I have only belatedly gotten into Sixto Rodriguez—but then, in fairness, so did everyone.
The story-beats of his career are familiar by now: the Detroit-based musician released a pair of folk-rock albums in the early-‘70s that flopped so hard (his debut Cold Fact didn’t even chart) that he got dropped by his label, the label itself folded, and he was consigned to a life of menial labor and obscurity afterwards. Such, of course, is the common fate of virtually all aspiring Rock stars.
But then his two albums found second life in the Southern Hemisphere, of all places: first in Australia, where he garnered a strong enough cult-following that it was worth the plane ticket to tour there twice in the late-‘70s/early-‘80s; but then even more dramatically, he took off in apartheid South Africa, where by some accounts he outsold Elvis.
Such was the intensity of Rodriguez fandom in South Africa that when apartheid finally ended in 1994 and media censorship was lifted, his fans were flabbergasted to learn: 1) Rodriguez was still alive (the longstanding rumor had been that he’d committed suicide on stage—hence, they assumed, why there were only the two albums); and 2) he was almost completely unknown in his home country. Consequently, a group of South African mega-fans took it upon themselves to track down Rodriguez in Detroit (he didn’t even own a landline), inform him of his massive popularity down in ol’ Mzansi, and finally get him to tour there—as recounted in the Oscar-winning documentary Searching for Sugarman in 2012. Thanks to the doc, Rodriguez also finally found fame in America, played both Letterman and Leno with a full orchestra, and got a New York Times obituary when he passed away at 81 last year. Overall, a feel-good story.
What I want to focus on right now, however, is why he took hold in South Africa in particular, and what that in turn might say (in an oblique and slanted way) about the popularity of Punk and Indie among the youth of Zion, of all places.
By way of comparison: a couple years ago I published a post on this very site about how, despite growing up in the Pacific Northwest within spitting distance of K Records, Kill Rockstars, SubPop, and Kurt Cobain’s hometown of Aberdeen, I nevertheless learned on my mission that “my knowledge of Punk and Alternative [was] downright elementary, even embarrassing, compared to that of the Utahans who would matter-of-factly go on to become my District and Zone Leaders, Elders Quorum and Relief Society Presidents, Home Teachers, Bishops, and Stake High Counselors. That is, it was not the anti-Mormon or ‘less-active’ fringes of Utah, Idaho, Nevada and Arizona where the Punk Rockers flourished, but among the rank-and-file Strength and Youth of Zion.”
At the time, I speculated that Punk and Indie was so popular among the LDS kids in the Intermountain West because, “even ensconced safely behind the Zion Curtain, Mormon youth have had an almost intuitive grasp of their innate outsiderdom, separate from the American mainstream (despite all the Church’s century-long attempts to normalize us to the contrary). Punk and Indie likewise takes an almost perverse pride in its marginality, and can perhaps provide to LDS youth a model for how to thrive on the cultural margins.”
Of course, one also shouldn’t discount the basic appeal of Punk and Indies’ sheer sense of rebellion, either. As was also written in an essay on the LDS appeal of Calvin and Hobbes just last Fall: “Calvin’s radical disobedience was itself part of the appeal: in a conformist heavy culture like ours, replete with numerous dietary, media, Sabbath, and fashion prohibitions, wherein ‘obedience is the first law of heaven,’ Calvin vicariously expressed what so many of us could only dream of doing.” It is exactly among the most regimented and obedient of youth—that is, Mormon kids in the Jello Belt—that subversive art is most likely to resonate on a bone-deep level.
Hence the following passage, from a 2008 Pichfork review of the Cold Fact CD reissue, couldn’t help but jump out to me, for how it explained Rodriguez’s South African popularity:
”The more direct reason his music spread so widely in South Africa, though, was the lyrics, which played as unbelievably subversive to young (predominantly white) South Africans living under a cultural system that was so repressed it considered the entire medium of television too corrupting to be allowed into the country. In a police state like that, songs with lines like, ‘I wonder how many times you’ve had sex/ And I wonder do you know who’ll be next’—never mind the drug-dealing references and anti-establishment messages—had automatic currency, the kind that caused listeners to circulate it amongst their friends. Ironically, the military was the most fertile ground through which music like this spread, as compulsory service for whites spread records throughout the male population by easy word of mouth.” Once again, it was among the most regimented and obedient of youth—in this case, white kids doing compulsory military service for an oppressive apartheid state—that subversive art resonated the most.
The irony of course is that Rodriguez, though certainly socially-conscious, wasn’t even all that subversive! His signature song “Sugar Man,” for example, is obviously about his drug dealer, but not much more blatantly than, say, “Doctor Roberts” by the Beatles (heck, it’s still not as blunt as “Heroin” by the Velvet Underground—though it does share with the latter a strong understanding for why the desperate might seek solace in drugs in the first place). Likewise “Inner City Blues”, “This is Not a Song, It’s an Outburst”, and “Gomorrah (A Lullaby)” are all fine protest songs, but they aren’t especially more incendiary than, say, Bob Dylan or Neil Young.
But perhaps in a place as repressive and repressed as apartheid South Africa, any level of social criticism is going to feel like a revelation! (It’s like the first time I read Catch-22 at 17; though the book largely just gets dismissed as a dorm-room cliché nowadays, for a teen like me raised in a staunchly conservative household in a deeply Republican community, it was a bona fide epiphany to read a book that not only mocked the U.S. military, but did so without ultimately lionizing the troops in the end! The simple act of not fetishizing WWII blew my mind at the time.) It was maybe Rodriguez’s bad luck to release his music in a Vietnam-era U.S. market already saturated with protest songs to the point of cliché; but also paradoxically his good luck for his songs to then sneak into a South African market so restrictive that they couldn’t help but feel like a breath of fresh air (indeed, perhaps his then-lack of global popularity is why his music was able to sneak past the South African censors in the first place).
These are all of course speculations. I must also here emphasize that the cultural repressiveness of the Intermountain West is obviously far milder than that of apartheid South Africa (though we’re also tainted with our own awful history of racial segregation; even if Utah was never nearly as bad as Cape Town, as Seneca reminds us, it is not goodness to be better than the worst). Nevertheless, it is also not controversial to note that there is still a stifling atmosphere in Mormondom that even the orthodox and the faithful have had frequent cause to roll their eyes at. The standard Rock ‘n Roll Rebel cliches cease to feel like cliches when the atmosphere is oppressive in any degree of unrighteousness. Hence why so many youth, from the kids drafted into the apartheid battalions of Johannesburg clear down to the children of MLMers on the Wasatch Front, are drawn to the music of the margins; they instinctively feel that all these predatory and exploitative behaviors, whether trivial or gross, are not what we were put on this earth to do, no matter what our elders may insist otherwise.
In such self-reflective moments, we are all the more susceptible to those outside voices—sometimes still and small, yet which even then can also make “my bones to quake while it maketh manifest”—that whisper to us that there are far better things we should be doing with our all-too-brief mortal probations. In this, the Punk Rockers and the Prophets, the Protest-singers and the Apostles, the Sugar Men and the Holy Spirit they mimic, have drawn far closer to each other than we have previously dared acknowledge. We are all feeling after the same God that feels after us. Consider that, as Rodriguez would term it, a Cold Fact.