My Heart Cried for Sister

[Intro] [Music] My heart cried for Sister by Jessica Holter, writing as Ghetto Girl Blue, a movie review of Sparkle in poetry and history. [Verse 1] 1976... Giving up, she sang, was not easy. Sister was a sweaty fraction of what she had been, gum popping, sass talking. When the movie Sparkle found her after church, where she led parishioners to our precious Lord. I wasn't old enough to be in Oakland's 99 cent Roxy Theater, with rats scurrying beneath the seats, watching her crawl into Satin's fists, draped in the fur he stripped from his last chick. Makeup could cover her bloody sacrifice for the big time, powdering her insides to cover bruises for her adoring audience. [Chorus] Sparkle Beautiful Sister Fine They gave us the rock and took the line Nice and neat, [in French] Tout de Suite three strikes you go away for life My heart cried for Sister, like some strange social research. How would a seven-year-old girl react to this sad and musically intoxicating film about a vulnerable, beautiful woman chasing dreams, only to lose them to dangerous men. Sister was giving her man something he could feel, hooked on his love, sweet drug, Satin, a character something like a Ghetto Satan, the darkest man in the film, the villain, supplying freedom from her earthly hell, the casket. But the dream lived on through Sparkle, baby sister and enabler, with a song in her heart for Sticks, a grown man sticking it to the 15-year-old, on rooftops and seedy motels with cashmere bouquet soap, while writing designs to guide her career. A goal we would learn in the end, the green-eyed high-toned man was willing to die for. The industry was using the big screen for a new kind of minstrelsy, programming the community with imagery of success we sought desperately, and serving it with poison. But I did not know this. I was only seven. [Chorus] Sparkle Beautiful Sister Fine They gave us the rock and took the line Nice and neat, [in French] Tout de Suite three strikes you go away for life [Verse 2] 1977... In real life, drug consumption in Oakland and every other city where Sister's song and plight crawled onto the big screen reached an all-time high. Meanwhile, in Sherman Oaks, B Divine LTD found a model who resembled Sister, down to the flower in her hair, to sell us a complete snow refining system for straining fine powder straight into the bottle without losing a single rock. Nice and neat, [in French] Tout de Suite... The Blue Lady has the sparkle, said another magazine advertisement for organic Mennite Connoisseur, weighing on a scale propped against a blue panty backdrop between a model's legs, with the effervescence and solubility of the real thing. You too can live high and die glamorously. [Chorus] Sparkle Beautiful Sister Fine They gave us the rock and took the line Nice and neat, [in French] Tout de Suite three strikes you go away for life [Verse 3] 1987... Cocaine was no longer a rich man's high. The black community was rock hard for the free base pipe. A drug dealer's girlfriend and a high school journalist by then, on location at Seminary and Bromley, I watched him bag rocks and count money in a trade's apartment. Looking closely, I could see the new mother was once Sparkle beautiful, Sister fine. Breasts exposed, she sat on the floor, leaning against a big black bag of trash that cradled a baby small enough to fit in one hand. Barely audible, he shared his story, hooked on the same love, sweet drug as his faded mother. [Musical Outro] [Chorus] Sparkle Beautiful Sister Fine They gave us the rock and took the line Nice and neat, [in French] Tout de Suite three strikes you go away for life