Take Me to Heaven

The great disco-era singer Sylvester has faded into the past, hopefully buried with his own “band of gold,” to quote the famous Freyda Payne song. Sylvester prefigured RuPaul, the transvestite singer who was popular in the early ‘90s, but he wasn’t ostentatious in the way of Rick James, who was the Caravaggio of disco performers, singing about a violent world and eventually ending up in prison himself. Sylvester’s music was filled with the urgency and cadences of the gospel world out of which he emerged. The lyrics reflected the sexual promiscuity of the permissive San Francisco club scene where he earned his stripes, but like much of soul music, with its big band sound, Sylvester’s crescendos simply turned the love of God to man. R&B, soul and disco of the kind that Sylvester sang are fundamentally romantic idioms, and this differentiates them from the first rap artists like the Sugar Hill Gang, who started to appear in the later years of Sylvester’s career, and who presented a gritty urban realism. “Do You Want to Funk?” was one of Sylvester’s most famous songs, and the answer, in an age when almost anything went, was usually yes. But one of the greatest numbers in his repertoire is “Take Me to Heaven,” a song that inhabits the crossroads between aspiration and sexuality. Heaven is hopefully where Sylvester landed after he died from AIDS in 1982. 

Ordinary Pain

You are speeding along by yourself on an Interstate when a really great song like Stevie Wonder’s Love’s In Need of Love Today comes on, and you turn the sound up as loud as it will go.

    

What is a nice guy or girl? Cordelia wasn’t nice because she didn’t say what Lear wanted to hear. Goneril is definitely not nice. Oracles are not nice. Soothsayers like Calchas are not nice. The Sphinx is not nice in Oedipus because it only proposes riddles. You have to go through hoops to answer what walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three legs in the evening?

  

Lionel Trilling dealt with this subject in a series of essays called “Sincerity and Authenticity.” But what do these terms really connote? Are the Cordelias of the world better than the Gonerils, or are they merely seeking another kind of gain, i.e., martyrdom and moral superiority? One way to get ahead in the world might be to ask for things, another might be to propose self-deprivation. Though Augustine repudiated earthly desires, he made it (by the worldly standard of fame). Gandhi had a good run of success, as did philosophical kindred like Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela, who used passive resistance to achieve their aims. Is the man of peace better than the warrior? Is Mother Theresa saintly in comparison to Clausewitz, who argued that war was merely “the continuation of politics”? We are all imperialists, both on ontogenic and phylogenic levels. We all want to control and dominate, whether it’s a person, a class, or a society of people. Was Henry Kissinger’s realpolitik fundamentally more evil than the politics of conciliation that might be advocated by organizations of doves?

   

So is it all a matter of presentation, The Presentation of the Self in Every Day Life that Erving  Goffman described in his famed sociological tome. Is it all public relations? Is personality a series of conscious and unconscious decisions with a pubic face, but no moral scorecard?

   

Now you are speeding down the same highway and Freyda Payne’s disco classic Band of Gold comes on the oldies station.