The other day I was at work, and a song called “Naive” by a band called The Kooks came on. It reminded me of when I first heard the song, which was the summer before my 8th grade year of school. That summer I went to Western Europe and we had a chaperone who was British and really cool. She had a Red iPod nano just like mine (the one that was part of the Product (RED) campaign to fight AIDS in Africa) and had a lot of epic songs on it. The very first song I heard her play on our bus ride around Ireland was “Naive” by The Kooks. It sounded pretty cool, and I pretty much remember listening to all sorts of other British artists and consuming British stuff when I got back home. I even started begging my parents to buy me Weetabix cereal, which is a popular cereal that was often served when we were in the United Kingdom. It’s actually pretty good with soy milk and fruit, and I wouldn’t mind eating it even now.
The chaperone also had a lot of other cool music by The Kooks on her iPod, many which I have fond memories of listening to with the other people on the trip. “Seaside” was one of them, and it’s just such a peaceful and beautiful song. It made me want to go to, as the song title suggests, the seaside. Another was “She Moves in Her Own Way,” which is a really fun tune I love. After listening to these songs I started loving The Kooks. The chaperone also had some songs by Gnarls Barkley on her iPod, specifically “Crazy” and “Smiley Faces,” and listening to these made me fall in love more with Gnarls Barkley’s music.
This is the one of the first songs I listened to on the trip by The Kooks:
So I had been meaning to write this review for a while, because honestly Brown Sugar is one of my favorite albums of all time. It’s by an artist named D’Angelo, and I don’t know, it just takes me away. When I need chill time or whenever I was working on stuff for work, or knitting something, or just needed some music to relax to, listening to this album’s songs has always helped. I just decided to listen to the full album today and just see if I could write about it. At first I was worried about not sounding perfect but I realized that it doesn’t have to sound perfect at first. Of course, when I publish this I want it to sound cohesive and to the point but at the same time I have to just start off with listening and appreciation of the music. I’m going to try to sound objective when reviewing this album, and hopefully I accomplish doing this. I’m going to be honest I may not be able to pick out all the instruments that are involved on the album, but I am going to try my best.
I think the song that really got me started with D’Angelo’s music was the 1st song on the album, and it’s also the title of the album, called “Brown Sugar.” It is smoky, sexy, brilliant. It is everything. And it was really hard for me to figure out what to say about this album because it elicits so many emotions and feelings for me, and his singing and instrumentals are just so raw and beautiful that putting it in words, I mean, I don’t really know if it will do the album justice. And honestly while I am writing I am going to spout some hogwash and my writing for this first draft will make very little if no sense. I sound really self-critical here, but I’m just getting my thoughts out.
Anyway, I’ll just write my basic feelings about the album even if it’s not totally comprehensive or put-together. I first heard about D’Angelo when I was browsing iTunes, because there’s another neo-soul artist named Joss Stone, and what iTunes did back in the day is compile a playlist of the songs that actors, musicians and entertainers love. One of the playlists was for Joss Stone, and one of the songs on the playlist was “Brown Sugar” by D’Angelo. The first time I heard it, it sounded okay, but then I didn’t know if I would pursue D’Angelo’s music again after that. But back then, I was still exploring the soul genre and had just started with artists like Joss Stone and Amy Winehouse, then slowly started moving towards classic singers such as Marvin Gaye and Aretha Franklin over time. In college I had a few D’Angelo songs on my iPod Nano (it was the super skinny one and it came in the red color as part of the Product(RED) campaign. I still have that baby to this day.). But when I actually listened to the full album Brown Sugar, I came to more appreciate D’Angelo’s artistry and the different influences that appear in his music. Also, reading more about who he is as a musician was amazing because he plays multiple instruments and although he had help from other artists in the production of Brown Sugar he produced the majority of the album in addition to writing the songs. According to the Wikipedia page about D’Angelo, he was influenced to do this because of Prince. Prince took full control of the production of his music, and was really serious about copyright, probably because he knew the music industry might try to control his rights as an artist. Especially as a Black artist, when you think about how historically Black artists were robbed of their rights and copyright while working under white record executives, it’s not surprising that artists like Prince or D’Angelo would take full control of their albums.
If you’re looking for an album that will help you relax, this is definitely one of those albums. And especially if you’re a huge fan of R n B or quiet storm music, this is an album that many fans and critics loved and still celebrate. I don’t know too many close friends who know about his music, but a couple of times I talked with some fellow R n B fans and we have gushed about D’Angelo’s music together. It’s a mature album, and not just because it has the Parental Advisory sticker on it. It’s an organic, beautiful album that must have involved a serious process where D’Angelo thought about and worked really hard on, along with his team. It’s incredibly sophisticated, and is reminiscent of a lot of classic Motown R n B artists. Of course, I can’t exactly compare Marvin Gaye’s music and D’Angelo’s music because they were produced during different times and with different recording equipment, but the crooning of Marvin is similar to the crooning of D’Angelo, as well as the song content. Marvin Gaye’s songs have a lot to do with romance and sex and love, and so do the songs on Brown Sugar. This album also reminded me a lot of Thundercat’s album Drunk because both albums mix funk, R n B and jazz, and both vocals are incredible on both albums. I guess also because both are alternatives to mainstream R n B.
The album
“Brown Sugar”: The song opens up with a smooth jazz riff, and then D’Angelo delves into an incredibly beautiful story about his encounter with a beautiful woman named Brown Sugar. He can’t help but be attracted to her because she is so attractive and he needs more of this woman to be satisfied. This song was caramel, brown sugar when you melt it in a pan and let it simmer. It is delectable, juicy, sexy, and sweet. The drums and the voices make it feel like my body is melting in chocolate. I close my eyes and I’m just totally taken in. The background noises convey the narrator with his friends as he’s thinking of this beautiful woman he can’t get enough of. The more times I listen to this song the less tired I get of it, and the more I crave it. I can’t help but move my body to this music. It is incredible. I know there is a Rolling Stones song called “Brown Sugar” but this version (which, of course, is totally different from the Rolling Stone one) is pure beauty.
“Alright”: The song opens with some old school radio crackling, giving the song an old school feeling. The album overall has a very old-school feeling and of course that’s not surprising because it came out in 1995. I really love D’Angelo’s soaring vocals. The song is in a major key, A major. I found myself closing my eyes and swaying to the music. It just has a sweet groovy feeling, like those 90s movies you watch when two people meet in high school and do old-school romantic things together.
“Jonz in My Bonz”: this song has a really cool hip-hop beat to it. It’s almost like a mantra that repeats through the song, “I’ve got a jonz in my bonz” and this mantra over the really chill percussive rhythms.
“Me and Those Dreamin’ Eyes of Mine”: I love this song. I listened to it in college and I have always sought comfort in D’Angelo’s rich sophisticated voice. I love the key it is in G Major. There is a beautiful bass beat underlying the song. I love how the chorus sounds, too, just so beautiful. And I love how the drums sound throughout the song it gives it its jazz and R n B feel.
“Shit, Damn, Motherfucker”: I love the intro to this song. It has a groovy feel in E minor and has a sort of dance rhythm. Like “Jonz in My Bonz”, “shit, damn, motherfucker” is like a mantra throughout the song.
“Smooth”: the jazz intro is absolutely gorgeous. Then it moves into old school rhythms. And like the title of the song, the song itself is smooth. I love the use of piano in the song, too. I found myself bobbing my head to the rhythms.
“Cruisin'”: This is originally a song by Motown artist Smokey Robinson released in 1979, and D’Angelo gives it a new spin. It just sounds sexy as hell, just being perfectly honest. It’s like D’Angelo’s voice just took me away. It also relaxed my muscles and helped me destress. I also love the strings and the drums backing up the vocals. It’s like D’Angelo’s voice wrapped me up inside it and never let me out.
“When We Get By”: This is actually one of my favorite songs on the album and it’s the one I can’t stop listening to. I love the key of F sharp major, and I see the color gold when I hear it. This song had a very pleasant feel, like when you wake up in the morning and don’t have to rush about, you can just take your sweet time and eat your breakfast and make your coffee and smell the roses. It made me want to take a nice stroll outside.
