“Compared To What”
Song by Ray Charles
Ray Charles’ disco version of “Compared To What” was released as a single and also opens his 1980 album Brother Ray Is At It Again; it’s a blast of hard funk and anguished vocals from Ray. Although disco was waning culturally, and his own disco releases hadn’t reconnected him with a bigger audience as he might have expected, “Compared To What” signifies that Ray’s late 1970s muse was maturing. This was disco with a serious message.
“Compared To What” was written in 1969 by Gene McDaniels, and while Roberta Flack first recorded it and released it as a single that year, it was pianist Les McCann and saxophonist Eddie Harris’ version from the 1969 Montreux Jazz Festival that became a million-selling hit. Flack’s version built slowly but kept its restrained tension – more of a plaintive cry – where McCann’s lengthy, jazzy version features his angry and exasperated vocal performance.
Ray’s 1980 version is pure disco – like some of the music on the recent albums Love And Peace and Ain’t It So, but different in its socially conscious lyrics. Injustice, abortion, racial problems, and the Vietnam War are all mentioned in the original lyrics, a far cry from the usual Studio 54-centered concerns of dance music of the era.
Actually, with a president from the same state as Ray in office (Jimmy Carter from Georgia), and the unpopular Southeast Asian military quagmire long over, Ray skips the verse about Nixon and the war, but keeps everything else intact. He also imports many of McCann’s vocal asides – “sock it to me!”
Instrumentally, “Compared To What” was arranged by Mike Post, producer of such disparate acts as Dolly Parton and Van Halen and once the subject of a song by The Who. The synthesized disco beat is irrepressible, hurtling along and like the lyrics taking no prisoners. The hook is on the last line of each verse, the famous indignant question, “Trying to make it real – compared to what?” Here, the music stops and starts in a great forceful staccato, and Ray sounds really outraged each time. (This was lifted from the McCann/Harris version.) Eleven years after the song was written, not enough had changed, it seems.
A searing electric guitar solo comes halfway through the song, somewhat unusual in a Ray Charles piece. Our humble keyboardist gets his own synth solo towards the end, exploring the new pitch-bending technology then available and foreshadowing much of his 1990s work.
Single releases
Listen to “Compared To What”
Fans of “Compared To What” are also encouraged to get Les McCann and Eddie Harris’ album Swiss Movement to hear their quite different but thrilling take on it.
Get your own “Compared To What” on 45, LP or MP3 from Amazon.
Songs on Brother Ray Is At It Again