Express Yourself! Features
PHYLLIS HYMAN
By Jose F. Promis
As a kid in the 1980s, coming of age in the bleak cultural wasteland that was Tucson,
AZ, I grew up on music videos. Videos were my outlet to another world, a world where
art and music came together, where a lonely kid stuck in the suburbs could live
vicariously through these exciting artists as they caroused through faraway and
legendary places like London and New York City, things which did not exist in my
petty, mall-obsessed consumer-oriented city.
This was an age when MTV, BET, and, later, VH-1 played videos for most of the day,
before their programming degenerated into “lifestyle” programming. I grew up
listening to Duran Duran, Madonna, Culture Club, Eurythmics, the Pointer Sisters, Billy
Ocean, Chaka Khan, Cyndi Lauper, Sade, Tina Turner, etc. Sometimes before school I
would turn on the television (once my parents would leave, because they always
frowned on excessive television, something I have come to agree with in later years)
and would manage to catch a handful of videos before heading off for the day. Once, in
eighth grade, during one of these secret viewing sessions, I saw a video called “Living
All Alone” by a woman named Phyllis Hyman. I barely remember the video, as in those
days I was more concerned with disposable chart hits as opposed to a quiet storm
siren (I liked Anita Baker because she, unlike Hyman, managed to score top ten pop
hits). However, there was something in this woman’s music, message and mood that
registered in the mind of this fair-skinned, blue-eyed Chilean immigrant adolescent that
I was, even though the chances of her having a top pop hit were considerably slimmer
than the chances the Greeks had of recapturing Constantinople.
Time passed and I did not forget Phyllis Hyman. 1991 was the year I graduated high
school, entered college, traveled to South America for a six week sojourn, discovered
“night life,” and, in my mind, started to become a “man” (or at least something
resembling an adult with free will and some degree of autonomy from my parents’
yoke). I obtained a fake ID as soon as I could muster the courage to parade into the
DMV with a friend’s birth certificate, and I used this trophy to sneak into Tucson’s
precious few nightclubs in order to satisfy my ever-growing curiosity about everything
and anything, and to be exposed to “night music” from that bygone era. I was thrilled
by the sleek sounds and elegant rhythms of those post-1980s/early 1990s
dance/house music acts, such as Black Box, Deee-Lite, Snap, Enigma, Lisa Stansfield,
Cathy Dennis, CeCe Peniston and C+C Music Factory. This was an era in which
popular music was allowed a final, ecstatic gasp of multi-ethnic celebratory freedom
before giving way to the dreary, hopeless, violent and racially-polarized sounds of
grunge and gangsta rap that would unmercifully go on to dominate (and, some could
say, pollute) all aspects of popular music and culture for the remainder of the decade
(until Britney Spears and the Backstreet Boys thundered through). And, in that same
year, Phyllis Hyman emerged from her hibernation with a sleek new track that resulted
in her first bona-fide number one R&B hit, “Don’t Wanna Change The World,” a hoppin’
club jam very much in tune with the wonderful dance music of that very special, very
brief era. Ms. Hyman once again stepped in to my consciousness.
It didn’t stop there. It was “Don’t Wanna Change The World”’s follow-up single, the
melancholy masterpiece “Living In Confusion,” that succeeded in permanently etching
this tortured songstress’ coveted spot in my select pantheon of living gods and
goddesses. The tragedy, the pathos, the soft ferociousness of her voice all came
through in this wonderful, all-too-short seven-minute epic. And the video!! Ms. Hyman
was fully decked out in her regalia, dressed like an elegant queen from an era which
pre-dated the trashy and tacky styles that would overtake a nation on a one-way high-
speed train ticket to obesity and self-absorption. And her triumphant depression! Her
feelings were on full display in the song’s video, from which I can only remember a few
select scenes, something akin to Ms. Hyman walking with a tear in her eye, dressed in
a trench coat, somberly and absently comforting a poor child whom she was almost
vainly trying to shield form the inevitable emptiness and hopelessness that surely
awaits one in later years (at least this seemed to be her experience). I was hooked. This
song was a masterpiece! I bought the album “Prime Of My Life” and began to research
the life and music of this singularly fascinating woman. In my world, none of the other
R&B queens came even close to transmitting the delicious sorrow, despair, aloofness
and melancholy in which Phyllis so effortlessly and gracefully succeeded. Not Aretha,
not Gladys, not Anita and certainly not Diana (although she is one of my favorites as
well)…no one.
