Compared to What?
A few years ago, after the release of Cookie: The Anthropological Mixtape, I made the point that MeShell Ndegeocello—revolutionary Soul singer—was the artistic progeny of Eugene McDaniels. To many, McDaniels is still an obscure figure, though his composition “Feel Like Making Love” is one of Roberta Flack’s most well known hits. Unfortunately McDaniels was not too obscure for former Vice President Spiro Agnew, who was rumored to give Ahmet Ertegun, the late founder of Atlantic Records, a call in the early 1970s to complain about the criticisms of the Nixon administration that McDaniels lodged throughout his underground classic Headless Heroes of the Apocalypse. McDaniels was dropped from the label shortly thereafter.
Ironically, McDaniels’s most stinging critique, “Compared to What?”, was not even on Headless Heroes, but was recorded a few years earlier by the aforementioned Flack (on her debut First Take) and Eddie Harris and Les McCann, who recorded a live version at Montreux in 1969. Lyrics like “The President, he's got his war/Folks don't know just what it's for/Nobody gives us rhyme or reason Have one doubt, they call it treason” were just as politically relevant in 2003 when the Coca-Cola company remixed to song for their “Real, Compared to What?” campaign, which featured Common, Musiq and Donnie, among others. I can’t imagine that McDaniels was happy about his artistic legacy was being reduced to selling brown caffeinated fizz.
Fast forward to 2007 and it’s Ndegeocello that makes good, recording a version of “Compared to What?” on the soundtrack to Talk to Me, the recent Don Cheadle biopic about the legendary black radio personality Petey Green. Ndegeocello’s version invest the song with a sparseness, that plays closer to the Flack version of the song than the much more well-known Harris and McCann version. As usual Ndgeocello has a way with making songs her own, whether it’s Jimi’s “May This Be Love” (from Bitter) or her breathtaking remake of “Fantasy” on the recent Earth, Wind and Fire tribute recording.
On “Compared to What?” she also makes subtle lyric changes—“possession is the motivation” becomes “possessions are the motivation”—changes that makes us all complicit in ways that I don’t think the McDaniels original intended. But that has always been the genius of Ndgeocello—her ability to hold a mirror up to the culture by holding that mirror up to herself and the folk first. And tragically, folk still ain’t checking her out the way they should. With The World Has Made Me The Man Of My Dreams (her 7th full-length recording) due in the fall, hopefully some of that will change.
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