The Commandments Of Love. Little Richard. 1967. Okeh.

Flamboyance is a stylized form of provocation that presents itself as one of beauty’s many proxies, intimidating and surreal. Affording her customary, invaluable perspective, Flannery O’Connor was quoted, saying, “Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one…it is when the freak can be sensed as a figure for our essential displacement that he attains some depth in literature.” The same, obviously, can be said about the freak’s place in rock and roll. Our most flamboyant performers—from Jerry Lee Lewis and Janis Joplin to Ozzy Osbourne and Prince—often went to veritably comic lengths to reflect the grotesquerie of our passions, parodying our struggles with expression, and, most importantly, eradicating our fantasies of self-importance, replaced on the rock and roll stage with unadorned humanity, the essence of which remains with us despite the prevalence of  less talented acts who rush in to fill the gaps left by their lack of original vision with pre-received ideas of glamour and pyrotechnics. By 1967, heterogeneity across the broad spectrum of popular music was still commercially viable, while within specific market demographics, musical formulas and conventional trends had calcified into cultural orthodoxy. This was the industry that saw the release of a new Little Richard record, The Explosive Little Richard. According to Richard Penniman’s biographer, the former foot doctor Charles White, Penniman found much about the record’s material dissatisfactory, including the label, the producers—Larry Williams and Johnny Guitar Watson—and the songs themselves. With an intro nicked from the Flamingos, The Commandments Of Love isn’t much of a song in itself, but Penniman’s instinctive understanding of how low-tempo vocal tensions functions within the structure of a basic songwriting template is so thoroughly pleasurable that of course you can forgive him his diva’s temperament. Because rock and roll is often a hustler’s business, it is an embarrassment having to  witness our musical heroes’ unguarded, sometimes nakedly desperate, hustle, to see them reduced from practitioners of a wondrous art to plain-spoken negotiators transacting in bureaucratic terminology for the privilege of actualizing our fantasies. No popular artist can fully transcend the duplicitous messiness of Western capitalist self-interest but when Little Richard redefined the American popular stage as a site where consumer fantasies and sexual release combined, he popularized the subversion of conformist ideals and prevailing moral hygienic disciplines. Creating a rock and roll listenership, he returned to the public a coherent narrative for channeling its mad freak tendencies, the shrieking mass hysteria of godless worship. The Commandments Of Love is a late-century plea for love that memorializes, with pop sublimity, this unholy exchange.

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