Searching for Sugar Man :: Original Soundtrack (2012)

If you’re drawn to the vitriolic dimension of Rodriguez’s 26-song opus and are tracking reactions to Searching for Sugar Man, you’re probably tempted to respond to the media blitz with a pinch of cynicism. A Wikipedia entry, tweets and a rash of Facebook pages? Tick. Official merch and top-dollar eBay memorabilia? Affirmative. Bandwagoning and profiteering? Maybe, but who the fuck cares? Certainly not Rodriguez. “Fame is fleeting,” is the cold fact that he drops on CNN (video below). It’s his highest profile interview ever. His star has never shone brighter. Yet he responds with an air of cultivated detachment. This is not the man who wrote those songs 40 years ago. He’s even wiser.

And as for the unfortunate “Hispanic Dylan” tag that accompanies most mainstream commentary about Rodriguez, perhaps it’s best to identify the truth in it. While “Dylanesque” has come to describe any guitar-strumming singer-songwriter with a taste for poetry and irony, there are certainly Dylan and Rodriguez songs that make great companions. “Sugar Man” speaks to “Tambourine Man” while “Establishment Blues” sits comfortably next to “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” “Forget It” and “It Ain’t Me Babe” are both table-turning reactions to being dumped and “Like Janis” and “Like a Rolling Stone” see Rodriguez and Dylan at their most vividly scornful.

As for Rodriguez’s Hispanic credentials, it’s hard to tell. His strumming technique definitely betrays shades of Mexico but he certainly doesn’t lean on Latin pop sensibilities and is unlikely to ever be anthologised alongside troubadours like Trini Lopez or José Feliciano. More useful are parallels with the work of Leonard Cohen (stick on “Cause” and “Suzanne” in rapid succession) or Lou Reed (the same characters of “Most Disgusting Song” inhabit “Walk on the Wild Side.”) Add Rodriguez (Detroit) to Reed (New York) and Bukowski (Los Angeles) and you can trace the coast-to-coast, downtrodden, urban fallout of Hunter S. Thompson’s wave that broke and rolled back at the end of the 1960s.

All this in lieu of a legitimate review of the Searching for Sugar Man soundtrack. Suffice to say that this compilation is the most astute way of packaging “the best” of an artist who has only released two albums. It’s a combination of songs from both Cold Fact and Coming from Reality with a trio of non-album singles to boot. In short, if you’re certain you’ll only ever be satisfied with one Rodriguez album, this is your best bet. And if what you’ve already got was released before the “Dead Man” tour, you could do worse than support a remastered playlist that Rodriguez will get a cut from. Who knows, insomuch as it describes itself as an “original motion picture soundtrack,” there may even be room for an Oscar nomination if Sony Legacy can bend the “written specifically for a film” rule. One glaring omission, however, is a track or two from his South African concert album Live Fact. Although a rusty Rodriguez fronts a makeshift local backing band, his 1998 tour is central to the film and his interaction with the crowd and “thanks for keeping me alive” quip are golden.
 

Sugar Man :: Bigger than the King, Stones, Beatles & Batman

You’ve heard every story there is to tell? How about this one? A Swedish guy makes a documentary in 2012 about a 1970s folkster from Detroit who returns from obscurity after discovering that he has a large, devoted audience in South Africa. The film culminates in a cathartic 1998 concert marking the musician’s first significant performance in 27 years to an audience who thought that he had died. The film is critically acclaimed and makes big waves in the US and the UK but, and here’s the rub, nobody in South Africa knows that it exists.

The real magic of the Rodriguez “story” (which belongs to different a dimension to the content of his two albums, which I’ll cunningly abbreviate as Fact and Reality) is that it continues to deliver delicious ironies. As such, perhaps its fitting that the dramatisation of this story should see its SA “preview/première” in the margins of the Durban Film Festival after taking the rest of the world by storm. Nevertheless, that the story is being well received abroad is cause for celebration in South Africa insomuch as we're paying dues for 30 years of Cold Fact sales that didn’t include Roriguez in the value chain by playing a role in launching a music career that slid below the US stardom radar in the 1970s.

Truth be told, Rodriguez is currently on his third resurrection. The “Rodriguez Alive” tour in Australia (yes, they also thought he was dead) marked his first circa 1979 through 1981. The second began with the first appearance of Cold Fact on CD in South African in 1991, taking in the release of Coming from Reality (mistakenly identified as his lost debut) in 1996 and ending with his “Dead Man” tour in 1998. The trilogy concludes with the first CD release of Cold Fact in the US in 2008 and features the world première of Searching for Sugar Man at Sundance in January 2012, where it was quickly snapped up by Sony Pictures Classics. In short, there’s room for a prequel and a sequel. Any (more) musicologist detective (filmmakers) out there?

Oh, and by the way, the story of  the other “honorary” South African album, Paul Simon’s Graceland, also premièred at Sundance this year in the form of Under African Skies. As Cape Town vinyl expert Steven Segerman surmises, Simon & Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Water (1970),  which appeared about a month before Cold Fact and went on to become the world’s best-selling album for the next two years, was responsible for stealing the thunder from everything  that folk-rock dropped in its wake. Yet, 40-odd years down the line, Simon and Rodriguez share their stories on the same film festival platform with both Graceland and the Searching for Sugar Man Original Soundtrack rubbing elbows in the Sony Legacy Recordings catalogue. “These are the days of miracles and wonder” indeed, to quote the closing words of the Searching for Sugar Man trailer, which inadvertently quotes Paul Simon’s “Boy in the Bubble” from Graceland. Just a weird song title randomly inspired by a trip to 1980s South Africa? Take another look at the cover of Cold Fact. Curiouser and curiouser.

At DIFF :: Searching for Sugar Man

Searching for Sugar Man | Malik Bendjellou | Sweden, United Kingdom | 2012 | 85min

Many attempts have been made to dramatise the incredible shift in global consciousness that came about when the Internet started performing its magic in the mid-90s; when we discovered ourselves across time and space and realised that we were seeing ourselves in each other’s songs; when fiction was replaced by facts that were better than fiction. Few of these attempts can match the true story of an artifact that lost contact with its mothership and was orphaned on a distant planet where it stirred and amused the locals and provoked fantasies about its unknown origin until a technology was devised that would open a line of contact with its creator and reconcile imagination with reality.

Distilled as such, Malik Bendjelloul’s Searching for Sugar Man (2012) is a documentary about our addiction to stories and the deep satisfaction that narrative patterns and peculiarities provide. The music of Rodriguez forms the tingling spine of the film but its overarching genius lies in the fact that Sixto Rodriguez is the “MacGuffin” of his own tale and has little to add when the yarn finally catches up with him. Rodriguez occupies the eye of a storm of intrigue, commentary and enquiry and then lopes through the Detroit snow with his mystery as intact as the crystal-ball apparition on the cover of Cold Fact.

Searching for Sugar Man is a beautifully crafted and emotionally evocative addition to Rodriguez lore and one that, given its success at Sundance 2012, seems set to finally and deservedly embed Cold Fact and Coming from Reality (released on CD in the US for the first time in 2008 and 2009) in the consciousness of his homeland. In addition to introducing the songwriter’s three daughters, the film features Detroit and London collaborators as well as Cape Town’s Stephen Segerman, Mabu Vinyl purveyor of sonic delights and a key cog in the strange mechanism that brought Rodriguez back from the dead and onto a stage in Belleville in 1998.