{"id":47373,"date":"2013-02-26T11:23:17","date_gmt":"2013-02-26T16:23:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=47373"},"modified":"2013-02-26T11:27:51","modified_gmt":"2013-02-26T16:27:51","slug":"sugar-rush-letter-from-cape-town","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2013\/02\/26\/sugar-rush-letter-from-cape-town\/","title":{"rendered":"Sugar Rush: Letter from Cape Town"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"120614sugarman_6349050\"<\/a>Grand West Casino is decorated in the theme of \u201cCape Town\u2019s Maritime Tradition.\u201d A tradition which involves, for the most part, magenta skies painted on oppressively low ceilings, so that your subconscious incessantly implores you to hunch. At Grand West you may gamble or ice skate or play miniature golf or watch a show. We\u2019ve arrived\u2014my sister and I\u2014for option four. I\u2019ve option foured here a few times, most often with regret. South Africans have a certain obsequious gratitude when it comes to international acts (a holdover, I assume, from three decades of cultural boycotts), so that we now seem to provide palliative care for washed up music careers the world over, one rung above, or perhaps below, the cruise ship circuit. In the last few years we\u2019ve offered our gushy services to Helmut Lotti, Belinda Carlisle, Gladys Knight, Roxette, and, incessantly, Michael Learns to Rock.<\/p>\n

But not tonight. Tonight isn\u2019t the usual Southern Hemisphere rent-a-crowd. Quite the opposite. Because tonight we\u2019re here for the grand reunion of the guru and his gurees: it\u2019s Wednesday, February 20, and Rodriguez is on his first tour of South Africa since all the hullabaloo around Searching for Sugar Man<\/i>. Letterman hullabaloo, Leno hullabaloo, iTunes hullabaloo, Oscars hullabaloo. They say the first audience at Sundance was laughing and sobbing and talking in tongues. What a story; what a man. Stoic. Poet. Prophet. Maybe a bit of an alcoholic, rumor has it, but who isn\u2019t? I tell you, as a South African, to finally see him get international recognition … it\u2019s pretty irritating, actually. This was our one thing. And now, whooshhh<\/i>: gone. Well, not gone<\/em>, but omnipresent, which is just as bad. I watched the film with a viper of vexation writhing around in my gut. Not because there was much wrong with it but because, I mean, why hadn\u2019t I made it? Just imagine how actual<\/i> documentary filmmakers must\u2019ve felt! After repeatedly scratching \u201cRodriguez story\u201d off their project lists for fear it was too obvious. And then, enter Malik Bendjelloul. Malik Bendjelloul from Sweden. Malik Bendjelloul from Sweden comes all the way to South Africa on a \u201cstory-finding\u201d excursion, and he finds our story.<\/p>\n

Where once I could have indulgently filled you in, with the rare confidence of someone who has something interesting to say, I believe the abridged version will now suffice. In Detroit it goes like this: construction, construction\u2014Whoa, fame!<\/i>\u2014construction, construction. In the parallel world of Cape Town it simultaneously goes like this: he\u2019s dead and famous everywhere; he\u2019s dead and only famous here; he\u2019s not even dead. Now, back in the present, not only is he alive, but he\u2019s also genuinely famous everywhere. And if we\u2019re gradually accepting that Rodriguez is no longer our tale to tell, we\u2019re not yet willing to give up the lead in his adulation. There has been rampant appreciation inflation. If you once only owned Cold Fact<\/i>, you now have to memorize all the lyrics in Coming from Reality<\/i>. If you once boasted that you’d been listening to him since childhood, it now emerges that you\u2019d actually been listening to him in utero. And you definitely, no question, have to see him perform.<\/p>\n

Terrible things have happened to concerts. The seats are more comfortable than ever, sure, but as for everything else … There were no lighters to be waved, no lumo bracelets, no hard tack, no glass bottles, no smoking, barely any dancing. We sat as if watching a TED<\/small> talk. You could, if you were risqu\u00e9, shuffle a little above your seat. But if you tried to shuffle beyond your seat, into an aisle, a neon-vested fire marshal would soon shuffle you right back. You understand: this was not to be one of those \u201cintimate\u201d affairs, which you can recount annoyingly for eons, like that time you walked into an abandoned hall to avoid the rain only to find Nick Cave standing there in the dim light of a chandelier, and he composed a song about you before biting off the head of a rose and sprinkling you with petals. No. This was one of those regular, stranger concerts. Where the star walks out and you make a minute-long effort to stare at the \u201creal\u201d them, register their bizarre material minuteness (Celebs! Just like us!), and then content yourself with the accompanying screens for the rest of the night; watching, in effect, the simulcast of the very event you\u2019re at.<\/p>\n

