R-E-S-P-E-C-T

When Aretha Franklin released Respect in 1967, she wasn’t just covering Otis Redding. She was rewriting him. Redding’s original, recorded two years earlier, was a man’s demand, a plea for acknowledgment, for the respect he was “owed.” Franklin’s version turned that demand on its head. Same melody, same bones of the song, but suddenly it was the woman asking for respect.

Just like playing a swap hands card in UNO, she transformed a masculine assertion into an anthem of female agency. Aretha didn’t just sing a cover of a song; she re-situated it within the cultural context. She historicised Redding’s original version to expose its ideology of male entitlement. With a few lyrical shifts (“Take care, TCB,” meaning taking care of business), Franklin transformed a masculine assertion into an anthem of female agency. And that’s where things get interesting, because what’s really happening here isn’t just a change in words; it’s a change in meaning.

Meaning, as Fredric Jameson reminds us, doesn’t exist in isolation. It is always historical. It moves and mutates. Each cultural artifact, every song, film, novel or even meme, carries the residue of the world that produced it. So when Aretha Franklin sang Respect, she wasn’t just singing a song; she was intervening in a world where women’s voices were expected to harmonise, not to lead.

Jameson, in his theory of the dialectic, urges us to see the status quo not as a static set of meanings but as a living conversation. It is a constant negotiation between past and present, structure and agency, ideology and resistance. A work of art, in this view, is never final. It is always a site of struggle between dominant and emergent meanings, between what something was meant to say and what it comes to mean when history shifts beneath it.

That’s what Franklin did. It’s unlikely she was reading Hegel and consciously enacting a dialectical intervention in Redding’s version, but that was the result when she went against the status quo. She took Redding’s Respect, a product of one historical consciousness that was male and Southern in mid-1960s America, and rearticulated it within another: the rising consciousness of women’s liberation and Black pride. The same cultural object, two entirely different ideological worlds.

It’s easy to forget how radical this gesture was. This was 1967, long before “women’s empowerment” became a marketing slogan or before books told women to Lean In. Franklin wasn’t just singing for equality; she was performing a rupture in meaning itself. The song became a battleground for dignity, not only for women, but for anyone whose worth had been taken for granted.

The status quo is never fixed. It changes as we give meaning to it. What was acceptable a hundred years ago is no longer acceptable today. Part of being an active citizen in the world is participating in that ongoing transformation of meaning. The “status quo” is not a natural foundation on which society rests, but something that forms retroactively as people reinterpret and contest it.

This is what Fredric Jameson meant when he said we must always historicise. Every work of art, every ideology and even every self-taking-trend emerges from a particular set of material and historical conditions. Yet capitalism depends on our forgetting this. It thrives by detaching us from history, by convincing us that the present is permanent and that what is, has always been. It turns culture into spectacle and memory into style.

To historicise, then, is an act of resistance. It is a way of pulling the present back into view, of reminding ourselves that what feels natural was once made. When Aretha Franklin reinterpreted Respect, she was doing precisely that. She reconnected a cultural form to its history. She took a song that seemed to express an eternal human plea and revealed it as a product of a particular world, a man’s world, and then sang it into another.

And that, in Jameson’s terms, is the dialectic in motion: contradiction as the engine of meaning. Redding’s Respect and Franklin’s Respect do not cancel each other out; they define each other. They exist in tension, revealing through their conflict a broader social truth. The demand for “respect” shifts from an individual desire to a collective claim.

Franklin’s version historicised Redding’s. It made visible the hidden ideology beneath the original, the assumption of male entitlement, and inverted it. In doing so, she didn’t just sing about dignity; she produced it, musically and politically.

Jameson often says that ideology is not what hides reality but what makes it visible in a certain way. And when art performs a dialectical turn, as Franklin’s Respect did, it exposes those lenses for what they are. Suddenly, we see that the meanings we thought were natural were merely contingent, waiting for someone to flip them.

Which is why Jameson reminds us to always historicise: to see the current moment we are in not as something inevitable or immovable, but as the result of the history that created it. And if something can be created, it can be re-created within a new cultural framework.