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Betty Davis

Is It Love Or Desire
CD $13
LP Black $25
LP Gold $28
LP Silver $28
Cassette Tape $12
8-Track $35
CD $15
Digital Download $9.99
  • Betty’s previously unreleased 1976 album!
  • LP available on Standard Black Wax or Special Gold Color Edition or Limited Color Vinyl (Silver Metallic)
  • Expanded vinyl edition featuring gatefold jacket and booklet including rare photos and lyrics
  • Vinyl pressed at RTI
  • CD housed in a digipak and featuring expanded booklet

Description

Is It Love Or Desire is a little-known gem in the Davis catalogue. Mastered from the original tapes, and untouched for over 30 years, this release features detailed liner notes by Oliver Wang (Soul Sides, Betty Davis and They Say I’m Different re-issue contributor), the originally intended artwork housed in a lavishly packaged digipak, rare photos, archival material, and recent interviews with Davis and her skin-tight band, Funk House.

Betty Davis was a musical maverick with vision. Image, substance, sex, and grit combined with a badass band that could deliver the funk bed backbone to the sultry music between the sheets. After cutting two notorious discs for the Just Sunshine label (Betty Davis and They Say I’m Different), and Nasty Gal for Island Records, Davis went to work on her most personal and expressive record yet. After capturing 10 hard-hitting tracks in 1976 at the remote Studio In The Country (Louisiana), a creative difference with her then label caused the platter to be unexpectedly shelved. Davis would cut one final album and soon retreat from the music business, completely disappearing from the public eye.

Is It Love Or Desire is a little-known gem in the Davis catalog. Mastered from the original tapes, and untouched for over 30 years, this release features detailed liner notes,...

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Artist Bio

There is one testimonial about Betty Davis that is universal: She was an artist ahead of her time. From her brief moment in the limelight to her decades of living as a recluse until her death in 2022, Betty Davis was a beautiful enigma. A drop-dead gorgeous model (and one of the first Black models to be featured in Glamour and Seventeen), Betty ran in crowds with Jimi Hendrix and was briefly married to Miles Davis (not to mention she played a large part in his stylistic radicalization). Her demure demeanor in life starkly contrasted with her onstage persona which oozed raw feminist liberation, a truly original punk-funk provocateur in her silver go-go boots and signature afro.

One can hardly imagine the genre-busting, culture-crossing, musical magic of Janelle Monáe, OutKast, Prince, Erykah Badu, Rick James, The Roots,...

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Preview Tracklist

  • 1 Is It Love Or Desire
    2:37
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  • 2 It's So Good
    3:21
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  • 3 Whorey Angel
    5:02
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  • 4 Crashin' From Passion
    3:25
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  • 5 When Romance Says Goodbye
    3:44
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  • 6 Bottom Of The Barrel
    3:48
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  • 7 Stars Starve, You Know
    3:36
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  • 8 Let's Get Personal
    3:32
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  • 9 Bar Hoppin'
    3:13
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  • 10 For My Man
    1:43
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