Never mind the misery, let’s focus on the music
Another month, another music tragi-doc opens in the cinemas. Kevin Macdonald’s Whitney, which was released on Friday, has been widely criticised for being too bleak and fixating on Whitney Houston’s 2012 drug-related bathtub drowning. In focusing on the singer’s demons, the film has been accused of overlooking her music. One critic dubbed Whitney “strange and dismaying”, suggesting that Houston’s magnificently life-affirming voice had been somehow recast as a tool against which to juxtapose her depressing descent into addiction.
There’s a trend here. Asif Kapadia’s 2015 Amy Winehouse documentary, Amy, followed a similar pattern. A music tragi-doc this year called 27: Gone Too Soon didn’t even pretend to be about art: it focused solely on the death aged 27 of musicians including Jimi Hendrix, Brian Jones, Janis Joplin and Kurt Cobain. All grave, no rave.
I’ve had enough of the gloom. Why can’t music documentaries mentaries simply celebrate the he art form? Filmmakers need ed to lose the ghoulish obsessions. bsessions.
This isn’t ’t to say that all documentaries aries that focus mainly nly on the music sic are good. Far from it. Many any are self-induldulgent follies. s. Led Zeppelin’s lin’s The Song Remains the he
Same, which ch interspersed ed concert footage otage with cod-mystical Arthurian drama starring the band, was ridiculous. Even the band found it dull. And ABBA: The Movie suffered from overlaying flimsy narrative on what was essentially a concert film.
But when music films work, they soar. Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense revels in the pure joy of excellent music and bold staging. The Band’s The Last Waltz is as cinematic as you’d expect a film directed by Martin Scorsese and featuring a cast including Neil Young and Joni Mitchell to be. Watch the opening minutes of AC/DC Live at Donington, from 1991, and tell me you’re not utterly exhilarated. Music documentaries that simply follow their subjects can be just as illuminating about the human condition as grizzly warts-and-all examinations of stars’ downward spirals. Anyone who watched watc 2008’s Anvil, for exampl example, couldn’t fail to be inspired inspir by the two elderly rockers’ rocker undying belief in them themselves. A 2012 docume documentary about Katy Perry called c Part of Me was quietly devas devastating in its bac backstage gli glimpses into the breakdown of h her marriage to Russell Brand. And in neither film was there a burnt spoon in sight.
But the most powerful music films are those in which the twist is provided by culture being documented, rather than by clever storytelling.
Take The Rolling Stones’ 1969 Gimme Shelter, which culminated with The Stones’ open-air show at Altamont Speedway in California. Altamont was meant to be the band’s crowning glory, but the film ends with the stabbing of concert-goer Meredith Hunter by a Hells Angel, caught on camera. Gimme Shelter, therefore, became a chronicle of the end of the hippy dream.
Or watch The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years. This 1988 documentary by Penelope Spheeris follows a batch of poodlehaired metal bands on Los Angeles’ Sunset Strip – a snapshot of tawdry and materialistic misogynists at the fag end of the Reagan era.
But the main problem with tragi- docs is that they don’t end as they should. An artist’s tragic decline should only be the penultimate act, artistically speaking. The final act should, of course, be redemption.
Nick Kent, the music writer, had this to say in 2004: “Watching the latest breed – from Pete Doherty to Whitney Houston – slowly disintegrate before our eyes surely indicates one thing. Self-destructing – in rock, in public, in fact anywhere – is not good for the human spirit, not to mention the lungs, liver and kidneys.
“Artistically, it’s best approached the way David Bowie did it in the midSeventies. His cocaine addiction turned him into a withered stickinsect figure of a man but also inspired the best music of his entire career. He sorted himself out and became the golden-haired survivor.”
Of course, not everyone is fortunate enough to survive. As Kent points out, the “redemption” part is too often a fool’s dream. And that’s a terrible tragedy. But it’s time that music documentaries started focusing on the exhilarating and fascinating lives of artists, and not just their deaths.
The Rolling Stones’ 1969 concert film ‘Gimme Shelter’ became a chronicle of the end of the hippy dream