Soul and rock music went heavy at about the same time.

While heavy metal at the beginning of the 1970s was an expression of a white youth that brought together the cultural boredom and deprivation of the working class, the psychedelic soul of this time was a means of protest.

Gil Scott-Heron, James Brown and Curtis Mayfield described conditions in neglected metropolitan ghettos and the destructive use of heroin in inner cities impoverished by White Flight.

With Funkadelic, George Clinton had created a razor-sharp variety of funk that was more rousing than models from New Orleans in the 1960s.

A challenge for eyes and ears

Philip Krohn

Editor in business, responsible for "People and Business".

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Betty Davis' three albums from 1973 onwards were no break for trained ears, but they are still a challenge from today's perspective.

Never before had an African-American singer screamed into the microphone, pleaded and exposed her own body so much.

These three masterpieces were an expression of a new black self-confidence.

A “superamazone” who decided about herself and no longer wanted to be squeezed into a scheme like Diana Ross or even Aretha Franklin did a few years earlier.

Record covers and promo photos with an Afro hairstyle, bare legs in leather boots and the body in a very low-cut bathing suit on a casual motorcycle aimed at a hitherto unknown image for an Afro-American woman: the self-determined black sex symbol.

Learning from Miles

Davis gave her self-confidence to her short-term husband Miles, the jazz legend whose name Betty Mabry bore until her death.

In return, she also gave him something in the short and intense relationship that remained until the end of his life: an interest in the music that was popular at the time at the intersection of rock and soul by artists such as Sly Stone and Jimi Hendrix.

These influences are said to be what fueled his pioneering work of the era, "In A Silent Way" and "Bitches Brew."

Bands like Mother's Finest or Skunk Anansie would be hard to imagine without Betty Davis, and Prince and Madonna also learned a lot from her.

Her legacy are the three radio fireworks from 1973 to 1975. After that, the market didn't know what to do with her anymore.