"I Don't Need No R-E-S-P-E-C-T": Brittany Howard

Charles looks back with a 2016 essay on the artist, who's got a new album out today

(Brittany Howard, 2014; Photo by LZA AXLWD, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic.)

Brittany Howard has a new album out today, one that - judging by its first singles and the early word - is going to be another worthy chapter in one of the most interesting and compelling careers of the last decade. To celebrate, I thought I’d pull out a presentation I gave in April 2016 at the mighty Pop Conference, then housed at the Museum of Popular Culture in Seattle. The conference theme that year was “Voice,” and I was part of a panel with my old friends and brilliant colleagues David Gilbert and Tyina L. Steptoe. I’ve cleaned up some errors and cleaned out some clunky phrasing, but otherwise I haven’t altered or updated it.

Looking back, I think it holds up pretty well and doesn’t ring too false in light of where Howard’s career has gone since then. She’s made more remarkable music - including Jaime, my favorite album of 2019 - and she’s both explored new sounds and found powerful ways to engage with old ones. And there’s been a lot of great writing about her, including in Maureen Mahon’s masterful Black Diamond Queens and this brand-new conversation with Jewly Hight. (As you’ll see below, Hight has gotten Howard’s multiple wavelengths since the beginning.) Howard’s still keeping us transfixed and keeping us guessing. And we’re all the better, stranger, and more beautiful for it. - CH

‘I Don’t Need No R-E-S-P-E-C-T’: The Disruptive Black Southernness of Brittany Howard (2016)

In October 2015, Billboard magazine named Brittany Howard their Women in Music “Powerhouse” Artist of the Year, an appropriate honor given the breakout success of Sound & Color, the second album by Howard’s group Alabama Shakes, as well as the surprise debut from her garage-punk side project Thunderbitch. But, as Howard saw it, she had achieved more in 2015 than critical or popular breakthrough. “We were…being treated as a novelty,” she said, “made out to be a retro, cute band. I found it frustrating.” Indeed, through these striking recordings, Howard challenged her early positioning as a representative of Southern soul tradition and more broadly defied the cultural expectations for a Southern black woman associated with a retro musical genre in the 21st century.

At the center of this project - and of the records themselves - is her voice. An instrument of astonishing power and flexibility, Howard’s singing eschews authenticity and embraces ambiguity in performances that betray easy attempts at stylistic categorization. At a moment when artists like Leon Bridges or St. Paul and the Broken Bones have gained fame through their painstaking recreations of classic soul sounds – and self-conscious adherence to its buttoned-up and prescripted performances of race, gender, and region – Brittany Howard moved in the other direction, exploding preconceptions and the historical mythologies. As both instrument and symbol, her singular voice acts as explicit and implicit resistance.

When they emerged in late 2011, the Alabama Shakes – with their gritty sound and integrated membership – seemed like the literal embodiment of soul-revivalist dreams. Justin Gage, who premiered the Shakes’s first release on his Aquarium Drunkard blog, wrote that the Shakes were “a slice of the real,” and – like most writers – he devoted much of his attention to the fact that the group was “fronted by a woman armed with a whole lotta voice and a Gibson SG.” Early presentations of Howard ranged from the occasionally perceptive (as usual, Jewly Hight and Ann Powers got there earlier than most of us) to a distressing number of treatments that relied on long-held stereotypes about southern black women’s musicality. This included everything from the reliance on mystical narratives of regional and racial essence to offensive invocations of her body and presumed sexuality as shorthand descriptors for her musical gifts. (When putting this paper together, I very nearly scrapped the whole thing and instead presented you with the Top 10 Worst Things Written About Brittany Howard, which are an astonishingly comprehensive laundry list of racist, sexist and size-ist stereotypes. It’s so bad that Bob Lefsetz isn’t even the worst.) Her voice became central in this symbolism through a litany of comparisons to earlier singers like Janis Joplin or Otis Redding, and the supposed distance from the contemporary pop world. As Rolling Stone breathlessly noted, “In a year when most divas couldn't get beyond post-Gaga spectacle, along came Brittany Howard… [who] reincarnated the ghost of Sixties rock and soul without resorting to over singing histrionics or bald imitation.” Even in less hyperbolic moments, writers and fans praised Howard’s voice for its richness and texture and called the Shakes’ 2012 debut album Boys & Girls an authentic expression of the South’s sweaty soul.