I had been meaning to see this movie for a while, and I had read some movie reviews about it, and the trailer looked so good. I watched it last night, and I was stuck making a decision whether to watch this or Good Boys. Good Boys is funny and this movie, The Runaways, was pretty serious. I will watch Good Boys another time though because I’ve really been craving biopics.
This film is based on Cheri Currie’s memoir about being a member of Joan Jett’s music group The Runaways. Honestly, I haven’t listened to much of Joan Jett’s music but this film made me appreciate her music even more. I’ve heard one of her more famous songs, “Bad Reputation,” in just about every movie known to man, every grocery store, on the radio, everywhere. It’s been in Shrek, Baby Mama, and so many other movies. And I’ve heard “I Hate Myself for Loving You” and “I Love Rock n’ Roll” so many times. And maybe “Cherry Bomb” in Guardians of the Galaxy. But I actually first heard of the song “Cherry Bomb” from watching the trailer for The Runaways, and then I recognized it when I watched Guardians of the Galaxy later on. But it wasn’t until this film that hearing Kristen Stewart sing her songs while playing Joan Jett that I actually became familiar with more of her music. Like, in the end credits, the song “Love Is Pain” but Joan Jett and the Blackhearts, I hadn’t heard that one before. In the near to final scene of the film, Kristen Stewart, as Joan Jett, is lying in the bathtub and singing lyrics to what would become her song “Love Is Pain.” It’s a beautiful song and I love it, too, because it’s in D major and I love that key.
Honestly, I saw Kristen Stewart in mainly the Twilight franchise and while I liked her in those movies, she really played Joan Jett well. I don’t know much about Joan Jett’s story, but Kristen embodied the musical energy that Joan Jett put in her performances. The chemistry and complex relationship between her and Cherie Currie (played brilliantly by Dakota Fanning) was played so well, and by the end of the film I wanted to listen to the song “Cherry Bomb” on repeat. Honestly I can’t really put Kristen Stewart’s performance of Joan Jett into coherent words. You know when you watch biopics you know that that one actor was meant to play that person? Like Chadwick Boseman, he was made to play James Brown. Or Jennifer Hudson was meant to play Aretha Franklin (I still have yet to see Respect, but one of my friends said Jennifer was really good in it.) I just felt like I was watching Joan Jett when watching Kristen Stewart perform. I also didn’t realize that Alia Shakwat played one of the members in the band; I vaguely recognized her face, but the last thing I saw her in was Broad City.
Honestly, I wouldn’t mind watching this film again. Maybe it’s because I saw Lovelace and really liked that film. Lovelace and The Runaways both take place during the 1970s and Linda Lovelace is briefly mentioned in The Runaways in passing. Of course, the storylines of these films are different, despite them both being biopics. The former is about Linda Lovelace and the abuse she dealt with when she was coerced into filming a pornographic film called Deep Throat. The latter is about a group of female rock musicians who defy gender stereotypes. However, both films deal with young women who don’t know much about sexuality, but then come into their sexuality. In Lovelace, Linda is in her early 20s and lives with her very religious family, who don’t want her seeing boys and value marriage over dating. However, she meets Chuck and he introduces her to pornography, and at first their relationship is strictly friendship but then he coerces her into the business without her knowing what really goes down in the pornography industry. It completes changes her, and while she did awaken to her sexuality, she also dealt with a lot of trauma and abuse at the hands of Chuck and the men involved in the filming of Deep Throat. The film also put tension on her relationship with her parents because no matter how many parties she was telling them she went to, at the end of the day, she was still working in an industry that went against their family-friendly religious morals and they were worried about her (until later on in the film, when they find out that she didn’t choose to go into the industry and that instead, Chuck forced her into doing pornography.) The film made lots of money and Linda became a star but Chuck still maintained full control of her success and her whereabouts, dictating where she could go and not valuing her independence. In The Runaways, Cherie Currie is 15 years old and lives with her parents and twin sister, Marie. She doesn’t get to spend much time with her family and her parents divorced. When she meets Kim Fowley and Joan Jett, her life changes and she becomes more confident in her sexuality. When they first meet Cherie, she doesn’t feel comfortable saying the lyrics to the song that Kim comes up with called “Cherry Bomb” because they are sexually suggestive. When she expresses her discomfort, Kim laughs at her and kicks her out, but then Joan tells her that it’s just a song and to just sing it just as she is.
However, this sours when Kim sets up a photo shoot where some photographers shoot sexualized photos of Cherie posing in sexually suggestive positions for The Runaways’ upcoming tour in Japan. Joan and the other band members get upset with Cherie for selling out and selling her body, and this is partly what drives the band apart. While Kim is definitely different from Chuck in Lovelace, he also is quite manipulative. Even though it seems like at the beginning he is empowering Joan, Cherie and the other band members he is actually driving them apart, calling them names and condescending to them. Towards the end, he calls them a bunch of dog c**ts (not gonna print the actual word but I’m sure you’ll find out eventually.) and Joan throws stuff at him. But he just cheers it on like it’s normal rock and roll behavior. It takes Joan herself realizing that Kim is driving them apart and preventing them from just being true to themselves and making music as friends.
Overall, this was an excellent movie.
The Runaways. 2010. Rated R for language, drug use and sexual content- all involving teens.
The first time I heard about Hustle and Flow was when I was watching the 78th Academy Awards in 2006 and one of the songs in the film, “It’s Hard Out Here For a Pimp” won an Oscar for Best Original Song. After that, I didn’t think about the film again, especially because I was too young at the time to see it. But fast forward to 2021 and I’m older and have seen enough R rated dramas to not mind seeing another one. Also, the movie received positive reviews from critics, so I wanted to see it.
It was definitely different from watching Zola. For those who haven’t seen Zola, it’s a dark comedy based on a true Twitter thread by a young Black woman named A’Ziah “Zola” King, who meets a fellow stripper while waitressing in Detroit and embarks with her on a wild road trip to Florida. The pimp in Hustle and Flow, played by Terrence Howard, ends up being a good guy who just wants to follow his dream of being a musician. Even though he doesn’t respect the women in his life, they still help him follow his musician dreams. The pimp in Zola, however, is anything but a good guy and doesn’t even become a good guy at any point during the film. In one scene of Hustle and Flow, D’Jay has Nola accompany him to a pawn shop where he is buying equipment for his recording studio, but the old white guy working there is unwilling to give him a discount for the expensive equipment. But then the guy ogles Nola and DJay arranges for her to have sex with him in exchange for the music equipment (this scene creeped me the fuck out, not gonna lie.) Nola then leaves the store and DJay threatens her with abusive language and she tells him she doesn’t want to hustle anymore, and wants something different in life even if she doesn’t know what that is. DJay then has Nola help him out in recording his rap album, and later on in the film when he is arrested for shooting up a bar he gives her his cassette tape and has her say aloud that she is in charge, meaning that she needs to take over his career while he is in prison. She is later scene getting out of a car wearing a business suit (which early on in the movie she told DJay she wanted to wear) and heels and walking to a radio station, and she seduces the DJ at the station to play DJay’s song “Whoop That Trick,” which he recorded at his home with Shug, Nola, Shelly, and Clyde. The song ends up being a hit and everyone rejoices.
