When we heard the news on Sunday that Isaac Hayes had died, the companionship I was with divided a mo of daze and skepticism and an instant of contemplation. Then one of us exclaimed: "The Black Moses!"
That's how we remember him. A soul singer/musician/composer with the balls to be to a fault black, also strong and too beautiful at a time when the happy-clappy negro of Motown was the unthreatening template for the soundtrack of "brigham Young America". Isaac Hayes didn't do cute.
At least, not in 1971.
Back then, with his shaven head, full beard and dark specs, he looked like the "baaad mother ... shut your mouth" of his alter ego Shaft � the "private pecker" who's "a sex political machine to all the chicks" and wHO kickstarted a new musical genre of movies they called "blaxploitation". Hayes's album Theme From Shaft made it to Britain before the movie. But it wasn't what we expected.
Hayes didn't come from Tin Pan Alley. Neither was he shouting gaudy "I'm black and I'm proud." His score for the picture show was more subtle than that � a symphony with soul that forced you to sit and listen. There would be many boogie-woogie nights to come (Theme From Shaft marked the birth of a new kind of music: discotheque), but Isaac Hayes's masterpiece was besides cool for cats � from the black ghettoes of America's northern cities to the African-Caribbean "ghetto" of Tottenham, north London � to ignore.
So, they gave him a Best Original Song Oscar for it. A first for an African-American. And he didn't take to "step and fetchit". On the contrary, the Academy Award seemed to make him more warlike. The sir Ernst Boris Chain of slave rings about his chest was a reminder that his citizenry, like the Israelites, were enslaved, and his "Jesus in dark glasses" image on the cover of the Black Moses album emphasises the point that Hayes was more than scarcely a composer/musician/singer at a time when black America needed more from their superstars.
For a few days, it looked as though Isaac Hayes might be that blackened leader Americans were looking for for � to take the seat of the slain Malcolm X and Martin Luther King. But off the record, Hayes had become an icon in the entertainment earthly concern. We wanted him to lead us all right-hand, all the way to his adjacent gig or his side by side album and, besides, he wasn't truly as competitive as his image would suggest. He was likewise cuddly and too much Mr Nice Guy to call out "let my people go" to honest-to-god pharoah. He also had a sense of humour that sawing machine nothing amiss in the voice of southern soulfulness becoming the voice of the Chef in the cartoon series South Park.
That's how offspring black and white kids will remember Isaac Hayes. To them, he had balls, all right � "chocolate salty balls". An irony that was not lost on us as we took in his passing.
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