ornral jamarcus garlanah
Janie Leverone
From Ken Burns' 10-volume jazz odyssey to Ice Cube's 51-minute meditation on the L.A. Raiders, Netflix offers no shortage of excellent music content to stream immediately. Most of the rock doc classics (Don't Look Back, Gimme Shelter, The Last Waltz, Wild Style) require you to utilize your DVD queue (or hit your local rental store), but here are the 30 best options if you need a fix right now.
By Reed Fischer, Caryn Ganz, Richard Gehr, Kory Grow, Keith Harris, Will Hermes, Daniel Kreps, James Montgomery, Jason Newman, Mosi Reeves, Julianne Escobedo Shepherd, Al Shipley and Christopher R. Weingarten
The first voice you hear in Muscle Shoals, the first face you see? Bono. So you know right off the bat that this is going to be one of those documentaries that ratifies the importance of its subject matter with famous talking heads. Thankfully, once the film gets going, firsthand accounts of cutting classic records at Muscle Shoals Sound Studio outnumber hyperbolic testimonies by uninvolved superstars like Alicia Keys. Great stories abound, from the tense, awkward sessions that made Aretha Franklin into a superstar, to the engineer who had to push a fader up and down as Percy Sledge's voice rose in volume as he recorded "When a Man Loves a Woman." And in those little details the big picture emerges, of a racially integrated studio in Civil Rights-era Alabama that changed the sound of rock and soul.
Peter Spirer's scattershot profile of dozens of rappers, from sundry members of Wu-Tang Clan and A Tribe Called Quest to Cypress Hill and E-40, has become a time capsule of hip-hop on the eve of its greatest tragedy. There is an interview with Tupac Shakur, as well as scenes of his funeral; the Notorious B.I.G., who also appears, was murdered three months after the doc's January 1997 release.
New Jersey's Sugarhill Gang has long been dismissed by hip-hop historians for allegedly ripping off the original Bronx hip-hop scene for "Rapper's Delight," rap's very first national smash. In this engrossing documentary, Wonder Mike and Master Gee reclaim their reputation as MCs worthy of respect as they wage court battles with their former label, deal with a fake "Sugarhill Gang" led by disgraced member Big Bank Hank, and record an unlikely Europop hit with French producer Bob Sinclar.
The most enduring documentary about the Band, Martin Scorsese's 1978 concert film The Last Waltz, has often drawn criticism for its focus on Scorsese's buddy Robbie Robertson at the expense of his bandmates. Decades later, Ain't In It For My Health offers a gratifying corrective: a film dedicated to the Band's brilliant, golden-throated drummer Levon Helm. Released just a couple years before Helm's 2012 passing, Jacob Hatley's documentary catches the legend in the middle of his late-career renaissance, holding the famous Midnight Ramble concerts at his home in Woodstock and releasing Grammy-winning solo albums. But his decade-long battle with cancer, and the problems with money and drugs that plagued Helm after the Band's dissolution, aren't glossed over, as his complicated life and undeniable talent are captured with warts-and-all honesty.
The main attraction of filmmaker Sini Anderson's tribute to riot grrrl pioneer Kathleen Hanna is the extensive footage of early Nineties Bikini Kill shows. It's one thing to hear admirers explain the band's impact on third-wave feminism and attest to Hanna's charismatic pull; it's another to see visual evidence of Hanna's aggressive yet un-macho performance style in real time. No less compelling, however, is the more recent intimate examination of Hanna's life with her husband, the Beastie Boys' Adam Horovitz, as the singer talks about the late-stage Lyme disease that has mostly sidelined her since 2005.
The shopworn tale of "influential cult rocker who, decades later, finally gets his due" is redeemed in Last Days Here, the story of heavy metal pioneers Pentagram and their frontman Bobby Liebling. More gutter than Black Sabbath, Pentagram were the band that almost made it, but drugs and internal conflicts doomed the group to obscurity before Myspace nostalgists resurrected them. Liebling, a semi-functioning heroin addict living with his parents, allows directors (and superfans) Don Argott and Demian Fenton to shoot everything as he prepares for a comeback tour and attempts to turn his life around. With more than 300 hours of footage to pick from and an intense, endlessly watchable protagonist, Last Days Here is the rare music doc to transcend the title "music doc," the harrowing story of a man teetering on the edges of both death and success.
Between 1967 and 1975, Swedish journalists visited the U.S. and filmed interviews with the era's black radicals, including Stokely Carmichael, Angela Davis, Eldridge and Kathleen Cleaver (filmed while in exile in Algeria), and the Honorable Louis Farrakhan. Decades later, Gran Hugo Olsson discovered this footage languishing in the Swedish Television studios, and assembled it into a cogent narrative featuring commentary by Erykah Badu, ?uestlove (who created the soundtrack alongside Om'mas Keith), Talib Kweli, Harry Belafonte, Abiodun Oweyole of the Last Poets and others. Onetime Fugees associate John Fort, who was incarcerated for years on drug charges, offers some particularly poignant words about the 1971 Attica uprising and the question of whether "prisoners have human rights."