Zola, however, paints a much grimmer picture. There are many scenes where Stefani, the white woman who coerces Zola to go on the trip with them, faces brutal treatment from her pimp, X (Colman Domingo acted the hell out of that role, and I’m glad I watched interviews of him talking about his character before watching the film, so I wouldn’t be scared shitless by his character.) When Zola first gets in the car, it seems they are all having a fun time, with X driving and all of them–X, Zola, Derek, and Stefani—rapping loudly to Migos’ “Hannah Montana.” However, within the first fifteen minutes of the film things go dark real quick, and we find out that X is actually more sinister than he appears. In one scene of the film (that has stayed stuck in my memory in the months after watching the movie) Stefani has sex with a client and ends up making less than she is worth, and Zola is furious with that, telling Stefani that “pussy is worth thousands.” Stefani tells her with false confidence that she doesn’t set the price for her services, and Zola has her update her profile and set a rate for her services. Stefani ends up making a ton of money that evening with multiple clients, but the next morning, when Stefani gives the money to X, he gets angry and tells Stefani to not let Zola get it in her head that her services are worth a lot of money, and that he is in charge when it comes to negotiating the rate of Stefani’s services. Stefani taps him quietly on the shoulder, and whispers in his ear if she can have some of the money (that she, not X, made through her own work), X tells her no and to be grateful that she has “food in her belly” and that he is providing her with these places to stay. Stefani lives in fear of X because he is absolutely an unpredictable character, and even though she projects this air of confidence around Zola, that X is just doing his job as her pimp and that she has no problems with him, it’s obvious that he uses fear and pumps himself up to intimidate Stefani and make her feel like she doesn’t have control over her life. In another scene, Stefani is forced into a client’s room and locked in a closet, and X, Zola and Derek run over to the room to get her. X shoots the guy who held her captive and they end up getting Stefani out of there, but in all honesty he’s not doing it because he like Stefani. He’s doing it because she makes him money, and if he loses her he will lose his cash flow, especially because Zola refuses to follow through with anything he does because she is a good bullshit detector and knows X is trying to intimidate her and make her lose her sense of self-worth. X doesn’t care about Stefani’s hopes and dreams, or even really about her career, unless it makes him money.
I am actually glad I watched Zola before watching Hustle and Flow. And I admit, I cannot compare the two movies to one another. While both movies are crime films, Hustle and Flow is a serious drama, and even though it has its tender moments and some funny moments of joy, it is at the end of the day a drama. Zola, however, is a dark comedy that has its funny moments, and it was an enjoyable film to watch (I think had I not read the Twitter thread before seeing the movie, I probably wouldn’t have appreciated the film as much.) The film doesn’t of course poke fun at sex trafficking or dancers themselves. The comedy lies in the absurdity of Stefanie, Derek and X, and knowing that Zola already knows how trippy and wild these people are as she quietly observes their ridiculous behavior. In Hustle and Flow, DJay is the main character and the women he pimps (Shug, Nola, and Lexus) are supporting characters who help bolster his music career so that he can address his midlife crisis (not that that isn’t important or that DJay’s dreams didn’t matter. They certainly did, and as a musician myself the film was quite inspiring in that sense) while in Zola, the pimp is a supporting character and Zola’s narrative is front and center and she gets to tell it just as it happened. Zola actually gives the lived account of a woman who was coerced into this trip. Honestly, it wouldn’t be fair for me to reduce it to just a wild trip to Florida. It was human trafficking and Zola, a Black woman and dancer, was actually in real life coerced by a young white woman into the human trafficking business and she actually shared the trauma she dealt with on that trip on Twitter in 2015. In one scene, Zola is sitting by herself at the poolside of the hotel X has them stay at, and she is just trying to have some alone time to herself but then X interrupts her and forces her to come back inside so that she can accompany Stefanie to meet with clients. Zola then says that she came on the trip to dance (at the beginning, when she and Stefanie first meet they dance together at a strip club, make a ton of money and have a good time just being themselves and doing their work) but then X tells her that “they’re done with that” and that she is here so that she and Stefanie can make him money. In Hustle and Flow, we briefly see Lexus and other women working at the strip club, and DJay sending Nola off to meet with clients, but that’s pretty much it. We don’t actually see what the men do to these women, how they treat them. It’s pretty much focused on DJay, his old high school friend Clyde, and a white guy named Shelly who all work together to create an album and help launch DJay’s career. Nola, Lexus and Shug are there for support, and even though Shug sings the chorus on the song “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp,” she is still at the end of the day a supporting character who helped the main character succeed in his career.
And of course, that’s not a bad thing in itself. The movie is really about people making music together and enjoying the process of it. It actually reminded me of Begin Again in that sense, because in Begin Again Keira Knightley’s character, Gretta, and Mark Ruffalo’s character, Dan, create their own band from scratch, recruiting random musicians who aren’t signed to a record label and just want to make music together and have fun. It is an enriching process of music making for all of them. Of course, the way Gretta and Dan see the music making is different from how DJay views it. Dan and Gretta just want to enjoy life and making music together, and even when Gretta sells the music online for a small price, Dan doesn’t mind because they had fun on the album together. DJay, however, puts a lot of pressure on Shug when she is singing the vocals for the song “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp” because he really wants his album to get noticed by big producers and in particular, a famous musician he looks up to called Skinny Black (played by real-life rapper Ludacris). They are not making the album for fun; they are having fun in the process, but they are not just making the album for laughs. DJay wants worldly success and acclaim because he came from nothing and is going through a point in his life where he doesn’t know what to do. Dan, however, is also going through a midlife crisis like DJay, but he was already working for a renowned record company for years so he had access to the resources in the music industry and all the connections. He has won many awards, while DJay is just getting started and has to start from scratch and has to work extremely hard to get noticed by the big record labels and radio stations, and of course, his idol Skinny Black, who ends up putting his career down and not supporting DJay in his dreams. Even though these two movies about music are totally different in their subject matter, they are about people following their dreams from scratch even when the going goes rough for them.
Here is the trailer for Hustle and Flow:
Hustle and Flow. 2005. Rated R for sex and drug content, pervasive language and some violence.
Wow. All I can say is wow. Honestly I can say that this film really deepened my appreciation for Chadwick Boseman’s work as an actor. For those who don’t know Chadwick Boseman was an incredible actor who starred as King T’Challa in the movie Black Panther, as well as the character Levee in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and Jackie Robinson in the biopic 42. He passed away from colon cancer last year, and I remember feeling disbelief, not knowing how to react to his death, and then crying for about a week, just long sobs. I honestly didn’t think I was going to get through most of my days at work that week without crying. On television shortly after his death Black Panther was on, and afterwards there was a tribute to Chadwick, and seriously I was convulsing with tears and didn’t think I would sleep that night. I didn’t understand how life was going to be the same without Chadwick alive because in every movie I saw with him, he just put his heart and soul and feeling into the roles he played. And in the biopic Get On Up, it was like he was the only actor who could actually play James Brown, was meant to play James Brown.
This is also the first film I’ve watched starring Nelsan Ellis. Nelsan Ellis is an actor who was famous for his role in True Blood. I haven’t seen True Blood, but when I saw him in Get On Up, I was like, Damn, this guy could act. He plays Bobby Byrd, a member of James Brown’s band The Famous Flames. The movie shows how their rapport changes over time, and even when the other band members quit because James won’t pay them on time, Bobby stays behind and is the only member of the band to stick with James. That is, until he tells James that he wants to release his own record someday. In one powerful scene of the film, he and James are performing together, and James lets Bobby have some of his spotlight, giving him some credit when before he treated Bobby like any other member of the band. But when they’re sitting and talking together, Bobby tells James that he wants to release his own solo record, and James goes off on him and accuses him of stealing his spotlight and going around telling everyone he’s going to become the next big thing rather than stay in James’s shadow as he’s been doing the past something odd years they were performing together. Bobby quits because he can no longer take this anymore, and when he leaves Brown asks him why he’s leaving him alone, and Bobby tells him that from the very beginning James has always been on his own and wanted to do his own thing. This shows that he can see right through James, that even if James wants him to stay, Bobby knows that he worked behind the scenes with James for years, bolstering his career, hoping to one day launch his own career, but James isn’t going to return the favor or help him because he’s focused on his own career and his own success. Earlier, Maceo Parker, asks Bobby why he is sticking with James even though he treats the band poorly, and Bobby says it’s because he wasn’t meant to have the spotlight on him, and that James is the one meant to be in the spotlight. Maceo questions this logic, and we can see Bobby reflecting on whether he should stick with James or not. Even many years later in 1993, James thinks Bobby should perform with him again, even though Bobby has moved on and started a new life with his wife and family. The film shows how complex their relationship was, and Ellis and Boseman both did incredibly embodying the roles of both these people.
