
Who were the most important American songwriters after Woodstock? Bob Dylan, Neil Young and Rodriguez. Everyone knew that where I was growing up, among the malcontent teenagers of white suburbia in apartheid South Africa in the 1970s. What’s that you say? Who’s Rodriguez? Don’t be stupid. Rodriguez. You know, the Mexican guy with the hat and the sunglasses — “I Wonder,” “Sugarman,” “Crucify Your Mind”…
It was only upon arriving in the United States in the early ’90s that I realized that nobody here had ever heard of Sixto Rodriguez, whose debut album Cold Fact we’d considered one of the most important of all time, owned on vinyl or cassette copy by every white South African who’d ever smoked a joint or entertained a dissident thought about the horrors of the apartheid system — or simply wondered what the hell was the point of charging around the bush in an army uniform, fighting Namibian liberation fighters on the border with Angola.
via Sixto Rodriguez, Secret Rock Star Behind ‘Searching for Sugar Man’ | Entertainment | TIME.com.
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