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CELEBRATING THE POWER OF THE DIVA IN POP CULTURE
Aretha, Tina, Beyoncé: the diva is mighty. To celebrate the V&A's latest exhibition, writer Emma Firth pays her respect.
WORDS: EMMA FIRTH
Long before I experienced romantic love, no musician could rival Aretha Franklin’s ability to help me understand it. She had this unparalleled gift to make you wake up and pay attention. To really listen. “If a song’s about something I’ve experienced or that could’ve happened to me it’s good,” she said. “But if it’s alien to me, I couldn’t lend anything to it. That’s what soul is all about.”
One lesser-known song, a rare live recording, deserves special mention: Sweet, Bitter, Love. Just her at her piano, singing. The lyrics themselves are objectively despairing – "Our magic dreams have lost their spells" – yet her vocals transcend this, there’s a softness within that suffering. I urge you to listen to it. If not singularly for its beginning, a brief window into her dedication. Thirty-two seconds in, Franklin’s unhappy with her performance. She pauses briefly, “One more time!” Not waiting a beat before launching into a gentler interpretation. It captures something essential about her: she was unapologetic, untethered by approval, authentically herself.
Her male counterparts would have been hailed rock stars. Aretha? A diva. In almost every obituary you’ll read of hers it’s the word that describes her the most. One that – when you think, hear, or read about it ¬– has two very different faces. It’s a word London’s V&A celebrates with the opening of their DIVA exhibition this month, inviting attendees to honour the power and creativity of iconic performers, across genres from film, stage, music and beyond.
Tina Turner, late 1970s. Gai Terrell, Getty.
It makes sense that for a term rooted in mythology, deriving from the Latin word for ‘goddess’, its focal point is on the image. For notable divas of the 20th century – Tina Turner, Diana Ross, Grace Jones, Mariah Carey to name but a few – their exaggerated glamour, dramatic hair, makeup, and costumes were part of the package; an amplified femininity of sorts to reflect their stratospheric talent. A few years ago, I probed legendary costume designer Bob Mackie (dubbed the ‘guru of glitter’), whose showgirl outfits for Cher and Tina Turner’s late-1970s ‘flame dress’ are notable highlights in the exhibition. “An outfit or idea never intimidated Cher,” he told me. “We used to call them ‘get-ups’ because they weren’t ‘fashion’, they were her own little world that she lived in.”
Cher at the Oscars, 1988. Darlene Hammond, Getty. Rihanna at the CFDA Fashion Awards, 2014. Dimitrios Kambouris, Getty.
A lovely notion, no? Style as a tool for rebellion. An F-you against the status quo. This language has loud subtext: look at me! It demands attention. There are plentiful examples when you dig. I think about Cher’s memorable black sheer and sequinned look in 1988, at the Oscars (“that year they sent out a little booklet of what the presenters should and shouldn’t do and dress,” according to Mackie. “Cher says, ‘As you can see, I read my book on what the serious actress should wear…’ and there she was. Iconic.”) This was decades before the internet coined ‘naked dressing’, in part responsively to Rihanna’s 2014 CFDA awards dress, adorned with 200,000 Swarovski crystals, and on show for the first time at the V&A.
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These looks provoke and be damned sure, purposely so. It’s wearable performance. Like any good and proper storytelling, it offers a heightened mood or projection of the self. “For me, a diva is like the great opera singer, the great film star,” as Grace Jones put it in her autobiography, I’ll Never Write My Memoirs. “Out of reach, in their own world, with a real gift for invention.” There’s a mercurial, shapeshifting, quality at play with these personas; a character that is both known and unknown at the same time. You could even argue it’s a kind of survival mechanism, a cloak of armour. As Beyoncé sings on her 2008 album ‘I Am…Sasha Fierce’, "A diva is a female version of a hustler".
She keeps moving, keeps transforming.
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It cannot be overstated enough, too, just how much diva-dom’s thirst for reinvention ushered in a new sex appeal over time. It’s Madonna exploring female sexuality in a white wedding dress. It’s Lizzo singing “I just took a DNA test, turns out I'm 100% that b***h.” It’s Tina Turner… I mean, where do you even begin? Somewhere near the beginning, I suspect, revisiting the late star’s sensual renderings of male artist B.B King’s ‘Rock Me Baby’ to Otis Redding’s ‘I’ve Been Loving You Too Long’; or her headline-making micro-minis (“I wanted to move,” Turner told NBC. “So, my skirts got shorter and less constricting because freedom was important to me, onstage and in life.”) Doubtlessly there’s something euphoric about her comeback era, in her mid-40s (after her divorce in 1978 she walked away with little money but held onto the rights to her stage name). The sexy and moody music video for ‘What’s Love Got To Do With It’ was a significant moment… leather-clad, lips stained a deep red, mullet sky high, looking directly into the camera. It was a rebirth, in every sense. A new alter-ego.
This is not to deny the diva’s distasteful connotations over the years. Somewhere along the way, the word has been co-opted as a badge of dishonour, a way to effectively label someone as difficult, demanding, too much. Depressingly, nothing makes (some) people more uncomfortable than a woman who comfortably owns her own power. When, really, we should strive to embrace it. In its most basic terms, it’s about championing yourself, championing others, speaking up, not dressing down because you think that’s what you should be doing, asking for what you want because if not you then who? Knowing, essentially, that if something doesn’t sit quite right, be more Aretha, say to yourself: one more time. And begin again.