being violent - and after a year she left him.
But without Betty Davis, the revolutionary record Bitches Brew and everything that followed from it would never have happened.
He also produced a few tracks for her to get her into the Columbia record label - but they weren't interested.
They only came out in 2016.
She was simply "too much" for him, Davis wrote many years later in an autobiography.
He was used to women who knew how to behave in a classy way (which means they accepted that Miles was the boss).
But »Betty was a free spirit – gifted as a motherfucker«.
She went to London, came back to America.
And eventually recorded three albums: Betty Davis, They Say I'm Different, and Nasty Girl.
Super heroine of emancipation
These fun, wild and wacky funk masterpieces would be called sex positive today.
Davis (who kept her name) worked with the best musicians you could find in Los Angeles in the mid-'70s - Buddy Miles, Herbie Hancock, Alphonze Mouzon, the Pointer Sisters - and she invented a dry funk sound about which she wrote her lyrics in which the speech melody of rap already appears.
The tracks were about promiscuity ("Don't Call Her No Tramp"), S&M ("He Was a Big Freak"), not letting anyone tell you what's right or wrong ("Nasty Gal"), sex in the dark ("Shut Off The Lights") or the joys of dating ("I'm In Luck I Might Get Picked Up").
They are great records, full of humour, sensuality and self-confidence.
The covers show them like this
like she did at her shows: in hot pants, with a huge afro and platform boots.
Glamorous and confident.
A black sexual emancipation superhero.
The problem: nobody wanted to hear it.
She did have her moments of fame though.
Muhammed Ali was spotted at one of their shows.
But there was no great success.
Doing nothing for forty years
What happened then, no one knows exactly.
There are a few interviews Davis has given over the past few years and a documentary has been made about her - but she never appears in it, she didn't want to be featured.
But how it really was is still in the dark.
Davis recorded a fourth record in 1976, which did not appear, she probably went to a Japanese silent monastery for a few months - and then moved back to Pittsburgh.
Where she remained for the next forty years.
What was she doing there?
"Nothing," she told an interviewer.
"Just live."
Now she died there.
Betty Davis was 77 years old.