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Abstract
Malik Bendjelloul’s music documentary, Searching for Sugar Man (2012), uses the narrative of its central figure, American rock “n” roll musician Sixto Rodriguez, to allegorize South Africa’s emergence from censorship and isolationism to a post-apartheid and increasingly transnational dispensation. I look at the cultural politics of apartheid-era censorship in attempt to account for Rodriguez’s cult appeal in South Africa, despite his artistic shortcomings and his obscurity in the USA. I then focus on the film’s final concert sequence, featuring Rodriguez’s first South African performance, which Bendjelloul subtly positions as a moment of celebration over the new possibilities enabled by the demise of apartheid and the rise of an increasingly integrated global culture.
Notes
1Quotations from the film, transcription the author’s.
2It is worth noting that the film’s production circumstances were themselves enabled by transnational circuits of communication. Bendjelloul, a documentary filmmaker for Swedish television, discovered Rodriguez while backpacking through South Africa in search of true stories to film. Rodriguez himself was a Latino performer who was ignored in his home country of America, but adored in faraway South Africa, and also in Australia—although the film makes no mention of the story’s Australian dimensions. Moreover, Sugar Man achieved considerable popularity among American audiences, who, in turn, have revived interest in Rodriguez’s music within the USA, thereby closing this transnational circuit.
3Theorists disagree, however, as to how essential these two phenomena are within the new world order. For instance, Robert McChesney argues that electronic communications and post-Cold War politics provide the context for the current era of cultural globalization, but the driving force is the rise of neoliberal policies and expansionist business practices, which have enabled a handful of media conglomerates and culture producers to dominate the cultural marketplace.
4For instance, see Doobo’s, “Hybridity and the Rise of Korean Popular Culture in Asia.”
5For instance, see Austin, “Double Vision: Al Jazeera English at Odds with the American Media.”
6In the course of researching for this article, I happened on a few insightful papers that nuance the discussion of cultural globalization and transnational hybridity in interesting ways. For instance, Siho Nam, in an essay on the burgeoning Korean cultural industry, argues that Korean cultural products simultaneously rebuff western hegemony (by offering marketable alternatives), replicate it (by incorporating western ideals within Korean cultural texts), and supplant it (by dominating large sections of the regional marketplace in a manner that is reminiscent of American cultural imperialism). Moreover, Mpolokeng Bogatsu’s essay on the South African fashion label Loxion Kulcha shows how a popular domestic product has synthesized transnational and local references, thereby crafting a style that both incorporates and resists western fashion trends. These articles go beyond simplistic conceptions of cultural globalization as a force that either decentralizes or further entrenches western imperialism.
7Gitlin, The Sixties, 420.
8Hunt, 149.
9Ibid., 157.
10The Manson murders were a series of home invasions and killings in the summer of 1969, enacted by members of a California-based commune who identified with the sixties counterculture. The Altamont Free Concert in northern California (December 1969), featured many of the decade’s leading bands. The event is remembered for several violent episodes, including a hit-and-run accident and the onstage killing of a festival attendee, committed by Hells Angels who were contracted to manage security for the event.
11The sixties counterculture is difficult to define, since it was comprised of loosely affiliated groups with varying backgrounds, motivations, and practices. The hippies, rock ’n’ fans, political theorists, and activists that have come to be associated with sixties social rebellion did not belong to a single, ideologically coherent movement. My use of the term counterculture is, therefore, by necessity, vague.
12Jones, “A Conversation with Searching for Sugar Man Director, Malik Bendjelloul,” par. 13.
13Segerman pinpoints the mid-seventies as the point in time by which Rodriguez had become a household name among white middle-class pop-culture–savvy liberals. Given that the album came out in 1970, and that the South African market did not embrace it instantaneously, I see no reason to second-guess Segerman’s timeframe.
14Drewett, “Censorship of Popular Music,” 190–1.
15Merrett, A Culture of Censorship, 62.
16Ibid., 80.
17McDonald, 36.
18Coetzee credits Van Rooyen with having articulated the underlying philosophies of the censorship state: “If we wish to understand South African censorship in its systematic phase, from the coming into force of the Publications and Entertainment Act of 1963 to the negotiation of a democratic constitution … there is no better place to start than with Van Rooyen’s account of its working.” Coetzee, “The Work of the Censor,” 186.
19Ibid., 192.
20The connections between drug culture, music culture, and popular culture in fifties and sixties America are too numerous to list. The most obvious examples include Miles Davis’s oft-quoted assertion that jazz music popularized herion, Ken Kesey’s LSD-fueled parties in mid-sixties San Francisco with the Grateful Dead in attendance—popularized in Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968)—as well as the 1965 Jefferson Airplane concert where attendees were brought onstage to sip LSD-spiked punch from an oversized chalice.
21Grundlingh, “Rocking the Boat in South Africa?” 486–7.
22Ibid., 498.
23Pettiness was a characteristic of the apartheid system, as author Christopher Hope noted when he complained that the state “presides over every activity from burials to bowel movements” (Hope, “A Warning to Others,” 95.) Hope’s formulation is parodic, but it nevertheless captures the state’s propensity to intrude into even the most banal aspects of life.
24Maingard, “Imag(in)ing the South African Nation,” 22.
25A recent New Yorker article comments on instances of aspiring Korean pop performers being coerced into facial reconstruction surgery so as to look more western. (Seabrook, “Factory Girls,” 91.)
26For instance, see Taylor and Williams’s, “Neoliberalism and the Political Economy of the New South Africa.”