Certainly, many of the tracks on Boys & Girls luxuriate in the soul, rock and country overlaps that defined southern music of the 1960s and 1970s, and Howard’s voice anchored these explorations. (I don’t want to undersell that record, or her singing on it.) But Howard herself resisted these familiar narratives from the beginning, demanding that observers move beyond their essentialism, caricature and straight-up misogyny in characterizing her work. She noted that her musical upbringing included everything from Prince to Pink Floyd to Elvis Presley, and she explicitly resisted the standard boundaries used to frame her artistic identity. She redirected discussions about her rural upbringing away from the expected Beasts-of-the-Southern-Wild language of exoticism or deprivation and towards what she called her “nesting period of creativity,” detailing how her relative isolation fueled her early love of science fiction, poetry, and music, and later manifested in her continuing practice of recording intricate solo demo recordings. And she blanched at the obvious Muscle Shoals connection that often came attached to the band thanks to their geographical proximity and sonic affinity. Howard said she hadn’t even heard of Muscle Shoals until white bassist Zac Cockrell told her how great and soulful it was. (I think this is an apt metaphor for the larger place of Muscle Shoals soul in our cultural conversation.)

Howard’s most powerful intervention was her resistance to the comparisons with soul singers. While she acknowledged the importance of artists like Aretha Franklin and Otis Redding, she more often name-checked AC/DC’s Bon Scott as a main influence, both in terms of timbre and intensity. “That's soul singing,” she said of Scott. “It doesn't have to be '60s R&B to be soul music." Through such a reorientation, Howard not only offered a set of influences that more accurately reflected her musical origin and defied the standard set of touchstones. “Sometimes people can draw easy [links] between me and Janis Joplin because it's the most obvious thing,” she noted, but said that another Janis – Ian – was just as much of an influence. Even when drawing attention to soul predecessors, Howard sometimes flipped the script. For example, Howard spotlighted Aaron Neville’s version of “Ave Maria” as an example of “gives-no-fucks” singing and claimed that the greatest influence she drew from Nina Simone came not through her singing, but her gifts as a pianist. “She spent her entire life trying to get better and better at the classical piano. That inspires me because I want to get better, to play better and understand music better.”

The Simone remark came in early 2015, as Alabama Shakes released their long-awaited second album Sound & Color. Although Boys & Girls had been a critical and commercial success, and though the group’s prominence extended to a White House appearance where they performed Stax classic “Born Under a Bad Sign” as President Obama championed the interracial harmony of the southern soul era, Howard viewed Sound & Color as a corrective to the assumptions and even refusals of journalists and others to take her seriously. Howard told Jewly Hight, “[Soul songs] were what we were into at the time. Any time I did an interview, I’m pretty sure I explained that pretty well. And they would always ask me, ‘Oh, do you like Janis Joplin? Do you like Aretha Franklin?’ Of course I do. But I also like a lot of other things.” Elsewhere, Howard noted that the critical attention paid to clear soul throwbacks like “You Ain’t Alone” obscured “our quirkier songs” that she said “had a little more depth to them.” Guitarist Heath Fogg added that “We all like [experimentation] more than pigeonholing ourselves with the classic R&B thing,” and Howard’s new songs – most of which developed as sophisticated home demos that producer Blake Mills likened to Funkadelic’s Maggot Brain – foregrounded themes of redefinition and obscurity. As Howard asked in the title of one new song: “Guess Who?”

Howard and the group announce this interest from the album’s opening title track, which begins with a tender vibraphone line that Howard said was inspired by The Wizard of Oz before her multi-tracked vocal enters with a lyrical statement of purpose: “A new world hangs, outside the window/Beautiful and strange.” The song concerns an astronaut on a mission to find a new habitable planet who wakes after 500 years to realize that he’s all alone. Solitude – voluntary or otherwise – is one of Howard’s primary lyrical themes, and here, such loneliness symbolizes both challenge and opportunity. “Even though he’s alone,” she told NPR’s Terry Gross, “it’s so beautiful.” Like much of the album, which takes up space travel, regeneration and other themes, “Sound & Color” settles neatly into an Afro-futurist tradition that has long been crucial to the expressions of black southerners (including fellow Alabamian Sun Ra, who Jerome Dotson spoke about so eloquently here at EMP a few years ago) and appraisals of the South as both place and idea. (Jewly Hight deftly noted that Huntsville, the “Space City” where Howard’s grandmother worked as a NASA secretary, is perhaps a more apt Alabama signifier than Muscle Shoals.) Exploring this odd future, Howard insisted that - to paraphrase another of her early musical heroes – we all turn and face the strange. (Side note: One of her favorite songs growing up was David Bowie’s apocalyptic “Five Years,” and her December 2015 comments that she hoped to have “tea” with Bowie because they could “have some great conversations” are inestimably sad now.)

