Jordan Peele’s NOPE was inspired, in part, by a burned CD a friend handed him in the mid-2000s, scrawled, simply, with the word “Exuma.”
Tony Mackey borrowed his stage name from an island district in the Bahamas, moving to New York and the Greenwich music scene in 1961, where he meshed modern rock & roll with the sounds and traditions of his homeland. A central figure in his music was the Obeah Man, a kind of mystical creature from local legends.
. Although Mackey had some industry support for his debut — Nina Simone even covered a few of his songs — his music was just too…to be marketable in a fickle business like entertainment. Still, he was a mainstay at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival and wrote music and plays, and made art until his death in 1997. He’s also managed to find a niche among cratediggers and music lovers with a taste for the beautiful and bizarre — including Peele.
The song crops up at a pivotal point in the movie, which follows the plight of siblings OJ and Emerald Haywood as they attempt to save their father’s Hollywood horse-training business — the only Black-owned operation of its kind — by catching an extraterrestrial creature on camera. “From early on in the writing phase, ‘The Obeah Man’ is the one song that was in the script exactly where it ended up being in the final cut of the movie,” Peele says.
Peele says the song is a kind of “anthem” for the family, as “at its core, this movie is about giving agency to the erased or underappreciated figures in history – which ties in directly with Exuma and his legacy.” As Emerald explains during an early scene, their business was founded by their ancestor, Bahamian jockey Alasdair E. Haywood, who was based on the unknown Black man in pioneering photographer Eadweard Muybridge’s early moving pictures.
“You develop a very special relationship when you discover an underappreciated artist like this later in life, and on a personal level, I made a connection and identified with this feeling of him being an outsider,” he adds.
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