In Griswold’s (2013) Cultures and Societies in a Changing World she introduces an analytical tool called the cultural diamond. This tool can be used to investigate the relationship between society and culture by identifying the four concepts that form the cultural diamond (Griswold, 2013). The cultural diamond is formed of four concepts each occupying a single vertex of the diamond. At the top of the cultural diamond is the concept Social world, moving clockwise the next concept is Receiver followed by Cultural Object, then Creator, finally coming back to the Social World (Griswold, 2013). Using Griswold’s cultural diamond, I will analyse the film Searching for Sugar Man (2012) as well as how Rodriguez’s music was heard and provided significant
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In the 1970’s when Rodriguez became popular in South Africa, a man called sugar began an investigation about who Rodriguez actually was and what happened to him. There were many stories of how Rodriguez died, some believed that he died on stage after singing his last song and then shooting himself in the head. Another belief was that he lit himself on fire on stage during a performance. Both are very aggressive suicides, and how these stories were made up could quite possibly be due to the mystery surrounding the artist himself. Griswold suggests that to produce culture one would need proper marketing techniques to target cultural consumers towards the cultural object (Griswold, 2013, p.73). In the film (2012) it is clearly evident that the cultural creator, Rodriguez, after producing the cultural object, his music, did not succeed initially because his record company’s marketing techniques failed to grab the cultural consumer in America and his record company failed to recognize the connection that could be made from his music. Rodriguez himself was a person who believes in humility and generosity, he preferred to do the hard work because someone has to do it, as he worked in construction and renovating buildings conducting manual labor. He was born in Michigan, Detroit and kept a mostly invisible …show more content…
However, it seemed only in South Africa were the people able to relate the cultural object, Rodriguez’s music, to the cultural receiver, South African fans, while in the United States Rodriguez and his songs never gained any traction. In South Africa, Rodriguez was considered a legendary figure because of his great song writing and albums. Cold Fact and Coming from Reality was even bigger than Rolling Stone, he was like a Jimi Hendrix in that because he was dead and Rodriguez was assumed to be dead there was a recognition of the movement his songs generated. Sixto Rodriguez’s songs inspired political and cultural change and as a result sold millions of albums. Rodriguez influenced an entire generation of South Africans by his music and created a subculture. ‘His songs held a powerful set of symbols, meanings and behavioural norms which were opposed to those in the larger culture, that bound the subculture’s members together (Griswold, (2013), p.
In the 1970’s when Rodriguez became popular in South Africa, a man called sugar began an investigation about who Rodriguez actually was and what happened to him. There were many stories of how Rodriguez died, some believed that he died on stage after singing his last song and then shooting himself in the head. Another belief was that he lit himself on fire on stage during a performance. Both are very aggressive suicides, and how these stories were made up could quite possibly be due to the mystery surrounding the artist himself. Griswold suggests that to produce culture one would need proper marketing techniques to target cultural consumers towards the cultural object (Griswold, 2013, p.73). In the film (2012) it is clearly evident that the cultural creator, Rodriguez, after producing the cultural object, his music, did not succeed initially because his record company’s marketing techniques failed to grab the cultural consumer in America and his record company failed to recognize the connection that could be made from his music. Rodriguez himself was a person who believes in humility and generosity, he preferred to do the hard work because someone has to do it, as he worked in construction and renovating buildings conducting manual labor. He was born in Michigan, Detroit and kept a mostly invisible …show more content…
However, it seemed only in South Africa were the people able to relate the cultural object, Rodriguez’s music, to the cultural receiver, South African fans, while in the United States Rodriguez and his songs never gained any traction. In South Africa, Rodriguez was considered a legendary figure because of his great song writing and albums. Cold Fact and Coming from Reality was even bigger than Rolling Stone, he was like a Jimi Hendrix in that because he was dead and Rodriguez was assumed to be dead there was a recognition of the movement his songs generated. Sixto Rodriguez’s songs inspired political and cultural change and as a result sold millions of albums. Rodriguez influenced an entire generation of South Africans by his music and created a subculture. ‘His songs held a powerful set of symbols, meanings and behavioural norms which were opposed to those in the larger culture, that bound the subculture’s members together (Griswold, (2013), p.