In the early 1980s, “we were getting hit with a stream of
singers who weren’t exactly flying the flag of blackness….Male singers were
taking the bass and texture out of their voices, trying to cross over and get
some of that Lionel Richie money. It wasn’t their fault—and there was some good
music that came out of that moment. But it wasn’t exactly affirming.” Black
people start hating themselves. (176). Hip hop changed that….
249. “I remember in the 1980s, when rock music started losing
ground, which created a lane for hip hop to become the dominant pop music. Once
MTV launched, rock music started to change. Style started trumping substance,
which culminated in the rise of the big hair bands….the thing that made rock
great, it’s rawness whether it was Little Richard screaming at the top of his
lungs or The Clash smashing their guitars, disappeared into all this
hairspray….I wasn’t mad, because rap was more than ready to step in.” He feared
something like this was starting to happen to Hip Hop in the first decade of
the 21st century, and saw it in Auto tune; again, the bass and texture being taken out of the voices. “I wanted to kill
auto-tune like Kurt Cobain killed the Hair bands.”
excerpt from LIFE IN A TIN CAN (or Still-Life With Piano Van).
Benjamin Shapiro’s paragraph-length summary of his
forthcoming monograph in the 33 1/3 Book series covers a lot
of the most salient components to the myth of Daniel Johnston, so I’ll quote it in full for the
benefit of those who don’t know:
"In 1983, the troubled
American songwriter Daniel Johnston suffered the first of a series of mental
breakdowns that would plague him for the rest of his life. In his mental
illness, he managed to commit 15 song fragments to tape using a $59 Sanyo
cassette recorder and Radio Shack tape stock. The collection would later be
presented as Hi, How Are You, the single most influential homemade
cassette tape of all time. Composed during a period of extreme emotional stress, the album has fascinated and
haunted its many listeners, including Tom Waits, Beck, Ben Gibbard, and Kurt
Cobain, who popularized the record by wearing a Hi, How Are You T-shirt
during Nirvana’s 1992 performance at the MTV Music Awards. 20 years later, the
recording is recognized as a key document of early independent music and a
master text of virtuosic outsider art.The
album doubles as a document of music produced from the isolated borderline
between insanity and mental disorder. The historical links between creativity
and madness have been studied at length, but never seen through the lens of a
document such as this. Johnston, who suffered from schizophrenia and manic
depression, saw his early cassettes as a message to the world. This lo-fidelity
recording was not only a temporary cure
for the disease that had gripped his mind since childhood, but also a
manifestation of a schizophrenic’s illusions of grandeur. Johnston didn’t hear
the tape as the hiss and crackle of a basement recording—he heard the
pronouncement of the next major pop star who would, like the Beatles before
him, change the very fabric of the world."
Shapiro begins by introducing, and emphasizing the artist
rather than the particular album: a “troubled American artist” who “suffered
from schizophrenia and manic depression.”[1]
Shapiro frames his proposal by adopting the tone of clinical psychoanalysis: “The
historical links between creativity and madness have been studied at length,
but never seen through the lens of a document such as [Hi, How Are You].“
Thus, the book promises what literary critics call a “thematic reading,” of the
Album. The album becomes a document for a case study, and the aesthetic value
is secondary.
Shapiro’s summary also implies that his case study of
Johnston will not focus merely on the individual and his emotional illness, but
also on what the success this album/cassette achieved tells you about American
society (or at least a sub-culture of [mostly white] indie rock) in the
80s/90s, or even into the 21st century, by showing how Hi! How Are You? became “the single most
influential homemade cassette tape of all time.”
Although Shapiro recognizes the influence of this album, his
summary seems to purposely avoid attributing this influence to any genius or
brilliance in Daniel Johnston’s own art. He doesn’t bother here with aesthetic
claims like: “Walking The Cow,” or “Speedy Motorcycle,” are more powerful songs
than “Like A Virgin.” Nor will he call Daniel Johnston a brilliant conceptual
artist for choosing “to commit 15 song fragments to tape using a $59 Sanyo
cassette recorder and Radio Shack tape stock” during this era of corporate
dominated rock (with its vital punk and hip-hop scenes bubbling beneath).
