My immersion narrative

"Forget punk posturing, forget Jim Morrison's poetic superiority complex, Simone is the real thing ..."

So begins a review of Nina Simone: Love Sorceress which I saw last week at BAM, along with a packed house of sorcery enthusiasts. Our rapt attention to Simone's every gesture in this documentary of a 1976 appearance at Montreux Jazz Festival was only matched by our bewildered hostility to the bizarre French orientalist who kept interjecting a running on-screen commentary about Simone. He actually made some worthwhile points about her work but it was hardly the appropriate moment ...

Jet-setter that I am, the following day found me in Charlotte, NC, screening Raymond Gayle's black rock documentary Electric Purgatory. Its an earnest, Fishbone-centric tribute to the tribulations of artists who fall between the yawning gaps in the marketing departments' nets, but my considered opinion of it now is that rockism is frustrating and limiting even when its black rockism. In particular, the doc fetishizes the guitar as the summum bonum of rock, ignoring the ongoing relevance of piano from Little Richard onwards, but also of the rhythm section and, of course, the vocalists. Thus Tina Turner is absent from the doc, and Prince present only as a guitarist who gets props only when he became "a man" and stood up to the recording industry in the mid-1990s.

There was in other words a pretty unreconstructed masculinism at work throughout the doc, fretfully fingering the electric guitar as its throbbing tool of reassurance ...

After a brief waylay in Hotlanta I am currently holed up in Macon, GA, home to aforesaid Little Richard and some killer Soul music radio stations.