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The movies of music - Cadillac Records
Other | Thursday 17th May 2012 | Osh
Since time immemorial (or at least since the Lumiere brothers and MTV), movies and music have been complementing each other to express the visions of whoever made them. There are a handful of films which deal exclusively with the stories behind the music that shaped generations of people, and probably led to the conception of many babies - and you might be one of them.
If Skrillex had a movie, it would be short and awkward - a hipster boy trying to somehow get famous by imitating real bass art from England. But when Chicago blues gets a movie of its own, you can be sure it’s like a Cadillac - elegant, powerful and goddamn soul-shaking. If you’ve seen Cadillac Records, then you know it’s a movie about Muddy Waters and his blues, and about how most of the music we have around today started out. When Muddy was making hit records, the world was a very different place, and the world of music even more - that’s the purpose of this film, as I see it - to teach kids about rock and blues and how it all evolved into hip-hop, electronic music, et al. It’s basically a history lesson in the form of a biopic with great music and decent acting by Adrien Brody (as Chess himself), Jeffrey Wright (as Waters), Cedric the Entertainer (as Willie Dixon) and by a couple of musicians who must’ve been honoured to get on board with this project - Beyonce (Etta James) and Mos Def (Chuck Berry). Although the plot revolves around Muddy Waters as the protagonist of the story, the movie is really about how Cadillac Records sprung some hugely talented artists, who successfully ran their own game and eventually got ripped off by Elvis.
One of Muddy’s first songs, ‘Rollin’ Stone’, has been the inspiration for a bunch of scruffy English kids who were also taking up music around 1960, and they liked the Chicago Blues so much they travelled to the US to see it live for themselves. Later, when Chess records was slumping, The Rolling Stones opened up the doors to the Kingdom for the american bluesmen to make some new records and perform to a still eager audience. I wasn’t there, but I’ve seen the film, so it’s more or less the same thing.
The undertones of racism, alcohol abuse, violence and dishonest business practices are also a part of that world of raw emotions coming out of the amplified guitars and harmonicas; lest we forget, these people are the forefathers of rock and roll, which means they lived the lifestyle hard to the fucking core, and were proud of doing it too. The term ‘hard life’ probably had a different meaning to black people with no rights who were born on cotton plantations in Mississippi.
Were it up to me, I’d add this film to the curriculum of every primary school, for the simple reason that it’s a soulful lesson in real stuff, and real stuff is getting scarcer and scarcer by the day. Maybe a perspective on the bad old days, however stylised and hollywoodish, would help the youth understand what it takes to do it right.
by Harry Cathead
