#therelatives

Fresh Listen - The Relatives, “Speak to Me”

(Some pieces of recorded music operate more like organisms than records. They live, they breathe, they reproduce. Fresh Listen is a periodic review of recently and not so recently released albums, sometimes songs, that crawl among us like radioactive spiders, gifting us with superpowers from their stingers.)

In popular soul music, there are a number of rhetorical strategies used by artists to address racism in the United States. Songwriters like Curtis Mayfield ("We're a Winner") and James Brown ("Say It Loud, I'm Black and I'm Proud") proclaimed the beauty and nobility of being African American in this country, while poets like Gil Scott-Heron ("The Revolution Will Not Be Televised") followed a path laid by social leaders like Malcolm X, suggesting that the inevitable chickens would come home to roost if racial inequities, institutional and social, continued.

"Speak to Me," by Dallas, Texas gospel group the Relatives (featured in a recent episode of "Love Is a Real Thing"), discusses race in a way similar to blues giant Big Bill Broonzy ("Black, Brown and White," "I Wonder When I'll Be Called a Man") and Stevie Wonder, in his "Heaven Is Ten Zillion Light Years Away." Where Big Bill Broonzy made a plea to the powers-that-be to measure him by his record as a worker and a soldier (and not on his race), Stevie Wonder and the Relatives call upon the righteousness of God to mediate racial injustice. "What's wrong with America?" the falsetto lead vocal cries. In "Speak to Me," there is no response but continued intensity and pain.

The drums and distorted wah-wah guitar in "Speak to Me" are as heavy as any proto-metal track laid down by Cream or Hendrix--all the more arresting because the song, on its surface, is a ballad in waltz-time.