In fact, Johnston is presented as a rather passive figure in
the story of this album’s ultimate influence. Far from being career savvy,
Daniel Johnston created this album out of “a schizophrenic’s illusions of
grandeur.” In saying this, Shapiro’s book promises to be provocative and
controversial and reopen the debate that Jeff Feuerzeig’s The Devil And Daniel Johnston presented various sides of. As the
title implies, Feuerzeig’s movie went beyond the merely psychiatric
interpretation, and explored how his the Christian-Fundamentalist upbringing
may have been at least as significant a contributing factor to Daniel
Johnston’s “affliction.”
Jeff’s movie simply does not simplify this issue. It offers
both the psychoanalytic interpretation that is common in this secular society,
but also suggests a sociological or even religious one. The devil is not just a
demon that possesses a delusional madman, but also a central tenant of the kind
of Christianity that Johnston’s family always tried to hold themselves to (and instill
its moral code in Daniel). In this religious world-view, the devil is real, as
in many gospel (and even secular country) songs---“Don’t let the devil ride. If
you let him ride, he’ll want to drive. Don’t let the devil drive.”
When discussing Daniel Johnston’s art, the psychiatric
emphasis may be unavoidable (since the line between aesthetics and
psychology—behavior, ethics--blurs in this myth), yet the diagnostic terms that
Shapiro uses here are themselves controversial, and need to be defined more
clearly in order not to provoke the ire of “mental health activists” and even
some passionate DJ fans.
Take the phrase, “ illusions of grandeur,” for instance. In
order to support his claim that the album is “a manifestation of a
schizophrenic’s illusions of grandeur,” Shapiro writes: “Johnston didn’t hear
the tape as the hiss and crackle of a basement recording—he heard the
pronouncement of the next major pop star who would, like the Beatles before
him, change the very fabric of the world.” It’s an interesting either/or
distinction, yet there is no verifiable evidence to support that DJ “didn’t hear…the hiss and crackle of a
basement recording.” Clearly, Daniel Johnston knew that he didn’t have a band,
and couldn’t afford a recording studio. Furthermore, Shapiro’s claim that
Johnston believing he could be the next
Beatles, or the next big thing, albeit delusional, is a delusion many other
musicians—including bands that are considered much more ‘well-adjusted’ than
DJ---shared, especially during the time the album was released.
Many musicians
were vying to be, and publicists, managers and critics were promoting bands
as, the
next Beatles. It was becoming increasingly clear that with the corporate
monopoly dominating the
American music industry, and the fragmentation
of niches over the previous decade that even the mega
selling acts like Michael
Jackson or Hall And Oates could not “change the very fabric of
the world,” as
the Beatles apparently did for many (though that history, too, is
often overemphasized compared to
other of their contemporaries; if the Beatles
changed the very fabric of the world, we should at least ask,
given the changes that have
taken place since 1970, was it really for
the better?). The pop-group, or
solo
artist, that could transcend niches and reach people from a wide range of
demographics as The
Beatles did, was simply not possible by The Reagan Era.
Against this
corporate trend, other bands were trying to convince us “that phony Beatlemania
has bitten
the dust.” Daniel never said that (as far as I’m aware), but since Hi. How Are
You? has become “the
single most influential homemade cassette tape of all
time,” that, for many, “changed the very fabric of
the world,” we should at
least consider that DJ was not suffering from “delusions of Grandeur” in
creating this album—but did somehow understand that there was a need for music like this, presented in
this format (a chord organ and a cassette) that was not being met by the
increasingly soul-less corporate
glitz that dominated this time.
Certainly Daniel Johnston was not the first to choose
music—or the other arts—as “a message to the world,” which he could not
communicate with by other means. Take, for instance, the patently
“well-adjusted” musician (at least as well-adjusted as a famous musician can
be), the debonair Bryan Ferry singing that music is his “only way to reach
you.” In terms of clinical psychology, almost every musician would suffer from
some ailment (hell, if Jesus or Moses, lived to today, they’d be trying to get
them on pills too). In the contemporary American pharmaceutical/mental health
complex, sometimes overemphasizing the psychiatric interpretations of
maladjustments are encouraged to distract us from the deeper issues of the
highly materialistic, individualistic, tech-driven economy and culture that
many artists struggle against.
