Political correctness lessens the music doc Little Richard: I Am Everything.
In her mostly adulatory documentary Little Richard: I Am Everything, director Lisa Cortés gives the rock ’n’ roll legend born Richard Wayne Penniman in Macon, Ga., his place in history, also putting his life and career in a politicized context.
But the eccentricity that made Little Richard one of the most fascinating and dynamic performers of all time overwhelms Cortés’s enthusiasm and the misguided revisionism she has structured around it.
Several of the talking-head admirers Cortés interviewed — particularly academics Jason King, Zandria Robinson, Tavia Nyong’o, Fredara Hadley, and a couple of others — get stuck trying to probe the political correctness of Little Richard’s phenomenon through academic jargon. Their focus on the unsurprising issue of Little Richard’s homosexuality — a fact he forced the world to reckon with and essentially look beyond — ultimately narrows his musical impact and cultural significance.
Despite the intention to honor Little Richard, Cortés chose a PBS approach that views him as a conundrum rather than an innovative “architect” of both an art form and a social identity.
Little Richard’s recordings of “Tutti Frutti,” “Long Tall Sally,” “Good Golly, Miss Molly,” and “Rip It Up” remain amazing almost a century later — expressions of a complex personality and visible, vibrant proof of an irrepressible culture. (A better art documentary would explore the subcultural stories within those extraordinary hits or show how they influenced Michael Jackson, Prince, the Isley Brothers, Sylvester, and David Bowie.)
Film footage and video clips from the peak of Little Richard’s career to its end preserve his constant challenge to social and individual orthodoxy. His wide eyes, flamboyant manner, and insistently good nature defy you to not smile back at him. Even his late-career campaign, via numerous TV and award-show appearances, for official recognition from the music industry that had ignored and cheated him (“It was egregiously unfair,” says historian John Branca) are poignant — the only meta-media provocations needed.
Cortés is right to collate and preserve these vexatious interventions. There’s nothing else like them in the history of pop culture. But when Cortés attempts to modernize Little Richard as a problematic proto-activist icon — forgetting the artist’s own wit (“I’m not conceited, I’m convinced!”) — the movie backfires.
Observations from provocateur filmmaker John Waters and activist-performer Billy Porter are included alongside bizarre tribute renditions of songs associated with Little Richard by Valerie June, Cory Henry, and John P. Kee — all unworthies. The presumption that Little Richard needs to be defended in the petty terms of today’s identity politics is unpardonably offensive.
How dare Billy Porter compare his narcissistic career moves to Little Richard’s pioneering courage and native genius: “I can only imagine. I’ve lived through my version of that. It’s debilitating. It’s soul-crushing, and it can be deadly.” Jason King scoffs at Little Richard’s Grammys outbursts: “It’s funny, but as a black man, I can also hear seething anger.” But King’s petulance seems politically naïve and stunted next to Little Richard’s onstage boast — “I feel so real, I feel so unnecessary” — in which he mastered camp code-switching, stood up for himself, and still got his point across. King argues that “more of us need to declare ourselves, especially blacks, especially queers,” reducing Little Richard’s life-affirming art to propaganda.
At the start of his career, Little Richard had done time as a Southern-subculture drag performer,“Miss Lavonne,” synthesizing the various styles of Louis Jordan, Esquerita, and Billy Wright before taking on the larger world. Scholar William T. Lhamon (in his book Deliberate Speed) has explicated Little Richard’s complex “strategy to express and repress meaning simultaneously.” But appreciation of that performance tradition is lost among these contemporary black academics. (RuPaul, architect of his own drag-Oprah empire, seems to be the model for these commentators.)
It was Little Richard’s good fortune to claim, “My music broke down the walls of segregation.” And in mid career he could announce, “I want to change my image. I want to come out loud and gaudy as ‘The Living Flame.’”
None of Cortés’s intellectuals grasp the significance of that “Flame” image or its connection to the same Pentecostal roots that produced the great gay disco singer Sylvester. Instead, they scorn Little Richard’s religious ambivalence, seen in his later conversion (that once-wild voice conveying serene gospel beauty) and his personal adjustment to scriptural strictures on homosexuality. One academic complains, “There is harm to communities to have people speaking on a public stage that way.” Such a knee-jerk response reflects deep ignorance of the art and conflict that Little Richard epitomized. (That “community” cliché is ridiculous next to the still photo of a woman kissing Little Richard’s cheek as his mascaraed eyes look heavenward. Billy Bragg called it the quintessential image of rock ’n’ roll.) At every stage, Little Richard pierced our defenses. Not even political correctness can hold his genius down.