Little Richard laid the foundations of rock and roll, the most important music and youth movement of the last century, and opened the door to the firmament of music stars full of rebellion and ambition. He also achieved this by being poor, black, gay, and disabled at a time when homosexuality was illegal and the United States maintained racial segregation laws. The documentary Little Richard: I Am Everything, directed by Lisa Cortés, was released in cinemas yesterday in an attempt to reclaim the artist’s role as a cornerstone of rock and roll. And this is the first time he’s trying to do this without skirting around his sexuality or his contradictions.
Born in 1932 in Macon, Georgia, a religious and conservative town in the southern United States, Little Richard grew up with his eleven siblings in a home full of difficulties as well as contradictions. Her father was a strict Adventist minister who eventually kicked her out of the house for unacceptable excesses, but he also ran a nightclub and had a secret distillery in his own home and did not hesitate to let her return. He is at the family home when he sees his music career begin to take off.
Rebellion and adolescence
The documentary quickly highlights a young man’s desire to go his own way, from barely knowing how to walk to pressing the piano keys to singing the gospel in church and adorning himself with his mother’s jewelry and makeup. It also speaks of someone who knew how to appreciate gospel singer Rosetta Tharpe, considered by many to be a pioneer of rock and roll, or various figures of the dirty blues who were gay pioneers in an era of the music genre and drag. that homosexuality and cross-dressing are illegal.
From his first steps, Little Richard adopted these values of rebellion as his own. During the recording of the first album he became untamed and found himself playing the piano in a slum near the recording studio; here he stole an explicit tribute to anal sex; When properly toned down, it would become his first big hit: Tutti frutti. A hit ranging from explosive wop bop to loo bop to lop bam boom would eventually result in many more copies being sold in the hands of white artists like Elvis or Pat Boone. It’s the first warning that the music industry is happy to tap into the talent and inspiration of black artists, but they’re less comfortable giving them the same prominence.
The 1950s brought together a generation that wanted to leave the memories of the war behind with the official birth of adolescence, a youth that for the first time loudly expressed their desire to adapt to the order. In one of the many testimonies among the artists, family members, and Little Richard collaborators circulated in the documentary, film director John Waters sums it up with his usual precision: “The first song you love and your family hates is the beginning of a new era.” the music of your life. “Little Richard gave me the urge to rebel at a very young age.”
The singer has repeatedly stated that his music breaks down the walls of discrimination. And as John Waters recalled, among that generation of young people seduced by the songs programmed by African-American radio stations, “even the racists were listening to black music.”
a dangerous artist
According to the established morality of those days, Little Richard was dangerous. He sang openly about sex and projected an ambivalence that was provocative rather than threatening. The fact that he was out of breath and screaming while singing and that his performance on stage was extraordinary led him to the dungeon many times. He hasn’t done much to change that perception, both in and out of the spotlight. “Everything was going for me. If you knock on my door and I feel that way, I say ‘keep going’,” he says in a trailer for one of the interviews in the documentary.
The orgies, free and open sexuality, and problems with drugs and alcohol that characterized his life were, on the contrary, accompanied by strong religious beliefs that led him to repent and declare himself “cured” of homosexuality. Personal contradictions that haunted (and tormented) him throughout his life. “He was coming out of an orgy and was going to read the Bible,” it is said at one point in the documentary.
extremely generous
His musical career would also be marked by his extreme generosity towards artists who would outshine him in the eyes of the public and media, who were eager to cultivate new idols and not very impermeable to the extravagant. Little Richard, in one way or another, sponsored artists such as James Brown, Jimi Hendrix, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, and served as a source of inspiration and reference for musicians from Elvis to David Bowie. Still, he fought an uphill battle with the music industry to get the money he deserved as the creator of legendary songs like Long Tall Sally, Lucille or Good Golly Miss Molly, and to get the recognition he deserved as the architect of rock and music. roll.
Lisa Cortés’s documentary meticulously examines decades of North American popular music, gives voice to A-list heroes, and highlights the intersections with Little Richard’s life. It also highlights how the industry has traditionally used minorities as creative fuel for white artists and how, not so long ago, it forgot to value them. Perhaps the spirit of Little Richard: I Am Everything can be summed up in the question posed by Julliard School ethnomusicologist Fredara Hadley: “What would it mean for the mythology of American rock music to say that its pioneers were black and gay?”