One may be a genius artist or intellectual, but still can
barely tie his shoes without assistance, as I know too well. State-hired
shrinks may offer many clinical diagnoses, but they often come down to
semantics. Match the symptoms to the disease from a book; it doesn’t always
work. I’m no clinical psychologist, but I’ve read enough to know that some of
the “symptoms” I share with Daniel Johnston could render me with a mild, or
early-stage manifestation, of what used to be called “Idiot Savant” (though the
more correct word these days is “Savant Syndrome”) at least as much as
“schizophrenic.”
In Shapiro’s proposal, he relies on the term “mental
illness” to describe Daniel Johnston, yet that term is often used
unreflectively in our society. There is a distinction between “mental illness”
and “emotional illness.” Many people who suffer from “emotional illness” still
have enough mastery of their mental faculties to function as intellectuals
and artists in our society. But this distinction is often elided, smoothed
over, by the dominant media and healthcare industries. Such a conflation can
have disastrous consequences for the patient so diagnosed. For instance, a
university is less likely to hire a “mentally ill” professor (even if is her
intellectual/analytical skills remain in tact and s/he can do her job even
better than many others) than they are to hire an “emotionally troubled” one
(especially if she published a memoir). If this person can no longer find a job
in the one field he excels at, he can
no longer pay people to take care of the basic needs that are simpler for
everyone else: last year’s genius artist can become this year’s raving homeless
maniac.
The fact that Daniel Johnston, at age 53, is still able to
tour---no small feat at his age even for more ‘well-adjusted’ people---suggests
a man who can do that one thing, and do it well enough to make a living on it.
He did not commit suicide like some of his “pretty boy” contemporaries, nor did
he end up homeless. There is a strength in this man who is a survivor, and
maybe even a kind of mental health advocate if he’s taken seriously---whether
or not you like his music or want to get close to him as a person. I do not
mean to downplay the strong evidence that reveals DJ’s “maladjustments” in many
areas of life, only to suggest that the vague language of “mental illness”
Shapiro relies on runs the risk of weakening what promises to be a very fascinating,
thought provoking book, yet analyzing it gave me a deeper appreciation of
Daniel.
[1]This could also describe David Berman, or at least the
speaker of “Random Rules” who was hospitalized for approaching perfection in
1984, almost the same day that Daniel Johnston was.
While I generally do not see Hollywood movies these days, I
try to make an exception for music biopics: not because I think they will be great
films, but because I feel a duty to see how Hollywood presents, or often
misrepresents, musicians, music and music history—especially since these
accounts give many their “education” about legendary figures such as Ray
Charles, Johnny Cash, Etta James, Chuck Berry, and Biggie Smalls to name but a
few….and, now, James Brown. Directed by Tate Taylor, with a screenplay by the
Butterworth brothers, and co-produced (and partially financed by) Mick Jagger. Get On Up (2014) is ostensibly a film
about James Brown, but in many ways the film is as much about Hollywood as it
is about Brown.
It is interesting to observe that the subjects of most of
these major Hollywood biopics made in the past decade (with the exception of
Biggie) emerged during the 1950s, a time when America was building its national
(and imperial) mass culture identity. These stories of iconic figures that were
the subject of Ray, Walk The Line, and
Cadillac Records all tell us as much about
the changes taking places in American culture (the ground) as they do about
their ostensible subject (figure). In general, there is a reason so many more
larger than life iconic musicians---even geniuses—emerged during that time than
in more recent years. Electronic mass culture encouraged and nourished a
present culture then, but now it prefers to use these figures, and our cultural
past in general, to prevent something like this from happening today.
Part of this is due to the fact that in the 1950s and 1960s
a more decentralized music culture (for instance, the chitlin circuit) dominated
and generally lead the more centralized Hollywood culture, from the ground up.
But since the early 1970s, the music culture of America takes its lead much
more from an industry centralized in Hollywood (NYC and Nashville to a lesser
extent, but increasingly Silicon Valley).
