Sixto Rodriguez
Coming From Reality — Finding a Sense of Place in Searching for Sugar Man
And now for something a little different. Four and a half years ago, I began my penultimate semester at university and took a course in the theories behind Visual Anthropology. It was a fascinating and inspiring class with the excellent Dr Mike Poltorak. One of our assignments was to pick a documentary on which we would do a critically reflective essay. I chose the Searching for Sugar Man film because I found everything about it fascinating and riveting. It’s an assignment that has always stuck with me and provided significant inspiration in the creation of this platform. It is not quite a tribute to film maker or subject, but the film itself which felt bigger than the sum of its parts.
Please note if you haven’t seen the film, this article contains spoilers.
“As place is sensed, senses are placed, as places make sense, senses make place” (Feld, 1996:91). I reflect on Feld’s quote as I sit down for my second viewing of Malik Bendjelloul’s documentary ‘Searching for Sugar Man’ (2012), this time with family members. My previous viewing had been one of unabashed enjoyment with my boyfriend, but this time round, I was going to try and analyse it with a more critical lens. I try to imagine how the opening shot of the car on the highway would come across, without the haunting guitar chords and Rodriguez’s distinctive vocal being overlaid on top.
Could just the visual shot trigger my memories of similar experiences in the same way? Or did the sound provide a more embodied remembering of place, as posited by Casey? (1987). I am inclined to go with Casey’s perspective, as Rodriguez’s sound almost instantly evokes within my fellow viewers and myself, a very strong sense of nostalgia and something akin to déjà vu. Is it simply because his sound is so strongly reminiscent of Dylan and other artists of that late 60’s and early 70’s era? So strong, in fact, that we all comment on how we feel like we already know his music, which seems strange, when the film quickly reveals that barely anyone outside of South Africa or Australia has heard his work.
As the camera cuts to Stephen “Sugar” Segerman, one of Rodriguez’s biggest South African fans singing along to his music as he drives along, I can recall so many wonderful road trips with friends, family and my boyfriend, singing along to a myriad of different artists. I hear echoes of myself in Sugar’s fervent tone as he describes how his nickname comes from Rodriguez’s most well known song “Sugar Man” and I see myself reflected in his enthusiastic expression. I have been a ‘super fan’ of the band U2 since my early teens and so I find myself quickly resonating with Sugar and Craig Bartholomew, another fan, as they team up to try and discover what happened to the enigmatic and seemingly ‘disappeared’ Rodriguez.
Bendjelloul builds up a sense of mystery around the character of Rodriguez as he charts the artist’s humble beginnings in the working class neighbourhoods of Detroit, where the latter catches the attention of music producers Dennis Coffey and Mike Theodore. In a beautifully crafted and reconstructed sequence, they are seen ‘moving from the mist on the dock into the smoke of the club to find a man playing with his back to the audience’ (The New Yorker 2012). My friend Elena comments on the film’s use of aesthetics “Bendjelloul’s haunting shots of cityscapes carefully edited with Rodriguez’s visionary songs enabled me to be directly transported to smoky dive bars and the foggy crime-filled streets of 1970’s Detroit.”
However, is it actually Detroit or is Bendjelloul giving us his potentially romanticised version? Similar to other recent film portrayals of Detroit, nostalgia can be seen as ‘mythic depiction of the past that leaves out far more than it includes, and filters history through the kind of rose-colored glasses which serve the interests of present hegemonic ideologies’ (Sperb 2016:213). Through the nostalgia-infused lens, it is hard to fully grasp the privations and hardships that Rodriguez and his family have potentially experienced (The New Yorker, 2012). As people of colour living in a culturally and economically deprived city such as Detroit their lives are likely to have been especially challenging (Sperb 2016). “Instead,” my boyfriend says “when you watch the film you focus on the anticipation of his concerts in South Africa and how his fans will feel when they finally see their idol”.
It is a clever way to keep my friends, family and myself fully hooked, rather than potentially switch us off by more honestly depicting Rodriguez’s experiences before fame arrives in the latter stages of his life. However, I think a clearer juxtaposition of the challenges they have faced as a family, due to Rodriguez not receiving any royalties from his former record label, might have provided a more truthful portrayal. Instead, the film focuses on what he means to white South Africans growing up in the apartheid regime and how his anti-establishment and explicit lyrics provide them with a ‘weapon of the weak’ or every day form of resistance against the status quo (Scott 1985).
