Paying the Cost to Be the Boss

"Paying the Cost to Be the Boss" is B.B. King at his most assertive and self-possessed — a departure from the yearning and lament of his slower work, this is a declaration. The horn section announces the premise with authority before King's voice arrives, and when it does, there is no apology anywhere in the performance. The song is about power within a relationship, about the price of independence and the refusal to relinquish it, and King performs it with a swagger that never tips into arrogance because the guitar playing remains too personal, too full of genuine feeling. The arrangement is more sophisticated than pure blues, with a soul music architecture that situates it in late 1960s Memphis and Chicago, the moment when blues and R&B were generating soul as a shared vocabulary. King's guitar here is percussive as much as melodic, short stabbing phrases that accent the horn hits rather than filling the spaces. There is a theatrical quality to the whole performance, a sense of a man who has decided exactly who he is and will not be moved from that position. Reach for this when you need the sound of someone who has worked out their terms and will not be renegotiating them — music for walking into a room knowing exactly what you bring.