sugar man

I'm not one to buy into hype easily. When I was in high school, Jurassic Park filled all eleven screens of the local cinema. I stayed at home and encountered the dinos only a few years later when I found myself on the rather insipid Jurassic Park ride at Universal Studios. Then came The Matrix and so oblivious was I of any details that I later got excited about the digital rain of a neon green Unix screen saver without seeing the connection for years.

It's harder for me to claim distance from the cult of the bitten fruit, given that I've owned two iPods and four Macs. In my defense I say that I've never parted with my own money for the devices or any upgrades, and that while I've got rather comfortable with the computers, I believe the company lost its bearings two-three years ago and nothing worth getting excited about has left their factories since. The trajectory of the operating system has been downward at a frightening pace.

When I went to see a friend of mine in Northern Ireland for the weekend, I had something in my backpack that was the product of a hype, though one that took place long enough ago and far away for me to be comfortable with it. It was Searching for Sugar Man, a documentary that tells the story of Sixto Rodríguez, a singer-songwriter who released two records in the 70s that were quickly forgotten.

In the 80s, by an inexplicable twist of fate, Rodríguez became a star-in-absentia in South Africa, his songs endlessly bootlegged and handed on. It was the days before the internet and instant information, and just as no one in South Africa knew who the mysterious singer was, Rodríguez didn't know that his music had caught a nerve halfway around the globe. In the 90s, two fans started digging, and the story took off from there. Now we've got a Special Jury Prize at Sundance, an Academy Award and a musician who doesn't have to work in excavation and demolition anymore.

In case my friend had already seen the movie, I also bought the soundtrack. I don't quite understand the rationalization of Rodríguez's success that's given on the sleeve. There is no "Dylanesque anti-establishment punch". Lacking the poetry and overdoing the cheese strings, Rodríguez is no Dylan. His voice is unusual but what mesmerized me so much that I exhausted my free-account allowance on Spotify before buying the CD was the sound: old-school and hip at the same time, scratchy and scrawny but fresh. The sound of the original vinyl has been wonderfully preserved; there are strange stereo cross-fades, distortions and tape stretch. Background noises tell of master tapes roughly scraped clean of the grime of four decades. Thanks to brilliant production, all comes together with a sparkling rawness, as if the CD had been recorded last week.

I've got to keep the CD. Like me, my friend hadn't seen the movie. Belfast was rainy and cold. Even the St. Patrick's celebrations didn't encourage us out onto the streets. There was ample time to watch the movie, but with a one-year old, even simple things can turn into logistical challenges. My friend and I repeatedly fled to the warmth of the pub and the comfort of a Guinness, and I still don't know what Sugar Man is all about.