Ripping it up: the Big Bang of Little Richard

A new documentary finally frames this wild genius of rock'n'roll as also a black, queer pioneer, says Hamish MacBain

- Hamish MacBain

MUSIC journalists — and I’m allowed to say this because I used to be one — can often be some of the silliest people on Earth. You can tell they are silly because they are forever describing pop musicians as ‘important’, when it’s patently obvious that very, very few pop musicians, ever, have been genuinely important. Marvin Gaye, Bowie, The Beatles, Prince, Madonna? Fine. But there aren’t many others.

The late Richard Wayne Penniman, better known as Little Richard, was and is unique among pop musicians in many ways: not the least of which is that to call him important is an understatement. None of the above artists, or many others, would exist without him.

It thus seems unfathomable that there has not been a serious documentary centred around this black, queer icon and the wild, sexually explicit three- minute pop hurricanes — Tutti Frutti, Rip It Up, Lucille, to name three — that sound as outrageous today as they must have done in the Fifties. But maybe 2023, where race, gender and identity are now so central to the cultural conversation, is the time. Maybe the world just needed 70 years or so to catch up. With I Am Everything, director Lisa Cortés has done an appropriately fabulous job. There is an abundance of archive footage (he is as brilliant on talk shows as he is onstage) as well as interviews with all kinds of people: from ethnomusicologists who contextualise his impact, to the stars who so admired him, to friends, family and lovers. Together, it makes for a complicated story of a complex character.