LINER NOTES: Boris Gardiner, Every Nigger is a Star (1973)
In an attempt to build excitement for the Every Nigger is a Star (film), the film’s soundtrack, with its suggestive album cover, was released months before the film. Its provocative title, look, and sound promised the excitement of this series, or at the very least, Lockhart’s Silky Slim (fig. 6). 18 The style of the album cover placed it in direct conversation with the album cover for The Harder They Come. Drawing on the same comic book aesthetic used for the earlier film’s soundtrack, but affecting a more comedic sensibility, Every Nigger Is a Star’s cover was a field of unmediated bright yellow, with a band of muted ocher along its lower edge. Boris Gardiner, who wrote and eventually recorded all of the album’s tracks, is rendered from his shoulder up, and placed in the center. He is depicted wearing a neat “Jim Kelly” afro and a beaming smile.
Though Gardiner’s head is the largest single component on the cover, it does not determine the album cover’s narrative or affect in any meaningful way. His decapitated body is stilled by the yellow, and though his face appears animated, because his gaze is directed away from the viewer and off to the right side of the composition, the centered head performs like the hands of a clock, shifting visual focus away from him to the activity around him. A caricatured figure of an “Obeah man” is presented to the left of the frame. Barefoot, wearing aqua-blue and pink robes, a feathered “African” mask, and carrying a spear, he is rendered mid-stride, engaged in a kind of spirited dance.
In the lower right corner, a man who appears to be a sly Rasta with new dreadlock buds jauntily looks out at the viewer, his body levitating mid-stride in a gravity-defying bop. Just off center, in the lower quadrant of the album cover, a caricature of Calvin Lockhart wearing what appears to be pimp attire dominates. A vision to behold, he is outfitted in striped aquamarine bell-bottom pants, a polka-dot shirt, a light neon-green floor-length overcoat, a broad-brimmed white hat and matching white platform shoes and dark shades, and wields a red scepter. Lockhart’s outfit is arguably completed by the presence of two black women. Also nattily dressed, the woman on his left wears a halter jumpsuit, accentuated with a white boa and heels. Her hairstyle resembles the white-black lines of a skunk, though in this case, one can surmise that the white sections are intended to suggest “shine.” The woman on Lockhart’s right is similarly attired in a pink halter jumpsuit, matching pink high-heeled sandals and earrings. Her shiny afro-wig, secured with a lavender headband, recalls Pam Grier’s Foxy Brown. 19 Like the “Obeah Man,” Lockhart and the women also appear to be engaged in a kind of ecstatic “Soul Train” dance.
Here, Lockhart does not affect the suave, cool pose and controlled movements of the cinematic pimps he was known for, though in all other respects, he certainly looked the part. To complete this discordant, compositional mash up of heads and dancing bodies, the film’s title appears in red caps above it all: “EVERY NIGGER IS A STAR.” In this context, the cover suggests that the film will turn towards the comedic antics of Lockhart’s recent film Uptown Saturday Night, rather than the electric drama of The Harder They Come, and the Carib Theater audience, knowing that the picture had been shot in Jamaica, no doubt thought it would be a version of that story in a local context. Their presence at the premiere, packed houses at all three venues, indicated great expectations.
However, while in Jamaica, Lockhart had immersed himself in grassroots culture and had grown to admire local music, particularly reggae. Greaves was completing a transition from experimental filmmaking and a formalist approach to film, to a more activist expression that drew heavily on the realism and truth that characterized cinema vérité, but transferring these principles to black representation in the context of documentary filmmaking.
-Erica Moiah James
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