Movie Review: Searching For Sugar Man: Meet Rodriguez, The ...

In the early 1970s, a shaded, Mexican-American singer-songwriter from Detroit, Michigan named Rodriguez recorded two albums. Their fate, despite some decent reviews, were the same of thousands of records recorded each year: obscurity. Rodriguez continued to perform, and then he disappeared, another failed musician fading back into the landscape. End of story ? if you could even call it that.

South African filmmaker Malik Bendjelloul?s documentary film, Searching for Sugar Man, takes up Rodriguez?s story nearly thirty years later. In perhaps the single strangest twist of fate in the history of popular music, Rodriguez?s music and career does indeed have a story to tell, only it is one the singer-songwriter never knew. At some point in the 1970s, while South Africa suffered under the tyranny of apartheid, Rodriguez?s albums, Cold Fact (1970) and Coming from Reality (1971) made their way into the African country. The music struck a chord among white, middle-class South Africans who heard in Rodriguez?s cut-and-dry political lyrics and chilly, stark honesty, anthems of resistance. The records were shared, bootlegs were circulated, the albums were censored by state radio, and Rodriguez became a South African legend, selling hundreds of thousands of records. But the musician had no idea about any of it. Furthermore, in South Africa, no one had any idea who their musical hero really was.

There is a nostalgic subtext to Searching for Sugar Man, the kind of mystery born out of a time before the internet. I consider myself lucky to have grown up at a time when, without any spending money, the only way to get your hands on a new song was to sit by the radio with a cassette in the slot ready to hit record as soon as it was played. Before iTunes and YouTube, Spotify and Groveshark (before, dare we say, Napster) there was a preciousness to music that is now nearly completely lost. The younger generation doesn?t know how it feels to find a Jimi Hendrix track buried in a compilation album that snuck its way into your father?s record collection, or to have a friend slip a two-sided 90 minute cassette in your backpack at school, with side A bearing Metallica?s Master of Puppets, side B boasting Ride the Lightning. For a 12-year-old, slipping a nugget of pure gold in the zipper-lined pocket of the Jansport wouldn?t have been as exciting.

This is the world Searching for Sugar Man brings us back into, with Rodriguez?s music gaining mystique from the rarity and the mystery that surrounded it. Through the years, rumors began to circulate about what happened to the musician, including tales of a tragic and fatal end, Rodriguez lighting himself on stage after an audience rejects his unacknowledged brilliance. Taking cue from a magazine article that initially looked into the mystery behind Rodriguez, Malik Bendjelloul decides to try to track down the story. In the early days of the internet, in the late 1990s, clues begin to arise. But efforts to ?follow the money,? tracking the sales of Rodriguez?s music through the South African record labels back to America come up short. Someone has been profiting off Rodriguez?s unlikely success, but we can?t tell who. What do know is Rodriguez has been completely written out of the equation of success.

Here?s the trick, before you see Searching for Sugar Man (and it is one of those rare and unique documentaries with a story so odd and unlikely ? and well told ? that is not worth missing) don?t Google or wiki-search Rodriguez. What Bendjelloul does so well in his film is assume that obscurity of the artist persists to this day in some corners of the world (which it does, of course) and piece together a ten-year-old story that puts you right at its befuddling center. As Bendjelloul, along with South African music enthusiasts search for the story behind the man who wrote the songs that helped to define their lives, they discover something so simple and moving that to have any hint of its outcome would be to spoil some of the movie?s joy. The documentary is a joy, a celebration of a musical hero, the rediscovery of his powerful music, and the revelation of a man so honest, pure, and undeniable. What Bendjelloul leads us to is a profound kind of discovery, that when dealing with a personality like Rodriguez, his life lived amidst suffering and poverty, joy necessarily exists as a ?cold fact.?

Source: http://frontrow.dmagazine.com/2012/08/movie-review-searching-for-sugar-man-meet-rodriguez-the-most-famous-musician-no-one-has-ever-heard-of/

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