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I Put On Spell On Me
Screamin 'Jay Hawkins a exercé une grande influence sur de nombreux musiciens et ses interprétations étaient si provocantes dans leur originalité qu'elles pouvaient encore aujourd'hui être considérées comme "révolutionnaires".
Screamin 'Jay Hawkins a rencontré Nicholas Triandafyllidis et lui a demandé de réaliser un documentaire sur sa vie dans et hors de l'industrie de la musique.
Screamin 'Jay est venu en Grèce et il a donné ses derniers concerts à Thessalonique et à Athènes, avant sa mort subite à Paris en 2000. Après avoir laissé un héritage de sessions confidentielles et d'images de ses derniers spectacles, Triandafllidis a complété le film avec l'aide des amis de Jay: Jim Jarmusch (directeur de Ghost Dog), Bo Diddley, Eric Burdon (The Animals), Rudi Protrudi, Diamanda Galas, Arthur Brown (The Crazy World of Arthur Brown), Andre Williams et d'autres...
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Screamin' Jay Hawkins' All-Time Greatest Hits: A Novel by Mark Binelli
Au magazine "Rolling Stone", Binelli a présenté certains des plus grands musiciens de notre époque, et ce roman joue habilement avec une focalisation démesurée sur "l'authenticité" dans une telle quantité d'écriture musicale sur les Afro-Américains. Tout un roman construit autour d'un musicien aussi délibérément inauthentique que Screamin 'Jay Hawkins devient ainsi une sorte d'acte subversif, à la fois extrêmement drôle et étonnamment émouvant.
Livre en anglais.
He came on stage in a coffin, carried by pallbearers, drunk enough to climb into his casket every night. Onstage he wore a cape, clamped a bone to his nose, and carried a staff topped with a human skull. Offstage, he insisted he'd been raised by a tribe of Blackfoot Indians, that he'd joined the army at fourteen, that he'd defeated the middleweight boxing champion of Alaska, that he'd fathered seventy-five illegitimate children.
The R&B wildman Screamin' Jay Hawkins only had a single hit, the classic "I Put a Spell On You," and was often written off as a clownish novelty act -- or worse, an offense to his race -- but his myth-making was legendary. In his second novel, Mark Binelli embraces the man and the legend to create a hilarious, tragic, fantastical portrait of this unlikeliest of protagonists. Hawkins saw his life story as a wild picaresque, and Binelli's novel follows suit, tackling the subject in a dazzling collage-like style.
At Rolling Stone, Binelli has profiled some of the greatest musicians of our time, and this novel deftly plays with the inordinate focus on "authenticity" in so much music writing about African-Americans. An entire novel built around a musician as deliberately inauthentic as Screamin' Jay Hawkins thus becomes a sort of subversive act, as well as an extremely funny and surprisingly moving one.
