Ray Charles Ive Got A Woman Analysis

In the present day world of music, almost all songs draw influence from a piece made before it. This influence can come in the form of ideas, background beats, and most importantly, through the lyrics. However, when an artist takes the lyrics of another, they have the ability to pervert the meaning of the lyrics and change the original song’s meaning. In their Grammy winner and Billboard top 100 song Gold Digger (2005), rapper Kanye West and Jamie Foxx, sample the lyrics of RnB and soul singer Ray Charles’ I’ve Got a Woman (1958). In their song, West and Foxx take not only the hook from Charles changing the word ‘give’ to ‘take’, but Foxx, who played Charles in his movie biopic in 2004 entitled ‘Ray,’ steals the style and the musicality
The song itself was a reworked version of the gospel song “My Jesus Is All the World to Me,” and drew influences from both gospel and jazz, allowing for it to reach a wider audience. The song in its entirety is a song that eulogizes a woman, who is always there for her man, one that ‘gives him money when he is in need.’ However, there is one line that brings forth some questions about the sincerity of the song. Charles sings: “She knows a woman's place is right there now in her home,” creating the notion that the ideal woman is one that is domesticated. Despite this being very out of character for the song, it is not out of character for the time, and should not be a view of Charles but rather a view of the decade itself. “For young mothers in the 1950s, domesticity was idealized in the media, and women were encouraged to stay at home” (PBS). Charles simply used an idea mimetic of the time, and though it appears out of nowhere, the rest of the song is wholly about praising
Every woman in the video is scantily dressed in lingerie, dances around in a seductive manner and is posed in a way that accentuate parts of the body deemed sexual. These women are also placed on magazine covers with names such as “Fantasy, “Ooh La La,” and “Vixen,” making them living pin up models. In the present day world of music, it is almost unheard of for songs to not feature women as objects and to use their sexuality to sell records. In a 2011 study, Professor Dawn R Hobbs, author of Evolutionary Psychology says that “Approximately 92% of the 174 songs that made it into the Top 10 in 2009 contained reproductive messages.” Though this study was about a time that occurred five years later than the release date of “Gold Digger” the idea stays the same; sex sells and music will keep using sex as long as it continues to