Some people at Grand West hadn\u2019t quite accepted the limitations of the venue. A gung-ho group in block H tried to rally a Mexican wave and failed embarrassingly about four times, before succeeding, to my surprise, so we were all compelled to half-raise ourselves and make whooping noises which had nothing to do with our mood. When this festivity was done I heard the man behind me repeat the nation\u2019s favorite false utterance: \u201cOnly in South Africa, hey, only in South Africa.\u201d This man\u2019s running commentary was to be my constant companion: I am so familiar with his thoughts on the entire Rodriguez concert experience that I could easily be writing this from his perspective instead of my own. (He enjoyed the whole thing a helluva lot more). Among the things I now know about my constant companion is that he doesn\u2019t think Oscar Pistorius meant to shoot Reeva Steenkamp. He\u2019s also a huge Rodriguez fan. Huge. He\u2019s seen the film twice, and this was his second concert. Though after the monotone opening act, with the screen still hanging over the stage, when the first song began to play, he said \u201cDo you think this is him already, or just his CD?\u201d And his friend had to say, \u201cThis is, um, Cat Stevens.\u201d<\/p>\n

The time arrived. The screen lifted. A small posse of musicians dispersed to their respective instruments. Rodriguez (vest, dark glasses, bird bolo tie) said nothing as he adjusted his guitar, and pulled on a black felt hat, perfectly completing his resemblance to Yoko Ono. And then, hallelujah, he began to strum the first magical chords to … I don\u2019t know. May we pretend from now on that my memory has perfectly retained the order of songs? Thank you. The first magical chords to … \u201cLike Janis.\u201d And you measure for wealth by the things you can hold, and you measure for love by the sweet things you\u2019re told, and you live in the past of a dream that you\u2019re in, and your selfishness is your cardinal sin\u2014<\/i><\/p>\n

That was written well over forty years ago. Rodriguez is seventy now, and in declining health. No one came expecting a showman. The first Detroit concert described in Searching for Sugar Man<\/i> has him hunched in the corner of the room, back to the audience. And you still get the feeling that\u2019s how he\u2019d prefer it. It\u2019s as good as perfect. There are some concerts you go to for the razzmatazz, but others you go to as a pilgrimage. This was the latter. The only way the messiah can get it wrong is by failing to show. But a big part of any pilgrimage is also the other pilgrims; a community of shared faith, or its modern substitute\u2014shared taste. And here is where the problems began. On this February night, at Grand West, I was made complicit in The Worst Audience.<\/p>\n

This realization arrived to me as fact but with very little justification. At first it was just a lingering prejudice, which grew a little more every time I overheard the phrase \u201csoundtrack to my life<\/i>.\u201d In time I would make a little headway in articulating it, which I\u2019ll get to, but on the night it just clung to me irrationally, like a lemur or a child. One distinct aspect of The Worst Audience was that it discovered early on that it had acoustic power. For whatever reason, the miraculous design of Grand West stadium allows ordinary mortal voices to travel freely throughout the enormous space, without much need for amplification\u2014with just a slightly raised voice, any fool could be heard by all, including the venerated Sugar Man. Between every flippin song: \u201cI love you!\u201d \u201cMe too!\u201d \u201cMe threeee!\u201d \u201cMarry me!\u201d \u201cSixto!\u201d \u201cRodriguez for president!\u201d \u201cI\u2019d vote for you!\u201d \u201cMove here!\u201d \u201cAre you still in that same house?!\u201d \u201cHello Frikkie! Hello Johan! Hahaha, Sorry I couldn\u2019t resist!\u201d<\/p>\n

Occasionally Rodriguez would sip from a bottle of water, or sometimes from one of those small ceramic hotel-room mugs. This mug, with its mysterious contents, became an object of fixation for The Worst Audience. \u201cHey! Sixto! What\u2019s in the mug?!\u201d \u201cWhat\u2019s that you\u2019re drinking?!\u201d My constant companions decided early it contained tequila, \u201cbecause he\u2019s Mexican,\u201d and amused themselves by screaming \u201cTequila!\u201d every time he took a sip. Once when Rodriguez went for the mug (\u201cTequila!\u201d), another woman also screamed \u201cCaf\u00e9!\u201d A ripple of mortification ran through the hall, and the crier realized her innocuous caf\u00e9<\/em> had been mistaken for the most egregious South African racial slur. The confusion probably started with how absurd it is to share a two-syllable observation as banal as caf\u00e9<\/em> with an audience of several thousand: we are more accustomed, it seems, to the Tourette\u2019s of bigotry than that of beanery. \u201cOh no!\u201d she screamed again, desperate to recover. \u201cI meant \u2018caf\u00e9!\u2019<\/i>\u201d (Silence). \u201cAs in \u2018coffee\u2019!\u201d (Silence). \u201cIn Spanish!\u201d (Silence). \u201cOh no!! I wasn\u2019t being racist!\u201d<\/p>\n

