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No altered ‘male’ or ‘female’ version required adjusting the pronouns, simply serving as joyful noise that artists shared an affinity for.
By Marissa Lee.
There are few more remarkable times in music history than the motown-soul era of the 60s and 70s, when there were more ways to sing “I love you” than there were people to say it to. Words of “Can’t nobody love you / Like I’m lovin’ you baby” (Can’t Nobody Love You, Solomon Burke) sung over melodic strings and plucky piano to an unidentified, better yet, unspecified, subject, are emblematic of a time in which every song was a love letter dedicated to whoever wished to listen. What is lesser known about these ballads, so drenched in soul that it nearly drips out of them, is that they were unintentionally progressive.
There’s an explicit gendering in the lyrics of most songs making it an obtrusive fact that each song is dedicated to one gender and one gender only. Likely deeply rooted in the need to prove one’s sexuality, it’s either due to heteronormativity, or artists crying out, , “Trust me, I’m straight, I’m only singing to the opposite gender.”
It often goes unnoticed that the decadent soul songs of the late ‘60s and ‘70s forfeited pronouns, instead opting for the ambiguous ‘baby’s and ‘honey’s that populate their lyrics. This may not have been done on purpose, but it definitely served a purpose. It made the songs more highly marketable, and beyond that, offered them a form of artistic commonality. This is because a preeminent factor of the soul music scene was the recycling, covering, and sampling of others’ music; once a song was written and performed, it was there for the taking, and was often redone a number of times by different artists of the same era. No altered ‘male’ or ‘female’ version required adjusting the pronouns, simply serving as joyful noise that artists within a community shared an affinity for.
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An example of this is the collaborative1968 album Diana Ross & the Supremes Join the Temptations, during which both groups take turns covering each other’s songs and performing duets and mashups, facilitated largely by the ambiguity of the gender to whom they’re singing. A personal favorite on the record is I Second That Emotion, a song that was originally released the previous year by the Miracles, and has since been covered by nearly every soul and motown group to succeed them. The 1968 version features the Supremes backed by the Temptations, and vice versa, singing lyrics, “If you feel like giving me a lifetime of devotion / I second that emotion.” Whoever the ‘you’ and ‘me’ are in the song is not of importance; it’s the joyous expression of emotion and love that substantiates the melody.
As it goes, the path of music and artistry must move and adapt and take listeners to new places. Since emerging from the hot and heavy era of radio-pop of the 2000’s and 2010’s, during which nearly every song was concerned with who was doing what to who (I Kissed A Girl, Where Them Girls At, Birthday Sex), we’ve somehow wound up just a short step from where we started. Respectfully ambiguous music is becoming the norm, shying from the ‘girl’ and ‘boy’ that find themselves in the blank spaces of pop songs. Instead, we’re granted solace from binaries and once again given more, perhaps unintentional, genderless expressions of adoration. The love songs in this new explorative space (See Black Dog by Arlo Parks and Cooks by Still Woozy) once again opt out of gender specifications, allowing mentions of ‘you’s and ‘we’s to apply to every ‘he,’ ‘she,’ or ‘them’ that pleases to listen.
Images via @dianarossandthesupremes
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