How did you figure she was "maligned" exactly? She was extremely well-respected and well-connected. She wrote the tracks for the Commodores that got them signed to Motown Records as well as wrote "Uptown for the Chambers Brothers. And this was in the 60's long before she ever met Miles. Barry Gordy even offered her a job as a songwriter for Motown. She put out her first album and had the Pointer Sisters singing backup and Sly and the Family Stone's rhythm section backing her. You don't get that type of backing band on your debut record without a lot of respect. I mean Muhammad Ali and Richard Pryor were fans and would turn up at her shows. Also I don't believe she ever saw herself as even part of the Rock and Roll world, she was straight up Funk.
Modern day search engines still aren't it seems, I tried looking her up yesterday and kept getting results for Bette Davis instead for her until I turned off all safe search features. And what I saw did not at all warrant filtering her out for sexual content IMO.
Betty predates Chaka and Bernadette (and Chaka admits to influence from Betty), and Mavis was considerably prudish compared to the stage antics of Betty.
Betty's gravity on Miles alone would be enough to guarantee her iconic status, but her overall body of work is significant for its overall influence.
..and don't forget Office Space. He has savant-like abilities to observe and reflect personalities and society. True genius, and much under-appreciated.
I, too, grew up in Texas (in the 'metroplex') and really love his portrayal of it all. His insights and satire aren't hateful or spiteful; but rather more playful. KOTH made me more proud and happy to be a Texan, in fact.
It's (at least mostly) a diminutive for Elizabeth (or Elisabeth more recently) but Elizabeth has declined a lot in the past few decades. I'd also (very anecdotally) observe that diminutives like Liz have probably become more popular than Betty.
Me too and I was confused why the news just made it here, thought this must be a great Rolling Stones article to be trending on HN 5-6 weeks after she passed. Then, oh, nope, that’s not Betty white…
You may be under a misimpression of what's on topic here. Nothing has changed. HN has always been for posts that gratify intellectual curiosity, on literally any topic. Betty Davis is interesting because of her music, her story, and her historical significance.
Of course, no post gratifies everyone's curiosity—the front page is an amalgam of a lot of people's different tastes. If this topic isn't to yours, there are plenty of others to look at. If you'd please do that instead and refrain from posting unsubstantive comments, we'd appreciate it.
Perhaps not. But my quote illustrates an exception to your statement that “HN has always been for posts that gratify intellectual curiosity, on literally any topic.”. There has to be some limitation on what is considered interesting, or else HN will simply always contain the top news headlines. I think that HN too often does not follow the quoted guideline, and instead appears to simply follow the rule that “people on HN are interested in this, therefore it belongs here”, and I think that this reasoning, unchecked, will lead HN to be a simple general news commentary site, and not a site limited to specific topics. If this happens, I fear that HN will attract people who will want to comment on those general news issues, and then it’ll be all over.
That guideline about TV news is there precisely because most such stories are not intellectually interesting. If HN were going to become a general news site, this would have happened already 10+ years ago. Things have been stable in this respect, at least, for a long long time, and a thread about Betty Davis represents zero threat to the quality of HN. On the contrary, it enhances it.
I realize different people would make borderline calls differently. I'm making that call on this one; if you disagree, fair enough. But on a level of the principle involved, there's no change here.
Yeah, OK. As long as you’re aware of the issue, then I have no problem with you drawing the line slightly differently. I was just worried that you weren’t aware of it, since in my opinion, HN has seemed to contain too much mainstream news, with every questioning immediately shot down with “it’s interesting!”, and then your comment seemed to imply that no restrictions whatsoever were to be applied. But if you’re aware that one actually has to make a judgement on it, then I have no real problem with it; good work overall.
while i do appreciate the stand made here for a black woman, note that a different call was made for kobe bryant's death for unexplained reasons. not meant as a personal attack, but there does seem to be some capriciousness in these decisions. perhaps all death notices should be unflaggable (and let them rise or fall on their merits), or they should all be out of scope for hn.
i personally find death notices (and especially the in-/out-moderation of them) to carry more cultural propaganda than genuine curiosity, so i'd be totally fine with the latter approach.
As it happens, no. I almost never look at usernames, as the design of HN discourages from doing so, by making user names hard to read. And even if I had, is moderatorial infallibility a dogma? Put another way, does any conversation improve by “do you know who I am?”? What is the purpose of your comment? To make me retract my comment because I didn’t know who I was disagreeing with?
She was too far ahead of her time. The Rock'n'Roll world was not ready for such an independent, sexual, and black woman in the 1970s