Why Labelle Matters

Why Labelle Matters is a bracing treasure trove of pop revelation...If your main impression of Patti Labelle comes from the overproduced studio versions of her later solo hits, and your knowledge of Labelle, the group, is limited to 'Lady Marmalade', this punchy little volume will open your ears to a progressive past that still sounds like the future.

— Passport Magazine

[Why Labelle Matters] not only chronicles the group’s history but demonstrates, as the title suggests, why their music was and is so important.

— Please Kill Me

In this vivid prose marvel of a praise song to her lifesaving, teen-fangirl crushes, Adele Bertei deploys rock solid scholarship, granular musical analysis, and piquant, personal revelation to transcendent and inspirational effect for an array of readers—those equally long besmitten from a century past and the postmillennial virgin-eared alike.

Sarah Dash, Nona Hendryx, and Empress Patti LaBelle (in tandem with far-sighted guiding light manager Vicki Wickham) emerged in the '70s as a trio of soulful warrior-queens whose legendary accomplishments now hold several pop pantheons on lock: that of the Great Black Music canon’s most spectacularly adorned space-funk fashion avatars, most hypersensual feminist icons, and most gender-radicalizing cohort of rock & roll hall of fame rebels. In Bertei, this audacious trifecta of harmonizing trailblazers has been gifted a trenchant, mythopoetic scribe worthy of writing fiercely about Labelle’s reverberant spiritual depth, omniversal cultural significance, and torch-bearing Black Futurist visionary status. All with a whole lotta love, wit, and witness-bearing illumination.

— Greg Tate, author of Flyboy in the Buttermilk

Labelle changed how we look at women singers. No longer were they 'girl groups.' They and we were grown up. Voulez-vous coucher avec moi? You bet. This is the book that tells us how and why.

— Nikki Giovanni, author of Make Me Rain: Poems & Prose

Finally, here's a book that pays tribute to the true mothers of Afrofuturism.

— Lenny Kravitz, author of Let Love Rule

A marvelous account of the whole magnificent Labelle phenomenon.   

— Angela McRobbie, author of Feminism and the Politics of "Resilience": Gender, Media and the End of Welfare

A smart, shrewd, joyful read, as piercing as any top C shriek from the woman who gave Labelle their name.

— Barney Hoskyns, author of Glam! Bowie, Bolan, and the Glitter Rock Revolution