Only in South Africa, hey, only in South Africa. A brief adjournment among the musicians commenced, and the next song began at last (\u201cHate Street Dialogue\u201d?). During the quieter bits you could still hear Caf\u00e9\u2019s mumbled explanations. I want to acknowledge something about The Worst Audience: I was in it. This is the bitch about group membership. There are some collectives I\u2019d just as happily bow out of, but if we all took that option, who would be left to take responsibility for abominations like … well, everything. To be sure there was a counter-presence there that night: the anti-establishment within the self-proclaimed anti-establishment crowd. \u201cShhhh,\u201d they hissed. \u201cShut up!\u201d \u201cQuiet.\u201d Maybe those were the people I\u2019d paid handsomely to sidle up beside, though I wasn\u2019t seated near any of them.<\/p>\n

And frankly I wasn\u2019t faultless. As Rodriguez began singing \u201cCrucify Your Mind\u201d I leaned over to my sister, stage whispering, \u201cThis is my favorite,\u201d and then I sang it loudly just to prove to all and sundry and no one in particular that I knew all the lyrics. No doubt, through those refrains, the Tequila Guys resented me with the same heft with which I\u2019d been resenting them. (As it turns out, matched resentment is what we arrived at instead of sincere tolerance. Democracy, you scoundrel!) But once \u201cCrucify\u201d was done the delicate balance between the allure of the messiah and the detestation of the pilgrims began to tip, tip and tumble. We were stuck in a pie-sliver of seats which had no direct relationship with aisles; undeterred, we shoved past our fellow citizens, our huffing early exit intended as a variation of rebuke. We sprinted in the parking lot, though we are not runners by nature, which I use here as a symbol for freedom. We took the N1 back into the city bowl, listening to Johnny Cash: the severe topography of Cape Town growing in our windscreen; a thousand climbers descending Lion\u2019s Head in the dark, their flashlights strung like tinsel across its crown.<\/p>\n

When I got home and took a dip in the Google I could finally start to put words to what had been so iffy about that crowd. The indicative words came from Rian Malan. Malan\u2014The Great, it must be said\u2014penned a piece for a local newspaper a couple of weeks ago in which he thought, Why not take Rodriguez\u2019s recent mega-success as a kind of existential endorsement for his ilk? Malan features in the documentary: that long-haired hippy who thought the whole spandangle of Rodriguez being alive was a poorly-conceived hoax. \u201cThe royal \u2018we\u2019,\u201d he writes, \u201cAs in old white hippies\u2014at last have a movie we can be proud of.\u201d He also writes: \u201cRodriguez\u2019s global triumph is actually a huge compliment to people like me\u2014white South Africans born in the baby boom, raised on the apartheid moonbase and converted in the Sixties to the cause of long hair and teen rebellion … We got it; Americans did not.\u201d<\/p>\n

A few things are going on here. Thing one: hubris. But why dwell on it; who doesn\u2019t when they have the chance? Thing two: nostalgia. When you grew up in a country like this, on the oppressor side of the frontier lines, nostalgia can feel a tad morally problematic. What\u2019s that you miss? The eighties? Oh you liked those, did you? I think part of the recent Rodriguez high around here has been about this condoned nostalgia for an older white generation. Suddenly you can reminisce about which suburb you grew up in, which dances you went to, what music you were listening to, and not really have to mention apartheid. \u201cI grew up in Linden!\u201d \u201cI grew up in Emmarentia!\u201d \u201cWe danced at the Lemon Squeezer!\u201d And maybe that\u2019s okay. I\u2019m not intent on having my say on the matter here, one way or the other. Nostalgia is an issue. But not the <\/i>issue.<\/p>\n

Thing three: the \u201canti-establishment.\u201d The lore in Searching for Sugar Man <\/i>(which, in fairness, Malan also disputes) is that Rodriguez\u2019s albums were part of a wider political movement. It\u2019s a strange kind of algebra: Rodriguez was anti-establishment, I was into Rodriguez, therefore I was anti-establishment. It turns out everyone was a liberation hero. Which, phew, is a real load off the old conscience. It also turns out that they were all part of a \u201cscene.\u201d And let\u2019s not kid: our adult lives are lived in desperate search for a scene. It\u2019s a more affirming thing than anyone would care to admit. Accept that by fairly authoritative accounts, the Rodriguez scene of yesteryear is being amply misremembered. Anton Kannemeyer\u2014also The Great, while I\u2019m at it\u2014wrote into the newspaper too. \u201cMy brother and I were once beaten up by Rodriguez jocks because we listened to Kiss and the Sex Pistols. So what is all this \u2018white hippy\u2019 shit I’m hearing now? For me, Rodriguez was right up there with rugby and Die Stem.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rodriguez jocks<\/i>? There are lots of ways to be a fan, and all these generalizations will be more false than true. But I think there\u2019s something telling about the biggest hits from Cold Fact<\/i> in South Africa. They\u2019re great songs, but they\u2019re also of the worst of them (the actual worst is that nursery rhyme song: track 10). And for a nation that\u2019s now calling this album its theme song to political freedom, it\u2019s worth remembering that these are the two tracks that have the least to do with freedom. Forgive me, but with hindsight these look like the songs chosen by a\u00a0 populace made puerile by censorship and patriarchy. \u201cI Wonder\u201d: the sex one. \u201cSugarman\u201d: the drug one. And if in South Africa the song of the eigties was \u201cI Wonder,\u201d then the song of the nineties, as I remember it, was probably Salt-N-Pepa\u2019s \u201cLet\u2019s Talk About Sex.\u201d I leave the rest of the deductions to your perverted minds; mine is out gathering forget-me-nots.<\/p>\n