The biopic is also important to watch because of the theme of Black masculinity. We see several flashbacks to James’s childhood, when his father threatens to shoot and kill his mother and beats her severely. Another scene is when his mother is seen drunk and playing around with another man, and the young James calls out to her but she pretends to not remember who he is. Another scene is when James is talking with Little Richard during Richard’s shift at a burger joint, and Richard opens up to him about his past trauma and then asks James about his past trauma. James recalls a moment when he and several other Black boys were blindfolded and had numbers painted on their chests, and they had to fight in a boxing ring against each other in front of a crowd of white people. All the members in the band playing during the fight are Black men, and the camera flashes to their pained expressions as they look at the fighting. It shows the injustice of it all, because these Black men not only have to play music for white people but also have to witness young Black men learn aggression against each other for the sake of entertainment. They understand that these Black boys are being treated like chattel for the white audience. When James is knocked down, he looks at the band from where he is lying and they break out into a funk song and start getting into playing the music, and seeing this in his mind’s eye, even though it may not be actually happening in real life, inspires James to get back up and fight even harder against the other boy in the ring.
These flashbacks not only give a glimpse into what James’s life was like growing up, but it shows how he had to hide being vulnerable under all his success so that he wouldn’t seem weak. In one powerful scene of the film, his mother Susie comes by and tries to engage James in casual conversation, but James says he doesn’t want to talk to her because he doesn’t need her help anymore. His mother cries and explains that she did her best to raise him, and he gives her a $100 bill and shows her out the door, telling her to stop crying and getting sentimental because he is James Brown and he can make it on his own without anyone else’s help. When she leaves she says he is beautiful but he still gives her a hard cold expression. When Bobby appears, James appears to be crying, but he quickly wipes the tears away, suggesting that he doesn’t want to appear less than a man by crying. The scene made me think of the film Moonlight, and its depiction of Black male pain was told from a different lens because Chiron, unlike James, had homophobia to deal with on top of the struggles of being a poor Black youth. Towards the end of the film Chiron is sitting with his mother, who abused him when he was younger, and she is reflecting on her past behavior towards him and starts breaking down in tears because she feels she could have been more supportive of him when he was going through such tough times. When he sees his mother crying, Chiron breaks down and cries. This is a total contrast from the beginning of the scene where we first meet Chiron as a grown adult because at the beginning he is muscular, he works out, he’s no longer the skinny kid who got beat up by his crush in high school for being gay. He seems to be the prototype of the straight Black man, but the scene where he meets his mom shows that even as a grown man, he is a human being with feelings and that he doesn’t have to be ashamed of crying. We cry so we can heal from past trauma, and Chiron cries because he remembers his past and realizes he can’t keep it buried away no matter how much he tries to distance himself from his past. Him crying and sharing this moment with his mother of reconciling grief and trauma when he was younger allows him to truly heal and to express his humanity, his manhood, in a way that is true to himself, that doesn’t depend on societal expectations that say that men, particularly Black men, should keep their emotions to themselves and not share them with anyone.
James Brown actually had a song called “I Don’t Want Nobody to Give Me Nothing (Open Up the Door I’ll Get It Myself)” where he talks about not needing people’s charity or anyone’s help (“open up the door/ huh/ I’ll get it myself” is one of the lyrics). As groovy as that song was, it reminded me that asking for help, especially as a Black person living in a racist society, is perfectly okay, but also how historically Black people have been conditioned to pull themselves up by their bootstraps if they want to be successful. However, this mentality has only caused further pain and trauma because talking about mental health has historically carried a stigma in Black communities because of the idea that Black people, and Black men in particular, should just buck up and keep their feelings to themselves. It’s getting better and more people in the Black community are realizing that we need to talk about our mental health in order to go through the process of healing from trauma.
Also, side note: it was so interesting that Viola played the character she did, because in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, it’s totally different and this time, instead of being a supporting character like she was in Get On Up, Viola Davis actually plays a musician famous during the 1920s called Gertrude “Ma” Rainey. Boseman, in the film Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, plays Levee, who is a member of Ma’s band. Unlike Ma, who just wants to make her records and do her own thing, Levee caters to the white record executives and seeks validation from them for his work. He is constantly asking them to take his songs, and when they refuse he pretends to be okay with it, and then takes his anger out on his bandmates because as a young Black man living in a white supremacist society he doesn’t have many other outlets through which to express his frustration. He also challenges Ma a lot, underestimating her authority as a musician. Ma constantly puts him in his place though and reminds him that he needs to keep his ego at the door and just play the music how she wants it. It was interesting to watch Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and then Get On Up because I think Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom gave me some key context for watching Get On Up, particularly in regards to how Levee and James both handle their past trauma. In one scene Levee recalls how a white man assaulted his mother, and how witnessing her assault led to him feeling angry and disillusioned about life, especially life as a young Black man. Remembering that trauma with his mother also challenges Levee’s faith in God, and he points up to the ceiling cursing God and telling him to turn his back on him. I think that’s why, when I think about the last scene of the film, where a white band is seen recording Levee’s song, which the record executives at first rejected but then stole and sold to a white audience, because in that song there is a lot of pain and trauma underneath the joviality and upbeat nature of the song. Levee put his life into that song, and while writing it wrestled with his past trauma, his tense arguments with Ma and the other band members, so to the record executives, it’s just a song to be sold and distributed to the public, but within music there is the narrative of someone’s life, and Levee’s life, his suffering and brief moments of joy, went into that song.
In one scene of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, the white record executives are about to do a recording session with Ma, but she tells them that she won’t record the song until they bring her a Coca-Cola. This is just one of many demands that Ma makes, and it frustrates the record executives. But Ma tells one of the members of her backing band, Cutler (played brilliantly by Colman Domingo), that she knows that the white record executives only want her voice. They only want her voice, not her humanity, and they will do what they can to control her image to appeal to white audiences, giving her little to no artistic freedom or room to express her authentic self. This was common though at the time, and another example of someone who had to assert herself in the industry was Aretha Franklin. In a tribute to Aretha Franklin, Daily Show host Trevor Noah said that Aretha demanded to get paid before she performed instead of after she performed. She did this because she knew how white executives treated Black musicians, and in general because she was living in a racist society where Black people were treated as second-class citizens even in a prominent industry like the music industry, so she had to demand her pay and be assertive so that she wouldn’t be walked all over. In the film Ma didn’t care what other people thought of her, and she wasn’t trying to curry favor with the record label. She had a certain way she wanted to sing and express herself, and she came in with that self-knowledge, so she wasn’t duped into thinking that she had to do what the record labels said for her to do. Similarly, in Get On Up, James Brown makes several demands to his manger, Ben Bart, because he knows that if he signs with the record labels, these white executives are going to just make all the money they can off of him and not pay him well or treat him with respect, or even genuinely respect his artistry. Earlier in the film he has a conversation with Little Richard, who warns him of the “white devil” and to not let himself get easily duped by white people in the music industry. He remembers this advice and when he meets with Ben Bart, he tells him that he knows the “white devil” (aka the white record executives) just want to make money off of him, and he commands respect and makes demands of what he needs from them so he can launch his career and have complete ownership of his image. James suffered from mistreatment as a young Black man all his life, so he isn’t going to let white people profit from and take away the one thing he holds dear, his musical talent.
Overall, I really loved this movie. And Boseman’s dance moves were out of this world.
Get On Up. 2014. 2hr 19 min. Rated PG-13 for sexual content, drug use, some strong language and violent situations.
I just finished On the Come Up by Angie Thomas and think there needs to be a sequel to the book. It is that good. I read her novel The Hate U Give about a year ago and devoured it within a few days. For those who haven’t yet read the book, The Hate U Give is about a young Black woman named Starr who loses her childhood friend when a police officer kills him. Starr, over the course of the novel, learns to transform her grief into a call for everyone to protest racial profiling. This novel earned Angie Thomas a spot on The New York Times bestseller list and a movie starring Amandla Stenberg as Starr.
