Creativity Quote by Aretha Franklin

Calling rock and roll "very, very wholesome" is Aretha Franklin doing something quietly radical: reclaiming a genre that America loved to brand as dangerous. Rock was marketed as teenage trouble, racial mixing, sex, noise. Aretha flips that moral panic on its head with a word usually reserved for church basements and PTA dinners. The repetition - "very, very" - isn’t coy; it’s insistence, like she’s tired of pretending the beat needs an apology.

The subtext lands harder coming from Franklin because her whole career sits at the border people kept policing: sacred and secular, respectable and rebellious, Black tradition and pop crossover. She grew up in gospel, then watched rhythm and blues get repackaged, sanitized, and sold as rock. When she calls it wholesome, she’s not claiming it’s polite. She’s arguing it’s nourishing. Rock and roll, at its best, is community music: bodies moving together, voices answering back, a kind of democratic release. That’s a moral claim, not a musical one.

There’s also a sly defense of working-class pleasure here. Wholesome doesn’t mean innocent; it means life-giving. Franklin is telling you that joy, desire, and loudness can be healthy - that the so-called "clean" culture is often just control dressed up as virtue. Coming from a woman who could turn pain into a shout and a shout into a hymn, it reads as both endorsement and indictment: if you fear this music, you might be afraid of what it lets people feel.