There was a time when music documentaries promised revelations. They have been carved out as artefacts for the curious and the crucial, not shrines constructed to cement sainthood. However now, you may predict each body earlier than hitting play.
The identical template is dragged out, airbrushed for gloss, and paraded round like a cultural present when it’s nothing however pre-approved canonising for artists already propped up on sufficient crucial scaffolding to outlive the subsequent ten cultural apocalypses.
There’s the grainy footage of a provincial childhood, then the adolescent wrestle, adopted by fast ascent, decadent peak, the crash, the comeback (in the event that they’re alive), or the elegiac fade-out (in the event that they’re not). All of it stitched along with interviews from drained business heads who’ve been saying the identical issues about “affect” and “genius” for many years. It isn’t historical past, it’s a hagiography – and the creativity of the medium is rotting.
Reduce and Paste Myths in Trendy Music Documentaries
Up to now 5 years, you can play a ingesting recreation with these documentaries and barely make it by way of half an hour sober. Whether or not it’s Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry, Lewis Capaldi: How I’m Feeling Now, or Amy, you get the identical saccharine sentimentality, the identical framing gadgets, and the identical suspension of criticality.
These movies let you know who to mourn, who to admire, and who to put on a plinth, whereas any actual investigation into the context round their profession is both lazily skimmed over or ignored solely. The artist turns into a fable, their environment fade into irrelevance, and their viewers is anticipated to eat the story with out a lot as an eyebrow raised. These aren’t documentaries, they’re cinematic candles on the altar.
Music documentaries have grow to be much less about music and extra about persona packaging. The business has discovered yet one more approach to repackage somebody’s trauma, wrap it in tender lighting, and ship it to streaming platforms in time for award season. Even when the artist in query remains to be alive, the tone has grow to be pre-emptively funereal. There’s a starvation for a fall, and if there hasn’t been one but, the narrative will dig till it finds one.
Who Is This For?
These documentaries aren’t made for the curious. They don’t seem to be made for many who wish to perceive the lineage of a style, the shifting cultural tides that formed a sound, or the unusual, tangled path a motion took earlier than it entered the mainstream. They’re made for followers who wish to see their favourites fluffed for ninety minutes. There isn’t a problem, no scrutiny, no actual journalism. You’re extra prone to discover considerate evaluation in a 30-minute YouTube video produced in somebody’s bed room than in a shiny Netflix manufacturing signed off by a staff of govt producers with advertising and marketing levels.
Take the Earlier than Bauhaus: How Goth Turned Goth video essay on YouTube, for instance – it traces the cultural roots of goth not by way of chart knowledge and shiny interviews however by way of socio-political context, creative family tree, and precise music evaluation. It doesn’t fawn, it educates. It doesn’t bend the narrative to make one band seem like a genesis level, it unpicks the lineage like somebody who nonetheless provides a rattling about what the music means and the place it got here from. These are the sorts of insights it’s best to have the ability to anticipate from the medium, but they’re nowhere to be present in most trendy music documentaries.
Sanitised, Protected and Permitted by PR
The actual crime is how little threat any of those movies are prepared to take. Even when the subject material is ripe for crucial evaluation – assume the business’s therapy of feminine artists, the commodification of psychological well being struggles, or the systemic rot below main labels – it’s tiptoed round prefer it’s fabricated from glass. We’re left with tearful confessionals from interior circles and relations however no exploration of why these artists struggled, past imprecise gestures at fame being “arduous”.
These documentaries are secure as a result of secure sells. They’re commissioned by the identical corporations that additionally maintain the rights to the music and the picture, and the merchandise. There’s no incentive to problem the narrative, to disclose the contradictions, or to query how the equipment of fame operates. They go away you with the emotional resonance of a shampoo advert and about as a lot cultural perception.
That is the place The Punk Singer broke the mould. It didn’t simply observe Kathleen Hanna’s profession like a Wikipedia article set to music. It contextualised her work, her politics, the scenes that formed her, and the best way her artwork interacted with feminism in actual time. It challenged its viewers to grasp her as an artist and as part of a bigger cultural resistance. It dared to be messy, it dared to be crucial, and it left you with one thing to truly take into consideration.
The Echo Chamber of Hero Worship
The hero-worship format dulls every part it touches. It robs the topic of their humanity and erases the world round them. It repeats the identical origin tales as if every artist materialised in a vacuum, untouched by the cultural and political circumstances that form music. It’s a conveyor belt of icons, every one getting their flip below the halo-light of posthumous reward or pre-mortem adulation.
And there’s no scarcity of those movies. Miss Americana, Shawn Mendes: In Marvel, Wham!, Oasis: Supersonic – even after they do contact on wrestle or battle, it’s not often something greater than surface-deep, handled as a minor beat within the rhythm of a pre-destined rise. Among the newer bulletins embrace documentaries about BTS, Olivia Rodrigo, and even a second spherical of Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck-style deep dives. What all of them share is a refusal to get their palms soiled.
The artists is likely to be compelling, however their tales are flattened. The actual guts of their music, their context, their contradictions, are left unexamined as a result of hero worship has no room for nuance. You possibly can’t query a saint.
Conclusion: The Want for Vital Curiosity
There may be nothing mistaken with admiration. However when admiration turns into the one lens by way of which we’re allowed to view an artist, we’ve misplaced the plot. Music documentaries ought to open new home windows, not simply polish the stained glass. They need to examine, not validate. And they need to worth reality over tidiness.
It’s not that artists don’t should have their tales informed – however they deserve greater than this. They deserve a medium that respects the chaos of creativity, the context of tradition, and the complexity of being a human being within the music business. Till the components is damaged, one of the best revelations will proceed to return from impartial video essayists who aren’t afraid to query, to dig deeper, and to place the music again on the centre of the story.
Keep updated with our weblog for future lambasts on the insidiousness of latest tradition right here.
Article by Amelia Vandergast
