Beginning in the late 1970s, while making the transition from background singer to phenomenal solo act, Luther Vandross shaped the sound of commercialism as much as he shaped the sound of modern American music. He recorded lucrative jingles for Juicy Fruit, Miller beer and even Gino’s pizza. During the Gino’s session, he was asked to personify a sizzling hot pie coming from the oven, and he improvised by quickly dropping his tenor into the hadal zone of his body and retrieving it, like a free diver collecting pearls.
“I could see the control room just jumping up and clapping,” he says in one of the interviews laced throughout “Luther: Never Too Much,” a new documentary by Dawn Porter (in theaters).
It was a genius stroke. He developed a signature as recognizable as Whitney Houston’s record-length notes or Mariah Carey’s fluted crystalline range. Vandross’s musical intelligence predated what is obvious in the era of TikTok: A distinct sound is worth the price of gold.
Vandross left a full, rich archive, yet there’s still an emptiness at the heart of it that manages to come through in Porter’s engrossing work. She starts her chronology with Vandross’s second birth. In an interview clip early in the film, Oprah asks Vandross when he knew he could sing. He answers that he decided to sing after seeing Dionne Warwick perform in 1963 in Brooklyn. “I wanted to be able to affect people the way she affected me that day,” he explains. Notice how he didn’t specify a date. Notice how he knew the voice was always there. He just chose the way he wanted to use it.
In the film, a white interviewer asks Vandross, who grew up in the Alfred E. Smith Houses on the Lower East Side, if he was poor then. His response is earnest if not amused. “My impression of life growing up was great.” He knew something that she did not: Money is only one kind of wealth.
In her essay on Black aesthetics, “Characteristics of Negro Expression,” Zora Neale Hurston reveled in our desire to gild language, ideas, stories, gesture, clothing in resplendent layers of flamboyance. “There can never be enough of beauty, let alone too much,” she observed. Hurston wrote her oracular essay in 1934, nearly 20 years before Luther Vandross was born, but she named a tradition that he would uphold in his own time.
Before he would perform as part of the group Luther or go out on his own, Vandross sang backup for everyone: Carly Simon, Diana Ross, Donna Summer, Chaka Khan, Bette Midler, “Sesame Street.” Porter draws a new cosmology of a freer soul and R&B sound drifting down from Philadelphia in the late ’60s and ’70s. The music journalist Danyel Smith describes it in the documentary as an adult Motown, a scene that wasn’t worried about matching outfits and “being in bed by midnight.”
One afternoon, a friend of Vandross’s, the guitarist Carlos Alomar, was called to record some music for David Bowie, who was in town to work on what would become his 1975 album, “Young Americans.” Vandross tagged along, as his friends often did when others scored an enviable gig. During a lull, Vandross hummed his own arrangement of the chorus. Bowie was dazzled. Usually, in a film like this, an anointment from a white artist serves as a legitimization, a reference letter from a prestigious institution. Instead, Porter uses it to underline how Vandross transmogrified everything he touched.
Another great music documentary, “Summer of Soul” (2021), reminds us of the synchronicities between the explorations coming out of the Apollo Theater in Harlem and NASA’s Apollo 11 mission: Both changed the course of human history, albeit from different vantage points of Earth.
When Vandross was ready to release his own music as a solo artist, none of the record labels would touch him; he had to ask his friends, including Cissy Houston, to lend their time for free. He directs them to play a song he wrote. At first, they were taken aback by its unusual bass line. The demo session became “Never Too Much,” which the film understands as his most enduring masterpiece.
Though there’s a deep trove to pull from, Porter keeps the focus on Vandross’s live performances. His honesty and comfort onstage, along with his theatrics and exuberance, made him a legend.
Collective cultural processing has become its own genre of entertainment. Much of the work of contemporary documentaries is to reveal past pop-cultural metanarratives as apocryphal. They push us as viewers to reckon with a past that was shaped by a coterie of media organizations and anchors who were often serving their own best interests in capitalizing on the most salacious and scandalous stories. Perhaps, also, these documentaries help us practice our current media literacy.
Here, Porter makes the case that fat phobia terrorized Vandross and minimized his accomplishments. Music had its own Jim Crow, and Black artists were segregated on stages, in record stores, by genre. Vandross refused to be diminished. He saw his eight Grammys and 40 million albums sold as momentum for the civil rights movement. But it was his public weight fluctuations that interviewers pressed him on. The media didn’t hide their fascination and repulsion at his appetite. People debated their preferences for “big Luther” or “little Luther” on television and in my high school.
For a while, he retaliated with sly pleasure. After Eddie Murphy took gibes at his size and eating habits during his 1987 stand-up special “Raw,” Vandross wheeled out a prop basket of Kentucky Fried Chicken at a show. If Porter wanted to make a sequel to “The Substance,” she has plenty of material. The film understands the way food is a demon that can live inside of you, too. Vandross told friends that food was a harmless vice, but years of disordered eating and weight fluctuations took their toll; he had diabetes and, eventually, suffered a stroke. And those were only the physical manifestations.
The media’s relentless obsession with his weight pushed Vandross to withdraw from public view. Porter frames his reclusiveness as protection, which only made the rabid probing worse. His sexuality was scrutinized almost as much as his body; once, after a dramatic weight loss, there was even a rumor that he had contracted H.I.V. Another time, he watched a pastor on television say a prayer after a rumor circulated that he had died. Vandross, rightfully so, refused to entertain the violations of privacy. He owed the public nothing but “my best effort,” he said. “That’s all.”
Vandross’s voice touched listeners’ hearts, and other parts of their anatomy, too. Vandross sang about love so much that fans gave him an honorary degree in it, nicknaming him the Love Doctor. Vandross knew a song was not a body, as the poet Saeed Jones once put it, but he poured so much of himself into his music and performances that the public mistook his genuine emotion for libidinousness, a common mistake given that the era would expand to include Keith Sweat and Maxwell. (Though America has a way of doing that to all Black men.)
The 1988 song “Any Love,” which he described as his most autobiographical, included the lyrics “Now all you need is a chance to try any love.” Max Szadek, his assistant, interpreted that as desperation. “He wasn’t seeking love — he was seeking any love,” he tells Porter. But Vandross always seemed to sing with faith, not fear. “I don’t consider myself unlovable,” he told an offscreen interviewer. “But I’m still waiting.”
The fulcrum of the film is heartbreak — ours, not his — that someone responsible for shaping the universal feeling of falling in love never experienced it himself. Acceptance arrived in his 2003 song “Dance With My Father” that finds peace in growing up well-loved in a home with both parents.
Vandross drifted back into the collective consciousness last summer when Solange Knowles (under the moniker of her art studio, Saint Heron) released a collection of handblown glassware. The beautiful objects were displayed in conjunction with a new installation: large screens showing a live 1989 performance of Vandross singing at Wembley Stadium in England.
At Vandross’s funeral in 2005 (the singer was 54), the ever-regal Dionne Warwick was helped to the lectern to give a eulogy. The film is punctuated with interviews with her and details about their lifelong friendship and collaboration. (She first wrote the lyrics that Vandross readorned and that later inspired Knowles’s beautiful home décor.) Warwick’s speech is brief. “His legacy, will live on, forever.”
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