Forget Clint-Obama-Rama. And our economy sliding over a cliff.
At Sunday’s Grammy Awards a cataclysm of titanic proportion occurred when Beyonce Knowles introduced a waiting-in-the-wings Tina Turner to a drop-jaw audience as … “The Queen.”
Come Monday an irritated
Aretha Franklin, always and forever to be known as The Queen of Soul, declared the following about the supposed contretemps:
“I dismissed it as a cheap shot for controversy.”
Franklin then made like Storm from the X-Men superheros team and with a severe sweep of her arm annihilated dozens of neighborhoods in Beyonce’s hometown of Houston Texas.
What Aretha may have lost in of-the-moment pop music relevance during recent years — where her musical output has been scattershot and weakly received — she seems to be making up for in sheer mass and madcap, could-give-a-fuck fashion chutzpah.
She wore this yellow satin ensemble (above) to a recent awards dinner, stopping the milling mob of spectators in their tracks as she moved atop the red carpet. And who could blame the gawker’s stunned shock? There in the their midst, as if beckoned from the very mists of time, was an in-the-flesh personification of the paradigmatic Venus of Willendorf statue (left) — yes, Mother Nature incarnate.
Aretha’s attire seems a deliberate throwing down of the gauntlet. Her war cry? “Who says women in pop need be Beyonce-thin to remain talented, potent or legendary?”
Traditionally a spaghetti strap dress is worn to highlight a woman’s shoulders and arms. With Aretha we get the shoulders, the arms — but also a quality that is much more gripping, an effect that is absent should the dress be worn by the wan or svelte. Aretha’s dress offers us a visceral halting, a suspension that rivets the attention and generates a state of architectural wonder.
The million dollar question? Will those straining-to-near-snapping straps hold back the mighty fullness of her breasts?
The overall impact of Aretha’s guise elicits the same shocked awe one experiences when, say, viewing the awful magnitude of Arizona’s Hoover Dam for the first time (Should you doubt me read Joan Didion’s The White Album essay on the monolithic structure sometime.) Trying to take in the fullness of the dam is impossible. You’re made mute. Silenced before humankind’s ability to contain nature.
Working this very theme, Aretha offers us both woman and nature combined.
And you really don’t want to fuck with that, Beyonce.
What queen wouldn’t react testily when her title is threatened? Aretha has transcended trendiness by becoming something eternal and self-contained. Writing about the enigmatic, paleolithic Venus of Willendorf statue, social historian Camille Paglia noted in her crazy, sexy, cool book Sexual Personae:
“Bulging, bulbous, bubbling. Venus of Willendorf, bent over her own belly, tends the hot pot of nature. She is eternally pregnant. She broods, in all senses. She is hen, nest, egg … She is turgid with with primal force.”
Thus remains Aretha. Forever the Mother, forever primal, forever the very personification of Queen.
Tina and Beyonce? Flotsam and jetsam. Mere shadows passing along the Walls of Soul. Pop pap.
*sigh*
I love her voice, I love her music.
But dear god…why aren’t her shoulders bleeding? Thank god this site isn’t in 3D, or I would’ve probably fainted from shock.
The really sucky thing is…at her weight, she could very easily die far sooner than she needs to, and then we won’t have her talent at all excepting recordings.
Those udders give me the shudders!
Oh.My.God.
It’s odd to me how the world is hellbent on forging these rivalries between famous women. She’s the Queen of this, she’s the Diva of whatever. There was that supposed competition at one time between Brigitte Bardot and Sophia Loren for the title of The World’s Most Beautiful Woman. That’s really such an impossible thing to quantify objectively. It’s like choosing between Helen of Troy and Cleopatra.
It’s a similar situation with Franklin and Turner. Yes, Franklin’s a pro, but so is Turner (a double threat at singing and dancing) and you can’t fault her for being equally talented and more lustrously preserved.
As for Knowles, I’ll give her credit for being ridiculously overexposed but a good deal less annoying than most of her young counterparts.
And do you remember her “Nessun dorma” at the Grammys one year when Pavarotti backed out???!!!
Those aren’t breasts, they’re repositories for fat. If she lost weight she’d lose boobage. It’s as gross an abomination as the dicks Tom of Finland drew. NOBODY’S organs are so grossly oversized.
Aretha has become a bad caricature of herself, but doesn’t seem to realize it or else she wouldn’t have worn that dress. That’s always a shame.
Watch out Tina. Aretha’s got two Master Blasters in her Thunderdomes.
Good Lordy, someone throw a blanket on that beast, now!!!
Aretha, bless her sure to be straining heart, has a long history of bad wardrobe choices going back decades. Now that she is flat out obese, there’s just more bulky volume to dress badly, amplifying the effect. What’s the opposite of anorexia? When you think you are thinner than you are?
The skin on those enormous knockers! Yikes!
That is a very scarey site indeed!
Aretha is nicknamed the “Queen of soul”, but tina has always been called the “Quen of Rock n’ Roll”. So, why this controversy??