Tony Cokes’ The Queen is Dead … Fragment 1 is a visually and emotionally layered video work that merges text, music, and motion graphics to honour the legacy of Aretha Franklin. Set against Scott Pagano’s morphing, liquid-metal visuals that resemble a serene digital greenery, Cokes’ signature textual montage unfolds across the screen as subtitles. The shifting green abstraction behind, becomes a kind of fluidity, evoking ideas transformation and flux, themes central to Franklin’s life and legacy.

As Aretha Franklin’s iconic songs, Natural Woman, Respect, I Say a Little Prayer and Think, pound their way through the video, Cokes presents a textual narrative taken from writings by Vann R. Newkirk II and Matt Thompson. These texts contextualize Franklin as both a witness to and an architect of Black resistance and cultural power. Her voice was more than musical, it was revolutionary, embodying the collective hopes, pain, and perseverance of Black America.

The work, as Coke’s orchestrates these collisions with a raw affective charge, highlights Franklin’s refusal to conform to exploitative norms, her radical self-possession, and her role in elevating soul music as a political force. Her transformation of Otis Redding’s Respect into a civil rights anthem, her support for Angela Davis and the SCLC, and her gospel roots are recast as acts of cultural authorship. The visual fluidity parallels Franklin’s ability to transcend categories; sacred and secular, feminine and militant, vulnerable and powerful.

The video operates as both eulogy and call to action, prompting reflection on what it means to lose an artist who gave sound to liberation. Through text, music, and abstraction, Cokes doesn’t just memorialize Franklin, he also extends her revolutionary presence. The result is a deeply emotive tribute to a woman who refused to be defined by anyone but herself, insisting instead on freedom and on voice.