![]() But the startling power of Little Richard’s art resulted from a combination of risks, innovations, and signifiers that was as unprecedented as it was dazzling. Perhaps no one can claim to truly be the originator of a sound that came from so many places - from so many hands and hearts - at once. He did, and his knowledge gave his music world-conquering power. He used masks to both conceal and reveal, to enact his truth in plain sight. He wore makeup, teased his hair a foot high. Visit our Special Tribute Package for More on Little Richard’s Music and InfluenceĪnd in return, he became everything, an omnibeing who contained multitudes, whose art refracted, critiqued, and remade American identity, drawing its explosive charge from multiple consciousnesses: male, female white, black straight, gay the pleasures of the flesh and the word of God. “The kids would call me faggot, sissy, freak, punk. They thought I was trying to twist and walk feminine,” he told Charles White in The Life and Times of Little Richard: The Quasar of Rock, an authorized biography. He was different, born that way: His right leg was shorter than the left. It was a sign from the start that he was no one thing, had no one identity. His parents wanted to call him Ricardo, but the birth certificate said Richard, his maternal grandfather’s name. He was born the third of 12 children in Macon, Georgia, on December 5th, 1932, though he sometimes said it was December 25th, perhaps to honor Christ his savior, perhaps to burnish his own legend, or more likely both. ![]()
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