Roberta Flack / First Take / 1969
Compared to What
bitterly ironic, simmering anger beneath cool composure
A furious, jazz-inflected protest song that catalogs the hypocrisies of American life—consumerism, war, religion, race—and keeps circling back to a single sardonic question: compared to what standard of 'realness' are we measuring any of this? Flack's version (originally written by Gene McDaniels) turns the satire into a slow-burning, almost sermon-like performance, letting the piano and her phrasing carry as much irony as the words.
social hypocrisy war and dissent religious skepticism consumerism and possession racial and class critique disillusionment
Who's speaking
A collective, unnamed narrator speaking as part of 'we'/'us,' addressing an implied American public; the voice is knowing and exhausted rather than earnestly moralizing, closer to a jazz-club provocateur than a preacher.
What happens
The song moves through a series of loosely connected snapshots—domestic self-deception, rural violence and cruelty, wartime propaganda, religious fear-mongering, economic desperation—each ending in the same deflating refrain. There's no plot resolution; instead the accumulation of images builds a mounting case that the whole culture is performing sincerity it doesn't possess, climaxing in a comparison to a doomed ancient king before returning to the opening verse, closing the loop rather than resolving it.
How it's built
Verse-refrain form with a recurring tagline that acts almost like a Greek chorus. The refrain's repetition intensifies into an extended vamp before the King Tut verse, mimicking a live improvisatory breakdown, then the song loops back to its first verse—structurally enacting the futility the lyrics describe.
Section by section
Opening verse
“Love the lie and lie the love”
The chiastic opening line immediately signals that clarity is unavailable—love and deception are interchangeable. The verse frames intimacy and material possession as tangled together, setting up the song's larger argument that personal relationships mirror national dysfunction.
Second verse
A grotesque catalog of rural and domestic cruelty juxtaposes casual violence against animals and children with misplaced affection for pets, suggesting a moral order that's scrambled—compassion and callousness applied to the wrong objects entirely.
War verse
“Have one doubt, they call it treason”
This section names the political target most directly, describing a climate where questioning authority is criminalized. The image of the population as gutless 'chicken-feathers' indicts collective passivity as much as leadership.
Church verse and vamp
Religion is reframed as another mechanism of control, with the preacher's fear tactics dismissed outright. The extended repetition of the refrain that follows functions almost as a secular tent-revival chant, mocking the very fervor it's replacing.
King Tut verse
“Unreal values, crass distortion”
The final verse widens the lens to economics, morality, and abortion politics, then pulls back to antiquity, comparing modern striving for permanence to a pharaoh's ultimately futile monument-building—suggesting the futility described is not new but historical.
Closing repeat
Returning to the opening verse rather than resolving forward, the song structurally refuses catharsis, implying the cycle of self-deception simply starts again.
Craft
- anaphora
- The repeated refrain phrase, especially in its extended vamp near the end, hammers the futility of 'trying' into an almost hypnotic drone.
- chiasmus
- The opening line inverts subject and verb in a mirrored construction, embodying the theme of confused, self-deceiving values right from the start.
- catalog/list
- Each verse stacks unrelated images—slaughterhouses, rednecks, old ladies with dogs—into a rapid inventory that suggests a society made of disconnected, absurd cruelties rather than coherent values.
- rhetorical question
- The title phrase functions as a recurring rhetorical question that refuses resolution, forcing the listener to supply their own unstable comparison.
- historical allusion
- The reference to an ancient Egyptian ruler links contemporary American striving to a civilization's grandiose, ultimately failed attempt at permanence.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats the song as a critique of the American tendency to measure authenticity and virtue against unstated, shifting standards—nothing is ever truly 'real' because the yardstick itself is corrupt. An alternative reading emphasizes the specifically late-1960s political context (Vietnam, dissent criminalized as treason, religious authority) as the primary target, with the domestic and animal imagery functioning as absurdist comic relief that sharpens the political points by defamiliarizing them.
Context
Written by Gene McDaniels and first recorded by him in 1968, the song became strongly associated with jazz and soul artists as a Vietnam-era protest piece; Les McCann and Eddie Harris's 1969 live version is probably its most famous rendition. Flack's take on First Take, her debut album, situates the song within a set otherwise dominated by intimate ballads, using it to establish her range and political seriousness early in her career. I'm not certain of specific recording details for Flack's version beyond its inclusion on First Take.
Listen for
- The way Flack's piano and phrasing lean into irony rather than outrage, keeping the vocal cool even as the lyric content escalates
- The building repetition of the refrain into an almost chant-like vamp before the final verse
- The abrupt tonal shifts between grotesque comic imagery and blunt political statement within the same verse
- The song's refusal to end on new material, looping back to its opening verse instead of resolving
About Roberta Flack
Roberta Cleopatra Flack was an American singer and pianist known for her emotive, genre-blending ballads that spanned R&B, jazz, folk, and pop and contributed to the birth of the quiet storm radio format. Her commercial success included the Billboard Hot 100 chart-topping singles "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face", "Killing Me Softly with His Song", and "Feel Like Makin' Love".
1937 - 2025 / United States
Full biography and catalogue