Happy 35th Anniversary to Chaka Khan’s sixth studio album Destiny, originally released June 14, 1986.
Since she released her debut solo album Chaka (1978), Chaka Khan records generally have kept their center of gravity positioned directly over funk, post-disco, and boogie—all comfort zones where she can dominate with minimal effort. She took a gamble in 1984 with I Feel For You, hard pivoting into strobe-lit commercial R&B, brightly accented with aggressive DJ cuts and elements of some new genre called hip-hop. Those risks were rewarded with heavy radio and video airplay, impressive sales, and a GRAMMY award.
When the time came to record its follow-up, Khan again decided to either go big or go home. Enter Destiny, a starry-eyed pop mélange with arms reaching into R&B (“Tight Fit”), dance (“It’s You,” “Earth To Mickey”), straight-ahead rock (“So Close,” “Watching The World,” “Who’s It Gonna Be”), and even avant garde jazz (“Coltrane Dreams”).
Destiny wastes no time on subtlety and pillow talk. It aims straight for those who turn the volume up when they hear Peter Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer” or Philip Bailey and Phil Collins’ “Easy Lover.” Accordingly, Destiny is full of saturated colors, big brawny beats, exaggerated flourishes, skyscraper-tall pop-rock, and Khan’s voice dwarfs them all.
Little has been written about Destiny, so I sought to speak with someone who witnessed it in real time: Sandra St. Victor. Before her solo career and initiation as one-third of The Family Stand (“Ghetto Heaven,” Paula Abdul’s Spellbound), she was a gifted twentysomething vocalist from Dallas that Khan hand-picked to sing with her on stage and in studio.
St. Victor describes working on Destiny with producer Arif Mardin, explaining, “Arif is amazing. Oh my God, I loved him. I've never worked with anybody that meticulous before. The whole board was just full of her lead vocals. He would like some tracks, [but then] ‘that T isn’t right, so we gotta get that T’ and ‘that G isn’t right on that track.’ Sometimes he would ask me to do little things like that.”
For this divergent release, Mardin also enlisted a team of co-producers to share this work including Russ Titelman, Reggie Griffin, Robbie Buchanan, and son Joe Mardin. In addition to being present for these New York sessions, St. Victor also moved in with Khan for a time. “There's an album called High Crime by Al Jarreau,” she says, reflecting upon the music that influenced Destiny. “We just played the shit out of that album. She loved that. Her thing was Joni Mitchell, right? And I turned her on to Scritti Politti.”
Khan soon sought out David Gamson and Green Gartside of Scritti Politti. The amalgamation of their musical metals would yield Destiny’s shiny first single, “Love Of A Lifetime” (Dance #11, R&B #21, Pop #53). It bore the vibrant fingerprints of Scritti’s sparkling Cupid & Psyche ’85 sound: spunky riffs, radiant horns, pastel synths, and pizzicatos that pirouette and jeté. With its colorful, dancer-backed music video, “Love Of A Lifetime” became Destiny’s biggest single and set the tone for the LP to come.
Next up was the swarthy, high-minded single “Tight Fit” (R&B #28). This smoky soul midtempo about looking for love in all the wrong places let Khan flex her jazz chops on its sophisticated bridge. (For the record, that’s St. Victor’s molasses-colored voice giving off basso profundo on the “high and low” ad-libs. Yeah.)
Warner waited until March 1987 to launch Destiny’s final single, the spacey, young “Earth To Mickey” (R&B #93). With a Melle Mel-esque guest rap by Griffin, it revisits “I Feel For You” in a new way. Here, Ms. Khan portrays a girly girl frustrated by “Mickey,” who’s either high on his own ego or some other substance. He wasn’t the only thing frustrating her either. Chart peaks this low were unacceptable for a star of this caliber. It was well past time someone asked to speak with a manager.
On a positive note though, Khan also invited “Broken Wings” hitmakers Mr. Mister to shape Destiny. The result was a wind-in-your-hair, rock rollercoaster called “Watching The World.” The stomp-bang rhythm on this UK-only single moves like Simple Minds’ “Don’t You Forget (About Me).” The drummer driving it is none other than Phil Collins, who also lends his unmistakable voice to the chorus. In total, this hidden gem is the best argument for why Khan belongs in this sound. Her energy on the vamp is combustible and her performance, soul-stirring.
