By Vincent L. Hall
“My problem is I WANNA be a Wife! I wanna go to sleep and wake up to the SAME person for the rest of our lives. I wanna be dedicated! I wanna owe my Man an explanation, I want my lover to be my diary, my turn up partner, my worship partner & my real bestfriend ! I wanna take family trips and baecations. I wanna have unprotected sex because we both KNOW there’s NO ONE ELSE. I want a concrete foundation. I wanna be able to trust someone else” Slimrockx on Threads
The Threads social media platform is new to me and I need help navigating it as well as I did with Twitter. But I would rather be deaf, dumb, and blind than support X or anything else Elon Musk creates, owns, or governs.
He is the kind of “Keebler” that wears on my nerves. Last week, Mark Cuban publicly disagreed with Musk on DEI and raised his stock with me.
Anyway.
I ran across this sister on Threads, who left a mesmerizing message. It was so sincere, transparent, and romantic that I wanted others to shoot holes in it. No one could.
All she said was what she wanted. I didn’t go to Survey Monkey and make it official, but every one of the single Black females I ran it by was as impressed as I was. It was love music to a romantic like me. It was like the music I grew up listening to.
The last lead role Eddie Kendrick had with the Temptations was also the swan song for Paul Williams. “Just My Imagination” was a major hit. In 1971, it had the brothers crooning, and the girls swooning.
It was a love narrative put to music about a man madly in love with a girl he had seen but never met. He was imagining and became infatuated with being in love with her.
“Each day through my window, I watch her as she passes by. I say to myself, “You’re such a lucky guy.” To have a girl like her is truly a dream come true. Out of all the fellows in the world, she belongs to me. But it was just my imagination, once again.
Running away with me.
“Soon we’ll be married and raise a family—a cozy little home out in the country with two children, maybe three. I tell you, I can visualize it all. This couldn’t be a dream; far too real it all seems.”
Kendrick, like Slimrockx, created a vision of bliss and imagined what perfect love could be. Two years later, Aretha Franklin sang about what she would do to keep her perfect love. Here is what she penned in the 1973 hit, “Until You Come Back to Me.”
“Though you don’t call anymore, I sit and wait in vain. I guess I’ll rap on your door, tap on your window pane (tap on your window pane. I want to tell you, baby, the changes I’ve been going through. Missing you, listen you. ‘Til you come back to me, that’s what I’m gonna do.”
My daughter, the middle one, the Frankenstein, who believes herself smarter than her inventor, challenged me about my interpretation of this song.
“Daddy, you might love that song, “but that song is F’in eerie; she is talking about stalking! You can’t follow people around and come to their houses; those days are over.”
Alison was right. What we call love in our generation is officially criminal behavior these days.
I don’t advocate stalking or anything of the sort. The idea and beauty of loving relationships aroused my affection.
One of the reasons we have a hard time showing love is that most of our music is so notice-ably bereft of love, sacrifice, and vulnerability.
Love is a chance proposition. There is no guarantee that it will last forever. There is no surety that it will not, at some point, become lopsided. But Slim-rockx took me somewhere else with that opening and her trailing post.
“I wanna prepare a meal, sit at the table, hold hands, and figure out whose turn it is to say grace. I want someone to care about “us” as much as I’m willing to! I want FOR BETTER OR WORSE, I wanna be loved correctly, unconditionally, for an eternity! ” And it was just my imagination, once again…..
Vincent L. Hall is an author, activist, award-winning columnist and a lifelong Drapetomaniac!