Another four years passed and it was now the summer of my college graduation, a
strange, frustrating period of flux between my underachieving undergrad years and my
equally frustrating and seemingly pointless graduate school years (I studied Media
Arts). As I was standing in line at the bank preparing to withdraw whatever minimal
amount of money I had left at my disposal, I glanced at a TV screen perched above the
bank teller windows which bore the headline “3 stars fade.” I don’t remember the first
two, it could have been the president of the United States for all I cared, because all I
remember was the third: Phyllis Hyman. I was not wholly shocked that my tragic and
tortured chanteuse, a singer whose appreciation I felt I shared with no other youth in
Tucson, committed the final, terrible act that a truly tragic chanteuse must commit:
suicide. Her music, through her horrific death, sadly became all the more poignant.
And the way in which she died--committing suicide right before an appearance at the
famed Apollo theatre in Harlem. It almost seems surprising that no Hollywood studio
has as of yet made a film of Phyllis’ life. However, if that were to happen, it would have
to be done with the greatest amount of respect, and in a way that her life does not
become a trivialized piece of cheese fluff soap-opera fodder, which is the way many
film biographies tend to turn out. Film or not, enter Phyllis Hyman into the league of
tragic female greats, a league which (in my mind) only incorporates the world’s true
tragic artists, of the caliber of Edith Piaf, Dalida and so forth. Eventually I came to find
that I was not the only one who seemed to think in such a manner (case in point: David
Nathan). Not long after her death, compilations and posthumous albums began to
surface, cushioned with loving and respectful liner notes, the music world slowly came
to understand the magnitude of this loss, a loss which still hasn’t fully manifested itself.
And how can it manifest itself? Beyond obvious answers, such as re-releasing and
remastering her back catalogue, we must ask our selves: what can we learn from her
passing? For one, Phyllis didn’t always record songs that were of her caliber,
something many of her critics are quick to point out. Phyllis would have done well to
have recorded her interpretations of classic standards (besides the precious few she
did record) but unfortunately that fantasy has to remain what it is: a fantasy. So we can
only enjoy the legacy she left us, and hope that when, and if, another Phyllis Hyman
were to grace the music world with her presence, that she be given material of her
caliber and led down a path that would not end in the way that Phyllis’ did. But then, if
it was otherwise or any other way, then she would not leave the true heartbreaking
impression that was left by the singularly talented, fascinating and tragic Phyllis
Hyman.
RECOMMENDED CDS:
Prime of My Life
You Know How To Love Me
Living All Alone
One on One
The Ultimate Phyllis Hyman
You can reach Jose by e-mail at: jpromis1999@yahoo.com
By Jose F. Promis
As a kid in the 1980s, coming of age in the bleak cultural wasteland that was Tucson,
AZ, I grew up on music videos. Videos were my outlet to another world, a world where
art and music came together, where a lonely kid stuck in the suburbs could live
vicariously through these exciting artists as they caroused through faraway and
legendary places like London and New York City, things which did not exist in my
petty, mall-obsessed consumer-oriented city.
This was an age when MTV, BET, and, later, VH-1 played videos for most of the day,
before their programming degenerated into “lifestyle” programming. I grew up
listening to Duran Duran, Madonna, Culture Club, Eurythmics, the Pointer Sisters, Billy
Ocean, Chaka Khan, Cyndi Lauper, Sade, Tina Turner, etc. Sometimes before school I
would turn on the television (once my parents would leave, because they always
frowned on excessive television, something I have come to agree with in later years)
and would manage to catch a handful of videos before heading off for the day. Once, in
eighth grade, during one of these secret viewing sessions, I saw a video called “Living
All Alone” by a woman named Phyllis Hyman. I barely remember the video, as in those
days I was more concerned with disposable chart hits as opposed to a quiet storm
siren (I liked Anita Baker because she, unlike Hyman, managed to score top ten pop
hits). However, there was something in this woman’s music, message and mood that
registered in the mind of this fair-skinned, blue-eyed Chilean immigrant adolescent that
I was, even though the chances of her having a top pop hit were considerably slimmer
than the chances the Greeks had of recapturing Constantinople.
Time passed and I did not forget Phyllis Hyman. 1991 was the year I graduated high
school, entered college, traveled to South America for a six week sojourn, discovered
“night life,” and, in my mind, started to become a “man” (or at least something
resembling an adult with free will and some degree of autonomy from my parents’
yoke). I obtained a fake ID as soon as I could muster the courage to parade into the
DMV with a friend’s birth certificate, and I used this trophy to sneak into Tucson’s
precious few nightclubs in order to satisfy my ever-growing curiosity about everything
and anything, and to be exposed to “night music” from that bygone era. I was thrilled
by the sleek sounds and elegant rhythms of those post-1980s/early 1990s
dance/house music acts, such as Black Box, Deee-Lite, Snap, Enigma, Lisa Stansfield,
Cathy Dennis, CeCe Peniston and C+C Music Factory. This was an era in which
popular music was allowed a final, ecstatic gasp of multi-ethnic celebratory freedom
before giving way to the dreary, hopeless, violent and racially-polarized sounds of
grunge and gangsta rap that would unmercifully go on to dominate (and, some could
say, pollute) all aspects of popular music and culture for the remainder of the decade
(until Britney Spears and the Backstreet Boys thundered through). And, in that same
year, Phyllis Hyman emerged from her hibernation with a sleek new track that resulted
in her first bona-fide number one R&B hit, “Don’t Wanna Change The World,” a hoppin’
club jam very much in tune with the wonderful dance music of that very special, very
brief era. Ms. Hyman once again stepped in to my consciousness.
