Aretha - Respect

Ooohhhh Sock It To Me

I’m not including Aretha’s last name in the title of this piece. There is only one Aretha.

If you could quantify the exact moment when pleading transformed into demanding in American culture, you’d probably land somewhere around 2:28 on February 14, 1967. That’s not when the session started at Atlantic Studios in New York. That’s roughly when Aretha uncorked that voice for the first time on Respect.

I realize comparing Aretha Franklin to Mike Tyson seems reductive, maybe even cheap. But here’s why it works: Prime Tyson was more than a fighter. He was the physical manifestation of inevitability. The bell rings, and you know — everyone knows, including the guy across the ring who’s about to get his face reorganized — that something unstoppable has been set in motion. That’s the feeling you get in those first nine and a half seconds of Respect before Aretha starts singing. The Muscle Shoals rhythm section (flown up from Alabama specifically for this session) and that A1-prime boiling guitar create this mounting pressure, this sense that the universe is about to crack open. And then it does.

Which raises an interesting question: What does it mean when a song becomes more famous than the thing it’s covering?

The Otis Redding Problem

In 1965, Otis Redding recorded Respect. It hit number five on the R&B charts, which is nothing to dismiss. It’s a damn good song. Urgent, powerful, Redding’s voice doing that thing where it sounds like he’s simultaneously commanding you and begging you. The narrative is straightforward: I’m going to give you anything you want, you can even cheat on me when I’m away, just give me a little respect when I come home. It’s masculinity at its most vulnerable, which is also masculinity at its most controlling. He’s saying “I’ll let you do whatever you want” while also saying “but here’s the one thing I require.” That’s not really freedom, it’s negotiation.

Here’s where it gets interesting: Two years later, Aretha takes that same song and doesn’t just gender-flip it. She completely rewrites the power dynamic. She transforms a plea into a demand, which sounds simple until you realize how radical that actually is.

Think about it this way: If someone is pleading with you, they’re acknowledging your power to deny them. They’re operating from a position of deficit. But when you demand something, you’re not asking for permission — you’re asserting a pre-existing right. Aretha’s version of Respect doesn’t ask for a GOTDAMN THING. It announces what already exists and what will continue to exist regardless of whether you acknowledge it.

The song went to number one on both the R&B and pop charts. Redding’s version is now primarily remembered as “the original version of Aretha’s song,” which has to be one of the most elegant forms of cultural erasure that exists. It’s not that Redding’s version is bad; it’s that Aretha’s version made it irrelevant.

The Valentine’s Day Thesis

There’s a certain poetry to the fact that Respect was recorded on Valentine’s Day, 1967. Valentine’s Day is supposed to be about romance, about love as this soft, gentle thing. But what Aretha created that day wasn’t soft at all. It was, and here’s where things get complicated, sexy as hell, but sexy in a way that had nothing to do with submission or vulnerability. It was sexy because it was powerful. It was an erotic exhortation for human dignity, which might be the most sophisticated thing popular music has ever accomplished.

Consider what was happening in America in February 1967: The Civil Rights Movement was in full swing. The country was tearing itself apart over Vietnam. Gender roles were being questioned but not yet dismantled. And into this moment drops a 25-year-old Black woman from Memphis (by way of Detroit) who literally spells out what she wants: R-E-S-P-E-C-T.

The spelling itself is genius. It’s didactic without being condescending. It’s the musical equivalent of saying “Let me make this simple for you.” She’s not asking you to understand respect as an abstract concept - she’s breaking it down into its component letters, making it impossible to misunderstand. And then she adds “T-C-B” — Taking Care of Business - which transforms respect from an emotional state into an action item.

The “Sock It to Me” Paradox

“Sock it to me” is one of those phrases that meant something very specific in 1967 and has since been diluted into kitsch. But when Aretha’s sisters, Carolyn and Erma, chant it in Respect, they’re doing something that shouldn’t work but does. They’re making a demand sound like an invitation. They’re being aggressive and welcoming simultaneously, which is exactly the tightrope Aretha herself walks throughout the entire song.

Here’s something most people don’t know (and this is my favorite detail about Respect): When Carolyn and Erma chant “Re, Re, Re” in the background, they’re not referencing the first syllable of Respect. “Re” was their childhood nickname for Aretha. They’re literally cheering on their sister in the middle of the take. They’re so in tune with what’s happening in that studio that they break into a spontaneous chant to amp her up. IN THE MIDDLE OF THE RECORDING. This is not something that happens. Musicians don’t typically turn a recording session into a pep rally. But they knew — in real time — that they were witnessing something that transcended normal music-making.

