“The Music is Physical and It's about Sex”

Chapter 5 , “‘The Music is Physical and It’s About Sex’: Betty Davis’s Ultra-Erotic Funk Rock, the Sexual Revolution of the 1970s, and the Black Feminist Funk Movement,” exposes readers to the life and musical legacy of Betty Davis, one of the most colorful figures in the history (and herstory) of funk. After a discussion of her upbringing in Durham, North Carolina, and relocation to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, her move to New York City as a teenager, modeling career, and whirlwind romance and brief marriage to jazz icon Miles Davis, the chapter centers on her work as an avant-garde, sexually liberated Black feminist funk singer-songwriter. Betty Davis’s work is explored as a form of radical “erotic funk rock” because of her irreverence toward Whiteness, maleness, White feminism, taboos surrounding sexuality, “Black music,” “White music,” “women’s music,” “rock music,” and even “funk music.” The chapter argues that her music, sometimes directly and at other times indirectly, reflects and expresses elements of the ethos of the Black Women’s Liberation Movement. Discussion is given to Davis’s trademark emphasis on artistic autonomy, women’s liberation, and sexual revolution, as well as her challenge to those who seek to “silence women’s speech about sex.” The chapter closes by highlighting the backlash against, and disdain for, Davis’s music by White patriarchs, White feminists, and the Black bourgeoisie. Ultimately, Davis’s music demonstrates that not only is the personal political, but the musical is political as well. Her love songs and anti-love songs doubled as political songs and protest songs precisely because of their disregard for, and outright antagonism toward, conventional racial, gender, sexual, and musical rules and regulations.