James Brown, in fact, touches on this transition that
occurred in American music culture in his autobiography, when he speaks about
what happened after Syd Nathan, the owner of his Cincinnati-based record label
King Records, died and he had to search for new labels in the early 1970s, and
large bureaucratic multi-national conglomerates like Polydor were now the only
game in town. Of course, that insight, and chapter of JB’s life is absent from Get On Up (more on this egregious, but
predictable, omission a little a later).
One Standard Cliche
of the Music Biopic (a short summary)
In Ray (2004), the
childhood accident that lead to Charles’ blindness is emphasized, not just for
giving the gift of music, but as a way to locate a founding trauma that lead to
the many demons that Ray had to battle in his own life. While racism,
especially as experienced in the Jim Crow south, is not absent in this movie,
his troubled childhood as a poor blind boy becomes the main context in which
his talent and genius, as well as his heroin addiction, emerged. Here, the
biopic convention essentially demands such a superficial analysis that de-emphasizes
the racism and poverty and emphasizes the “internal” causes of Ray’s maladies.
The personal story of a man who is addicted to heroin for
the same reason he’s addicted to music (and loves it more than his wife) almost
serves to ‘justify’ the white naysayers who felt that R&B and soul music he
was playing was “devil’s music.” Furthermore, the scene in which he takes a
gospel standard, and secularizes it (“I Got A Woman”), makes a clear
ideological choice in presenting the black gospel scene who resist this heroic ‘crossover’
moment that lead to what is now called classic rock as a bunch of reactionaries
(hell, even the Beatles tried to cover “I Got A Woman”).
Such reductions and distortions of history show how these
biopics push a despiritualized, commercial sense of American music that
elevates a heroic, yet troubled, individual who can change (or at least provide
a decorative soundtrack for) history. On the heels of this movie’s success, Walk The Line (2005) seemed consciously
scripted with Ray in mind. Another
“rags to riches” story of a southerner from a broken home (though he doesn’t
become blind), who is haunted by and motivated to musical greatness (and drug
addiction; again, the two are almost synonymous in this convention) to prove
something to the parental figure who abandoned him, whether physically or
emotionally (again, cut off from any serious dramatization of environmental
factors like abject poverty or systematic racism).
This deeply Freudian under song to Walk The Line becomes one of the many things the movie Walk Hard (2007) brilliantly satirizes. Obviously,
the director and screenwriters of Walk
Hard felt something very similar to what I felt when watching Walk The Line, and one of the reasons Walk The Line did not achieve the
success that Ray had was because it
had taken Ray and crassly made it
into even more of a formula…and audiences seemed to be getting hip. While Walk Hard is primarily a satire of Walk The Line, it reaches deeper to
satirize many conventions of the bioptic genre. The “hero,” Dewey Cox is
presented alone, in solitude, pausing before a long walk down a hall to a
retrospective performance that would somehow sum up his life-work. After Walk Hard, I hoped we would never have
to weather another scene like this, but it reappears in Get On Up, providing the narrative frame for the movie.
Life As Rise And Fall
(and maybe redemption)
A biopic is ostensibly similar to a behind-the-music show
in proposing a dividing line between the art and the life, but what does it
mean to be “behind the music” when you put your life into your audience and to regular everyday people who can blow
your mind each time you feel them
dance at your shows? Hollywood loves to undress what it believes is the hubris
of any musician who believes the power of music, of call and response, both
live and recorded, can be bigger than life viewed as a story.
Here, Hollywood casts itself in the roll of Toto: Take that,
you mighty and powerful OZ! We know you’re just a bumbling man from Nebraska
slumming it in Oz, a kind of homesick imperialist who really just never wanted
to grow up and be abandoned by mama like Citizen
Kane.
Hollywood is so wedded to the conventions of the biopic
that they exploit people’s love of music to lure people in, and in most cases
fans of the music leave disappointed. It’s not that that the musical scenes in Get On Up are not good. As Odie
Henderson points out, “Chadwick Boseman has done his dancing homework. Watching
him perform, and listening to him perfectly nail Brown’s speaking voice are the
true pleasures of Get on Up.Unfortunately, the movie wastes this
performance.”[1] Indeed,
the biopic seems designed precisely to push an alien religion on those for
whom music, especially black music, is often superior to, and wider than, a
story--in particular, a rise and fall story of an isolated self.
