Summer of soul - or you get what you're given

 My old schoolfriend and I dived into the waters of adolescence this week. The sun was on the sea and I was breaking my lifetime rule of never watching daytime TV. But this was an exception. This was a chance to watch the prizewinning Summer of Soul (Or, when the revolution could not be televised). 

It's on Disney Plus but, well....we put our feet up and were in Harlem, 1969, at a cultural festival spanning six weeks which, as we now know, coincided with Woodstock and the moon landings. In 1969 we were 14. 

Nina Simone in 1967

It was a year of some of the best music around - Marvin Gaye's 'I heard it through the grapevine' (Gladys Knight performs an earlier, slower version in Summer of Soul), Desmond Dekker's 'The Israelites', Stevie Wonder's 'For Once in my Life', Jimmy Cliff's 'Wonderful World Beautiful People', Diana Ross and the Supremes, 'I'm Gonna Make you Love Me', and the anthem, 'The Tracks of My Tears' by Smokey Robinson and the Miracles. 

Of course there were others that year, swimming around in those adolescent waters: Witchita Lineman, Je T'Aime, Where do you go to my lovely? but those Motown hits reach deep. I wasn't going to clubs at that age (my father wouldn't even allow me to go to a youth club). I didn't feel part of any scene. I hadn't even started my periods. But these Motown tracks ground me in the emotional territory of adolescence with all its optimism, anger, developing awareness. 

Anyway, back to Summer of Soul. Shocked, but not surprised, that another aspect of black history's been so suppressed, we watched, we hummed along, we marvelled at the clothes (elegant, original, inspiring, daring), the normal body sizes of women singers, the power of the music and the politics. I'm not going to spoil anything here, but I understand why this film languished in a cellar. It is dangerous, even now. To established thinking in the US, UK, Europe, the whole northern hemisphere that's still enabling endemic injustice and overt racism. Nina Simone's performance is electric. 

How many times during our watching did we say to each other, "Nothing's changed"? And googled if any UK cinema's screening it?  

If I could sit every 14 year old down to watch it before winter comes.... And I'd say, make the music, write the lyrics, be proud of yourself and resist, ask the questions that are asked so pointedly about so-called achievement that has been replayed this summer by the world's richest men.  

Desmond Dekker sang, "I get up in the morning slaving for bread, sir/ So that every mouth can be fed...." and Jimmy Cliff asked us to "look at the world / And the state that it's in today."