It didn’t stop there. It was “Don’t Wanna Change The World”’s follow-up single, the
melancholy masterpiece “Living In Confusion,” that succeeded in permanently etching
this tortured songstress’ coveted spot in my select pantheon of living gods and
goddesses. The tragedy, the pathos, the soft ferociousness of her voice all came
through in this wonderful, all-too-short seven-minute epic. And the video!! Ms. Hyman
was fully decked out in her regalia, dressed like an elegant queen from an era which
pre-dated the trashy and tacky styles that would overtake a nation on a one-way high-
speed train ticket to obesity and self-absorption. And her triumphant depression! Her
feelings were on full display in the song’s video, from which I can only remember a few
select scenes, something akin to Ms. Hyman walking with a tear in her eye, dressed in
a trench coat, somberly and absently comforting a poor child whom she was almost
vainly trying to shield form the inevitable emptiness and hopelessness that surely
awaits one in later years (at least this seemed to be her experience). I was hooked. This
song was a masterpiece! I bought the album “Prime Of My Life” and began to research
the life and music of this singularly fascinating woman. In my world, none of the other
R&B queens came even close to transmitting the delicious sorrow, despair, aloofness
and melancholy in which Phyllis so effortlessly and gracefully succeeded. Not Aretha,
not Gladys, not Anita and certainly not Diana (although she is one of my favorites as
well)…no one.
Another four years passed and it was now the summer of my college graduation, a
strange, frustrating period of flux between my underachieving undergrad years and my
equally frustrating and seemingly pointless graduate school years (I studied Media
Arts). As I was standing in line at the bank preparing to withdraw whatever minimal
amount of money I had left at my disposal, I glanced at a TV screen perched above the
bank teller windows which bore the headline “3 stars fade.” I don’t remember the first
two, it could have been the president of the United States for all I cared, because all I
remember was the third: Phyllis Hyman. I was not wholly shocked that my tragic and
tortured chanteuse, a singer whose appreciation I felt I shared with no other youth in
Tucson, committed the final, terrible act that a truly tragic chanteuse must commit:
suicide. Her music, through her horrific death, sadly became all the more poignant.
And the way in which she died--committing suicide right before an appearance at the
famed Apollo theatre in Harlem. It almost seems surprising that no Hollywood studio
has as of yet made a film of Phyllis’ life. However, if that were to happen, it would have
to be done with the greatest amount of respect, and in a way that her life does not
become a trivialized piece of cheese fluff soap-opera fodder, which is the way many
film biographies tend to turn out. Film or not, enter Phyllis Hyman into the league of
tragic female greats, a league which (in my mind) only incorporates the world’s true
tragic artists, of the caliber of Edith Piaf, Dalida and so forth. Eventually I came to find
that I was not the only one who seemed to think in such a manner (case in point: David
Nathan). Not long after her death, compilations and posthumous albums began to
surface, cushioned with loving and respectful liner notes, the music world slowly came
to understand the magnitude of this loss, a loss which still hasn’t fully manifested itself.
And how can it manifest itself? Beyond obvious answers, such as re-releasing and
remastering her back catalogue, we must ask our selves: what can we learn from her
passing? For one, Phyllis didn’t always record songs that were of her caliber,
something many of her critics are quick to point out. Phyllis would have done well to
have recorded her interpretations of classic standards (besides the precious few she
did record) but unfortunately that fantasy has to remain what it is: a fantasy. So we can
only enjoy the legacy she left us, and hope that when, and if, another Phyllis Hyman
were to grace the music world with her presence, that she be given material of her
caliber and led down a path that would not end in the way that Phyllis’ did. But then, if
it was otherwise or any other way, then she would not leave the true heartbreaking
impression that was left by the singularly talented, fascinating and tragic Phyllis
Hyman.
RECOMMENDED CDS:
Prime of My Life
You Know How To Love Me
Living All Alone
One on One
The Ultimate Phyllis Hyman
You can reach Jose by e-mail at: jpromis1999@yahoo.com
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