Searching for Sugar Man

I wasn’t going to post a blip today. I hate being a slave to this every-day thing. I like taking breaks, shutting the laptop, getting a little time to breathe, away from the camera and writing and comments and community and all of it. I like sometimes to be alone and still.

But today my number finally came up at the library. I had been on the waiting list for Searching for Sugar Man since it was nominated for an Oscar and won last March. I wasn’t sure I’d like it. I’m clueless about popular music of any time period, and here was a guy, a singer-songwriter from Detroit who tried to make it in the years of my youth: 1969 to 1973. He was thought to be dead from some spectacular dramatic suicide. He was unknown in his own country but adored by anti-Apartheid white South Africans at a time when South Africa was cut off from the rest of the world. He turns out to be alive, and maybe shy or deeply introverted or reclusive, very humble. And he gets found, and without writing a single new bar of music, just leaning on the work of those early years, he makes a comeback. It’s a guy thing, this movie. Rodriguez has three daughters. We don’t know what kind of father he was or who their mothers were or how he treated them, but apart from their cameo appearances, everybody associated with the quest for this man except the cinematographer, is a guy. I wanted to see it, but I didn’t expect to care about it deeply.

I do. I’m so moved by it that I might have to buy a copy, and you won’t hear me say that often. There is something in this film, in this story, that speaks directly to my core. Rodriguez is genuinely humble. I can relate to that. He needs to walk long distances in the city, and walk alone. He keeps his working-class identity; his hard hands, his stiff back, his posture, are all marked by his labor. He never asks where the money went, or why he doesn’t get it, even now. Some of his songs are beautiful, both the lyrics and the melodies, but it’s not the songs really but the quality of the man, the smallness of the ego, the love he gets when he goes to South Africa, even the love the film is getting.

A South African journalist says it well: “Isn’t this all our dream? That one day your talents will become visible to all the world.” It’s a dream of being loved, especially appealing to those who were not much loved as children. Here’s a very nice guy, as far as we can tell, who works hard all his life, ends up living alone and very simply in a run-down house in Detroit, and finally becomes a rock star--well, at least in South Africa, for four tours, singing his forty-year-old songs with a South African backup band.

It's a dream-come-true story. It’s not about the money. It’s not about privilege nor about justice for artists and dreamers. It’s not about politics, it’s really not about music, and it’s not, as a popular radio personality in the USA says, about all our children being above average. It’s the dream that one day our talents will become visible and we will be loved, and the love won’t spoil us: we’ll still be humble and a little awkward in interviews, and what has been starved will be fed. We’ll be very solidly loved. It’s a very happy documentary, and you don’t see that often.

There’s one other thing. In looks, voice, and manner, Rodriguez reminds me very much of my friend Frank Aseron, who visited this past January. It was the first time I’d seen Frank since about 1973, when he looked like the young Rodriguez. Suddenly he appeared, looking and sounding like Rodriguez sounds now, vividly reminding me of those years. I am grateful to be the age I am, to have seen the movements and heard the music of these years. Tonight I’ll probably have some mixed up dream about Rodriguez, Frank Aseron, and myself in 1973, all of us with long hair and very big dreams that never came true. Maybe in that dream I’ll walk onto a stage and 20,000 people will cheer. And then maybe tomorrow I’ll wake up and go online and buy the movie.