The excellent Little Richard: I Am Everything tells the rock legend's biography like a creation myth. panther_BL's review:
How do we honor a blueprint? Followed as they are over and over again, year after year, decades upon decades, they soon become taken for granted as part of the everyday. They are the air we breathe and the cosmos as we know it.
Little Richard Wayne Penniman of Macon, Georgia, was born with a constellation of identities that would set him apart forever. Black, poor, queer, femme and disabled, Richard quickly formed his own sense of the world and how to move through it. He taught himself music and how to survive with equal bravado.
Little Richard exploded onto the scene when young listeners, both Black and white, were looking for something new. Combining blues, boogie-woogie and Baptist church elements, Richard’s music was unlike anything before it. His joyous sound and incandescent stage presence made folks want to copy him, often without any credit or compensation. Little Richard’s legacy is invisible because white capitalists in the music industry “obliterated” his art and image. But Cortés is clever.
With all the ways Little Richard defied the norm, Cortés and her team rightfully spend time defining and discussing queerness not just as sexuality but as a non-normative “presence” in the world—a way of being that defies accepted categories. Such a mature and critical consideration of queerness helps us understand Little Richard and the public’s reaction to him.
Richard sometimes turned this revulsion on himself. Throughout his life, Little Richard would renounce his queerness and rock n’ roll lifestyle, retreating into faith and dogma. It is where he went when times were hard, and he was scared. Instead of trying to reconcile the conservative streaks in Richard’s life, Cortés genuinely attempts to understand and hold all of Little Richard’s complexities at once.
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