On April 2nd, 2011, James Murphy pulled the plug on his beloved disco-rock outfit LCD Soundsystem, getting the band together on the stage of New York's Madison Square Garden for one last dance. This doc capturing the days surrounding the final gig is framed with interviews by journalist/columnist Chuck Klosterman that capture a melancholy Murphy coming to grips with his decision to walk away from the well-loved project. There's full-song footage of the show (though not the entire set) that includes shots of Aziz Ansari crowd-surfing and the magical moment the band lit the disco ball during a scorching "Us V. Them." There's footage of Arcade Fire preparing an impromptu cameo on "North American Scum," which is how the film got it's name ("Just shut up and play the hits," Win Butler instructs Murphy in jest). There's Reggie Watts and a choir and laughter and sobs and almost enough POV footage from the pit to recall the feeling of teary ecstasy that filled the room that night. (Bonus: the excellent footage of Murphy's adorable French bulldog, Petunia.)
One of the most revealing Beatles docs ever revolves around their secretary, Freda Kelly, a Liverpool office worker who spent lunch breaks at the Cavern Club watching her favorite band. Eventually they gave her a job, and for 11 years (the band lasted 10) she was their loveably tough gal Friday and fan club spokeswoman. At core it's the story of a briefly charmed working-class life: Kelly returned to non-com secretarial work after her Cinderella ride. But with a juicy Beatles soundtrack, it's also about fandom, loyalty and unwavering British discretion. "Did you go out with any of them?" asks the interviewer early in the film. "Pass," she says, laughing.
The Big Star documentary Nothing Can Hurt Me is a rock & roll ghost story with a teary-eyed power-pop soundtrack. The seminal Memphis alt-country architects' main men Alex Chilton and Chris Bell died before the film's creation, so their hard-luck story is told by surviving members, family, Ardent studio/label personnel, and famous fans like R.E.M. and the Flaming Lips. After Big Star's failed rise and breakup in the early Seventies, the story steers to Bell's underrated I Am the Cosmos phase and tragic early passing. Later, Chilton's emergence from provocative punk experiments with Tav Falco's Panther Burns to reform the cult-favorite group is just as bittersweet as his melancholy vocal on "Thirteen."
This 19-hour mini-series is not without its problems. It's co-produced by jazz traditionalist Wynton Marsalis, so anything exciting that happened after 1970 (free-jazz, Afro-Cuban jazz, punk jazz, free improv) gets the short end of the drumstick. But no one tells America's story like Ken Burns, who treats our jazz heroes with the same loving hand he treated our Civil War vets, panning across archival photographs and letting people with first-hand experience tell the story. PBS' ability to use truckloads of actual jazz recordings is the real treat, so you get singer Jon Hendricks explaining Charlie Parker's phrasing while Charlie Parker plays; and tenor saxophonist Paul Gonsalves playing a 27-chorus solo at Newport Jazz Festival as photos show the audience in frenzy. An incomplete primer, but essential nonetheless.
Directed by Kevin McDonald (The Last King of Scotland), who took it on after Martin Scorsese and Jonathan Demme dropped out, this corn-free authorized assemblage of frank interviews and marvelous vintage footage paints the best A/V portrait to date of the non-Western world's most massive musical figure. With both Chris Blackwell and Bunny Wailer credited as producers, this 2012 release is a remarkably even-handed look at the reggae star who died of cancer in 1981 at 36. The early footage of the Wailers embodies cool as Platonic ideal, while the later Marley group's epic sound at the 1976 Smile Jamaica concert and 1979's Zimbabwe independence celebration capture fiery performances that seem larger than life.
In 1990, Madonna had her Gaultier-designed cone bra pointed in one direction: world domination. Her Blonde Ambition tour that year, timed to the release of Like a Prayer, was a sexy spectacle that inflamed the Vatican and "the facist state of Toronto" (which tried to get her to tone down her faux masturbation act during "Like a Virgin" for her show in the Canadian city). So of course she filmed it all for an arty doc that showed her crawling into bed with her dancers, sparring with her then-beau Warren Beatty and insulting Kevin Costner when he dared to describe her show as "neat." Ultimately, the film captures Madonna's fraught relationship with her family, her single-minded focus on her showmanship and her attempts to keep one foot in the seamy underground where her gay dancers live and one in the glossy Hollywood world she so desperately wants to conquer. It's a somewhat truthful, very daring and totally fascinating look at a pop superstar's continued rise.
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