The film doesn’t go quite as far as to have James Brown cry Rosebud with his dying breath, but we do
get Citizen Cocaine, if not King Heroin, right from the get go. As Henderson
brilliantly summarizes, Brown enters the movie “as a buffoon reeking of danger
and insanity who is rendered harmless by his own comic ineptitude.” This
“neutered, cartoonish,” yet nonetheless still threatening, version of him hangs
over the whole movie.
Clearly the screenwriters, the Butterworth boys, felt that
emphasizing these scenes set in 1988, only two years after the positive note on
which his autobiography ended, was the most dramatic way they could introduce
the character they call James Brown. Apparently, the directors and screen writers
felt that this was the fall, the negative climax, and it can only (or most
‘realistically’) be explained by a superficial Freudian reading of the “family
romance” of his childhood formative years. Thus, the plot of the movie becomes
“how did he fall so low from such a height?”
In Get On Up, the
scenes with his birth parents are overemphasized unless one is a Freudian or
post-Freudian developmental psychologist. Brown’s autobiography is frank, and
doesn’t dwell on his dad’s whoopings or inability to provide for him. Yet JB
offers a wider context for his dad’s particular pathology. His dad had a temper
about white people, but he was too submissive to express that to whites, so
took it out on his son. Showing the young James witnessing his dad’s encounters
with racist white folks could’ve made for great cinema, and dug into a truth much
deeper than trying to fit the movie into the Ray and Walk Hard grid
that puts Brown on the shrink’s couch when it’s not putting him on trial.
The post-Freudians, of course, have their system rigged so
that they would call any other interpretation of childhood other than “primal
foundational trauma” to be denial, and as long as (white) Hollywood continues
to be dominated by this mindset it simply cannot register why JB devotes much more
time on the largely positive relationship he had with his extended family in a
brothel presided over by his aunt. The movie does devote some time on a touching
scene with his aunt (her nurturing, her spiritual wisdom, her prophecy, and
her pride in him as he makes his first money hustling for her before he ends up
in prison as a teenager)—but it more insistently flashes back to the trauma
presumably caused by his birth parents.
White Supremacy &
Black Capitalism
Because JB understood his dad’s pathology against the
backdrop of white supremacy, the movie’s erasure of this is suspect. It’s not
that Get On Up entirely sweeps white
supremacy under the rug. Little Richard and JB bond over how to deal with what
Richard calls the white devil that runs the music business. This is a lesson JB
would later apply in his relationship with his white manager, Ben Bart,
affectionately called “Pop” by Brown (and played by “Blues Brother” Dan
Ackroyd in the movie). These scenes are perhaps the film’s most intimate, and
reveal some of JB’s chutzpah in
dealing with the white music establishment (and provide a useful contrast with
the scenes between Chuck Berry and Leonard Chess in Cadillac Records).
I’m glad the movie dramatized the scene in which James
brilliantly explained why cutting out those who “Pops” calls the best big time
promoters in the business and, instead, choosing to work with the local DJS, would
make both client and manager more money….and, in addition, help the underpaid,
exploited, DJS who were the lifeblood of the music industry (the filmmakers had
to make the DJ white, but that’s no biggie; some were). James’ solution is a win/win
situation that helps the local economy and helps bring democracy to the
nation’s music culture!
The manager was skeptical, but JB’s wisdom prevails. This
kind of insight into, and analysis of, the music industry is part of what makes
JB’s autobiography such a delightful, engaging and even empowering read. It
shows JB’s generous, populist, community oriented side—which is otherwise
absent from the movie. Yet, once again, Get
On Up has to frame this as a largely individual mere selfish attempt to make
money and, like Berry Gordy, disrespectfully underpay his musicians. But can
you really reduce his pubic service advertisements, his ownership of several
radio stations, his James Brown Stamps, and the generosity of his enlightened
self-interest to that?
Sure, he may have been too busy making music to really know
how to run all the enterprises he started (just like The Beatles with their
Apple Corp fiasco), but the movie makes it seem like it was merely about JB
trying to dodge taxes! I’m not looking for a white-washed portrait of JB,
stripped of his various contradictions that are touched on, for instance, in
Thomas Sayers Ellis’ brilliant poem sequence (with photographs and footnotes
for footwork), “My Dynamite Splits.” But I would at the very least like to see
a movie that acknowledges that what was so great about James Brown was not
merely the genius super bad musician and performer.
When I hear the cry in “It’s A Man’s Man’s Man’s World”
about how man makes money to buy another man, and how man is lost in the wilderness and bitterness, it’s not just about
little James and his personal hell, it’s about life in White man’s America, and
one black man’s attempt to do something about it, an attempt that in its own
way was as successful as any of the more radical spokesman and organizers of
Black Power during this era. He may not have liberated the people, but his hard
work liberated—and still can liberate--the spirit. There is little or no room
for this in the ideological interpretation the Butterworth boys, Taylor and
Jagger, promulgate in Get On Up!
“Closure: Walk Hard Style”
Though the movie touches on how important music was for JB
in prison the first time around, as a kid where he lead a group “to sing for the lord,” it shows nothing but one horrific broken
man scene during his 88-93 prison stay. It certainly shows nothing of the grassroots
movement of fans and supporters who held “Free James Brown” dance parties
across the country to fight the racist double standard in his 6 year sentence
for nothing more than a “blue light” violation.
Despite the repeated testimony by those who were closer to
him and visited him in prison during this period (like Tucker and music critic
Dave Marsh), the directors try to render James Brown into a flawed tragic hero
who couldn’t really relate to those closest to him, or even a villain, like
Richard III (pushing away the loyal Bobby Byrd as Buckingham) into that
isolation of the tragic individual that the genre of tragedy demands.
At least Walk The Line,
could rely on the cliché of the MGM or Shakespearean comic happy ending, a love
story that could inspire such songs Heidi Newfield’s “Do You Want A Love Like
Johnny and June?” Like Johnny, James Brown was also deeply devoted to his wife
and devastated by her death, but Get On
Up makes no room for that, and in the process reduces his (temporary) split
with Bobby Byrd to an argument over whose dick is bigger (“I could’ve had your
wife”); Byrd’s marriage is presented as healthier and more loving than Brown’s
because that fits the tragic larger than life cliché that underlies this
movie’s portrayal of Brown. What makes Brown great is what makes him tragic.
Larger than life becomes smaller than life; this isn’t what the audience
demands, what the complicated truth demands, and it’s not what the music
demands; it’s what the convention and the shrinks demand.
The movie does offer its little biopic cliché of redemption
when JB gets out of jail in 1994, a comeback concert and a personal humbling before Byrd (“I neeeed you”). This is closure: Hollywood style: Walk Hard style; it’s touching, but
ultimately trivial and tedious. I really wish JB could get on up today to tell a thing or two about the “honky hoedown”
these directors and screenwriters tried to reduce him to, or even look Mick
Jagger in the eye, and say, “you still making money ripping off black folks.”
Maybe someday, when Jagger dies, there will be a bioptic made of him. After
all, stories of the (Rolling) Stones mistreatment of women and drug abuse are
at least as prevalent as much as JB’s, but I severely doubt they will play as
central a part in such a movie.
In Get On Up, we
return to that long walk down the hall, in which the larger than life character
sees his life and career pass before him, a life reduced to the child’s need
for ego-validation. In this light, you can listen to many of James Brown’s
lyrics and see how much of an individualist he could be (in words), but that’s
a persona he consciously developed,
as he reminds us over and over again in his autobiography. Even the movie
reminds us it was the white suits who wanted to change the name of the Famous
Flames to elevate the solo artist. Sure, he’s a “greedy man.” Sure, “I got
mine, don’t worry about his,” but listen to the sounds of the grooves, the
collective unit, the package shows he put together: see everybody dancing. Join
the dance (if they let you do it in the theatre, or better Get On Out of the theatre), and
feel the unity—everybody working together in the name of soul, in the name of
JAMES BROWN who contains multitudes.