On the Come Up is also incredibly good. It is about a young Black woman named Brianna (nicknamed “Bri”) Jackson who lives with her mom and her brother after the murder of her father, who was a prominent rapper. Bri, like her family, is struggling to make ends meet while aspiring to be a famous rapper, but then her Aunt Pooh encourages her to enter a rapping battle to get a record deal with Supreme, a prominent rapper who was in competition with Bri’s dad. Bri enters the battle even though her mom and teachers want her to focus on studying for the ACT so she can get into college, and she ends up roasting her rival, Supreme’s son Milez. Her song goes viral and everyone at school now knows who she is, but the further immersed she gets in her career as a rapper, the deeper in trouble Bri gets with her family and friends. Jayda (nicknamed Jay), Bri’s mom, was able to recover from her substance abuse and get a job at the local church, but when she gets laid off, she struggles to provide for herself, Bri and her son, Trey. Bri’s fame becomes the talk of the community, and not in a good way. One day, two police officers profile Bri and accuse her of having drugs in her backpack when she actually has candy she is selling to make money. Everyone at the school sings Bri’s hit, but a lot of people criticize her because the lyrics seem to the public to glorify drug use, gun violence and money. Supreme tries to sell Bri out, but Bri eventually realizes how, in the end, the money and fame doesn’t matter if it jeopardizes your safety and the safety of your friends and family. She realizes that one can still be a rapper and not have to play into people’s mainstream ideas of who rappers are. In fact, rap can be used as a means of fostering community and addressing social injustice. This book really spoke to me, especially with Trey’s character. Trey went to college, got straight A’s in high school, and got a degree in psychology. However, he couldn’t find jobs in his field, so he got a job working at a pizza restaurant to support the family while looking for a better job and applying to graduate school. His grandfather pities him for having a college degree and working in food service, but Trey’s situation is a real reality that speaks to a lot of us millennials who get these college degrees but don’t have many opportunities after college to use these degrees in the real world. However, even though Trey doesn’t directly use his psychology degree in a job-market sense, he still uses it to his advantage when helping out Bri. In one scene, Bri cries because she is overwhelmed with the unwanted attention she is getting at school for getting her music out there, with her family’s financial situation, and with the death of her father. She gets on a radio show and calls out Hype, the interviewer, when he belittles her music and makes her out to be this violent person when she’s really just trying to survive, and she gets backlash from it. It is overwhelming, and she thinks she is weak from crying in front of Trey, but he tells her that crying doesn’t make you weak and that “admitting that you’re weak is one of the strongest things you can do.” (Thomas p. 362)
This made me think of the film Moonlight, which is about Chiron, a young Black gay man growing up at a time where no one other than a few people would accept him for who he is. In one scene, Chiron cries in the principal’s office because Kevin, the guy he fell in love with, beats him up after a homophobic school bully pressures him to do so. The principal tries to convince him that he should have told someone that he was being bullied, but Chiron tells her that she doesn’t know how hard it is for him to do that. In another scene, we see Juan, a drug dealer who supports Chiron when his mom doesn’t, break down and cry at the dinner table because Chiron is living this painful reality where kids at school are calling him slurs and his mom also neglects him at home, and he just doesn’t know what to tell this little kid when Juan himself is just trying to survive. This movie shows that crying is human, but that Hollywood hasn’t always been good about just letting Black individuals, especially Black men, have space to just release their pain through tears. I totally agree with Trey that crying doesn’t make you weak, even though our society has historically stigmatized the shedding of tears. Crying shows that you are willing to admit that something is wrong, and it is a powerful way to communicate. Of course, crying too much is not always a good thing (I’m an empath, trust me, I know.) So even though it seems Trey’s degree is useless, it actually helps him read people and know what they are going through. This is how I feel with philosophy and Africana Studies. As much as people love to bash philosophy majors, our degree really isn’t useless because regardless of whether you pursue economics, STEM, or the arts and humanities, you need a solid philosophy on which to base your studies, otherwise you’re just doing all this research with no purpose. Even when working all these different jobs not related to my major, I learned how to think and act like a philosopher. As a philosophy major I learned how to question everything: What is the purpose of being a creative? What is my purpose in life? Are there perks to being a perfectionist? I have applied philosophy to everything: when I listen to music, when I write, when I watch movies, when I go to my job every day, when I interact with my fellow human beings, when I perform music. I live philosophy every day even though I don’t get to sit in my dorm room and reread Descartes’ Meditations ten times like I did in college.
The Mask Stereotype
Even though my second degree, Africana Studies, didn’t get me a job working at the Smithsonian (I still need to just get a ticket and go visit the National Museum of African-American History), I have used my training as a philosophy major to think more deeply about the deep roots of Black pain in our country’s history and how we can continue to address these roots through music, writing and other mediums of expression. When Bri’s song becomes a hit, Supreme goads her to do more music with lyrics about gun violence, but after understanding the risk that producing this music has on her loved ones, Bri realizes that Supreme is using her as a pawn to beef up his already successful career. When she goes into the studio expecting to rap her own lyrics, Supreme says Dee-Nice, another rapper, already wrote the song for her. She reads the lyrics and finds that it’s the same subject matter she rapped about in her hit: possessing guns and killing other people in the community if they criticize her. James, an older white man who is friends with Supreme at the record label, only has this single perception of the Black community: problems. Everywhere problems. Drugs, gangs, violence, prison, unemployment. He doesn’t know rap’s potential to address the institutional inequality that caused these problems in the first place. But because James only cares about making a profit from Bri, he thinks that all she wants to rap about is “sassy black-girl shit” (Thomas 381) and that pigeonholing her will make the record label richer. However, as an outsider, Bri can see through their nonsense even though she has gained access to this rich powerful boys club of music producers, so she speaks to Supreme in private and tells him she’s got her own music and won’t rap what Dee-Nice wrote. Supreme tells her that she can’t worry about all that because she is in the music business and “this is about making money” because James has the money they don’t have to succeed in the business. In reality, if Bri were to keep making songs that didn’t personally speak to her, she would just keep getting paid less than a profit while James and Supreme enjoyed most of the money without really doing any of the hard work themselves (aka writing the music from their hearts.)
Bri says the moment when Supreme is threatening to end her career reminds her of when she went to the zoo, and these little kids were making faces at the animals in the exhibit and trying to get them to come up to the glass or make sounds, solely for the sake of entertainment. Even though these animals obviously didn’t pay attention to these kids, Bri remembers feeling bad for the animals, and after giving in to Supreme and rapping the song Dee-Nice wrote, she feels like she’s “in an exhibit, and there’s room full of people waiting for me to entertain them. I have to say what they want me to say. Be what they want me to hear.” (Thomas 384) There is a concept I learned about in one of my Africana Studies classes, and that was “putting on the mask,” or what happens when Black individuals feel like they are always performing for the public eye. Black individuals have diverse identities and experiences: straight, gay, trans, Democrat, Libertarian, Republican, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, biracial, multiracial, rich, poor, middle class, the list of identities goes on. However, race is about perceptio, and how people were brought up to view Blackness can condition how one wants to see Black people behave, and often these perceptions of Blackness are not very well-founded. James operates from a position where he feels it’s okay to belittle Bri, her dad and other Black citizens, because he promises her money and fame if she lets him say all these bigoted things about Black individuals. Instead of feeling like she can be free with her music, Bri feels trapped in the industry and is trying to hold onto her sense of self, but when her mom finds out what happened, she asks Bri who she really is and Bri can’t answer on the spot because she has other people telling her who she is. She realizes that she can still kill it as a female rapper without catering to macho bigwigs who couldn’t care less about her humanity.
