There was a time my friends and I would deejay for each other when we hosted get-togethers in our apartments, stateside and abroad; we wanted to share the soundtrack to our lives. Cassettes full of personalized lists of music were exchanged between friends; there was high fidelity to community.
Once upon a time, not that long ago, in the 60s and 70s, continuing in a diluted manner to the end of the last century, rock music used to have a point of view which was then packaged into “the concept album.” We listened intently to make sense of our formative years, giving them a soundtrack that served as a marker to the way we were.
As we grooved to the tunes, we tried to make sense of the extraordinary art and craft of album cover art; those of us into lyrics and literary rock criticism held onto the liner notes as if they were words of the prophets written on the wall.
We invested in handsome high-fidelity equipment that played our music, paying extraordinary attention to its look and feel, as it was the heart and soul of any living room. Bookshelves matter, but the custom stereo console that houses my stereo has pride of place in my apartment in San Francisco; it resembles the Phillips console we had in our apartment when we lived in Bombay in the late 70s.
The point of the exhibit Art of Noise at SFMOMA is to display this multilayered art and craft surrounding music, especially during the 60s and 70s—the highest watermarks for rock and jazz music that still flow through our subconscious.
Monolithic walls studded with hundreds of album covers, concert posters, and flyers overwhelm you; you are in a proverbial church with kaleidoscopic stained glass windows. My favorites are the concert poster art of Jefferson Airplane and Martha and the Vandellas.
The jazz album cover art dazzles with Kandinsky-inspired geometric designs, particularly Eddie Layton’s Caravan, Freddie Hubbard’s eponymous album, Reeds and Percussion, and Frank Sinatra Conducts Tone Poems of Color.
I don’t think, in these fragmented times, there is much interest in the narrative of a concept album. But then again, even the Beatles had a hard time making sense of the world in the late 60s, finally eschewing a point of view and narrative, giving birth to a fine record but with a nondescript title and design: The White Album. Joan Didion borrowed that title when she felt the center of our nation was falling in the 70s.
Does music unite us anymore? Does the nation have a collective soundtrack, and do we even want one in the age of hit singles?
A year or so after the SFMOMA exhibit, I saw Charles Burnett’s mid-70s film Killer of Sheep at the Roxie Theater in the Mission district. The film is a mood film, but not atmospheric in the conventional sense—not stylishly hazy or lit with dreamy billows of cigarette smoke curling toward the ceiling. I’m thinking here of the aesthetic opposite of In the Mood for Love by Wong Kar-wai.
Burnett builds his mood through rhythm, not melody; through antique jazz and blues, not treacly pop. If there were a Tower Records nearby, I would’ve bought the soundtrack on CD immediately, as I always did in the ‘90s. I found myself aware, even unsettled, by how unfamiliar I was with much of the music.
Burnett’s editing shifts fluidly between the interior lives of his characters and the ambient texture of the Watts neighborhood in 1970s Los Angeles, offering a portrait of working-class Black life rarely seen on screen. What gives the film its playfulness is the contrast between the brooding of the adults and the high jinks of the neighborhood kids. There’s no storytelling in the traditional sense—no plot engine, no transformation arc. It’s closer to a dream sequence. That this was Burnett’s student thesis film only deepens its accomplishment: in just 80 minutes, it renders the local universal.
Stan (Henry G. Sanders), head of a Black nuclear family, doesn’t ask for sympathy. He knows his hopes of rising above his job at a sheep slaughterhouse are limited. That knowledge is his burden—and the source of his emotional numbness. Unlike the Italian filmmakers, we Americans have never truly had a neorealist wave depicting the working class. We haven’t walked the talk when it comes to representing the working class—Black or white. Stan’s family isn’t destitute; they live hand to mouth. There’s food, shelter, clothing. But for Stan, this life is a dead end, a cul-de-sac. In one darkly comic scene, he’s offered work in the liquor store’s back office—only to discover it’s a sexual come-on from the elderly female proprietor.
It’s Stan’s wife (Kaycee Moore) who serves as the emotional meter of the film. She’s not just a homemaker but the moral center, pushing back when two of Stan’s friends suggest he join them in something shady, maybe violent. What a moment of sass. Later, after managing the kids and the house, she stands before a mirror, painting herself—making herself desirable for Stan. But he’s elsewhere. A man consumed by unattainable dreams cannot make love. It’s this quiet betrayal of tenderness that moved me most. That, to me, is the meaning behind the film’s title: not just Stan’s literal job slaughtering animals, but how his numbness slowly kills the intimacy in his marriage. After dinner, she reaches for him. They dance slowly to Dinah Washington’s “This Bitter Earth.” Their troubles haven’t vanished—the music makes that clear—but something softens. Some of the finest black-and-white cinematography I’ve ever seen is in this film. The children’s joy, mischief, and misadventures run counter to their parents’ fatigue. Scenes of rooftop runs, train-track stone throwing, and dizzying jumps across the roofs are acts of defiance against fate. They are Baudelaire’s modern painters—seizing the present through fleeting life. The film has the feel of a documentary but floats like a piece of visual jazz.
Toward the end, I was especially moved by Stan’s tender and sensual gestures toward his wife as Dinah Washington sings “This Bitter Earth” once more. The song speaks of love that flickers and fades. But in the scene, I felt it flickers back to life—and seems to stay. The mood and the musicality are the message.
Here was a film with a soundtrack to the life of the working man and his family, and the collective audience gave it sustained applause.
—Krishin
Works Cited
Art of Noise. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 4 May–18 Aug. 2024. SFMOMA.
Burnett, Charles, director. Killer of Sheep. 1978; restored release 2007, Milestone Film & Video. Wikipedia.
Washington, Dinah. “This Bitter Earth.” Mercury Records, 1960. Written by Clyde Otis.
Soundtrack of film :https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0076263/soundtrack/?utm_source=chatgpt.com
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