The king is dead. Long live the queen!
When news hit of rock legend Little Richard’s death, revisionists were quick to claim him as the originator of rock’n’roll. Bongani Madondo praises the camp queen, maps the African roots of the music and sets the record — a vinyl LP — straight
Good Golly, Miss Molly, the larger-than-life Richard Penniman, is, uh, heavened-up! Little Richard died last Saturday at the age of 87 and the world lost its marbles. Lord ha’ mercy, what we gonna do?
For one, we can all claim we loved him madly. That he was our darling queer avatar. The genesis of Afro-camp. That he liberated all our queer kin and kith. We can shout from the mountaintops of our Android and Apple devices that this “she-man”, as he once described himself, was our symbol of resistance.
We would not be lying.
After all, especially as it pertains to deceased and therefore harmless black antiestablishment figures, everyone simply adores you when you are dead.
Little Richard was indeed singular. As a performer and a visual symbol he stuck out in a musical culture that was itself set free by a spirit of subversion, reinvention, belligerence, pouts, black kohl around the eyes and glorious stuff-you-man shit from the git-go.
In death, Richard achieved what he failed to in life, receiving the dues he pined for after the asphyxiation by faint praise he had resigned himself to in the previous three decades.
But how should we make sense of Little Richard’s death? How should those of us who are black and cosmopolitan, African and global, choose to remember him, amid both the erasure of indigenous knowledge systems and the redress mob seeking to reclaim all of Western civilisation, from Hamlet to Homer, as African in origin?
For me, as a former music journalist and a student of performance ritual who is obsessed with the metaphysical and surrealist powers of pop culture, Little Richard’s death is, in a surreal way, timely.
The narrative around his death is reflective of the age of conspiracies and soul seeking — a manic desire to rewrite history. All of which happens in the full bloom of a pandemic, with humanity hellbent on reconfiguring the past while birthing a “new normal”.
Oooweee!
II
Little Richard is both an icon of the past century, and, it seems, a bona fide saint of the still newish 21st century.
The 21st century is the age of symbolism, of visual hyper-visibility. The age of worshipping at the altar of the archive. In a way, it is a time of raiding the past to fight current battles.
In that milieu Little Richard has secured himself a seat around the table of latter-day saints.
In this great age of sexuality Id wars, his queerness, which for a long time he alternately wore with pride or ambivalence, has become as important as the music the man created, if not more so.
Some commentators claim Little Richard and his fellow queer artists — they name Josephine Baker and James Baldwin but, curiously, not Langston Hughes, Arthur Mitchell, Alvin Ailey, Liberace or Gore Vidal — “created mainstream culture as we know it”.
Of course that’s rubbish.
In The Guardian this week Tavia Nyong’o wrote a searing meditation about Richard as “too black, too queer and too holy” for the white rock establishment’s comfort.
Before Richard’s body was cold, intellectuals from that digital Wakanda known as “Black Twitter” had barnstormed our feeds, extolling Richard as “the founder of rock’n’roll”.
I’d hazard a guess that a vocal chunk of these digital denizens had never cared for the music genre it has now become de rigueur to whip whitey with: “Rock is black. Y’awl stole it from us. Reparations time now!”
Poor little rich whitey: God, does he deserve it!
Our new cultural Bolsheviks are pontificating about rock’n’roll as though it means anything to them.
III
I don’t mind Richard’s reappraisal as a queer queen. But that is nothing new. For decades, rock periodicals have celebrated the revolutionary impulses of the Black Queer identity in rock.
To us old-school rock devotees, there’s always been a solid DNA line running from the African carnival around Congo Square in the Tremé neighbourhood of New Orleans to the exuberance of the Mardi Gras.
It’s the same line that created a frisson of high camp, artistic daring and gender ambiguity in artists such as Little Richard, Jimi Hendrix, Mick Jagger, Prince, David Bowie, Sylvester, Donna Summer, Diana Ross, Marc Bolan, Rick James — and I would add Grace Jones, MJ, Terence Trent D’Arby, Andre Three Stacks, Busi Mhlongo, FAKA, and Nakhane just for the freakish hell of it.
Reading my Twitter post to that effect, the queer pop star, writer and actor
Nakhane responded: “I wouldn’t be here had it not been for Little Richard.”
Because of such age-old appreciation of rock’s ambisexual dynamism, I must confess that to witness the mosh-pit dives into black history — in which Queen Richard the First is the “creator of rock’n’roll” — got my inner bitch going.
Make no mistake: Richard was not “my man”, but there’s no denying the man was a heroic figure.
This much is evident in the vocals, hair and overall visual style of perhaps his truest heir, a fellow native of Macon, Georgia: Janelle Monáe, with whom I found myself exchanging notes on the queer divination of Little Richard backstage at the AfroPunk super jam in Brooklyn, New York, in 2009.
So the queer score is pretty much a nobrainer. But did Little Richard create rock’n’roll? You don’t say! When?
IV
It is worth rearranging the pecking order of the culture and the style he luxuriated in and got burnt by. We’ll delve into the cultural movement between old Africa and its little reverse “cultural colonies” in the East and the West — although, since rock music is an Afro-Atlantic musical experiment, the focus here is on the West.
Because Insta-jive clickbait trendoids would have moved on the next “hot thing” by the time you read this, perhaps we should linger on the sticky fingers of rock’n’roll, and, by implication, the genesis of the global 20th-century black popular culture.