If all that blazing guitar is too scary, Griffin’s work on “It’s You” connects Destiny back to the quantized funk of mid-‘80s Black music. Think The Whispers’ “And The Beat Goes On,” but more metallic and sheened. Khan’s sister Taka Boom explored similar territory on the polished dance expedition Middle of the Night (1985). As an aside, the first line of “I Can’t Be Loved” may have inspired the hook of Londonbeat’s 1990 international smash “I’ve Been Thinking About You.” The lyric and melody similarity is too uncanny.
Finally, one of the most brilliant performances on Destiny is “The Other Side Of The World” (R&B #81). Khan’s masterful rendition—complete with an out-of-this-world G5 note in every chorus—is full of bombast and big emotion (“All those fancy girls? / Never believe / Their hearts are stone / They may warm your bed when you’re alone / But I can warm your heart instead”).
This would have been a great fourth single, had it not been fumbled prior to Destiny’s release. It appeared on the Atlantic Records soundtrack of White Knights (1985). Retrofitted with new vocals that could level a city block, its 7-inch remix was issued in March 1986 and later included on Destiny, but where was the radio/video promotion? For a “Through The Fire” styled pop ballad to have no Hot 100 activity is a travesty.
Those who believed Khan was “outside her lane” doing pop music may not realize how much Khan’s presence affected pop in 1986 alone. That year, Steve Winwood’s “Higher Love” and Robert Palmer’s “Addicted To Love” were #1 hits that vied for the Record of the Year GRAMMY. Khan was instrumental in creating both.
“Addicted To Love” was originally a duet with Khan, but Warner Bros. refused to let her vocals appear on it, fearing it would compete with Destiny. “I couldn’t use her vocals but she deserves credit for what she contributed to the arrangement,” Palmer explained to the Los Angeles Times. He described erasing Khan from the tape as heartbreaking.
“Higher Love” actually featured her backing vocals, saucy ad-libs, and a cameo in the video. It ultimately took home top honors, for which Khan was thanked twice during the acceptance speech. Khan had the Midas touch for artists outside of R&B. It should have also worked for her records too. For all the interference Warner Bros. ran on Khan’s outside projects, one might think they had some major promotional push planned for Destiny. But they had nothing. They simply weren’t trying.
St. Victor gives voice to the pressure Khan was under despite a dizzying schedule. “They were trying to rush this one out. She was on the road, we were out there all year! And then she had to come up with an album [too]? They just tried to ride off the back of I Feel For You… [but] she didn’t get the support she had when I Feel For You was out.”
When asked in 1986 about Destiny’s commercial performance, Khan’s hurt bleeds through her gracefully apologetic words. “More airplay would have helped, but it’s hard to say why the album and single didn’t get the airplay they needed. I don’t want to blame anybody.” Khan wouldn’t offer much more on the subject, and she has spoken of the underappreciated disc very little since.
Destiny peaked at #25 R&B and #67 Pop but was still GRAMMY-nominated for Best R&B Vocal Performance, Female. Warner Bros. assembled the Japanese remix EP Perfect Fit (1987) with rare extended mixes of “Love of a Lifetime,” “Tight Fit,” “Coltrane Dreams,” and others. And for the next 10 years, Khan and Gamson continued their alliance on hits like “Never Miss The Water,” the GRAMMY-nominated “Love Me Still,” and “Love You All My Lifetime” from the GRAMMY-winning The Woman I Am (1992).
Khan opted not to charge Warner Bros. with criminal neglect, despite glaring places where the support her project needed did not show up for her. The reasons this didn’t break her may be in plain sight with the album’s entirely self-penned title track “My Destiny.” This personal manifesto simply would not allow her to play the victim even when she had the right. “They'll never get this baby down,” she sings. “Say I'm crazy, well, that might well be / But there'll be no kickin' Chaka around / ‘Cause I'm the ruler of my destiny / If I blow it, it's because of me / There is nobody who's got the power / To determine what becomes of me.”
Art is all about taking chances, and both I Feel For You and Destiny rolled the dice. The former paid big dividends, whereas the latter didn’t get a proper chance to. But Khan held up her end of the bargain, delivering a lustrous set. If you haven’t taken a look (and listen) before, hold it up to the light now. I promise it will shine.
LISTEN: