A few days ago, I watched the documentary Searching for Sugarman. I tell you candidly, I wept. It was one of the most poignant cinematic stories I have ever seen. Very briefly, it is a semi-biographical piece on the singer-songwriter Sixto Rodriguez, AKA Sugarman. Rodriguez released two albums in the early seventies, Cold Fact and Coming from Reality. They were both dismal failures, I mean, really, really bad, as Clarence Avant put it:
“I think it [Coming from Reality] sold 6 copies in the States. I bought one, my wife bought one…”
Except, of course, that they were a massive hit in South Africa. Rodriguez found an audience in South Africa, where, unbeknownst to him, he was bigger than the Rolling Stones or Elvis. Twenty-six years after his stillborn music career was buried, in 1998, two intrepid South African music aficionados found him and resurrected the artist Rodriguez. Today, as a man of seventy, he is alive, kicking, and touring[2]!
It is always going to be difficult to put into words something that touches you as deeply as this touched me, but let me say what I can, as inadequate as that is bound to be. It is, on one level, a very, very, sad story. Rodriguez, whose songwriting skills were the province of genius by any measure, possessed a haunting voice and an authentic artistic charisma, not unlike Jim Morrison, was effectively never seen and never heard. He never even made it onto the radar, despite having released two albums produced and backed by serious music industry heavyweights. With this failure to launch as an artist, Sixto goes back to doing what he did before, hard manual labour, a very modest (to put it euphemistically) and simple life, unknown and unrecognised.
Twenty-six years later, as a man now well into his fifties, he gets to experience redemption and rebirth as an artist in South Africa. There is a scene, shot on his daughter’s home camera, where he is standing in front of an audience of around 10 000 people at the Cape Town Velodrome. Before playing a note, the audience is on their feet, just screaming and applauding wildly as he stands there. It is a transcendent moment. As Riaan Malan put it,
“It is the moment we all dream about, when the world finally recognises your talent. How many of us die without ever having experienced that moment?”
But, I ask you, does a moment make a life? In fairness, it should be acknowledged that it was not a single moment but a growing series of moments, after 98, wherein Rodriguez was given the opportunity to express himself as an artist and receive due recognition. Since the movie, his fame has finally grown even in the States, if very modestly. He is now a man of seventy.
What does his story mean?
Firstly, I concede that the very idea of looking for meaning presupposes certain questionable assumptions, i.e., that life is inherently meaningful – many claim it is not. Still, whether that meaning is a creation of our mind or an objective truth, I think we are called to ask and answer such a question as a kind of categorical imperative in Kant’s terms.
So did Rodriguez miss his destiny?
Does it make sense to say that someone missed their destiny? I think it does, if we mean by destiny the idea of an ‘ideal destiny’, roughly Jung’s idea of individuation. There is a notion that comes from the Japanese author Murukami, of a moment in each person’s life where he either seizes his destiny or sees it pass by. There is something really unpleasant about this idea that causes us to want to reject it outright, and yet I sense a truth in it.
Maybe Rodriguez missed his destiny. Certainly, if the producers and music executives interviewed in the documentary are to be believed, he did, and it was an absolute mystery to them why.
I think there is something deeply mysterious about this idea. The idea of having a ‘destiny’ or going further, let’s say an ‘ideal destiny’. This leads me to wonder about Jung’s idea of individuation. What is individuation? Ostensibly, it is:
A person becoming himself, whole, indivisible and distinct from other people and collective psychology (though also in relation to these).[3]
But, we might ask, how exactly does one become whole and distinct? Is it not through the realisation of who one is, the idea of becoming oneself in the world? What purpose would it serve, for example, if one were to become ‘whole and distinct’ in one’s living room and never speak that truth into the world? Or sing it as in Rodriguez’s case.
For many years, I thought I understood this idea. But I must concede that the more I ponder it, the less I feel as though I have. There is, as you have no doubt encountered in your own circle of friends, or acquaintances[4], a populist idea that whatever has happened is what was supposed to happen, i.e. I am exactly where I am meant to be, that sort of thing.