Historians remind us of the futility of “firsts” (first black in the White House, but there might not be a first black on the moon any time soon). Likewise, “golden periods” — useful meta-fictions — are fictions all the same. As it applies to rock music and pop culture, the following outline will, hopefully, dispense with thumb-sucking the past to fight our surprisingly, and horrifyingly, widening cultural wars.
Thus, to the much-fictionalised “founders” we return.
The essence of rock’n’roll’s fictions, thus its truths, is embedded in the music’s very name formulation. If jazz is the music of God (Jah Iz = Jah’ss), then rock, especially its “roll”, is testament to indigenous societies’ migratory instincts.
As we have seen in many photographs of ancient caves, from the Drakensberg to East Africa and Central America, it would seem the “rock people” all over the world have always been troubadours.
By nature, the San, Cherokees and other First Peoples are projected as a people in a perennial search for survival, healing herbs and communication with the cosmos.
V
In its own trajectory, rock music has always defined itself by its fluidity: a black art that has successfully, for better or worse, mutated from its gospel roots to being a white teenage form of rebellion and joie de vivre.
From its inception, rock has always enticed, aroused and jolted its audience and nonbelievers with its electricity. Something Little Richard knew innately was that rock’s potency lies in its preternatural force to repulse and shock.
Its signature dooo-dooo-dumb-booh-ha backbeat, the wiggle of hips, and the spiritual surrender; heads always tilted to the sky, as its most beatific stars hopped on musical stairways to heaven, even as they — as Richard, a “holly roller” to his genes, was accused of — commiserated with the devil along the way.
From the 1950s on, Little Richard symbolised rock music’s double bind. Its tradition and freedom. Its liturgy and lipstick. Its ying and yang, male and female. But does that make him the founder of this lost black art? Nyeeeww!
Sure, rock’n’roll is as American, in its marketing and studio chicanery remoulded form, as apple pie. But while it was, as per Bruce Springsteen, “born in the USA”, the spring wells of the music existed for long outside of the US: in Dahomey, the Congo Empire, Haiti, Cuba, the Garifuna eastern shoreline.
You can still trace its distinct doongdingly guitar line directly to KwaZuluNatal’s pantheon peopled by the likes of Sandile Shange, Mfiliseni Magubane, Mfaz’ omnyama and Mkhalelwa “Spector” Ngwazi.
Still, if it is the hierarchical “founders” the Twitterati is interested in, they should look no further than the following, and in this order: Louis Jordan, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, the blues contingent of Skip James, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Little Walter, Blind Willie McTell, Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, Bo Diddley, Little Richard and Ike Turner.
And that’s just its Negroid roots.
I’d throw in Big Mama Thornton, and Bessie and Mamie Smith, but that, while not being implausible, would be overreaching.
Simply put, Little Richard is not the originator, as it has been claimed, of rock music, let alone rock’n’roll culture. He is part of a cultural collective and not the first among those. Perhaps the most colourful, but hardly the architect. The differences matter.
It is true that the rock’n’roll media establishment has, over the years, inserted its pantheonic figures “in the break” between these New Afrikan performance expressions.
The takeover was achieved via new technology such as radio, the gramophone, studios, distribution and later television ownership.
The resulting cultural raid of the past 100 years — 90% of Little Richard’s entire life —
Little Richard is both an icon of the past century, and, it seems, a bona fide saint of the still newish 21st century
is, astonishingly but not surprisingly, analogous with Arabic and European countries’ brazen raids into African villages from the 12th to the 18th centuries, in search of unpaid labour.
Such that by the early 1960s — or by the time the Beatles’ pop-rock sea waves crashed hard and heart into the North American shores — the immersion process of the white Anglo-American students of the practice of New Afrikan musical ingenuity was all but complete.
So much so that some really outstanding students had become avatars of their “Negro” cultural nannies. People such as Buddy Holly, Bill Haley, Bobby Darin, Pete Seeger, Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis,
Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison, Bob Dylan, the Beatles, the Allman Brothers and my favourite white boys-gone-black and back to White Privilege without skipping a beat, the Rolling Stones.
From the 1950s onwards the white avatars played several variants of New Afrikan music, for there is not, and has never been, a single rock sound or style.
VI
The base of this thing called rock is black, fo sho. However, it owes its anti-authority force and exuberance of spirit to hordes of white, Anglo-American youths.
Rock music was hijacked from the New Afrikans’ spiritual séances, its field hollers and children’s baptism gatherings, its homebrew, into a dollar-generating travelling circus and TV bandstand ratings-revving shock fare.
It definitely owes much of its 1960s-2000 global youth appeal to those hordes of white, Anglo-American youths — to post World War 2 parents, “the barbarians at the gate”.
The barbarity of which, its picket-fence critics were fond of pointing out, peaked with punk-rock music. Which is the ultimate paradox, since punk was a form of rejection of rock’s black, blue and gospel roots. Which is what we’ve always known, no? That rock is both the music of the ancients and of the beautiful ones not yet born.
But then, in our moments of collective amnesia, Little Richard — his dark eyeliner, and a flick of a greasy hair lock or two — was always on hand to remind us.
He knew we’d love him madly the day he decided to leave us. Forever.
✼ Madondo is author of Sigh, the Beloved Country: Rock ’n Roll & Other Stories, and editor of I’m Not Your Weekend Special: Portraits on the Life, Style & Politics of Brenda Fassie, among other titles