This is why Flavor Flav’s entire career is basically a footnote to this moment.

The Jerry Wexler Endorsement

Jerry Wexler, who produced the session, later said that Franklin’s Respect was “global in its influence with overtones of the Civil Rights Movement and gender equality.” Which is producer-speak for “we accidentally changed the world.” Because here’s the thing about cultural watersheds: Nobody sets out to create them. You don’t walk into a recording studio thinking “today we’re going to restructure American masculinity and redefine what soul music can be.” You just make the thing, and then the thing does what it does.

The song didn’t open doors; it blew them off the hinges. It became bigger than Aretha herself, which is saying something because Aretha was already enormous. Rolling Stone ranked it as the fifth greatest song of the Rock and Roll era. The Library of Congress added it to the National Recording Registry. The Recording Industry of America and the National Endowment of the Arts included it in their songs of the century. Aretha became the first woman inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. She earned two Grammys for it.

Although she would eventually chart 117 songs in the top 40, nothing had the impact Respect did. Which raises the question: Can you have a career-defining song that’s also a culture-defining song? Because that’s what Respect is. It’s simultaneously personal and universal, specific and abstract, historical and timeless.

The Problem of Ownership

Here’s where I admit something uncomfortable: I got my ass kicked in seventh grade for singing Natural Woman. Three hillbillies in Southern Michigan took exception to a young man singing that particular Aretha song. They called me faggot several times while they stomped my head and back. Which is a very specific kind of violence — violence that polices not just behavior but the boundaries of identity itself.

The irony, of course, is that those hillbillies understood something fundamental about Aretha’s music that I was only beginning to grasp: It’s dangerous. It threatens established orders. When Aretha sings about being a natural woman or about demanding respect, she’s not just making music — she’s redistributing power. And people who benefit from existing power structures tend to react poorly when that power gets redistributed.

Years later, I played Think for a friend, Erika, who had just broken up with a boyfriend who didn’t know what he had. She later told me she thought I was insane at the time, which was accurate. I was insane. But I wasn’t wrong. She confessed that it opened a door for her — this woman, the eldest child of a single mother with three daughters, had never heard Aretha before, which is frankly unacceptable.

And here’s the thing: We’ve all been moved by Aretha’s Respect. If you weren’t, I don’t want to know you. Because nothing, and I mean nothing, is more powerful than an idea whose time has come.

The Voice That God Let Her Borrow

I suspect the Lord doesn’t need a voice to communicate, which means God probably let Aretha use that voice for her 76 years. It’s as if the music itself were descending from some all-powerful, worldwide transmitter. People responded as if the radio itself wasn’t strong enough to handle a sound that powerful, which might actually be true. Radios in 1967 weren’t designed for whatever was coming out of Aretha Franklin’s chest.

She once said, “As women, we do have it. We have the power. We are very resourceful. Women absolutely deserve respect. People are not as nice as they used to be. There used to be a time when we conversed. You don’t get a lot of real responses now. There used to be more polite and well-mannered people, generally. It’s minimal now. I think it would be a far greater world if people were kinder and more respectful to each other.”

There’s that word again. Respect.

The interesting thing about respect is that it’s both the simplest and most complicated thing you can demand from another human being. It costs nothing to give but means everything to receive. Aretha understood this in a way that transcended the song itself. She wrote into her performance contracts that she would never perform before a segregated audience, which is respect as action, respect as policy, respect as non-negotiable reality.

The Final Accounting

We should thank King Curtis for that ferocious key-changing sax solo. We should thank the Muscle Shoals rhythm section for laying down that foundation. We should thank Carolyn and Erma Franklin for that call-and-response that doubled as sisterly encouragement. We should thank Jerry Wexler for capturing it all.

But mostly we should think about what it means that a song recorded on Valentine’s Day 1967 became so embedded in American consciousness that we can’t imagine the culture without it. Respect is part of the national conversation, part of the American lexicon. It changed lives, restructured masculinity, redefined soul music, and proved that the most revolutionary act you can commit is to demand what you already deserve.

Whatever you want, whatever you say, Ms. Franklin.