Armond White on RUPAUL “Back To My Roots” Music Video - Part 1 (Dir: Randy Barbato)

 

(PART 1) SAT, July 28, 2007.  ”Official History of Music Video” Presentation by CRITIC Armond White. 15th Annual Music Video show at 2007 SCANNERS Video Festival. Critic Armond White speaks on RuPaul “Back To My Roots” Music Video.

MANIFESTO Genre
Critic Armond White speaks on
RuPaul “Back To My Roots”
Director: Randy Barbato

Critic Armond White also wrote an article in The New York Press (where he works as a film critic) about his music video presentation at SCANNERS.

Here are a few Armond White quotes about this video when it initially came out:

“…The Back To My Roots video launches RuPaul’s full-length album Supermodel Of The World (Tommy Boy) in grand, hilarious, heartwarming style. As directed by Randy Barbato, it is one of the few pop videos to revel in Black physiognomy and the various notions of glamour that Black folks create—whether Afrocentric or Hollywood-derived, a drag queen like RuPaul has access to all of them. RuPaul sets the video in his mother Ernestine Charles’s beauty salon on Auburn Avenue in Atlanta, as a personal and cultural homage—he goes to the source of personal reinvention, the actual factory of self-made Black men and women…”

“…Along with shout-outs to his homies (Miss Earlene, Burnetta, Little Baby Boy, Korneisha), RuPaul calls up various hairdos and Barbato throws hot colors, key lights, even a Nintendo grid, on each one: Corn Rows, Jheri-Curls, Afro Puffs, Hair Weave, Braids, Extensions, Asymmetrical Shrew. Every style is modeled by RuPaul, but in a blond wig and corresponding apparel - - a ploy that can only throw off cultural nationalists into a politically correct tizzy more confounding than the expected homophobic panic. For the chorus sequences, where dozens of Black folks show off different ‘dos in their own hair, to their own liking, RuPaul makes pluralism and unity seem fun - - but only after illustrating the Black cultural forms in which people take pluralism and unity for granted.”

“Going further than either Digable Planets’ “Nappy hair is life” statement or the Naughty By Nature video close-up of Treach doing his own braids (Everything’s Gonna Be Alright), Back To My Roots zeroes in on a Black universal: “Unh uh! I’m tender-headed!” That youth-and-ethnic-specific phrase deserves to be preserved in art (like the lice scene in The Long Day Closes and the hair-combing scene in The Color Purple). And in RuPaul’s art, it signifies the mental pains, the work of self-presentation and self-invention…”

The City Sun, June 30, 1992

Also in the book “THE RESISTANCE: Ten Years Of Pop Culture That Shook The World” By Armond White