This book reminded me so much of the film Dope. In the film Malcolm, Diggy and Jib are three high school “geeks” living in Inglewood who love ’90s hip-hop, want to go to college, and play in a punk band called Awreeoh. The school bullies pick on them for loving these things, and when a drug dealer named Dom invites Malcolm, Diggy and Jib to a party , Dom and the other partygoers at first make fun of them, but then when Malcolm finds out that Dom put a gun and cocaine in his backpack and Malcolm and his friends sell the cocaine on the black market, they suddenly become popular very fast. But when they get further enmeshed into the pickle of selling the cocaine, Malcolm’s ego gets in the way and I worried his friends were going to desert him. But Jib and Diggy stick with him through the whole thing even if it nearly costs them their future dreams. The friendship between Jib, Diggy and Malcolm reminded me of the friendship between Bri and her friends Sonny and Malik. They give each other the Wakanda handshake from the film Black Panther:
and they also love quoting Yoda from Star Wars. Their friendship is tight, and even when Bri’s hit goes viral and gets her backlash, they stick through with her all the way. I also liked how Bri and Malik never make Sonny feel different from them just because he is gay. Similarly, Jib and Malcolm love Diggy for who she is even when other people make fun of her for being a lesbian. As a queer POC, I was really happy that the rare gay characters were well-represented in Dope and On the Come Up.
While reading this book, I couldn’t help but plead in my mind: pleease let there be a movie for this. And sure enough, I Googled “on the come up movie” and Variety had just published a piece a couple of months ago about Fox purchasing the rights to produce the upcoming film based on the novel. I cannot begin to emphasize how important it is that we teach The Hate U Give and On the Come Up in our high school English classes (then again, I am lightyears removed from high school so I don’t know how the curriculum is nowadays.) We need to give kids of all races, especially young Black and Latinx kids, an opportunity to read books where they feel well-represented. I remember we read the occasional Gwendolyn Brooks poem for English class and Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street, but for the most part the books we read had few to no POC characters with rich backstories and character development, and a lot of the authors, frankly speaking, were dead white men. After taking Africana Studies and reading literature by writers such as Teju Cole, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Nell Larsen, I at first got angry because I never got to read these writers in school, but then came to appreciate in the end my college education and understand how much of a privilege it was to have access to even just knowing these writers exist and that they published these deeply personal works for us to read. Not everyone knows these works exist, and English teachers who just have their students read The Great Gatsby, Huckleberry Finn and Julius Caesar (8/10/21: not hating on these books, I enjoyed them as much as the next person) aren’t giving their students a chance to know that these narratives like those of Starr and Brianna exist. On the Come Up is especially powerful because it encourages kids who might want to be rappers or other musicians that, while it’s okay to make money from your art to pay your bills and put bread on the table, music should also speak to social inequalities and musicians not be afraid of speaking up when something is wrong or people are taking advantage of their well-being. Brianna later uses her music to address the sexism she has encountered as a female rapper and people’s expectations for her to be someone she isn’t. As a musician who doesn’t say much, Bri’s story was inspiring for me because as an introvert she uses music to express her anger. At this point, after watching so much news, it’s hard for me to express how overwhelming it is. I could just shut off and not think about it, but I feel inspired after reading On the Come Up to use my music to address racial injustice, climate change, sexism, domestic violence and other forms of injustice. I recently came across this powerful performance of Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings by Cremaine Booker, and in the video description he dedicates the performance to the late Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, two unarmed Black men who died at the hands of police in 2016. After seeing this performance I gained the confidence to use my music to address things that make me angry but that I didn’t have the words to express my anger about. I have seen orchestras on YouTube perform this beautiful solemn piece, but Cremaine’s was the first version I have seen that was directly dedicated to addressing social injustice.
Overall, excellent novel. I wouldn’t mind reading it again. Truly a blessing to read another work by Angie Thomas! 🙂
After watching A Star is Born, I felt quite depressed and hopeless. What was the point of being a musician if it meant letting fame and fortune get to one’s head, causing the artist to lose touch with themselves in the process? I’m not saying the music industry is in any way to blame for substance abuse, but the stress of touring and parties can really stress some musicians out, especially if they are already dealing with substance abuse. I cried, thinking that was all the music industry had in store for me (even though a lot of classical musicians don’t get famous enough to lead those kinds of fame-filled lives.)
With Pop Star: Never Stop Never Stopping, it made fun of the fame associated with being a pop musician, and believe me, I laughed (but of course, anything with Andy Samberg is going to tickle my funny bone.) But then I asked myself, Is being a musician really just one big joke? I know not everyone ends up like that, but it got me thinking, once again: is there a way to be a successful musician if no one has discovered your musical talent until much later in life? Conner4Real (Andy Samberg’s character) has had people telling him he would be a star since he was very young, and so he grew up thinking he would just be successful for the rest of his life, even if his songs got terrible reviews and he struggled with his ego.
But with Begin Again, I can honestly say that I feel refreshed. When it first came out in 2013, I thought about seeing it because it looked interesting, but never got around to seeing it. But then I finally decided I wanted to give it a shot, and I’m glad I waited to see it because had I seen it earlier, it probably wouldn’t have resonated with me as much. But now that I have been out of the league of constant performances and auditions for orchestras and have been deciding from scratch whether to go to music school, to teach music lessons, to move to a big city and find my dreams there, or whatever else I was dreaming about with regards to music, watching Begin Again gave me a new perspective on what it means to be a musician and still lead a happy fulfilling life.
Gretta is an introverted young woman who is also a gifted singer and songwriter, and she moves to New York City with her boyfriend and fellow musician, Dave. Dave gets signed to a major record label and leads her into this totally different life, one that she is not interested in. They move from their tiny apartment in the city to a fancy studio where Dave produces all his hits. Shortly after they move into the studio, Dave tries to convince Gretta to go on tour and produce the songs with him for their album, but she is more interested in just making music and not so much the glamour that comes with all of that. Dave heads to Los Angeles to work with some producers for his album, leaving Gretta to hang out with her friend, Steve, who also happens to be a struggling musician like Gretta. Dave comes back from Los Angeles and has Gretta listen to one of his tracks, but Gretta intuitively finds out Dave cheated on her for a girl on the record producing team in L.A. and leaves him. One night Steve, Gretta’s friend, encourages her to perform at a bar, and so Gretta reluctantly sings what turns out to be a beautiful song.
Dan, a record label executive with drinking problems, a bad relationship with his wife and daughter and a reluctance to change, can’t understand why the indie record label he manages with his college buddy, Saul, is allowing too many pop-sounding musicians to record for them. When Saul tells him he needs to just go with the changes in people’s tastes instead of close himself off from them, Dan gets upset and Saul fires him. With no money and no job, Dan goes to a bar, drunk and contemplating suicide. Then he hears Gretta perform and he suddenly envisions her performance as if she was in a real recording studio, with strings, keyboard, drums and a guitar to back her up. He offers her a record deal, but she refuses. She tells him that she makes music for herself, not to get famous, and he tries to convince her that the point of music is to share with other people, not just to play it for oneself. Dan gets an epiphany and realizes that unlike Dave, who is living the high-life and going on tour but not really feeling fulfilled in his music career, Gretta doesn’t have to live that life and can make wonderful music even before she gets signed to Dan’s record label. So he gathers a bunch of musicians who are willing to play music without pay and has them, him, Steve and Gretta perform for the NYC public in parks, subways, in alleys, and on rooftops. When Dave asks Gretta to meet up with him, he realizes that she has moved on with her life and is no longer lonely without him, even when he tries to beg her to come back to him. She thankfully realizes that he’s not worth returning to not just because he cheated with another girl behind her back (and also panders to a crowd of other girls who swoon when they see him), but because she has charted her own music path with Dan and many other musicians who haven’t lived through the fame and getting signed to a label.
