It is a record overripe for reevaluation-for reasons not limited to but certainly including pissing off the ghost of Richard Nixon.įrom the Greenwich Village coffeehouses of the early 1960s up through her Polaris Prize-winning 2015 album Power in the Blood, Sainte-Marie has always moved through the world as though she can peer into a fourth dimension. She recalled, “He had a letter on White House stationery commending him for suppressing this music, which deserved to be suppressed.”Īs the years went by, Illuminations developed something of a cult following in 1998, the experimental music magazine The Wire put it on a list of “100 Records That Set the World on Fire When Nobody Was Listening.” (“If Dylan going electric in 1965 would have turned folk purists into baying hyenas,” they wrote, “Buffy Sainte-Marie going electronic would have turned them into kill-hungry wolves.”) But, like Sainte-Marie herself, the bewitching, utterly transporting Illuminations has still not gotten a fraction of its due. But years after the release of Illuminations, when an American radio DJ was interviewing Sainte-Marie, he shocked her by apologizing for abiding by a government mandate to stop spinning her tunes. “Buffy thought that the decline of her record sales was just part of legitimate changes in American public taste,” her biographer Blair Stonechild wrote in 2012’s Buffy Sainte-Marie: It’s My Way. (Even Giorgio Moroder’s first Moog-driven hit, “ Son of My Father,” was not released until 1972.) Illuminations would have been a tough sell in 1969 regardless, but it wasn’t until the 1980s that Sainte-Marie learned another factor in its commercial failure: Because of her activism with the recently formed American Indian Movement ( AIM) and her outspoken Vietnam-era pacifism, the Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon administrations had both led campaigns to blacklist her music from American radio stations and record stores. Illuminations is a potent artifact from those early days when the synthesizer conjured audible awe and limitless possibility. They didn’t want somebody else-a girl like me-to be ahead of them.”īut she was. “Most of these boys-whether musicians or record company guys-did not want to seem old-fashioned or out of the loop. “I was real early with electronics, and I just got used to this typical music-biz resistance,” she recalls in Andrea Warner’s 2018 book Buffy Sainte-Marie: The Authorized Biography. Over and over, she has learned that being ahead of one’s time can be a liability when one does not look the way a vanguard is “supposed to,” which is usually like a white man. She still dismisses hierarchies and what she derisively calls “pecking orders” as rigidly Euro-centric, reeking of colonial absurdity and woefully lacking in imagination. Here is a brief pause, to let your brain try to catch up with Buffy Sainte-Marie.Īnd yet, Sainte-Marie has always been suspicious of “firsts”-something about the word itself connotes a narrow-sighted narrative of conquest. And in 1969, when she unleashed her astounding, trailblazing sixth LP Illuminations, she became the first musician not only to release an album with vocals processed through a Buchla 100 synthesizer (the very same unit that the electronic music legend Morton Subotnik had used to compose his landmark 1967 album Silver Apples of the Moon), but the first person ever to make an album recorded using quadraphonic technology, an early precursor to surround-sound. She is presumably the only person to have written songs that have been covered by the unholy trinity of Elvis, Morrissey, and Courtney Love. Being one of the mainstream’s most visible indigenous entertainers in the 1960s and beyond, Buffy Sainte-Marie was the first Native woman to do quite a few things, among them win a Golden Globe and an Academy Award.
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