Black Ground Noise

I have a theory about artists of color and success: very few can deal with it. Then Michelle Obama came along and things have changed in terms of role models, etc., but there’s a high percentage of artists of color, still, who grapple with the idea let alone reality of “achievement,” or a certain “other side of the street,” success (a famous author had to tell me what that phrase meant, recently; look it up). It’s difficult to be a commodity–a “brand”–if a large part of your history has been about being a commodity, or treated like one. How do you escape what’s in the blood? The brilliant documentary, “Twenty Feet From Stardom,” is a metaphor for all that. Ostensibly about the world of back up singers during the hey day of Phil Spector, Bowie during his “Young Americans,” period, the Stones and “Brown Sugar,” etc., it’s really a movie about the existential need for attention, and existential dread once that attention is conferred. In the movie the artists “struggle,” but for what? Some for the fame read money that was, by rights, there’s a long time ago, but had they achieved acclaim and comfort in their heyday, would they have known what to do with it? America did not teach them that. And, in any case, what was stolen that the film’s extraordinary women could not help but give away, which was their presence, their gifts? Is that America? The home of those with no gifts and those who have a surplus of them? Speaking from the heart about the balance between the need to do, and what the colored body can take, the great singer Tata Vega says it best: Had I become famous, I probably wouldn’t be talking to you right now. And yet the film ends with the advice a sage older singer confers: “Talent is God given, but what you do with it–that’s you.” A vital lesson. Best run with it.