Best Of Danyel Smith's "Shine Bright: A Very Personal History of Black Women in Pop"

Here is a selection of memorable quotes from Danyel Smith's Shine Bright: A Very Personal History of Black Women in Pop

Shine Bright by Danyel Smith is excellent and absolutely one of the best books I read this year. I read it the first time via borrowing from the library and it's so smart and heartbreaking I had to have it for my own collection so I bought it. This book is absolutely why Gladys Knight & the Pips's Midnight Train to Georgia was on my July playlist and Billie Holiday's God Bless the Child is on my November playlist.

I am the daughter of a Black Elvis fan […] The grisly conundrum of being a pop fan is that I want for those who concurrently partied with us and benefited from white supremacy to at least not have gone to the Klan meetings.

p.50-51

Ella [Fitzgerald] as a human, with a life that didn’t in every moment exist to be in the service of people's moods and fan worship, was, in her time, rarely explored.

p.79

The 1973 song, a huge R&B hit and the group's only number-one pop single, is the stunning and succinct story of a woman torn. One of the most forlorn and perfect songs ever recorded, “Midnight Train to Georgia” is my favourite song of all time.

Why? Because though Knight is forthright - I got to go/I got to go - about leaving, she also sounds like she’s convincing herself. Even when I was a kid, Gladys Knight sounded to me like she was singing one thing and wanting another. In my mind, she gets him to the station, but when the train pulls off, Knight is still on the platform.

p.71

I felt that men writers were jealous of the girls’ wild and sweaty emotional response [to the Beatles] - group response - to other men. They were angry at the girls’ assertiveness […] To scream at a show, to get drunk on bass vibrations, to sing memorized lyrics loudly in unison with people you don’t even know? It's the burning nest, most crackling current, and to stay in it for a full show? You’re linked with the world again, golden and new.

p.147

Women with long days and specific cocktails. The kind of brokenhearted women who throw the best parties.

p.159

Cheesy, - inauthentic, tacky, not cool or fresh - remains the lowest hovering descriptor for the 1980s […] this was the era that many music critics - most of them white - dismissed large swaths of popular Black music as bland, not genuine. Its interesting, because it was during the 1980s that Black pop made massive steps toward dominating the cultural landscape 

p.169

[…] and hate masquerading as love rampant.

p.196-197

Interviews are like first dates in that authenticity tends to win. It creates a tension: each person’s desire for the next intimate step in the face of the other’s suspicion. A race to see who, to quote Aretha Franklin, is zoomin’ who.

p.204

I couldn’t look at my future without seeing the stained-glass plans you make when you’re twenty-three. They change the colour of everything, forever. And by the time I was sitting up in [Whitney] Houston’s rumpus room, I was deep into mistaking hard work and depression for new wisdom. In any case, it felt like maturity, and I was what I had.

p.207

I had no idea what a generational curse was back then, but one of our family’s curses is the impulse to passively discourage those earnestly trying new things. Maybe it began as a protective measure, but it’s painful and it’s successful. In addition, beauty is untrustworthy. And - maybe this is in every culture - strength and independence are a threat. Billie Holiday co-wrote it and sang it and it gave me spine before I ever even heard Diana Ross sing it in Lady Songs the Blues: Mama may have/ And your papa may have/ But God bless the child that’s got his own.  Holiday has said that it was an argument with her mother over money that led to the song. We all of us have been doing this wearying stuff for a long time.

p.208

“[…] and about how pop hip hop itself was and remains powered by a spirit of reparation. Low-key payback for slavery and high-key payback for the successful theft of rock and R&B from musical generations immediately preceding the pioneers of rap.”

p.209

She said things about women who have light around them. Lena Horne said that certain men are attracted to that light. And that what those men really need to do, what's really in them, is the desire to put out that light. Her words are stenciled on my heart. 

"If we know ourselves, we are always home, anywhere." That's what Horne's angelic Glinda the Good Witch says sings to Diana Ross's Dorothy in the film version of The Wiz. But what if we don't know ourselves? Or can't? What if our time in history doesn't allow it?

p.218