Sex, Drugs, and Camera Rolls: Music Documentaries Then and Now

Year: 1970

Director: Michael Wadleigh

Still hailed as one of the best (read: insane) happenings of all time, the documentary that came out of Woodstock's three days of peace, love, and music is a best-of concert compilation that contains iconic performances by Jimi Hendrix, The Who, CSNY, Sly, Joe Cocker, CCR, etc.

Besides sharing a lot of beautiful moments and naked giggly hippies, Woodstock also reveals a complete ignorance as to how you organize a concert. Thankfully, that's something my generation has improved upon. We've made something like that donkey island in Pinnochio, weekend-long and neon.

Woodstock was declared a national emergency while it was happening due to a lack of food, facilities, and mud suction needed to sustain that mass of people for so long. Luckily, almost everybody was so fucked up it didn't even matter. A message was delivered, but it have been lost in all the music, mud and hallucinations.

Year: 2005

Director: Michel Gondry

Dave Chappelle was coming to grips with his dizzying celebrity in 2004. He was really, really, rilly blowing up. But Dave didn't seem to like what he saw in the mirror, and he walked away from network TV and made plans to travel to Africa. But before that, it was definitely necessary to have a block party. It was produced and released right around the time when one of our generation's greatest comedians decided to walk away from Comedy Central and fuckton of cash.

Chappelle's party gained momentum as a moment of rebellion and independence among musicians and millennials alike. He reunited the Fugees for the show, and got legends like The Roots and a still-rising Kanye West to perform, Chappelle created a much more personal event that seemed catered to his audience. Like Woodstock, Dave Chappelle's Block Party chronicled a moment that could only happen once. With the continued popularity and legitimacy of festivals, you have to wonder whether it all started here.

Granted, this block party is a far cry from the multi-million corporate productions you see out in Lolla-land and Coachella. But the originality of Chappelle's decision to leave and the decision to throw a festival as a final act of rebellion... that's kind of what they're shooting for now, right? A weekend escape, throwing off the shackles of your daily life.

Year: 1974

Director: Alan Yentob

David Bowie was riding along the edge of the fame rails in the 1970s, screeching around corners in heavy makeup, blowing lines in limos and staring global fame in the face for the first time. Cracked Actor is a jagged and almost disturbingly honest account of Bowie's incredibly theatrical live shows. Ziggy Stardust himself recalls the period as such: "… so stoned… I'm amazed I came out of that period, honest… I cannot believe I survived it."

Theatricality has also been a part of the superstar's persona, but there's a marked difference between Bowie and the contemporary on the next slide. Where Bowie exalts and projects his excess and eccentricity to the world, Lil Wayne hides behind dark sunglasses and DJs, relying only on his voice and spontaneity to carry him through the tours. But the song remains the same: the pressures of fame promote an environment that can be too much to handle, so the rock star turns to self-destruction.

Year: 2009

Director: Adam Bhala Lough

Lil Wayne has not committed suicide, nor has he retired. He has had many adventures since The Carter was released almost four years ago. He has created multiple albums, gone to jail, and found God. Life has not stopped or even slowed for Dwayne Carter. But The Carter, filmed during the time preceding Lil Wayne's three years in prison, is nonetheless a study in manic deterioration.

But isn't that what we want to see? Lough's stoned intimacy is heart-wrenchingly good, shot through Wayne's perpetual sizzurp and deafening silences. Together, the director and the subject paint a picture of someone unable to channel brilliance into coherent patterns. The fact that Lil Wayne did pull himself out makes it all the better. Guilt doesn't make for good TV numbers.

This is not unlike the years-long bender of Bowie. But Ziggy Stardust released sixteen albums after teetering on over that cliff-high mountain of cocaine. And he's still going. Is Lil Wayne the next David Bowie?

No. No, he is not. Don't be ridiculous.

Year: 1970

Director: Albert & David Maysles

Gimme Shelter is a benchmark of the Direct Cinema movement, a passive mode of filmmaking that records events as they happen spontaneously. This style came in handy when the Stones performed at the shitshow that was the Altamont Speedway Free Concert, in which "security" for the band and many other performers was provided by the Hell's Angels. The Angels did more drinking, screaming, and tripping than protection—one even ended up stabbing an audience member to death. (To be fair, the fan had pulled a gun during the Stones' performance.) It's a film that manages to capture the insanity of the moment and the unruliness not just of the crowd, but of a generation that had been stretched to the breaking point.

But the Rolling Stones survived that moment, and are doing more than just surviving to this day. One of this movie's great moments happens after the fact, when the Stones plead for calm after the hysteria. It does no good, of course, because somebody just got fucking killed.

Year: 2008

Director: Martin Scorsese

Nearly 40 years later the Stones are still touring and fockin' killing it. They're doing well enough to survive Keith Richards bashing Jagger in an autobiography. They're doing well enough to warrant more documentaries to be made in their image. They're doing well enough to actually still be a great band despite having the fan base to afford slacking off.

But the shadows of that Altamont concert still remain despite an unthinkably deep discography and the inhuman longevity the Rolling Stones have managed to continue to this day. Shine A Light posits the band as the old guard of rock and roll rather than the rambunctious troublemakers that inadvertently caused a murder on the previous slide: they trot out old gray-haired friends and politicians and play themselves throughout, never losing the onstage intensity that has allowed them to survive in this role for this long. The aches and pains that ail them offstage is forgotten once the spotlight hits.

