Dying For Recognition: Reviewing "Luther: Never Too Much"

On Luther Vandross striving and struggling for respect and recognition.

Happy 4/20! It’s been a while since I’ve published an article. The news cycle has been dizzying since my January piece on MLK Day. I’m restacking this review of the Luther Vandross documentary I wrote a year ago. You may know that I am a huge R&B fan, and think of Luther as the best male R&B singer ever. His birthday was 4/20— he would be 74 today if not for his untimely death. I hope you enjoy revisiting this piece, spinning some Luther classics, and maybe even watching the documentary.

Ahead of seeing “Luther: Never Too Much,” I expected I would mostly learn about the secret sauce behind the late Luther Vandross’ many musical hits and perhaps hum along to my favorite ones. But in this in-depth look at his career, the documentary gives viewers unique insights into other aspects of Luther’s life rarely seen in work meant to cover artists’ professional achievements. Through the musical genius’ experience, director Dawn Porter offers a profound meditation on major hurdles often faced by Black artists in a manner relatable to the experience of regular, not-famous Black people in the workplace.

The documentary premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2024. It highlights Luther’s roots as a producer and songwriter with Dionne Warwick and Aretha Franklin, his relationship with other greats like Mariah Carey, whom he mentored, and David Bowie, who helped him cross into mainstream pop. It also covers his struggle with a lack of recognition and the pressure he experienced as the subject of media scrutiny due to his weight and society’s expectations of masculinity, especially for a Black man with chart-topping records about love. 

Black artists have long struggled to be justly recognized for their work, an experience Luther was way too familiar with. One scene in the documentary sequentially shows him gracefully waiting to hear his name called as a Grammy winner during the ceremony, followed by his face befallen by sadness, year after year, until he finally won one in 1991, 10 years after the academy nominated his chart-topping debut single Never Too Much for Best male R&B Vocal Performance. Another aspect of his struggle was being recognized as having mass appeal, which could only happen if he weren’t caged into Black categories like R&B and Soul by music executives. Back then, his music only played on Black radio (radio was very segregated). He would ultimately achieve this coveted crossover with critical acclaim through his album “Dance with My Father,” which debuted atop the Billboard 200 charts and whose title track earned him a Grammy for Song of the Year.

The recognition around “Dance with My Father'' was unfortunately eclipsed by a massive stroke, which rendered him unable to celebrate this achievement in real time. Like the prior achievements, the documentary highlights how many of his milestones are intertwined with serious health struggles, notably regarding his weight. He clearly struggled with his weight and relationship to food, swinging between periods of binge-eating for comfort and relief during times of stress and pain, and episodes of extreme dieting when body image anxieties took hold of his psyche. He also experienced tremendous pressure from societal expectations around his appearance and masculinity, mainly because his music was the subject of oh so many women’s adulation. Jamie Foxx illustrates it perfectly in his interview for the documentary.

"Back in the day, if you wanted to fall in love, you let Luther do the work for you," he says. "So I would put the phone up to the radio — and what's crazy is you had to wait for it to come on the radio. "So I would put the phone up to the radio and say, 'This is what I want to tell you.'"

Indeed, they called him the Love Doctor, a moniker he was reluctant to embrace because he wanted his music to be appreciated as more than mood-setting for the bedroom.

The moment in the documentary that best crystallizes the tension in what society expects of his appearance, given Luther’s music, and the reality, is a snippet from an Eddie Murphy standup show routine, where he says, “Luther Vandross is a big Kentucky Fried Chicken Eating motherfucker.” The crowd erupts in laughter, and Murphy mimics Luther’s singing and women’s effervescent reaction to his voice. “Sing. That’s all you gotta do is sing.”

Luther was ridiculed by the media and the entertainment industry for his weight when he was fat, praised when he lost weight, and ridiculed again when he gained it back. He became the punchline. Oprah Winfrey, who made compelling television out of her rollercoaster journey with weight, shares with him the tale of someone likening them. “You’re going to gain it all back like Luther,” they said of her recent progress. Unlike Luther, Oprah invited the public into her journey. Luther never had a choice, but he took it all in stride, using humor, a mature defense mechanism, like when he brought a giant KFC bucket on stage during a concert with Eddie Murphy in the audience.

It doesn't mean it didn’t hurt or eat away at him slowly. In one scene, he is shown sternly telling a journalist he would not like to talk about his weight. But at times, when the comments about his weight were positive, Luther leaned into the attention, like when he jokingly told a TV host that his doctor was Gianni Versace, showing off his new, svelte figure in a head-to-toe outfit by the Italian designer. Skinny or fat, Luther took his presentation seriously, from the costumes designed for his shows to the outfits he picked for TV appearances.