That idea has never really resonated for me. If it were true, it would seem to undermine all our endeavours to improve ourselves. If whatever happens, we say – well, that is exactly what was ‘supposed’ to happen, then I ask you, what is the whole point? No, I think that is, more than likely, a way of our wishing to comfort ourselves, make peace with our fate, whatever that may be.
Circling back to Rodriguez, can we possibly say he missed his destiny?
Somehow, I want to say no. On the contrary, I think he realised his destiny. That seems to imply that he had, by conventional standards, a pretty shitty destiny. A lifetime of hard manual labour in the desolate and dissolute city that is Detroit. A life where his enormous talent is unrecognised. A life where he is not given the opportunity for self-actualisation as an artist, a life lived on the breadline and often on the streets, moving from home to home, or house to house, as his daughter put it. And then finally what, old age and decrepitude, the inexorable hand of time that robs him, as it will all of us, of the beauty and grace of our youth.
And yet, despite all of that, I somehow continue to believe he realised his destiny. Not because he was given a moment of redemption as an old man, a moment to stand on the stage and be recognised. No, I think it’s something deeper than that.
There is a section in the documentary where a colleague of Rodriguez talks about his (i.e. Rodriguez’s) fate. I cannot quote it verbatim, but it is along the following lines: He says Rodriguez was a consummate artist; he had the soul of the artist, always able to rise above the mundane, the parochial. For example, we would arrive to a day of filthy physical labour dressed in a suit, and work as hard or harder than any other man on the team, in fact doing work no one else wanted to do. As he put it, Rodriguez is like the silkworm; he took what life gave him, and he made something better out of it, something refined, something beautiful, something transcendent, maybe even something eternal - he gave us Sugarman. Have you done something like that? he asks.
But still I find it difficult to see this once beautiful man, an almost ethereal being, now old and still walking alone on the snowy roads of Detroit, walking with the difficulties of old age- man, that’s tough. And yet, in that vulnerability that he transcends himself. His lyrics come alive in a way they never could have had he not lived the life he did. He lived the life and the truth that he sang of. It is a sad truth, admittedly.
Cause I lost my job two weeks before Christmas
And I talked to Jesus at the sewer
And the Pope said it was none of his God-damned business
While the rain drank champagne
My Estonian Archangel came and got me wasted
Cause the sweetest kiss I ever got is the one I’ve never tasted
Oh but they’ll take their bonus pay to Molly McDonald,
Neon ladies, beauty is that which obeys, is bought or borrowed[5]
But is it not beautiful, beautiful in a form that could never have been unveiled in any other way.
I am old enough now - 45 at the time of writing this post - that whilst I still have limited access to the vitality of my youth, I simultaneously have a sufficient maturity to recognise the impending hand of time bearing down on me. A way I have developed coming to terms with own aging, is recognising the beauty in the ageing process. God knows it’s not easy in our youth-obsessed culture. But an essential aspect of the person can only reveal itself with age and the accompanying maturity. Growing older, frailer, and being deprived of certain earlier competencies is, after all, a fundamental part of being human.
Somehow, I believe Rodriguez’ story speaks to this theme. That failure, pain and vulnerability are equally valuable aspects of the human condition as their opposites. That whilst we all strive to succeed, whatever that may be, we should not, in the same breath, disavow failure – we are, after all, all destined to grow old and die, that one could argue is the greatest metaphysical failure of all. And it is in the acceptance of this pain, of the very absurdity of our fate, that we have the possibility of transcendence.
Until we talk again,
Blessings and salutations,
Stephen
[1] From lyrics of Sugarman, written by Sixto Rodriguez, album Cold Fact.
[3] A Critical Dictionary of Jungian Analysis, p. 76.
[4] If, like me, you don’t have any actual friends.
[5] Cause, from the album Coming from Reality, Sixto Rodriguez