Howard’s vocals remained key to this process. Speaking to Terry Gross, Howard noted that “the voice is an instrument,” she said, “and you can play an instrument any kinda way you want to. And I always think it’s a shame that I have to stay stuck in one kind of personality. It’s like a palette – there’s so many colors you can choose.” “She could sing in all these different ways, and it worked best when she would take a chance,” producer Blake Mills noted. “She…has to deal with…stupid shit like the references to Janis Joplin…I think she’s aware of what she’s capable of…That’s where her fire and ferocity emanate from.”

The vocal experimentation on Sound & Color obscures and destabilizes the fixing of Howard’s identity. Faced with a historical tradition of black women being laid bare (both figuratively and literally) for gaze and consumption, and her personal lionization as a southern-soul queen, Howard responded with an album’s worth of vocal dissemblance and disruptions. She double-and triple-tracks vocals, spiraling upwards and downwards across registers – from rumbling baritone to soaring soprano – in polyvocal call and response. (She is not a lone soul woman belting out her troubles; she is a sophisticated arranger.) She shifts abruptly and even jarringly, unsettling listener expectations and often employing a liberating quietness that contrasts with her reputation for vocal and physical “hugeness.” Additionally, throughout the album, Howard’s lyrics are often hard to understand, a fuzzing of meaning and form that recalls earlier mindfucks like Sly & The Family Stone’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On and stands in conversation with D’Angelo’s Black Messiah, which was recorded around the same time and became a Howard favorite. Emily Lordi evocatively notes that D’Angelo’s vocals often sound like they were recorded “through a mask or a veil,” and Howard employs a similarly muffled style as a means of demanding that the listener simultaneously acknowledge her inaccessibility and listen closely to what she’s saying.

Perhaps the defining element of Howard’s expanded vocal portfolio is her use of falsetto, which anchors the rumbling funk of “Don’t Wanna Fight” and grooving rock of “The Greatest,” among others. Although women have long utilized the practice, falsetto remains primarily associated with male singers and coded as an opportunity for men to sing above their range and thus reach notes usually identified with women. Howard’s use of falsetto places her within an R&B vocal tradition that exists outside the grit-and-grind clichés and instead within a lineage of singers (mostly male) whose sweet voicings create what Marsha Music termed “the fanciful poesy of black…loving.” Also, as Alison McCracken notes in her amazing recent book on crooning, falsetto was a crucial mechanism in national anxieties about gender and sexuality in the mid-twentieth century. Falsetto singers were often termed “double-voiced,” which indicated their vocal shifts and their slippery position with a hardening gender binary. When I played Sound & Color for a friend last year, he remarked that he liked the way that guy sang, because he sounded like a woman. (Side note #2: Brittany Howard’s Spotify playlist – released in conjunction with Sound & Color – may offer a clue to another influence. Included alongside Bjork, Sly and others is Antony & The Johnson’s “You Are My Sister,” in which Anohni sings in falsetto and double-tracked harmony.) Howard’s falsetto, particularly when combined with the range of other voices that she utilizes on Sound & Color, acts as vocal confirmation of a larger attempt to defy a larger set of gendered expectations. As Howard noted, “you’re expected to be a darling up there. Like, ‘Look at that sweet little thing! Singing her songs about lurve.”

Howard amplified these juxtapositions with the surprise 2015 debut of Thunderbitch. This snarling and strutting set of glam-rock rave-ups links the 1950s rock-n-roll present in Howard’s work since early tracks like “Heavy Chevy” with the metal and punk that she loved as a youth. In the best rock ‘n’ roll tradition, many of the songs were about rock ‘n’ roll, specifically the music’s liberatory possibilities that have been canonical in rock mythos. In songs like “Let Me Do What I Do Best” and “I Just Wanna Rock & Roll,” Howard laid claim to the rock tradition – which is some sort of compulsory birthright for white men and yet has been detached and disassociated from southern black women in both past and present. Asked how it felt to be the “only rock ‘n’ roll brown chick” by BET.com, Howard declaimed such uniqueness, noting that “it used to happen all the time. It's still happening.”  

Howard debuted the album in a live appearance in New York, where she performed the stomping new songs in black leather and white face, entering astride a motorcycle and unleashing a performance that mixed Bowie’s rock theater with the greasy stomp perfected by Howard in her cover-band days back in Alabama. (Her band included a white man who shook his hips and banged a tambourine, an inversion of the archetypal gender framework.) For Howard, Thunderbitch allowed a further attempt to add mystery to her overdetermined cultural reputation. When asked about the band, Howard said “I've heard of them…I know they've got this singer that dresses up like a ghost, and I know they play rock & roll music."