Now pause and think about that experience for a second (even
if it’s just a recording of a song by a dead man at a party or an aerobics
class), and then think about what Hollywood—white Hollywood—is trying to tell
you, sell you, about Life---not just James Brown’s life, not just the biopic
convention, with no personal investment, not just the life of any public
figure, but life in general. Is the soliloquy really more “authentic” than the
dialogue? Is the community organizer really just a tortured individual? Is the
so-called man behind the music really the deeper reality?
“Hollywood: “that’s
how the white man sells himself to the world.”
Judy Juanita, Virgin Soul
Critic Tanya Steele argues that Get On Up exhibits “the need for ‘Hollywood’ to situate itself in
the lives of Black Americans without giving a Black Director the opportunity to
tell the story.” White Hollywood has a long history of this, dating back to its
origins with D.W. Griffith’s Birth Of A Nation.
While Get On Up doesn’t go so far
as to celebrate the KKK, it presents a series of dubious “tropes that are
supposed to relay that this is Blackness.”[2]
From its first scene, Get
On Up puts James Brown on trial, looking at him through judgmental white
eyes. As Bruce Tucker, co-author of James Brown’s autobiography, The Godfather of Soul, pointed out over
20 years ago: “for white audiences, even sympathetic ones, [JB’s] difference
always threatens to become otherness—the raw, uninhibited, possessed exotic
black Other of colonialist fantasy….Perfectly well-meaning people….talk to me
about his troubles in tones usually reserved for the appreciation of Road
Runner cartoons. It is clear that part of the price of the difference James
Brown sought—and the otherness he didn’t---is to be treated like a cartoon
character, capable of popping back into shape no matter how many anvils land on
him. Or, in an only slightly more affectionate form, he is regarded as a
child.” (xxii, xxv).
Get On Up relies
on both interpretations, and it’s unclear whether the filmmakers are
“well-meaning,” unconsciously racist, or purposely trying to debunk James Brown
by “dwelling on James’ high-handedness with musicians, the reported domestic
violence, and the problems that [in 1988] landed him in jail,” in Tucker’s
words. In Get On Up, even these
cartoonish portrayals cannot entirely neutralize the presentation of a strong,
proud black man who is first introduced as threatening and potentially violent.
And the movie is in many ways about the white culture of fear of the black male
which Michael Moore memorably exposed in Bowling
For Columbine, and presumption of violent
until proven gentle often subliminally instilled in contemporary white
consciousness.
However, comically portrayed, the fear on the faces of the
white people in the film’s first scene is real, and implicitly justifies the
harsh six-year sentence he received for his blue-light violation in 1988,
entirely ignoring the racist double standard involved in his sentencing by
relying on an unverified story of Brown shooting at a crowd. According to Get On Up, this apocryphal story is the first thing you need to know about
James Brown. We may ask, by what standards this is great cinema?
These ruminations lead me to some heavy question: Is Get On Up a failed movie, or does it do
exactly what it set out to do? Is it a bad movie that was genuinely intended to
be a tribute to James Brown? Or is or is it bad for the same reasons it’s
inherently racist? Amiri Baraka writes,
“our enemies have created our spokesmen” in reference to how white corporate
culture has elevated the image of the “gangsta rapper” and package it to black
folks. Hollywood couldn’t create James Brown, or even the image of JAMES BROWN.
However, they can muscle their way into it with their money in his death.
Yet, Get On Up
shows the bioptic as it is currently understood is a dead-end genre so based on
a Euro-Westernized notion of a self-contained “self” that it simply cannot
begin to sound the phenomenon, and ongoing legacy, of James Brown. If one must
accept that JB indeed had a “downfall” after 4 decades of top ten hits, this is
more likely due to the corporate takeover of the record industry than his own
personal trauma; this becomes very clear reading his autobiography. Ultimately
I concur with Tanya Steele that there are definitely black filmmakers “talented
as f**k who could smash a James Brown bioptic” much better than Get On Up does. I firmly believe that
such a movie could help revolutionize Hollywood as much as James’ Brown’s music
was able to breathe life into and transform American music.
In the meantime, if you want to know about James Brown, read
the autobiography, or check out all those less famous recordings he did (most
of us have only scratched the surface of his oeuvre). There’s really no point
seeing the movie unless you are interested in studying how Hollywood uses its
shock and awe tactics to try to manipulate us with its frame and narrow
world-view.
