The Godfather of Rap
Award-winning Documentary Pays Homage to Black Artist Oscar Brown Jr
In Music is My Life, Politics My Mistress, director donnie l betts is the first to comprehensively tell the life story of Oscar Brown Jr. He talks about the challenges.
Oscar Brown Jr was a composer, singer, actor, playwright, poet and black civil rights activist, with a career spanning five decades. As a result of his outspoken political opinions, no one had ever comprehensively told his life story before. That was until Denver-based director donnie l betts accepted the challenge of making a documentary that would introduce a wider audience to this talented and prolific artist.
The film, Music is My Life, Politics My Mistress. The Story of Oscar Brown Jr, is an insightful portrait of Brown’s full and colorful life; and his unexpected death at the age of 78, on May 29, 2005 – the same year the documentary was originally released - adds to its poignancy.
Instrument of Social Change
betts first met Brown at a workshop in Denver in 1974. He was so impressed with Brown’s belief that an artist should always aspire to be an instrument of social change, that he adopted it as the guiding principle of his own career. When he ran into Brown again 25 years later, and was asked if he wanted to make a story of Brown’s life, he accepted.
The film comprises a series of interviews with Brown, shot over six years, as well as commentary from family members and colleagues such as Amiri Baraka, Abby Lincoln, and Nichelle Nichols.
“I also used a lot of live performances because the essence of Oscar Brown Jr is to see him perform live,” says betts. “I was surprised by the breadth of his work. He wrote a thousand songs, a dozen plays, musicals and I don’t know how many poems.”
But music and performing were just a part of Brown’s life, and betts also wanted to portray his political side. His “mistress,” as Brown referred to his political career, entered his life early on.
Too Black to be Red
Born in Chicago in 1926, to a stockbroker and a schoolteacher, Brown had a relatively affluent childhood. He was expected to follow his father into business, but at the age of 15 was already working as an entertainer on a children’s radio series, and in his early 20s, after dropping out of university, he became the world’s first black newscaster. He repeatedly got “kicked off air,” however, for his controversial comments.
At one point he was a member of the Progressive Party, then the Republican Party, but he was really a communist at heart. He joined the Communist Party in his early 20’s, but left again when he was 30, proclaiming that he was “just too black to be red.”
By 1960, Brown had recorded his debut album, Sin and Soul, which blended soul, jazz and blues with a poetic story-telling technique that was completely new.
High Priest of Hip
His poem Bid ‘Em In, a searing portrayal of the auction of a slave girl, was on this album. He performed the piece at such a speed and in an almost sing-song voice, that it is not hard to see why he is sometimes called the godfather of rap. Reviews at the time described him as “a genius,” “all the great ones rolled into one” and “the high priest of hip.”
It looked like fame and fortune would soon come knocking. But while many people could relate to Brown’s music, his outspoken opinions on everything from racism to the constitution, alienated them. “They wanted him to sing and perform his songs. When it came to his politics, they weren’t interested,” betts explains.
It was this kind of mindset that eventually led Brown to consciously take himself out of the music scene for 20 years. “He didn’t want to be a slave to the music industry,” betts says. “That’s why he’s not as well-known as his contemporaries.”
Brown saw a first cut of the film just three months before he died, but his memory lives on in betts’ energetic and compelling documentary. Find out more about the film and the man.
