Thulani Davis, Author
"Wattstax is such a hot, upbeat, candid, funny, poignant and richly entertaining film I was halfway through it before a question arose. Is this still possible? " | Read more »
Ed Guerrero, Film Critic
"With the end of the '60s and turn of the decade, one of the sites where this fresh rebellious sense of black politics and identity came to full expression was in mainstream popular culture..." | Read more »
Craig H. Werner, Music Historian
"If you're looking for a single image to sum up the impact of Black Power on America, you can't do better than the moment when Jesse Jackson introduces Isaac Hayes..." | Read more »
Young woman with a Wattstax afro.
In 1973, black culture was being "mainstreamed" following the black power movement with mixed results, from a host of black "firsts" among elected officials to Nixon-era retrenchment on civil rights. Great black music was being created in every genre, black women novelists were changing fiction, Angela Davis was out of jail, black folks were winning Emmys, Grammys, Pulitzers, and everybody was a poet.
Today, in part because of Richard Pryor, and in spite of the fact that he pointed out slavery brought people here and created a new tribe called "niggers," you can say the "n" word anywhere but you cannot say "racist." Frank comment on race is as scarce in offices or editorials as it was in 1953. Discourse on race was important in 1973, along with self-respect, and activism.
A service taking place in a storefront church.
Does the discourse continue only in universities? In black communities especially, such talk is in danger. Exactly where would you find the streetcorner philosophers in Wattstax or those on soap boxes in years past? Gentrification and quality-of-life policing have all but disappeared the domino-playing, brown-paper-bag folk who had all the answers before you had questions. Or have guns driven these men off the street? Public squares in places like Harlem have become expensive real estate. The storefront churches so artfully documented in Wattstax are harder to find. If you take a film crew into South Central Anywhere today, will you see throngs of Muslim women, or crowded local restaurants where food is cooked by hand?
Can we see this kind of concert again with its mix of sounds and generations? Even as some of the Stax blues stars are going on, the cinematographers capture young men speaking of the blues as the past, and today it could not be more true. And yet the music speaks to the heart, and the men interviewed recall heartbreak with an openness that seems an age away from rhymes that never sigh. The film's artists and audience revel in not taking one's self too seriously. The visible conviction of one's inner and outer beauty has been turned inside out by makeover television. The people in Wattstax celebrate the genius of African American music, the elegance of empowerment, and all the graces of self-acceptance. Watch the faces when Rev. Jesse Jackson leads the audience in chanting "I Am Somebody" — they mean it, they got it.
Members of the audience doing a soul handshake.
With the turn of the decade, one of the sites where this fresh, rebellious sense of black politics and identity came to full expression was in mainstream popular culture. Blaxploitation flicks in all of their regal "baadnesssss" exploded on the cinema screen, producing among sixty-odd films, including the classics: Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song in '71, Superfly and Shaft, both in '72. At the same time, a number of black cast and theme television shows appeared on the major networks — notable among them Black Journal and Julia in '68, Soul Train and The Flip Wilson Show in '70 and Sanford & Son in '72. At the same time, visionary musicians such as James Brown, Curtis Mayfield, Marvin Gaye, the Staple Singers and Isaac Hayes shifted the subject of black popular music to urgent African American social concerns and agendas. Clearly though, the most ubiquitous expression of the new mood and times, displayed by all orientations and classes of African Americans, was the insurgence of nappy hair sported au naturel, or most assertively as the humungous "Afro."
Accordingly, clenched-fist salutes and soul handshakes, platform shoes, brightly-patterned dashikis, floppy hats, bell-bottomed pants and new dance fads all visualize the loud and liberated aspirations of the 90,000-plus audience, as Wattstax captures a grand moment in an emergent black consciousness, with its attendant shifts in politics, language and culture. From the ribald and wry social observations of the brilliant, rising comedian Richard Pryor, to the "I Am Somebody" mantra of Jesse Jackson, to the fabulous "soul" costuming of the Bar-Kays, to the gospel meter of the Staples Singers or the funky "wa-wa" big band sounds of Isaac Hayes playing the theme from Shaft, one can see the markers and expressions of a new, self-fashioned, assertive people in "Wattstax."
But what is most unique and telling about the film is that rather than focusing exclusively on the premeditated views of the "talented tenth" of black political and intellectual leadership (as most documentaries do), Wattstax captures the spontaneous voices and often illuminating opinions of the common people of Watts. In their own words and social spaces — from storefront churches to barbershops, street corners and beauty parlors — working class, low income, unemployed and welfare black urban people, (all still ghettoized, seven years after the Watts Rebellion), talk about everything from social inequality and police oppression to ghetto economics, relationships and black religion. Here "the people" are cast as the up-front, cutting-edge of the push for full African American equality and participation in American society. In all, Wattstax captures the rising expectations of black people at that brief optimistic, "revolutionary" political-cultural moment: between the slow decline of the Civil Rights movement and the rise of backlash neo-conservatism, looming on the near political horizon.