Male celebrities' weight is rarely so central to how they are discussed in the media or talked about in interviews. Those who carry their fatness on their sleeve, making it part of their persona through nicknames like Notorious BIG and Fat Joe, or exposing their rotund bellies like Rick Ross and DJ Khaled, are rarely the subject of weight-based scrutiny. But Luther Vandross made R&B, which is supposed to be sexy. But sexy, to his core audience, he wasn’t. In his memoir “Punch Me Up to the Gods,” Brian Broome depicts a scene of women from his family and neighborhood watching Luther’s first TV appearance, performing on Saturday Night Live. The commentary during this performance, preceded by much anticipation and excitement, was laden with disappointment. He was fat and round-faced with a double chin. But Luther worked hard for the R&B body in unsustainable ways. Along the way, he suffered psychological and physical trauma that all likely led to his tragic, premature death.

Luther Vandross first had a stroke at 52 and died of cardiovascular complications at 54. Black men, celebrities or otherwise, are no strangers to such early deaths. In Luther’s case, his friends and relatives point to his diabetes and diet habits as the causes of his downfall. His late mother shared in an interview that leading up to his stroke, he had been engaging in significant binge eating due to stress. But one must look further than his behavior and interrogate the sources of his stress. Successful and wealthy as he might have been, Luther was under similar pressures that shape the health behaviors of Black men and contribute to their adverse health outcomes. Undue pressure caused by a lack of recognition and unjust treatment is akin to experiencing workplace discrimination, known to increase stress and worsen health outcomes like hypertension. Indeed, he came out of the gates making popular music but wasn’t formally recognized as a pop star until a decade later, a delay in recognition often experienced by Black artists. A study in Sociological Inquiry found that Black artists are significantly less likely to be described as “category-spanners” by music critics compared to White artists, which inevitably affects public consumption of their music.

Besides this lack of recognition, the documentary makes clear that he felt pressure regarding his presentation and performance of masculinity, held hostage by the sexy archetype expected of male R&B singers. And he wasn’t just fat, he was also perceived as effeminate, and felt pressured to address rumors about his sexuality, which he neither confirmed nor denied out of a sense of privacy. All these stressors likely contributed to his disordered eating. While people often think of thin, young White women as the typical patients with disordered eating, studies show that Black men experience eating disorders at higher rates than White men. Furthermore, men and boys with eating disorders are less likely to be perceived as needing treatment. Luther’s disordered eating shaped his personal and professional relationships, and his friends interviewed in the documentary worried about his weight cycling, which is associated with worse depressive symptoms. It also shaped his relationship with healthcare. Emblematic of this is the press mention that leading up to his stroke, he endorsed a grueling headache for a week, but he skipped out on going to the doctor because he knew or feared all they would talk about would be his weight. Indeed, fat people who experience weight stigma often avoid seeking healthcare when they need it, which can lead to devastating consequences.

After seeing the documentary, I texted one of my mentors, who is also a Black physician, struck by the tragedy of a Black man gone too soon. She thought, “Black men who are high performing and achieving don’t slow down and take care of themselves enough.” There’s some truth to that. But even more, much research shows that working hard and striving against unfair odds harms our physical health. It’s a phenomenon called John Henryism. For example, one study in the journal Pediatrics compared Black and White adolescents and found that unrelenting determination to succeed among black adolescents from disadvantaged backgrounds was uniquely associated with a greater risk of developing diabetes in adulthood. It’s no surprise, given that Black boys and men have the shortest life expectancy in most states. We live under a microscope compared to our white counterparts and experience more discipline in school, more frequent traffic stops by law enforcement, harsher punishment in courtrooms, and more frequent workplace discrimination, to name a few scourges. Luther, like many successful Black men, was nevertheless determined to do well in his industry against the many barriers heralded on his path and the pressures surrounding him. A study more specific to his experience in the journal Psychology of Men & Masculinity found that racial discrimination and masculine gendered expectations were associated with depressive symptoms among Black men, which may well explain much of his tragic experience.

It is commonly said and agreed upon that structural fixes are necessary to address systemic disparities in health outcomes. Dawn Porter’s documentary shows us that this applies even to well-off, famous Black men like the genius singer. Just like his friends and critics often focused on his eating behavior, his weight, and their associated dangers, Black men and boys’ issues in health and education, to name a few domains, are too often met with individual solutions aimed at their behaviors, even by those with the power to do something more impactful, less ephemeral (President Obama’s My Brother’s Keeper initiative comes to mind). The structural forces upstream of those behaviors are, alas, rarely questioned enough. Instead, as society sees it, individual solutions are what Black men need, so a thousand fixes for our behaviors are never too much.