On Repeat: Betty Davis: "Anti Love Song" and "He Was a Big Freak" [MP3]
Betty Mabry wed Miles Davis in 1968. A year later, the couple divorced. Somewhere in the middle, goes the story, Betty changed the course of music history by introducing Miles to Sly Stone and Jimi Hendrix. Miles responded with the epochal Bitches Brew. Betty, for her part, eventually responded with a few albums of righteous funk. "Anti Love Song" featured prominently on her self-titled 1973 debut, and it's easy to hear why many allege that it was intended as a put down of her ex. "As hard as I'd fall for you, boy," she sings, spitting out the "boy," "Well, you know that you'd fall for me harder/ That's why I don't want to love you." A torch singer could have twisted those lines into a touching quiet storm ballad, but Davis' gleefully sadistic dominatrix sneer-- supported by a band featuring members of the Family Stone-- makes her intentions clear. "I'll have you eating your ego," she winks, "I'll make you pocket your pride." That's right: the song's a nasty, hilarious sex tease that in essence sends her former lover home to beat off. Revenge is sweet indeed.
MP3: > Betty Davis: "Anti Love Song"[from Betty Davis; reissue out now on Light in the Attic]
The cover of Betty Davis' second album, They Say I'm Different, shows the model-turned-singer posing as a sort of intergalactic funk sex warrior, but Davis liked to give as much as she liked to get. "He was a big freak!" Davis shrieks at the start of the song of the same name, "I used to beat him with a turquoise chain, yeah!" Considering how much Davis seems to relish said beating, you start to wonder which party is the bigger freak: Davis or the object of her turquoise affection? Throughout the track, the increasingly deranged singer likens herself her man's woman, his mistress, his princess, his house cat ("I'd scrub him, I'd love him, I'd cook his milk!"), his geisha, his flower, his mother, his lover, his daydream. "I used to whip him, I used to beat him, he used to dig it, he used to really dig it!" she declares, forcefully, toward the end of this porno nightmare, by which time her man must have high tailed it the hell out of there. As soon as she untied him, of course. Meow.
MP3: > Betty Davis: "He Was a Big Freak"
[from They Say I'm Different; reissue out now on Light in the Attic]