Monday, February 18, 2008
Black Male Iconography
filed under: gordon parks, madonna
Been reading Lucy O’Brien’s Madonna: Like an Icon, because I’m in the mood for a biography. The book itself is a quick read, nothing especially recommendable, but Madonna and her iconography has me making a leap of thought to black male iconography and who qualifies. Whoever gets to be canonized as an icon of that type sorta establishes what being a black male is allowed to look like. And so does the black male look like Jimi Hendrix or Miles Davis (I was named after them both, by the way), Muhammad Ali or Little Richard, Barack Obama or Tupac Shakur? I would say, obviously all of the above, but you’d be surprised who certain people consider the norm and who others consider the aberration.
Madonna, she’s thoughtfully tossed Marilyn Monroe, Frida Kahlo, Debbie Harry, etc. into a Cuisinart to create her own thing over the past 36 years. I can’t help think of the Afro as black male cultural iconography akin to whatever it is (bleached blonde hair? slut-red lipstick?) that makes you think “Greta Garbo and Monroe” when it comes to Maddie. When I see Cornel West or Ahmir from the Roots rock the Afros we’ve never ever seen them without, it’s like they’re carrying on a visual soul tradition set by the likes of Dr. J and Sly Stone.
I walked past Madonna at Café Tabac one night in 1992, as her bodyguards cleared a way for her to exit that old East Village restaurant, and I’ll never get over how… little she looked. But when it comes to a black male icon, I’ll always give thanks for the pleasure of meeting the late Gordon Parks on a sunny September day back in 1998. The handlebar moustache: that‘s iconography. Shooting a photo of hiphoppers for XXL (updating the old Jazz Portrait photo created for Esquire in the 50s), he sat and talked with me about Richard Wright trying to convince him to move to Paris back in the day and a little about Life magazine, where he started out taking pictures.
This is admittedly rather rambling; I guess I should just point out that I recently posted my old unearthed XXL cover-story essay about that particular great day in Harlem here on this Furthermucker. (Mosey over to the WRITING tab at left and you can’t miss it.) But for all the criticism Madonna has always taken about how calculated and “all naked ambition, no talent” her rise to the top was, it makes me wonder how thought-out various icons’ personal branding and career ascensions were in the days before Diddy. Richard Pryor, Duke Ellington, Berry Gordy: didn’t they intend to blow up too?
Sorina Diaconescu at 6:27 AM on 02/19/08:
The photo-essay Parks did of Eldridge Cleaver and his wife back in the early 70s for Life remains a landmark for me.. I have the actual Life magazine issue in question—and whip it out every now and then for inspiration-and to marvel at the kind of access popular magazines had back in the day to true historymakers.. And the shots he snapped for that piece are nothing if not ICONIC… I have no further profundity to add to this entry. The only thing to say is that back when I had a band, our fliers HAD to feature a Parks shot of Eldridge and Kathleen Cleaver—there was simply nothing cooler than that in my book.