Rodriguez - C/D

watched it last night: except for a few tunes of phrase, doesn't seem like this music is all that interesting to me:

but what I kept thinking was: this is the story of Afrikaners hearing something that gave them courage to distinguish themselves from the PW Botha-establishment. the South African musicians who were interviewed re: Rodriguez's influence were white. his music's omnipresence in SA was completely down to white afrikaners.

What did black people think of him? did they know his music? I would think a more meaningful musical symbol of throwing off the yoke of your brutal, repressive forebears would be…Hugh Masekela? Miriam Makeba? guys who did township jive? Why was it an (admittedly sweet and pleasingly unconcerned with accruing $$$) warmed over singer-songwriter that Afrikaners responded to?

this was the elephant in the room to me…

The way I understood it was, at first he simply became a cult icon among liberal white youngsters, because he was doing the sort of music white people listened to at the time, except that the lyrics had a bit more sting... The chronology was a bit unclear, but I took it that the Afrikaner political music movement gained prominence somewhat later, and he was idolized because all of those musicians had listened to him when they were younger, and took stylistic cues from his music and the way he wrote his lyrics, not because they felt he was symbol for their own struggle per se.

As for why not Makeba or Masekela, I don't know about the specific cultural barriers that existed in SA at the time, but I guess in the West too a lot of people supported anti-racist movements, even though they mostly listened to white rock and not black music. That's still the case today, I think.

great movie but yeah how comes the 2 South African geezers didn't know he wasn't dead if he was big in Austrailia and toured there?!
i know it was the pre-Google era but still.

had yer man sen Beverly Hills Cop he'd have clocked Dearborn was in Detroit lol.

^^^^^^^^^^^

Director of the documentary has passed on

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/13/malik-bendjelloul-dead_n_5319001.html

saw that.

have to admit the documentary (and rodriguez's music) left me almost completely cold. the worst kind of music doc IMO, just a bunch of talking heads saying "this guy is so great, he's like... bob dylan." also the narrative was obviously a bit too perfect, eliding and moving things around for the benefit of a really canned, can-see-it-an-hour-in-advance drama. and IIRC you don't actually get to hear more than 20 seconds of a rodriguez tune before someone starts talking over it. which is all for the good, i suppose, given that rodriguez was a pretty 2nd-rate singer-songwriter.

oh well, it's always sad when someone so young (my age, exactly, in fact) dies.

As for why not Makeba or Masekela

? b/c south african boomers listened largely to rock music just like their american and british counterparts ?

there is no lack of attention paid to makeba and masekela and their role as ambassadors for SA's anti-apartheid movement. they are surely household names in 10,000x as many homes as sixto rodriguez, which is the way it should be.

south african white boomers i should note

i always feel like an asshole when people are like, "omg, did you see that rodriquez doc, what an amazing story! and the music is incredible--he's better than bob dylan!" and i just kind of sit there squirming.

it reminds me of that moment in luis bunuel's "las hurdes" when there's a shot of a doctor inspecting a young girk's perfectly-fine set of teeth and the narrator says something like, "these people suffer from a total lack of dental care, as you can see from the atrociously deteriorated state of this young girl's teeth." and most people are like, "oh, yes, i see, very bad teeth." i guess if everyone interviewed is saying "oh my, he was so incredible--like a bob dylan who disappeared off the face of the earth" enough people in the audience will just buy that no matter what they are hearing.

I finally saw this, I thought it was pretty good but it def could have used more of him and his family.

RIP

I am listening to Cold Fact - "I wonder how many times you had sex" interesting line

always figured it was a "sexual liberation" thing, the joy of being blunt

but it's a dumb line and one that instantly made me suspicious of some of the hyperbolic claims abt his songwriting prowess

I am susceptible to believing music is better when it is hyped by critics - I guess depending on the critic

true, I was thinking about the blurbs/talking heads in the doc saying stuff like "he was better than dylan"