Movie musicals are having a second – if they ever stopped having one. Watch the pop music biopic. There are times, like now, when recognition arises, but the format never went out of fashion. And music documentaries, a reference in the world of independent cinema, only proliferated in the streaming era. This means they will have to compete for visibility, but many of them are being created and (mostly) seen. They turned out to be a satisfied epidemic.
Some, like “Amy” or “The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart?” are popular and essential enough to have earned a place in the culture — and, in the case of both films, to have made an impression on their creation. of a biopic (the upcoming Amy Winehouse drama “Again to Black” and the Bee Gees film that Ridley Scott is now set to direct). I’m sure if you’re trying to put together a music documentary, the prospect of it spawning a biopic could be an important promotional point.
But the fact that so many music docs are niche films is actually a pretty good thing. Indeed, how could it be otherwise? Unusual topics like the Beatles are common (or close enough) but not everyone want to look for a documentary about Sparks (“The Sparks Brothers”) or ZZ High (“ZZ High: That Little Ol’ Band From Texas”) or Go-Go’s (“The Go-Go’s”) or Blood, Sweat & Tears (“ What the hell happened to blood, sweat and tears?”) or Gordon Lightfoot (“Gordon Lightfoot: If You Might Learn Me Thoughts”) or Sinéad O’Connor (“Nothing Compares”) or David Bowie (“Moonage Daydream”) or Tiny Tim (“Tiny Tim: King for a Day”) or Grateful Lifeless (“Lengthy Unusual Journey”) or Nina Simone (“What Occurred, Miss Simone?”) or Velvet Underground (“The Velvet Underground”) or Mad Canines & Englishmen (“Learning to Stay Together: The Return of Mad Canines & Englishmen”) or Frank Zappa (“Zappa”) or Milli Vanilli (“Milli Vanilli”). But each type of film found a fervent audience.
And the hits keep coming, the most recent being the documentary Devo that was shown a few months ago at Sundance (and will probably be released this year). If you’re a music fan, a documentary that some favorite artists may feel, when it arrives, is strangely inevitable. You possibly can’t imagine the world without it. But it can be difficult to pull these films out of the background. The issue of music rights is huge, which means that artists, if they are still alive, must cooperate and that estates must be appeased.
It’s surprising to contemplate all the major and, in many cases, great musical artists who have never had a documentary made about them. The same goes for musical biopics — and this year, based on the success of “Bohemian Rhapsody” and “Rocketman” and “Bob Marley: One Love,” you’ll feel the obsession with that kind reaching a new peak, as we prepare for the first dramatic treatment of Bob Dylan’s life (“A Full Unknown,” starring Timothée Chalamet) and the four Beatles biopics that Sam Mendes announced he was making. Dylan and the Fab 4: It doesn’t get any grander than that. (Let’s hope the films fit their themes.) And I had as much fun as anyone imagining the pop music biopics I’d like to see or getting into the parlor game of casting them.
Right now, though, I’m quite excited that the music documentaries I’ve seen just in the last year – films like “Little Richard: I Am The Whole” and the recently released “In Stressed Goals: The Music of Paul Simon” – are fixated on this kind of thing. . The variety of perspectives on musical documents that have not yet been made is impressive. I even have a particular point of view on the subject, which is that I don’t have very modern musical tastes. As a rule (although not all the time), I lean towards pop ecstasy, which means there are artists I’d like to see a film about who don’t push the boundaries of cool. I have included them in the list below. So make fun of me all you want, no matter how cool or boring it may be, here is my list of the ten pop music documentaries I would most like to see. For guidance, I gave them titles.
“Midnight Cruisers: The Steely Dan Story.” The first thing people always say about Steely Dan has to do with the coded subversive quality of their lyrics. The first thing that he must The thing to mention about them is that their music, song after song, album after album, is never less than incandescent. Walter Becker isn’t with us, but Donald Fagen might be tour guide enough for a portrait of how Steely Dan crafted their extraordinary albums and how much they lived up (or didn’t live up to) the stories those songs tell.
“Patti Smith.” She is the extreme priestess of punk, with the most soulful voices – a wail of ecstasy – in rock history. But despite all the rediscovery of female artists that has been happening, there is an era that must also see, hear and experience the uneven glory of her saga.
“I can’t get it out of my head: ELO and the impact of the strings.” As a singer, Jeff Lynne was obsessed with sounding like John Lennon. As the composer-arranger-producer-brain of Electrical Light Orchestra, with songs like “Evil Girl” and “Nightrider” and “Livin’ Factor,” he built sonic castles in the air — and the fact that you could hear the layers made them part of the magic. ELO deserves a film that documents the group’s pop-symphonic ladder to heaven.
“Elegant and the Disco Revolution.” They changed music and altered the world, elevating the pulse of disco to a life-giving art form. (People act like disco was just a phenomenon of its time. Excuse me? Listen to “Dance the Evening” or “Blinding Light” by The Weeknd or anything by Girl Gaga.) And so they created an image of black beauty sophisticated experience that was bigger than aspiration – it was a dream come true. But while Nile Rodgers became one of the most celebrated producers of his time, what he and his colleague, the late Bernard Edwards, created on Stylish is a chapter in music history whose monumental arc has yet to be definitively reckoned with. .
“This Man Is in Love with You: The Story of Burt Bacharach.” He was the best romantic composer of his time. And I’d like to see a film that explored how he wrote these songs, a film that captured his star persona and talked about what the kind of romanticism he embodied really meant and why it fell out of fashion.
“Otis Redding: Strive for a Little Tenderness.” He was just 26 years old when he died. But the reason he was the greatest male soul singer of the ’60s is the depth of talent in his voice – he seemed immediately younger and out of date, full of joy but in dialogue with a pain that transcended into every line. Outside the studio, he was a giant, just like the legend he already was. But due to his tragic death in a plane crash in 1967, Otis Redding remains, to this day, a great mystery.
“As soon as I had a love: the story of the blonde.” I believe “Parallel Strains” is the second best album of the 70s. (Look below, and be very afraid, for my #1 selection.) Of course, the Blonde was O new wave crossover band, and the reason that happened is that their songs were transcendent. Deborah Harry’s singing was direct, ecstatic and operatic; she can scold and he or she can soar. And from its struggles and evolutions, the band was a story in itself.
“Duran Duran in the movie.” They may have been the quintessential ’80s band, which is why you might need mixed emotions about their slyly packaged, propulsive sound. But the devotion they impressed, and still do, makes them a worthy subject for a film that reappears at an age when Simon Le Bon, radiating the formal charisma of a villain in a John Hughes film, might turn out to be a teenager. pop avatar.
“Still, Dr. Dre.” Hip-hop’s transition to arguably the most influential type of mainstream music of its time is a saga of stunning fascination and energy. And Dre, perhaps more than any other figure, was the genius behind this transformation. He was an incomparable pressure on the formation of the sound of rap, expanding its complexity and enhancing (and announcing) its spirit of danger. He deserves a film that takes us behind the scenes of all these scenes, along with the scandalous ones.
“I hope you discover your paradise: Supertramp in America.” With apologies to the gods of respectability, I believe that Supertramp’s 1979 album “Breakfast in America” is the single best document of the 1970s. I also think it is the best Beatles album that the Beatles never made. I also like the early Supertramp stuff (and the 1982 song “It’s Raining Again”), but I’d like to see a full documentary on the band centered on the making of “Breakfast in America” – the exuberance, the pop sublimity – and the timeless fan phenomenon it has become.