One interesting conversation happens toward the end of the film, and that is about how record sales work. At a meeting in the record label conference room, Saul listens to Gretta’s album and says he will hook up some producers in Los Angeles to listen to it so they can put it in some TV shows and films. Dan says he’s not interested and that he wants to get Gretta signed onto the label. Gretta then asks how distribution of music works, and one of the folks at the meeting tells her that if a CD sells for 10 units, then the musician gets a dollar (“like selling a book for a buck.”) Gretta rightfully asks why the musician gets only a dollar while the record label gets the other nine dollars. Saul chuckles and tells her that if she were to sign onto the label, the label would hire a producer to remix a couple of her tracks, then she would sell a hit record and then she would live the long and fulfilling music career of her dreams, but that because it was her album, it was her choice in the end whether or not she wanted to sign with the label. I was literally watching this interview that Rob Markman did for digital media company Genius on a study that showed musicians only make 12% of revenue from the music industry, and how musicians have tried to navigate this, and where all the other money went to if not to the artist (the full interview is below:)
This interview forced me to wake up to the reality that there is much more involved than just playing music when an artist is signed onto a record label, and it made me think of how in Begin Again, Dave’s number one dream was to record with a major record label. However, after he got his dream, he came back to Gretta and, when she asked him how his tour was, said it was incredibly grueling because he had to travel so much by himself. In the past he and Gretta just made music in their apartment, and they had that intimate space to just make beautiful songs, but when Dave got signed to the label, it totally changed him and Gretta’s relationship because he wasn’t around to be with her, and it especially changes the relationship they have with music. For Gretta, music is about honesty, but for Dave, music is a way to get famous. When they meet up in the park, he plays a recording he did in the studio of “Lost Stars,” which Gretta wrote for him when they were together. Gretta tells him that the song has lost its authenticity ever since he became famous and cheated on her with another woman. This reminds me of A Star is Born, when Ally doesn’t want to lose her identity when she becomes famous, and Jackson accuses her of becoming someone she’s not when Interscope Records signs her. It also reminds me of Big Eyes because Margaret Keane was this woman who just wanted to paint as a means of catharsis, but her husband, Walter, wanted to sell out. Margaret tells him that she wants to be honest instead of focused on fame when she paints, but Walter tells her that no one really cares about honesty.
Begin Again helped me better understand that musicians don’t have to sign to a major record deal to be successful, and that musicians can find their own path even when they aren’t famous. Dan had a long successful music career, helping sign several artists and winning Grammy Awards left and right, but in the end, he was human and had his own battles to deal with. Dave got famous, and yet he was incredibly lonely on tour and got sad when he listened to Gretta’s voicemail. Gretta, although not well-known, found her own happiness and Dan also came to understand himself that what’s really important are the friendships you make along the way, not so much the money or the status. And this movie also taught me to be open to change; I had these wild dreams at one point that I was going to either get signed on to work for a major record label in LA or NYC. But then I did some more self-reflection and after watching movies like A Star is Born, Popstar and Begin Again, I think I can figure out an alternative career path for my music, one that doesn’t necessarily fit the stereotype of how musicians should be. I would of course love to do a lot more with my music, but I also don’t want to lose my love for it, and I sometimes worry that having a career in music would make me stop loving it. I know this is silly thinking, but after seeing Begin Again, I feel a lot better about where my love of music is going to take me. Seeing Gretta and Dan bounce back from their struggles and chart their own music path has inspired me to keep an open mind about my music career, instead of doing what I have done for the past two years and keeping a one-track-mindset of “I need to be this kind of musician by blah-blah-date.” Of course, having a plan for your career helps, but Gretta and Dan inspired me to think outside the box and experiment with other styles of music.
I honestly wouldn’t mind seeing this film again so I can remind myself to be patient and not feel any less of a musician just because I haven’t yet signed onto a major record label (or any record label.) Really excellent and inspiring film. Also, seeing the violinist and cellist in Gretta’s band made my day! 🙂 I am definitely open to playing more than just classical, so maybe playing in a band of some sorts while holding down a day job would be an option. Also I just really enjoyed the cast; I love all the actors and musicians who starred in this film, especially Keira Knightley and Mark Ruffalo! 🙂
8/5/21: as I rewrote this review, I realized how many generalizations I may have made at the expense of a lot of musicians who actually work in the recording industry. A movie cannot speak for the entire industry, and as someone who has not worked in the pop music industry I can’t speak from personal experience, so a lot of what you read here take with a grain of salt.
At first I didn’t think I could watch A Star is Born in the evening, because for me, watching gut-wrenching drama films at night before I go to bed is like having me watch Paranormal Activity at two o’clock in the morning (not that I would have the confidence to go see something that scary, let alone that late at night, or let alone at all. I am squeamish to a T.) But alas, here I am writing this review, and no tear duct has been shed from my orbs.
I wanted to cry. I really did. However, I was so busy digesting all the tough-love lessons of the film that I really couldn’t elicit any emotion other than a sense of unfairness that I feel about how the music industry treats women and especially people with mental health issues. I could no longer just sit and cry because I knew my tears would do nothing to address the real issue that the film portrays: mental illness and the stigma associated with getting help. So I took to writing this review to raise awareness of the issue, to do my part for the community. Like I mentioned earlier, I was deeply curious about how the music community was addressing mental health issues, and especially in the classical music community because the business of being an orchestra musician can feel like a total nightmare when you struggle with any kind of mental health issue. When you prepare for an audition, you are literally shaking in your boots, but it’s more than just mere nervousness. It feels like that dark cloud over your mind is going to swallow you up and prevent you from performing your best, let alone living your life. So after taking a hiatus from any heavy performing or auditioning, I decided to take matters into my own hands and do my own research on the topic of mental health and musicians, because Lady Gaga, at the Grammys this year when she won for her song “Shallow” from the movie, told it like it was: a lot of artists deal with mental health issues and we need to not only support each other through our mental health issues, but also seek out help for our mental health issues as well.
I completely agree, so it’s no wonder that, when I Googled “mental health and musicians” today I came across so many stories about how singer Justin Bieber had to take a break from touring so he could spend more time with his wife Hailey Baldwin and also take care of himself, or that rapper Big Sean had to cancel touring last year to get help for his anxiety and depression. Honestly, it’s weird as a fellow musician who also struggled with mental health issues to say this, but it goes to show how the entertainment industry still has a ways to go in how it churns out musicians and then spits them out to struggle through their issues alone. Somehow this seems dangerously toxic to me, and it’s why I am glad I am not yet a professional musician. I spent the longest time trying to figure out what my mission as a musician was, and I think, more than ever, I need to use my music to address the problem of mental health stigma. Yes, more people are becoming aware of the psychological toll of fame and celebrity, but still, films such as A Star is Born clearly show that there is a long, long way to go.
The film opens with a performance by Jackson Maine, a country rock singer who has had a long career on the road. We see him pop some pills before he gets onstage, and while he gives an electrifying performance, seeing those pills presents just the beginning of a very disturbing, grim and realistic portrait of the life of an artist struggling with depression and addiction. Jackson, throughout the film, is constantly drinking, smoking and, later on, snorting cocaine. Ally, on the other hand, is a struggling singer who works as a server at a high-maintenance restaurant. When I first saw this scene, I immediately thought about the film La La Land, where we see Mia working as a barista and dealing with a boss who could care less about her dreams of becoming an actress. When her boss schedules her on a day she has an audition, Mia tries to tell her she has an audition and can’t work, but her boss tells her she doesn’t care and to skip the audition so she can cover her shifts. Jackson goes into a drag bar and watches Ally perform “La Vie En Rose.” He is so moved by the performance that he goes to her dressing room to meet her and they immediately hit it off. When they go to a bar afterwards to hang out, he shares a very important message about what it takes to be a true artist. Ally tells him she doesn’t think she will make it because everyone keeps telling her she isn’t pretty enough to be famous, and that men constantly tell her she is a good singer but that she doesn’t have the looks of a singer. This shows how women in the music industry are pressured to look a certain way and further suggests why it’s so important for young women to embrace their beauty as it is so that other people don’t try and tell them differently. But Jack tells her that she looks beautiful and even says that he struggles with tinnitus but still made it as a musician. He says a quote that really stuck with me throughout the film, and that is that “talent comes everywhere. Everybody’s talented…but having something to say, and the way to say it so that people listen to it, that’s a whole other bag. Unless you try and go out there and do it, you’ll never know.” (A Star is Born) It made me think about how, in any career, women typically wait until they have all of the qualifications before applying for a job (I’m one of those ladies) and suffer from imposter syndrome. Ally thinks she cannot be successful, but Jack thinks she can.
