All it took was this song to make me fall head over heels for La Lupe’s voice, and the way she used it, her manic pacing, always ahead of the band, her growling and mewling. She reminds me of another great favorite of mine, Betty Davis, who I was so obsessed with for a while that I was trying to arrange to meet and interview her via her label (who had the good sense to reissue some of her work). Fierce talented women who, notably, also wrote many of their own songs.
There are no vids to be found of the later performing live (I was happily surprised to see that recent Wiki entry), and just a few for La Lupe, who has this crazy sexy frantic energy going on on stage — its so worth watching. And yes, she’s a little nuts, the voudou priestess to Celia Cruz’s perfect diva, as awkward as she is sexy. J’dore her, AND witness how hard she works to deliver. Her life story is pretty amazing too as the PBS doc conveys. She was born Lupe Yoli, and grew up in a tiny town outside Santiago de Cuba, so small it wasn’t on the map. Still, she became so wildly popular that Castro (supposedly) told her to leave Cuba because she was getting too much attention!
Betty Davis, briefly married to Miles Davis, lovers with Jimi Hendrix, also has an interesting story, the link to her label above gives the highlights. She never got the same fame or attention, though, her raunchy blues style being too raw for most labels to market, and too badass for 1970s radio. This odd little medley of some of her work isn’t a bad introduction, I guess, but here’s one of my favs that I think gives a better sense of her best work. (In my getting links for this post I just saw that somehow I missed this tribute at the Schomburg in 2011:(). She more or less went into hiding outside Pittsburgh in the mid-1980s.
Both of these artists excite and inspire me, for their octane energy and sexual abandon, of course, but also for being women who dared to take up more space than society allotted them, especially in the entertainment industry. Its one of my criteria for “my favorite broads” list, btw, which I need to update (someone who transgresses in this way). Anyway, listen to La Lupe and Betty Davis, and if you aren’t immediately smitten/inspired, you don’t have a pulse, haha! Naturally, it helps that they were both sultry vixens!
