Business secrets of the Pharoahs
Bamboozled book reborn
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As I was writing this week’s letter, I learned of the very sad news of the passing of Angus “Drummie Zeb” Gaye, the drummer-vocalist of British reggae band Aswad, at the age of just 62.
I’ve got really happy memories of listening to Aswad as a kid. The first song of theirs I ever heard was “Give a Little Love”, an irrepressibly upbeat single from 1988 that was included on the compilation Now That’s What I Call Music 12 (the double cassette of which I almost wore out, and whose haphazard-yet-inspired track list clearly, in retrospect, became a foundational text in regards to my rampantly catholic music taste.)
Aswad stuck around, and years later in 1994 scored the massive hit “Shine”, an unabashed anthem of Black British pride and inner strength which name-checked trailblazing sports stars of Caribbean heritage like Chris Eubank, Nigel Benn, Colin Jackson, Ian Wright and Linford Christie. Here’s a clip of a chronically depressed-looking and fed up-sounding Simon Mayo introducing an ebullient Aswad performance of “Shine” on BBC’s Top of the Pops—rarely can there have been such a stark contrast between the moods of host and performer.
It was only as I got older that I learned of Aswad’s earlier days as a much less poppy roots reggae band, and dived into their back catalog a bit more seriously. One of their best songs is the instrumental dub monster “Warrior Charge”, which features on the soundtrack of Franco Rosso’s classic Babylon (1980), a film that stars Drummie Zeb’s bandmate and co-vocalist Brinsley Forde in the lead role.
Anyway, pour one out for Drummie Zeb this weekend, and celebrate the life of one of Britain’s reggae superstars by listening to some of his music:
This week, I’ve decided to use this space to aggressively plug my own book, Facing Blackness: Media and Minstrelsy in Spike Lee’s Bamboozled, which is being published in a second edition by The Film Desk, and is now available for pre-order ahead of a fall release.
This edition comes with a newly-designed cover, a fresh-for-2022 foreword reflecting on the film’s increasingly horrific prescience in the past few Diamond and Silk-encrusted years, full color images, and some significant revisions to the main text, most specifically the repositioning and integration of footnotes that were unwisely and confusingly squirreled away as endnotes at the back of the first edition.
Said first edition was published in October 2015, to mark the fifteenth anniversary of the US theatrical release of Bamboozled, but slipped out of print before its time, leading to stray copies somehow popping up on Amazon for comically extortionate prices. I shouldn’t be too harsh on the original publisher who, before vanishing into thin air, was aiming for something ambitious in launching a new independent line of film criticism monographs—and certainly did OK by me.
But I’ll never forget an acquaintance’s cruel, hilarious (and I should stress ultimately inaccurate) comparison of the publisher to the fictional British London Books, the one-man outfit from a classic 2012 episode of Channel 4 sitcom Peep Show which releases Business Secrets of the Pharaohs, the debut nonfiction effort of frustrated credit manager Mark Corrigan (David Mitchell).
In the episode, Mark ends up paying British London (“doesn't that sound a bit... made-up?”) for the privilege of publishing the book, which winds up being printed in all caps, with text running into the margins, and spells the author’s surname incorrectly on the front cover—“few errata… there’s always going to be a few errata,” sighs Mark ruefully before resolving to flee the scene of his own book launch.
The launch of Facing Blackness in 2015, at a screening at Brooklyn Academy of Music, went more smoothly, though not without an amusing development of its own. I’d hoped to shift a few signed copies of the book following the film’s conclusion, but hadn’t counted on Spike’s team setting up his mobile merchandise operation, “Spike’s Joint” (the original storefront of which on the corner of Dekalb and South Elliott is now Café Paulette, by the way), directly adjacent to our puny table. We were somewhat blown out of the water by the voluminous array of Chi-Raq berets and Forty Acres and a Mule scarves on offer, but we did OK, and how could I be mad, really? It was an experience I will never forget, and cherish forever.
Sticking on a Spike Lee theme, maybe one day his obliquely teased musical film collaboration with Prefab Sprout will come to fruition. We know Lee’s a fan—two Sprout songs were used on the soundtrack of Lee’s Netflix She’s Gotta Have It series; and look, here’s a picture of Lee with Sprout songwriter and frontman Paddy McAloon taken on London’s South Bank in 2016:
Until such time, we (I) can dream, and enjoy the fruits and labors of one of the greatest lyricists Britain has ever produced:
See you next week!
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We can dream, AC! *We*!