Although they've been rock gods for 50 years, the Stones have had to reconsider the societal position of those fans over the course of time. No longer the tastemakers they once were, Shine A Light provides a look at a band that has managed to successfully and continually redefine itself as cool. They've been running stages for decades, and if it turns out they've been on steroids this whole time, well God bless'em.

It makes me a little sad about the Beatles, what they could have been like touring alongside the Stones. Because t his film is an example of the timelessness of music. They're playing songs that cracked charts decades ago and could do it again tomorrow.

Year: 1983

Director: Tony Silver

Style Wars is that moment where an idea is born. It's the ape's murder stick in 2001. The doc's main focus is on graffiti, but what they call bombing and breaking in the film has the same foundations as rap music: the projection of a persona, the ownership of a name. Make yourself a superstar, put your tag on the cars of every subway, rap your name in every song.

But what was amazing about Style Wars was its futuristic recognition of the multi-platform artist. Break dancing, rapping, and tagging were wrapped and rapped up into an identity that, together, painted a picture realistic enough for people to realize its significance. And the city began to catch on from there. If you need more evidence on Style Wars affect on the birth of hip-hop, skip to 1:24 and then go look at the Black Star.

Year: 2012

Director: Ice—T

Thirty years later, it's time to take a victory lap. Hip-hop has established itself not only as a worldwide phenomenon but as an art form as malleable as sculpture, film, and paint. So who are you gonna call besides Ice-T to direct the movie? Nobody, that's who, goddamn it. Only a couple years have passed since its understated release, but The Art of Rap already provides a new perspective on rap music, knowing what's happened to the people it pulls in.

The Art of Rap is as much a recollection as it is a celebration. And the elements of its style and delivery since Style Wars hasn't changed all that much. You get the feeling that the legends recounting the birth of their craft (Nas, Kanye, Common, Run DMC, Eminem, Snoop) were the same kids tagging subways in the '80s.

Year: 1968

Director: Bob Rafelson

You wanna get weird? I'll show you weird. The Monkees psychedelia is a series of sketches depicting the boys' cagey fate of being a made-for-TV band. It's a hyper-conscious paranoid story that looped Jack Nicholson and Dennis Hopper into the production mix right as their thirst for acid and more acid was peaking. But what's really incredible is how mainstream and formulated this whole story of mainstream formulation is. The Monkees lost creative control of the film to Bob Rafelson and Nicholson in the end, and the band slowly faded into obscurity.

The Monkees were a strange moment in the history of music — the first example of a band created solely for a sponsor's benefit. That's happening more than ever now, but the fact that The Monkees were able to exist as a band after the show's cancellation is a nice indication that music can be good regardless of time, place or context. Gawd bless humanity 'n shit!

Year: 2009

Directors: Aaron Aites & Audrey Ewell

Norwegian black metal made international headlines when members of its spiked juggalo subculture started setting churches on fire and ended up killing two people. This is the documentary that unfortunately and inevitably sympathizes with their "plight." The musicians never give much of an explanation as to the movement, but the music does more than their words ever could.

The existence of this documentary also couldn't have been possible more than a few decades ago. The universality of musical conceptions like death metal have done more than reach Norway—it's straight up infected the Scandanavians. The electronic foundation of the soundtrack's Norwegian nightmares were made possible by new inventions. The screaming distortion and intense feedback tearing across Deathcrush are a band apart, a violent earball assault that's worth every squirm and unfortunate makeup choice.

Year: 1978

Director: Martin Scorsese

A veritable roll call of folk music (EDM in the 60's), The Last Waltz is a Scorsese-chronicled account of The Band's farewell concert. It's a movie about the thing you can't describe at a live concert, replete with nostalgia for one of the formative groups of the era. Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, Van Morrison, Joni Mitchell, and Neil Young all bust out their gowns to perform in what is essentially a celebration—not just of the band or their music, but what the folk music movement was able to do in the '60s and early '70s—bring melody and social resistance back into the artistic marketplace.

Year: 2012

Directors: Dylan Southern & Will Lovelace

James Murphy decided to disband LCD Soundsystem at what some would say was the height of the band's popularity. But Shut Up And Play The Hits is less of a celebration of the band's (and Murphy's DFA records by association) success than a carefully orchestrated suicide, a self-aware manipulation of consumer demand and simultaneous renunciation of typical musical marketing. That said, it's a huge and beautiful loud climactic piece of film, never meant to be the emotional apex The Last Waltz proclaimed itself to be, despite "last concert" drama. It's a business decision, a left turn artistically, the end of a chapter. The intinmacy goes close-up without dissolving into any warmth. It's a strange sort of intimacy, and understated finality.

Murphy and his co-narrator Chuck Klosterman sometimes seem self-aware to the point of self-consciousness. It's an affliction shared by many screen-dependent millenials. We lose sight of what exists between who we are online and how we actually feel, split between who we encounter and what we're projecting to those we don't.

BUT! The good news is that it plays, and James Murphy has certainly not excused himself from musical conversations. Case in point.