Finalist, 2022 Lesbian Memoir/Biography, Lambda Literary Award for Arts and Culture
Crafting a legacy all their own, the reinvented Labelle subverted the “girl group” aesthetic to invoke the act’s Afrofuturist spirit and make manifest their vision of Black womanhood.
Performing as the Bluebelles in the 1960s, Patti LaBelle, Nona Hendryx, and Sarah Dash wore bouffant wigs and chiffon dresses, and they harmonized vocals like many other girl groups of the era. After a decade on the Chitlin Circuit, however, they were ready to write their own material, change their name, and deliver—as Labelle—an electrifyingly celestial sound and styling that reached a crescendo with a legendary performance at the Metropolitan Opera House to celebrate the release of Nightbirds and its most well-known track, “Lady Marmalade.” In Why Labelle Matters, Adele Bertei tells the story of the group that sang the opening aria of Afrofuturism and proclaimed a new theology of musical liberation for women, people of color, and LGBTQ people across the globe.
With sumptuous and galactic costumes, genre-bending lyrics, and stratospheric vocals, Labelle’s out-of-this-world performances changed the course of pop music and made them the first Black group to grace the cover of Rolling Stone. Why Labelle Matters, informed by interviews with members of the group as well as Bertei’s own experience as a groundbreaking musician, is the first cultural assessment of this transformative act.
Why Labelle Matters is a bracing treasure trove of pop revelation...If your main impression of Patti Labelle comes from the overproduced studio versions of her later solo hits, and your knowledge of Labelle, the group, is limited to 'Lady Marmalade', this punchy little volume will open your ears to a progressive past that still sounds like the future.
[Why Labelle Matters] not only chronicles the group’s history but demonstrates, as the title suggests, why their music was and is so important.
In this vivid prose marvel of a praise song to her lifesaving, teen-fangirl crushes, Adele Bertei deploys rock solid scholarship, granular musical analysis, and piquant, personal revelation to transcendent and inspirational effect for an array of readers—those equally long besmitten from a century past and the postmillennial virgin-eared alike.Sarah Dash, Nona Hendryx, and Empress Patti LaBelle (in tandem with far-sighted guiding light manager Vicki Wickham) emerged in the '70s as a trio of soulful warrior-queens whose legendary accomplishments now hold several pop pantheons on lock: that of the Great Black Music canon’s most spectacularly adorned space-funk fashion avatars, most hypersensual feminist icons, and most gender-radicalizing cohort of rock & roll hall of fame rebels. In Bertei, this audacious trifecta of harmonizing trailblazers has been gifted a trenchant, mythopoetic scribe worthy of writing fiercely about Labelle’s reverberant spiritual depth, omniversal cultural significance, and torch-bearing Black Futurist visionary status. All with a whole lotta love, wit, and witness-bearing illumination.
Labelle changed how we look at women singers. No longer were they 'girl groups.' They and we were grown up. Voulez-vous coucher avec moi? You bet. This is the book that tells us how and why.
Finally, here's a book that pays tribute to the true mothers of Afrofuturism.
A marvelous account of the whole magnificent Labelle phenomenon.
A smart, shrewd, joyful read, as piercing as any top C shriek from the woman who gave Labelle their name.
Chapter 1. Church: Aviary of the Girl-Child
Chapter 2. Regarding “Mr. Lee”
Chapter 3. Sweethearts of the Apollo
Chapter 4. Ready Steady Go!
Chapter 5. Pyrotechnic Gospel Punk
Chapter 6. Campanology: J’entends les cloches
Chapter 7. Revolution, Televised
Chapter 8. Afronauticfuturisticfunkadivalicious
Chapter 9. Mothers of Reinvention
Chapter 10. An Epic Triptych
Chapter 11. Apotheosis: Women Who Fly
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Notes
Sources