The Reverend Jesse Jackson at Wattstax.
With memories of the 1965 Watts riot still fresh in the minds and everyday life of both the audience and the police, it wasn't unthinkable that the celebration might erupt into an uncontrolled expression of the rage that Rev. Jackson — sporting a stylish Afro and still years away from his elder statesman status — was struggling to channel into constructive political action. So, as Hayes, musical incarnation of Blaxploitation anti-hero John Shaft, takes the stage, Jackson pleads for calm, warning the audience that another invasion of the field will bring the festivities to an abrupt end.
The decisive moment comes when Hayes, a.k.a. Black Moses, casts aside his full length cloak to reveal the gold chains draped over his gleaming ebony skin. He's black and proud, the embodiment of the Movement's half-mythic dream of self-acceptance and self-determination. The audience isn't about to risk missing out on his performance in exchange for the momentary pleasure of defying the cops. Jesse Jackson's smile breaks down the meaning better than a ream of sociological studies: music and style had the power to transcend the tensions that threatened to tear the dream apart.
Wattstax is a brilliant film in ways that are more obvious now than when it was released in 1973. Circling around the musical performances by the Memphis soul artists who drew on their gospel and blues roots to imagine a funky musical future, the film pinpoints the key themes of the Black Power: the tensions between the sacred and the secular, male and female, between analytical brilliance and rhetorical bullshit. Expressed in the voices of everyday black people and comic philosopher Richard Pryor, Stuart spins these themes into a polyrhythmic film as dense as Hayes' symphonic soul and as wise as the Staple Singers, who remind the audience that the real challenge is to live the life they sing about in their song. Wattstax didn't win an Oscar but, in a world that cared about race and history and uncomfortable truths, it would have.
Introduction
"Wattstax is such a hot, upbeat, candid, funny, poignant and richly entertaining film I was halfway through it before a question arose. Is this still possible? " | Read more »
"With the end of the '60s and turn of the decade, one of the sites where this fresh rebellious sense of black politics and identity came to full expression was in mainstream popular culture..." | Read more »
"If you're looking for a single image to sum up the impact of Black Power on America, you can't do better than the moment when Jesse Jackson introduces Isaac Hayes..." | Read more »
Thulani Davis
I asked myself this about the making of Wattstax, the creation of the concert itself, the places filmed in the African American community, the use of Richard Pryor as an observer, the candor, respect, and optimism, the blend of music, the absence of noise about money and fame, the sincere enthusiasm for the political. Just the idea of taking artists into local venues and letting folks in for free seems romantic in this cynical time. Wattstax is a beguiling prism through which to view a moment in black America in which some realities of today were inconceivable.
In 1973, black culture was being "mainstreamed" following the black power movement with mixed results, from a host of black "firsts" among elected officials to Nixon-era retrenchment on civil rights. Great black music was being created in every genre, black women novelists were changing fiction, Angela Davis was out of jail, black folks were winning Emmys, Grammys, Pulitzers, and everybody was a poet.
Today, in part because of Richard Pryor, and in spite of the fact that he pointed out slavery brought people here and created a new tribe called "niggers," you can say the "n" word anywhere but you cannot say "racist." Frank comment on race is as scarce in offices or editorials as it was in 1953. Discourse on race was important in 1973, along with self-respect, and activism.
Does the discourse continue only in universities? In black communities especially, such talk is in danger. Exactly where would you find the streetcorner philosophers in Wattstax or those on soap boxes in years past? Gentrification and quality-of-life policing have all but disappeared the domino-playing, brown-paper-bag folk who had all the answers before you had questions. Or have guns driven these men off the street? Public squares in places like Harlem have become expensive real estate. The storefront churches so artfully documented in Wattstax are harder to find. If you take a film crew into South Central Anywhere today, will you see throngs of Muslim women, or crowded local restaurants where food is cooked by hand?
Can we see this kind of concert again with its mix of sounds and generations? Even as some of the Stax blues stars are going on, the cinematographers capture young men speaking of the blues as the past, and today it could not be more true. And yet the music speaks to the heart, and the men interviewed recall heartbreak with an openness that seems an age away from rhymes that never sigh. The film's artists and audience revel in not taking one's self too seriously. The visible conviction of one's inner and outer beauty has been turned inside out by makeover television. The people in Wattstax celebrate the genius of African American music, the elegance of empowerment, and all the graces of self-acceptance. Watch the faces when Rev. Jesse Jackson leads the audience in chanting "I Am Somebody" -- they mean it, they got it.