While I watch it, I imagine growing up somewhere like apartheid-era South Africa, hearing audible gasps from my friends and family at the way authorities intentionally scratch vinyl records to censor certain music tracks. I make a post on Facebook, now very curious to see whether I have South African Rodriguez fans in my network. The responses come in thick and fast. Mildred said, “when I saw the film, the songs were in my cells. I just cried. They took me home like few songs do. The essence wove such completion and wholeness into me.” Maja said: I was giving birth to my daughter listening to his album ‘Cold Fact’-my daughter is half South African of course. And, even though I’m not South African I cried watching the film- a big mark in my life.” Sharon shared that “my 7 year old could sing every song — like Mildred his music was part of the soundtrack of my life in South Africa.”
These reflections take me back to the beginning and how I began with a reflection on sound, place and embodied memory (Casey 1987, Feld 1996). By Mildred claiming that Rodriguez’s music was in her ‘cells’ and Sharon’s seven year old knowing his songs word for word, it makes me reflect on my own experiences of the senses vis-à-vis memory and place. I recall my grandfather tearfully conducting his favourite operas on vinyl records from his armchair, the aroma of his Bristol Cream Sherry lingering in the air. Later on in my childhood, being introduced to a multitude of amazing bands and songwriters on long car journeys by my music enthusiast parents, forever tied to the anticipation and excitement in my tummy at going somewhere new. Realising that this is probably why I am always determined to listen to as much music as possible any time that I am travelling.
My first experiences of U2 concerts, in hot summer sunshine in London, Dublin and Hawaii, the smell of coconut scented sunblock and sweat infused with the feeling of aching limbs from standing for hours at a time. When Rodriguez steps out on stage in front of thousands of screaming fans, I am taken back to the moment when I first watched U2 walk in front of me. The dizzying, extraordinary sensation of experiencing something bigger, a connection to a wider ‘web of significance’ (Geertz 1973:5). At the end of the film, a friend and colleague of Rodriguez describes something akin to Geertz’s web of significance (ibid 1973), as he reflects on the singer-songwriter’s legacy ‘he’s like the silkworm, you know, he takes that raw material and he transforms it. You come out with something that wasn’t there before, something beautiful, something perhaps transcendent, something perhaps eternal. Insofar as he does that, he reminds me of the human spirit, of what’s possible,’ (Bendjelloul 2012:81).
This quote reminds me of our potential choice as human actors to make a life of meaning, regardless of what obstacles we might meet along the way. It is a powerful note on which to bring this beautifully crafted, labour of love documentary to its close. Its use of sound and visual aesthetics like the best of multi-sensorial experience is able to fully make real for me, the otherwise abstract “As place is sensed, senses are placed, as places make sense, senses make place…” (Feld, 1996:91).
Word Count: 1285
References:
Bendjelloul, M. (2012) Searching For Sugar Man. Available at www.netflix.com
Casey, E.S. (1987) Remembering: A phenomenological study. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Feld, S. (1996) ‘Waterfalls of Song: An Acoustemology of Place Resounding in Bosavi, Papua New Guinea’, in Feld, S. and Basso, K.H. (eds.) Senses of Place. Santa Fe, New Mexico: School of American Research Press, pp. 91–137.
Feld, S. and Basso, K.H. (eds.) (1998) Senses of place. 2nd edn. Santa Fe, N.M. : School of American Research Press: School of American Research Press, U.S.
Frere-Jones, S. (2012) Cold Facts. Available at: http://www.newyorker.com/culture/sasha-frere-jones/cold-facts (Accessed: 31 October 2016).
Geertz, C. (1973) The interpretation of cultures: Selected essays. New York, NY: New York, Basic Books
Scott, J.C. (1987) Weapons of the weak: Everyday forms of peasant resistance. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Sperb, J. (2016) ‘The end of Detropia: Fordist nostalgia and the ambivalence of poetic ruins in visions of Detroit’, The Journal of American Culture, 39(2), pp. 212–227. doi: 10.1111/jacc.12532.
