Singing the Blues

Musical bio-art

Billie Holiday by Carlos Sampayo and José Muñoz

Children learn to recognise beauty very early on. They like to look at symmetrical faces. It’s true. They smile more when they behold pretty babysitters than when they look upon ugly ones. And babies love music, love beautiful music, and prefer harmony to discordance.

So do we all. At least most of the time. Some of this is malleable, but much of it is built in. It takes a lot of training for anyone, adult or child. to ditch beauty and prefer ugliness.

When people are children, they also mistakenly assume that beauty, because it’s associated with good things, must mean universal good. Commonly, children believe that beautiful people, or people who look fit, do not get ill, even that bad things do not happen to them. There is, as we all known from our own lives, an association between beauty and talent and wealth, longevity and happiness. But it is not absolute. It’s not permanent, either. Tragedy comes to everyone, in the end.

But we don’t want to believe it. It might be hard, then, for someone who hears only the beauty in Billie Holiday’s voice, and not its deep wellsprings of hard-fought, hard-acquired emotion, to imagine how badly her life could have gone. How could anyone who sounds like that ever be made to suffer quite so much?

This graphic biography, by the writer-artist team of José Muñoz and Carlos Sampayo, does not explain why. Nothing really can. But it attempts to put it all into context, to give a long and tortured recitation of some of what happened.

Muñoz and Sampayo do not spare the readers. That’s not their job.

Easy though it is to leaf through, legible and direct though the illustrations are, the story is not an easy read. There are plenty of places you might, if you so wished, find out the particular things that Holiday suffered: mistreatment, violence, drugs and alcohol. The cruel cost demanded of too many. But instead of spelling all that out, I’d rather talk about the point of biography. Why do we write about living people? Why do we dramatise them?

This is, in some ways, a banal question. We talk about interesting people because they probably matter. Anyone who makes a piece of art we like is presumed to matter because they matter to us. Anyone we’ve heard of probably matters, because we wouldn’t waste our time thinking about anyone who did not.

Billie Holiday’s voice and her songs, the hold they had on more than one generation, were so profound that more than once, I’ve read death notices or obituaries which said something like ‘x died listening to Billie Holiday sing, per instructions.’

Immense charisma, tremendous meaning, lies behind something like that.

What meaning and charisma do we want our biographical writings, our biographical art, to convey? The biopic in film is a genre in desperate, urgent need of reinvention. The music biopic, perhaps more than any other. The stereotypes are so profound they have spawned note-perfect, word-perfect parodies of the entire genre. (Walk Hard being one of them.) And some formal innovations intended to shake the genre up. Rocketman, a very enjoyable film, was one of those.

But just think of the genre.

So many biopics about musicians have the same format, the same frame. We have obscurity and youthful charm, initial musical spark, the formation of a band or getting in the studio for the first time, followed by the idea or notion of a song that later became a hit. And then we go on. Recording the major hit. Possibly worrying a good deal all the while. The hit appearing on the radio; people listening to it.

Then the invitations roll in for our star or band. They get more attention — of all kinds — than they’d ever thought or hoped. Temptation — again in many flavours — comes calling. And they have drug and booze episodes. Then life becomes a terrible Lost Weekend-type haze. And then perhaps rehab, perhaps drying out, perhaps therapy. And then either a tragic denouement, or some kind of happy conclusion — however false that may be.

We’re all so used to this that we don’t really question it. Even if it does not satisfy. There must be something both endlessly satisfying and profoundly repeatable about these themes. The emotional 27 club: coincidence, synchronicity, regression to the narrative mean.

In this book, Muñoz and Sampayo are interested in suffering. They’re interested in how much a life define by transcendent talent can be scarred and marked by other things. How badly so many men can treat a woman. How much pain one person can endure.

What they implicitly ask — and this is a question that is occasionally asked in music biographies, musical biopics, the whole genres — is ‘and was it worth it?’

As if the two can never be separated — that with immense talent comes not only responsibility but a Faustian bargain that fame only accentuates. The argument Muñoz and Sampayo are perhaps making is that the one attracts the other. Holiday’s genius came from her moulding of the experience of pain into beauty. That pain could have been anybody’s. It is universal. But it happened to be hers.

Brilliance means fame; fame means attention; attention means money; money means attention from people unwanted, or new attention from people you may want, but who treat you worse than you could ever guess.

It would be a tragic view of humanity. This being a world that makes you sing the blues.