Update from the next day…(aka I have had more time to digest this film after pondering it day and night. It literally kept me up.)
The movie also raised some very important thoughts for me, and I’m going to just list them in bullet points because frankly, I am choking up now thinking of the film even though I wasn’t before, and I need to get these out here before I get stressed. After researching mental health and musicians more today, I decided to just take a break from research and just write my thoughts. It has been cathartic to do so, and it’s really going to keep me from thinking about how good but also how stressful this movie was:
What is the meaning of pop music? In the film a famous recording producer, Rez Gavron, who offers Ally several opportunities after seeing her perform. But then he has her go from doing country rock music to dancing hip-hop. While I can see why Ally would keep an open mind and go for these opportunities, it feels as if she lost a huge part of herself being on such a big label such as Interscope Records. And this is a problem, because she used to know herself pretty well enough to keep her day job while she did music, but when she went big she tried to tell Rez to not mess up her sense of self and make her something she isn’t, but Rez wants her to stick with his vision and not her own, so he tells her to dye her hair and has her live in this super extravagant living space. Which is nice at the beginning, but then Jackson loses faith in Ally and goes further into himself, telling her that all this pop fame isn’t her. Then again, the orange hair and hip-hop electronic dance moves are classic Lady Gaga.
Can two artists coexist? In the film La La Land, Mia is an actress and Sebastian is a jazz musician. They try to make it work, and Mia quits her job at the coffee shop to write her own plays (which is a risky move, as the film shows, because no one comes to the play she directed and she gives up.) But then Sebastian gets an opportunity to play with his friend, who tells him he needs to play other genres besides jazz because he can barely afford to pay his rent by playing jazz gigs alone. Sebastian tells Mia he’s going on tour, but then Mia tells him she wants to stay and pursue her acting career. The movie shows that if Mia and Sebastian got married, it would be really hard. And in A Star is Born, this idea is taken a step further because Jack and Ally do get married, but then as Ally becomes more famous and mainstream, Jack loses popularity and Bobby even replaces him with a younger musician at his performance. Jack soon loses faith in himself and becomes more involved with substances. When Ally wins a Grammy for Best New Artist, Jack drunkenly comes on stage and accidentally urinates on himself while she’s giving her speech. It is then that he is sent to treatment and Rez tells him to stay away from Ally because his marriage to her nearly ruined her career.
Women are held at very stressful standards in the pop music industry. Ariana Grande said that sporadically releasing music has proven to be more helpful for her mental health than following the incredibly structured high pressure plan that record labels expect female pop artists to adhere to. Ally, in the film, gets all these opportunities to be a star, but she never really gets to express herself anymore. At first she was very down-to-earth, but all it took was some egotistical micromanagey guy (aka Rez) to control her image for her. In one scene, Ally is recording a demo and the producers behind the screen keep telling her to start over because she is nervous, but then Jack has them bring out a piano and she just naturally becomes comfortable playing it with him. I still think it is interesting that Ally needs a man to boost her self-worth though; what if Ally had a female mentor? Would it have been a different relationship or the same? I’m not saying I hated the dynamic between Jack and Ally at all; I thought it was sweet. Also, Bradley Cooper directed this film and him and Lady Gaga wrote the songs, so I ain’t mad. 🙂 I am just thinking of other theoretical possibilities for the story line. I thought about the film Cadillac Records, and how in the film Leonard Chess controlled much of Etta James’s career, when in reality Etta James held her own in an industry that was macho. Leonard treats Etta as if she was irrational and angry all the time, and she tries to push back against all the pressure that the industry puts on her. So did she really need Leonard to make her feel accomplished? This is just a parallel I made watching A Star is Born.
Is suicide really the fault of musicians? Or does the overall industry play a part in it, too? At the end Jack commits suicide after breaking his sobriety and finding his old bottle of pills (this was the part that was extremely difficult to watch), and Ally is crying and Bobby tells her that it was Jack’s fault, not her or Bobby’s fault, that he committed suicide. Was it solely his fault, though? Sometimes I think people who have never gone through mental health issues assume that it’s the musician’s fault when they hurt themselves, but a huge part of me told me that the culture of the music industry, not merely Jack’s personal history with drug abuse and depression, played a more-than-significant role in his suicide. We need to stop perpetuating this idea that “oh we couldn’t control it, it just happened.” The music industry is incredibly competitive and even encourages people to party hard, do drugs and drink when they are stressed. The constant pressure of celebrity is what drove Avicii, Mac Miller, Amy Winehouse to their deaths. I’m not saying a glass of wine or two is bad. However, substance abuse is a whole nother animal, and throughout the film I couldn’t help but be pissed when Ally, Bobby, Rez and everyone else told Jack he needed to “clean up his act.” I know it’s hard to support folks when they struggle with something so subjective and deeply rooted in their personal life, but there needs to be better measures for how to address mental health issues in the music community. I just found this part incredibly frustrating as a musician who struggled with mental health issues before.
Hearing loss is huge in the music industry. Bobby has Jack put on a pair of earphones for this tinnitus, and Jack, under the influence of hard drugs, tells him he can go stick them somewhere else. I idealized the idea of playing at loud concerts, but because I have sensitive ears, I think I will pass on not wearing some kind of protection for my ears.
Being a tortured artist isn’t cute or funny. Nico Muhly talks about this in an interview he did about classical musicians and mental health, and how we need to stop perpetuating this romanticized idea of the tortured composer or musician or artist in general. While a lot of artists suffer from mental health issues, we cannot let our mental health issues try to define who we are as artists because it can lead to our self-destruction and potentially deaths. A Star is Born clearly shows how destructive it is to perpetuate the tortured artist myth.
Is fame worth it? I know in real life, Lady Gaga has achieved so many things, but she still gets idolized. I used to idolize all these famous people, but I realize that they are human, and this film shows how dangerous it is to deify regular human beings who just happened to pursue their passion for years and earned money from it. In one poignant scene, a heckler interrupts Ally and Jack’s conversation to tell him how he thinks Jack looks like someone he really hates, and pressures Jack to take a photo with him so he can show his ex-wife. Ally then beats the heckler up, and they escape to a grocery store so Jack can get some peas for Ally’s smashed hand. The store clerk, while checking out the peas, stealthily takes a photo of Jack and Ally while they are talking, but the lady’s not quick enough and they catch her in the act. While Jack treats it as if it was just a part of being famous for so long, Ally is, rightfully, not okay with it. This really taught me that if I meet anyone famous, such as Bradley Cooper or Lady Gaga, in any common public place, it would be more than stupid to chase them down for an autograph or take a photo of them without their consent. It would be just a straight-up invasion of privacy. Most, if not all, celebs aren’t thinking, ” Well if more people took my photo while I was out with my kids, I would feel better than I already feel.” Most, if not all, “celebs” are just human beings who love what they do and treat their music-making and film-making as a job like any other, and it is a job because it’s their profession that takes up most of their time. So it’s a waste of their creative space to ask them for autographs–they just want to live their lives. So again, I will try and be mindful of this now that I have seen this film.
As I am now emotionally exhausted from writing this review, I leave you with two clips, one of Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper playing “Shallow” and another of her performing it at the Grammys. Both are performances which I will have to take a hiatus from listening to because even just thinking about them is making me quite tearful now that I have seen this incredibly tearful movie. I cried watching both of these performances when they came out and haven’t stopped crying. They put so much soul into it that it’s hard to not appreciate their hard work.
Overall, excellent film and one that will stick with me for a very, very long time. Gosh, I’m already tearing up just thinking about it. It seriously deserved all the awards that it received this year. This review, no matter how long, can never convey how amazing and heartfelt and deep this film was for me. Thank you Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga. I know I should see the original versions, I was just too impatient to see this film.
A Star is Born. 2 hr 14 min. Rated R for language throughout, some sexuality/ nudity and substance abuse.
The Arts Are Life 