Searching For Sugar Man

About

After releasing two commercially unsuccessful psychedelic folk records in the ’70s, Detroit singer-songwriter Sixto Rodriguez disappeared into a life of demolition work. Over the years, those records gained a cult following. But it wasn’t until the internet age that Rodriguez's daughter discovered her dad's genuine star status in South Africa: His working-class-hero songs had become a soundtrack of the ’90s anti-apartheid movement. That spurred a proper reissue campaign of his long-out-of-print <i>Cold Fact</i> and <i>Coming From Reality</i> LPs—and the Oscar-winning 2012 documentary about that strange-but-true story, <i>Searching for Sugar Man</i>. This best-of collection is split evenly between Rodriguez’s two studio albums. “Sugar Man” is a woozy psych-pop single with the same withdrawal symptoms as The Velvet Underground’s “Waiting for the Man.” “Inner City Blues” is a portrait of Detroit as a decaying city on the brink of civil unrest, and “I Wonder” asks universal questions while looking inward. There are so many gems between these two albums, making this compilation the perfect dust-clearing companion to a remarkably compelling film.

via Apple Music