The final thing is ownership. This, at last, was how I came to understand what felt wrong at Grand West. Something was off-kilter with the star\/fan relationship. You got the sense that we thought he was ours, that maybe he even owed us. That it wasn\u2019t just us who chose him, but he who chose us. It\u2019s worth remembering that he didn\u2019t. Back when, in the early incarnations of the Rodriguez story\u2014told to one another at dinner parties every time the songs shuffled on (\u201cDid you know he\u2019s only famous here?\u201d)\u2014this question often arose: Why didn\u2019t he just move here? The Worst Audience certainly wanted to know. \u201cStay here!\u201d \u201cStay with me!\u201d For fifteen long years: no need to walk slowly through the snow (it never snows here!), no need to do roofing (we\u2019ll start paying for CDs!), no need to play to an empty room, no need, even, to introduce yourself. Of course, as it stands, the story ends happily. That seems about right. Recognition, acknowledgement, attention, some money. But since all that is already so well established, let me say this. It also sounds like a drag. To suddenly have to be cast as this inspirational tale: The little folksinger who could. The man-as-metaphor. No need to carry a fridge again, just carry this: a few million people\u2019s projections, misinterpretation, mismemory.<\/p>\n

\u201cHow does that feel? You weren\u2019t aware of something that would\u2019ve changed your life completely, probably for the better,\u201d Bendjelloul asks, towards the end of the film. \u201cWell, I don\u2019t know if it would\u2019ve been for the better,\u201d says Rodriguez (Buddha, most likely), coy, hand pulling his shirt collar together. \u201cIt\u2019s certainly a thought, you know.\u201d It is a thought. It\u2019s also a thought whether it would\u2019ve been better never to have been noticed at all. One can imagine in some ways that that\u2019s the career Dylan would\u2019ve preferred: unsullied, somehow. There\u2019s an angle from which fans look like a vulgarizing force. We think of the artist as requiring an audience, but maybe an artist is complete on their own. Maybe it\u2019s just trash that requires an audience. Rick Emmerson seemed to know something about this. Emmerson is the other construction worker who appears in Searching for Sugar Man<\/i>, leaving me with the final impression that you can\u2019t trip on a street in Detroit without falling into the arms of a philosopher. \u201cHe had this kind of magical quality that all genuine artists and poets have,\u201d Emmerson muses about his friend. \u201cYou take this raw material, and you transform it. You come out with something that wasn\u2019t there before. Something beautiful. Something, perhaps, transcendent; something, perhaps, eternal.\u201d<\/p>\n

That might be enough. That might be the only thing that\u2019s enough. And if it is\u2014and maybe it is\u2014then Rodriguez never needed any of us, or any of this, and he still doesn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

Anna Hartford is a writer based in Cape Town.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Grand West Casino is decorated in the theme of \u201cCape Town\u2019s Maritime Tradition.\u201d A tradition which involves, for the most part, magenta skies painted on oppressively low ceilings, so that your subconscious incessantly implores you to hunch. At Grand West you may gamble or ice skate or play miniature golf or watch a show. We\u2019ve […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":488,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[10167,10165,79,10168,10166,10170,46,8332,10169,8333,10164,87],"class_list":["post-47373","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-belinda-carlisle","tag-cape-town","tag-film","tag-gladys-knight","tag-helmut-lotti","tag-malik-bendjelloul","tag-music","tag-rodriguez","tag-roxette","tag-searching-for-sugar-man","tag-sixto-rodriguez","tag-south-africa"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nSugar Rush: Letter from Cape Town by Anna Hartford<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"February 26, 2013 \u2013 Grand West Casino is decorated in the theme of \u201cCape Town\u2019s Maritime Tradition.\u201d A tradition which involves, for the most part, magenta skies painted on\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" 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