The cumulative effect of this shapeshifting is a refusal not just of a particular narrative, but of the process of narrativizing itself in which black women are expected to perform a well-worn and limiting set of cultural and societal roles. As she provocatively yells in Thunderbitch’s punked-out “Wild Child,” “I don’t need no r-e-s-p-e-c-t.” By directly invoking and dismissing the Aretha Franklin anthem, so crucial to popular understandings of black women in the soul era, Howard also rejects the politics of respectability that sometimes taints the southern-soul revival. While I don’t want to over-extend the analogy with larger debates over respectability politics, I notice clear resonances in its nostalgic affection for a mythical Civil Rights era, closely-monitored set of signifiers, and fetishization of well-dressed, “old-fashioned” sounds and images. Brittany Howard’s work favors instead echoes the assertive intersectional approach that fuels #BlackLivesMatter, contemporary feminism, queer politics and other movements. Howard herself has mostly eschewed political statements (although her Spotify playlist includes KRS-One’s “Black Cop”) but – as Carvell Wallace noted – Howard points towards a more liberated and just future. “The problem, especially raising a girl and most especially raising a girl of color, is that you can say you love and accept them until you are unable to speak anymore, but this will eventually be drowned out by a world that tells them in thundering and certain terms: ‘There are a lot of parts of you — honest, beautiful, and vulnerable parts — that we don’t have any place for’…I can tell my daughter it’s OK to be something that no one else has given her permission to be. But Brittany Howard can show her.”

Howard stands in a rich tradition of southern black women who did similar cultural and political work through their music. Carvell Wallace offers seven “musical sisters” for Howard, and first on the list, appropriately, is Sister Rosetta Tharpe. Howard’s wardrobe at the 2016 Grammys made her debt to Tharpe unmistakable, but Howard herself expressed an appreciation for Tharpe back in summer 2013, as recordings for Sound & Color began. Asked about her favorite recent book, Howard named Gayle Wald’s Shout, Sister, Shout!, a Tharpe biography that reclaimed the oft-forgotten figure as a key and disruptive part in American musical history. Howard loves Tharpe as “a fierce singer and guitar player” – they both favor Gibson SGs – but also as a gospel singer who was a “party animal and rumored to be bisexual…It was fascinating to read about a fearless woman who was so far ahead of her time.” Wallace’s profile included six other southern forebears – including Memphis Minnie (who Howard has namechecked as an ignored progenitor of rock ‘n’ roll) and other names can surely be added to the list.

Beyond these crucial historical precedents, Howard bears similarity with other contemporary black southern women who demonstrate a similarly singular vision, what Ann Powers termed in her brilliant 2015 review of Sound & Color a “Southern freakiness” that defines “serious individualists” and “people whose ways of thinking connect to form an antidote to the deep conventionality that often surrounds them…[who recognize] that legacies can't be simply processed. They must be lived, confronted and altered from within.” Erykah Badu, Janelle Monae, Rhiannon Giddens, Gangsta Boo, Missy Elliot, Valerie June, and others all bear consideration in this conversation. As does Beyonce. Leaving aside the fact that Thunderbitch’s surprise album drop and Howard’s use of alternative personae owes something to Beyonce’s paradigm-shifting example, the two artists share a common interest in remixing their artistic identities, resisting the limiting discourses that surround them, and redrawing the map of the musical south around their iconoclastic voices.

Still, Brittany Howard reminds us to resist the temptation to only seek connections between southern black women. After all, one of the most tenacious and treacherous examples of white musical privilege is the lionization of white artists for adopting non-white influences while artists of color are identified only as inspirations rather than synthesists themselves. Additionally, Howard cautions us – and me – not to unintentionally flip the script and suggest that her particular performance is somehow more authentic or valuable because it resists or rejects some of the most well-known cultural markers. (This is especially true since Howard has never wholly rejected those markers, but instead demanded that they be placed within a context centered on her expansive and fluid personal creativity.) Howard’s point – made both through the labyrinthine mysteries of Sound & Color and the brash demands of Thunderbitch – Howard insists that we address her on her terms and keep listening.

In May of 2015, John Mulvey profiled Alabama Shakes for Uncut magazine, interviewing Howard at her home. Describing the setting, Mulvey wrote the following: “Beneath a crude painting of a black panther, a large old hi-fi cabinet that once belonged to Howard’s grandfather has been playing ‘Future Primitive,’ from Santana’s Caravanserai, at a selection of inaccurate and faintly disconcerting speeds.”

A new world hangs, outside the window. Beautiful and strange.

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