New documentary: The mystery of the sugar man | The Economist
►http://www.economist.com/node/21559908
One evening in Detroit in 1968, two music producers went to a dark and smoky bar. A man stood in the corner, playing a guitar and singing, his back to the crowd. Named Rodriguez, this singer was an eccentric, perhaps a drifter, with a lyrical style similar to Bob Dylan’s, but a mellower voice. The producers decided he deserved an album, which led to two, “Cold Fact” and “Coming From Reality”. But they both flopped, and Rodriguez disappeared back into the obscurity from which he had briefly emerged.
Although Rodriguez came to nothing in America, some bootleg recordings made their way to South Africa, where their melancholic defiance touched a nerve among white liberal youths during the apartheid era. “Every revolution needs an anthem,” says Craig Bartholomew-Strydom, a journalist. “‘Cold Fact’ was South Africa’s.” Rodriguez sold perhaps half a million albums in South Africa, where he was bigger than Elvis. Because the country was isolated by sanctions, South Africans had no idea that he was nothing anywhere else.
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