Ed Guerrero
With the turn of the decade, one of the sites where this fresh, rebellious sense of black politics and identity came to full expression was in mainstream popular culture. Blaxploitation flicks in all of their regal "baadnesssss" exploded on the cinema screen, producing among sixty-odd films, including the classics: Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song in '71, Superfly and Shaft, both in '72. At the same time, a number of black cast and theme television shows appeared on the major networks -- notable among them Black Journal and Julia in '68, Soul Train and The Flip Wilson Show in '70 and Sanford & Son in '72. At the same time, visionary musicians such as James Brown, Curtis Mayfield, Marvin Gaye, the Staple Singers and Isaac Hayes shifted the subject of black popular music to urgent African American social concerns and agendas. Clearly though, the most ubiquitous expression of the new mood and times, displayed by all orientations and classes of African Americans, was the insurgence of nappy hair sported au naturel, or most assertively as the humungous "Afro."
Accordingly, clenched-fist salutes and soul handshakes, platform shoes, brightly-patterned dashikis, floppy hats, bell-bottomed pants and new dance fads all visualize the loud and liberated aspirations of the 90,000-plus audience, as Wattstax captures a grand moment in an emergent black consciousness, with its attendant shifts in politics, language and culture. From the ribald and wry social observations of the brilliant, rising comedian Richard Pryor, to the "I Am Somebody" mantra of Jesse Jackson, to the fabulous "soul" costuming of the Bar-Kays, to the gospel meter of the Staples Singers or the funky "wa-wa" big band sounds of Isaac Hayes playing the theme from Shaft, one can see the markers and expressions of a new, self-fashioned, assertive people in "Wattstax."
But what is most unique and telling about the film is that rather than focusing exclusively on the premeditated views of the "talented tenth" of black political and intellectual leadership (as most documentaries do), Wattstax captures the spontaneous voices and often illuminating opinions of the common people of Watts. In their own words and social spaces -- from storefront churches to barbershops, street corners and beauty parlors -- working class, low income, unemployed and welfare black urban people, (all still ghettoized, seven years after the Watts Rebellion), talk about everything from social inequality and police oppression to ghetto economics, relationships and black religion. Here "the people" are cast as the up-front, cutting-edge of the push for full African American equality and participation in American society. In all, Wattstax captures the rising expectations of black people at that brief optimistic, "revolutionary" political-cultural moment: between the slow decline of the Civil Rights movement and the rise of backlash neo-conservatism, looming on the near political horizon.
Film critic and professor Ed Guerrero teaches in Cinema Studies at New York University. He is the author of Framing Blackness: The African American Image in Film (Temple University Press) and Do the Right Thing (British Film Institute). He is also a member of The Library of Congress, the National Film Preservation Board and has written numerous essays for journals such as Journal of Popular Film and Television, Discourse, Journal of Ethnic and Racial Studies and Cineaste.
Craig H. Werner
With memories of the 1965 Watts riot still fresh in the minds and everyday life of both the audience and the police, it wasn't unthinkable that the celebration might erupt into an uncontrolled expression of the rage that Rev. Jackson -- sporting a stylish Afro and still years away from his elder statesman status -- was struggling to channel into constructive political action. So, as Hayes, musical incarnation of Blaxploitation anti-hero John Shaft, takes the stage, Jackson pleads for calm, warning the audience that another invasion of the field will bring the festivities to an abrupt end.
The decisive moment comes when Hayes, a.k.a. Black Moses, casts aside his full length cloak to reveal the gold chains draped over his gleaming ebony skin. He's black and proud, the embodiment of the Movement's half-mythic dream of self-acceptance and self-determination. The audience isn't about to risk missing out on his performance in exchange for the momentary pleasure of defying the cops. Jesse Jackson's smile breaks down the meaning better than a ream of sociological studies: music and style had the power to transcend the tensions that threatened to tear the dream apart.
Wattstax is a brilliant film in ways that are more obvious now than when it was released in 1973. Circling around the musical performances by the Memphis soul artists who drew on their gospel and blues roots to imagine a funky musical future, the film pinpoints the key themes of the Black Power: the tensions between the sacred and the secular, male and female, between analytical brilliance and rhetorical bullshit. Expressed in the voices of everyday black people and comic philosopher Richard Pryor, Stuart spins these themes into a polyrhythmic film as dense as Hayes' symphonic soul and as wise as the Staple Singers, who remind the audience that the real challenge is to live the life they sing about in their song. Wattstax didn't win an Oscar but, in a world that cared about race and history and uncomfortable truths, it would have.