Michael Eric Dyson speaks at Aretha Franklin funeral service

it's a bishop Ellis and Reverend Smith to President Clinton and her husband Bill [Applause] it's Attorney General soon-to-be president holder and to Reverend Jackson and Minister Farrakhan if some cosmic ethnographer were to drop down here and do a biopsy an extract of living tissue of black genius here today would be the veritable cornucopia of its radical expression we done had all kind of singing up in here from high European derive classical composition so the gutbucket gospel grueling reality of our blues & soul traditions we have heard singers hit high notes and panned the depths of the diet patience top-of-the-range and scale of american music but we are here for one voice one reason one woman who was a freakishly precocious woman a bronze von gerkan of the gospel born in the legendary rhetorical rooms she just stated in of her father Clarence Levon Franklin she took me one day to the triumph Awards and there she had me attempt to explain his genius CL Franklin practice the species of black sacred speech called whooping how does one explain hooping the Corson - articulation the striated diction the elastic grammar speech pressured by music that turns into song you will quickly see one of the greatest exemplars of that rhetorical form in the presence of the Reverend dr. jasper williams but it was in that womb that she was born and in that Mississippi mud arrived Detroit deity Aretha Franklin at 14 saying never grow old and in singing it you could feel the theological precedence and the clairvoyance that God gave to her she became a vehicle of the on high purpose that was radiated in that beautiful brown body and when Aretha Aretha saying at 14 she convinced people that indeed she would never grow old but then she recorded the song again when she was 30 years old and in recording that song on her epic Amazing Grace where she gave us a vision of a return to the gospel world that her father claimed she had never left anyhow and then when she sang that song about 5 minutes and 21 seconds in on a 9 minute and 57 second song you felt the volcanic eruption the glissando the melisma stretching a single note across several syllables so that she could articulate the deep and profound realities that only song could capture Aretha sang that song at 30 in a different way she sing it at 14 why is that between 14 and 30 there was a whole bunch of living she never loved a man the way she loved that man she said if you gonna be a man demanding a do-right woman you better be a do right man now we know the great scholar Farah Jasmine Griffin speaks about the inchoate feminist perspective never calling her feminist because Aretha Franklin never called herself a feminist but she had feminist sensibilities the independent autonomous reach of black female identity was Iranian tin her rhetoric she was black girl magic before there was black girl magic and so between 14 and 30 there was a lot of living there was a chain of fools that she was conscripted to there there was the reality of the hurt and pain the ardor the ecstasy the suffering and the reality that we had to confront as a black people and don't get it twisted she was black without apology or excuse and she was American without argument or exception she was black because she was from the blackest city in the world Detroit I know y'all jealous you from Chicago Philadelphia Pittsburgh you good but you ain't got the DS Dagny reception they go red pun Vernors ginger-ale Coney Island hot dog [Applause] [Applause] the future hits to ride in a Cadillac and found its destiny in a Ford we had Motown music I know everybody else had music but y'all ain't had it like Detroit had it the greatest artists ever produced meets the Stevie Wonder the greatest songwriter ever Smokey Robinson and for a long while the greatest entertainer mr. Michael Jackson and the greatest singer in the world Aretha Franklin [Applause] she was an edifying thief she took other people's songs and made him her own when Otis Redding heard her saying he says she doesn't cook my song oh yes she did and he was glad she took it because she spelled out in a way he never spelled out respects she had to articulate it and enunciate it so fokin understand what she was talking about then in that belly of blackness in Detroit without apology or excuse that embrace of her blackness led her to be political we got all kind of music now that ain't got nothing to do with nothing except cars and money and glory a man a debt but she was about getting Angela Davis out of jail she was about working with Martin Luther King jr. and Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton she was about transforming the existence of black America not Negroes scared to say day black scared to show up at a too black place that's why some black folk ain't here today they send in letters they don't want to get up in this blackness they don't want to feel the nasty power of this blackness we are black Indian swing we don't care take your shoes off dip it in the water get baptized and then this orange apparition had the nerve to say she worked for him you lugubrious leech you dopey doppelganger of deceit and deviance you leaf a liar you dim-witted dictator you foolish fascists J worked for you she worked above you she worked beyond you get your preposition right [Applause] then he got the nerve to see he gon grab it that ain't would have reached the Franklin said imma give you something you can feel like your brothers in the streets a tap lightly like a woodpecker with a headache [Applause] and so don't you sully the memory of our great cream Aretha Franklin was an original never one like her before never another like her afterward she was bold and brilliant and courageous and beautiful and indebted to the traditions that sparked our renewal she refused to sell out Hira maned herself all along in her life and so as I take my seat you got to remember Aretha Franklin gave us something deep and powerful and when she made her transition Farah Jasmine Griffin the professor at Columbia said she was doing work even after she died when she made her transition convictions came down immunity pleas were made folk get sent to jail even as an ancestor she doing work she moved from being the Queen of Soul to the queen of souls she is indeed looking over us as our ancestor never forgetting that she will walk with us I had to go the other day from South Bend Indiana into Chicago leaving no trading going to Chicago to speak my tickets said the plane left at 433 but it arrived at 4:20 I had landed before I took off if you ain't already at where you going you ain't gonna be there when you arrive you got to already know where you had a reefer Franklin ain't just made no transition she been building up her housing equity in another place with another God who loved her soul she was already there she said a prayer for us she loved us and now she is the queen of our souls long live the Queen long live the Queen [Applause] but what it only Reverend professor Eric Michael Dyson Michael Eric Dyson at this time we will have Jennifer Hudson

Channel: Click On Detroit | Local 4 | WDIV

Views: 466,117

Rating: 4.7003307 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: y3Os2dc6bFY

Length: 13min 27sec (807 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 31 2018