Barry White knew how to save the world: “Simple common-sense advice”
One night, the soul sensation Barry White went to bed a regular boy with a regular voice. The next morning, the slumbering 14-year-old felt his chest vibrating. He shrugged it off. But when he said good morning to his mother, she almost dropped the eggs.
“It was incredible,” White said of the sudden transformation of his timbre, “for the next three weeks, all of my friends just wanted me to talk.” Science has mulled over the origin of this lavish voice, but even the sceptics have concluded that it must simply have something to do with the world needing love.
At least that’s what White has explained regarding his beginnings in Hollywood that soon followed this odd moment, “I didn’t mind working in the clubs, but I resented it being a club where pimps hang out. Because the music that I create is of a higher intellect than that. It not only encompasses pimps, but whores, ballplayers, executives… everybody.”
But his universal outlook didn’t make it all that much easier to make it. “All I had was the will and the love for music,” he told Joe Smith in 1987. “I couldn’t read music or write it. No connections, no car, no money, no bankroll, no clothes, no nothing.” But soon enough, he would land a smash global hit with ‘You’re My First, My Last, My Everything’, and he has spent over 100 weeks in the top 40 in the UK and the US.
All the while, he has stayed true to his one simple plan to make the world a better place: encourage love making. Yep, White things a soul-induced shagathon could perhaps save the day. He would know, he began the late singer began undertaking couples’ counselling work when he was only 14, shortly after his voice broke. “By the end of that first year, I was seeing 22 couples,” White recalls. “I’d give them simple, common-sense advice.” The same applied to his worldview and political advice.
“Mine is love, because I know when a man’s making love the last thing he thinks about is war,” he explained. The last thing he thinks about is how he can blow up a nation. Fleas fuck. Flies, snakes, everybody’s into love-making,” and when was the last time you saw a fly undertake a hostile, inequitable takeover of anything other than a turd? When was the last time a snake set in motion the inevitable privatisation of health services?
They don’t. They’re all too busy bonking, and in the process, they bonk their way to a deeper understanding of thy neighbours. White wanted to sing us towards that disposition. As the Flight of the Conchords once put it, “Redheads not warheads, blondes not bombs, I’m talking about brunettes not fighter jets.” White took that very seriously.
This wasn’t parody for the late White, but rather simple common sense in a battle to finally obtain elusive world peace. “It’s the most powerful element that men and women possess. Most of us don’t know what… how to use it, but we all possess it.”
He continued, “I think that there’s a time when people give their words to each other, it has to mean something. I’m a street cat. See, I’ve belonged in gangs, and when you had a partner, you went down with your partner, whether you won the fight or lost it. You went down together.” And he always hoped he’d see the day the world gave its word to love.
