The Original Diva Digs Deep

BY: Del Cowie

IF THERE’S ANYONE who has earned the spoiled-girl antics and tantrums of an insufferable diva, it’s Chaka Khan. With a show-stopping voice, eight Grammy Awards, and a career that spans more than three decades, she’s certainly paraded down the walk of fame.

One might think then that she’d give off a haughty sense of self-importance. But during a conversation with the original diva, you’re quickly disarmed by her self-effacing humility and genuine disbelief of how much respect she commands.

Flaunting her achievements just isn’t her thing. This quickly becomes clear when Khan discusses her latest album, Funk This, her first major studio release in a decade. Released in late September, the record became her highest debuting album ever on both Billboard’s Top 200 and R&B album charts in the US.

“The beautiful thing about it is that I never had expectations,” Khan says on the line from Los Angeles. “I did some postulations and they seem to have worked.” What Khan refers to involved writing down affirmations that Funk This would be “the best CD of my career.”

But making the album turned out to be more than just laying down vocals on a bunch of musical tracks. It represented a personal rebirth in her life and her career – one that began in the ‘70s for the Chicago-vocalist born Yvette Marie Stevens. As a teenager, given the name Chaka (meaning “woman of fire”) by a Yoruba priest, her musical endeavours soon attracted the attention of funk band Rufus.

Khan would go on to record hits with the band like Stevie Wonder’s “Tell Me Something Good” and “Ain’t Nobody.” She also broke out with a successful solo career, including pioneering tracks, like in 1984 with “I Feel For You,” one of the first songs to consciously mix the then comparatively nascent hip-hop movement with R&B.

While she continued to release music, during the next decade her mainstream profile waned, and in 1998 the album Come 2 My House, that she worked on with frequent collaborator Prince, represented her last major release until now.

While Khan remained busy as a singer on the road, she admits that during this time she “passive-aggressively talked to several labels” and remained absent from the recording studio. For her, this time span marked a break, where she was able to concentrate more on personal matters.

“During that time I decided I was just gonna upgrade the whole situation,” says Khan. “I moved, I changed my whole script and sort of isolated myself a bit.”

Khan struggled with substance abuse ever since she was a teenager. During this down time in her career, she was busy putting her personal life in order, eventually getting off the stuff, working on a candid autobiography and, best of all, becoming a grandmother.

Before she could return to recording in a studio environment, Khan felt it was absolutely necessary to come to terms with herself.

“Here’s the deal,” she says. “There’s like 30 girls in here at last count. There is a girl, a core girl, her name is Yvette. I was reuniting with Yvette. The girl that started the whole thing, on stage on her own, handling life, when doing big things at a very early age was still viable. I was like convening with her.

“Yvette is my core strength, and she has sat by in silence because I haven’t acknowledged her. For many years, I’ve watched her and she’s watched me do some good things, some bad things, things that I would never tell anybody; and some things I’ve forgotten. I’ve never given her a voice.”

On top of dealing with her demons, Khan’s son faced murder charges, stemming from a 2004 shooting incident. Her son was eventually acquitted of all charges.

“The hardest thing was suiting up, showing up, and being there, and making sure everything turned out in a good way,” says Khan. “That’s all, that’s all. I was fighting for my son and for the truth, and everything turned out right. Because good wins out. It really does.”

When she finally mustered up the nerve and the energy for a comeback, she needed someone who intuitively understood her creative process before she returned to the recording studio. Naturally, she tapped legendary music producer Arif Mardin, producer of her transcendent anthem “I’m Every Woman” and her debut solo album, to helm the project. Tragically, Mardin succumbed to cancer in the summer of 2006.

For a while, she was at a loss; she didn’t know who to turn to until Khan’s sister, also her manager, suggested she meet with dynamic duo Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis. Needless to say, it was a working relationship made in heaven.

“I’m telling you, they did everything but genuflect and bow down,” Khan says in disbelief. “It took us hours to get over the fact we were in the same building together. They wanted to work with me for nothing. These are the kind of guys that don’t mess with anybody unless your last CD sold a million. I was flipped out by that alone. And I didn’t think I was worthy of that.”

Their working relationship blossomed. In particular, Khan forged a special bond with Lewis. “Terry Lewis was very, very instrumental musically,” says Khan. “As I hadn’t gone into the studio solo in years, I guess he sensed that; he’s one of the most brilliant psychologists. Every night when I went in the studio, he’d ask me my name and I’d give him my name and then he’d say; ‘OK, now go in there and sing.’”

Khan calls the creative process “great therapy.” “I don’t want to work with anybody else right now. I don’t think I could.”

While Funk This features cover versions of Prince’s “Sign O’ The Times,” Joni Mitchell’s Ladies Man and Jimi Hendrix’s Castles Made Of Sand, these tracks, along with the naked vulnerability evident among the original compositions, represent something intensely personal for Khan.

“I really have given a piece of my heart. A piece of me is really living in this CD. It is alive. I’m hoping that, and the quality of music as well, is what people are responding to.”

Khan also hopes that the CD will resonate with youth, who may only be familiar with her as the sampled voice on Kanye West’s “Through the Wire.” Efforts like “Disrespectful,” the kinetic powerhouse duet with Mary J. Blige, whom she refers to as “my niece,” won’t harm those chances, but Khan is also looking to connect with youth in many more ways that transcend music.

Says Khan: “I wanted to make the emphasis of this CD to be my passion about children, about injustices, but mostly about the state of our kids and our young people. I wanted to empower them in a way.”

And what better way to send that message than to adopt a class of sixth graders in Watts, Los Angeles, where Khan intends to act as their mentor, helping them in education and in their efforts to secure grants so they can go to college.

And while being a role model is probably one of her proudest achievements, at 54, she’s not one to rest on her laurels of being an icon for contemporaries and aspiring singers alike. With style, stamina and stardom, Khan will be making her Broadway debut in The Color Purple early next year.

While she admits she doesn’t listen to many of today’s current crop of R&B artists, she does like Rahsaan Patterson and Ledisi. However, it’s evident that she feels the art of performing on stage is slowly being lost. “I came out of the performance era,” says Khan. “We didn’t have all this trickery and tomfoolery going on in the studio. When I was coming up, if you couldn’t sing and go on stage and do the damn thing, then you had to go work at the post office. That’s what a lot of people should be doing right now.”

Khan laughs. It’s probably the only time in our conversation that she even remotely sounds like a diva. But, hey, who is to say she hasn’t earned that right?