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There are as many reasons to make a music documentary as there are ways to sing a song. Perhaps the director is a fan of a performer and feels they have been underrated. Perhaps it is an outstanding performance captured by cameras that must be entered into the historical record. Maybe someone died too young, or maybe someone fell in or out of love, or maybe someone bit the head off a bat. Again. Who’s to say? If “writing about music is like dancing about architecture,” making a film about music is Frank Lloyd Wright dancing en pointe.
Music, which is always intangible, is somewhat diminished by these films. It’s a subject that will fascinate forever and endlessly, and over the years many talented directors have done their best to try to capture the impossible for posterity’s sake.
Here are the ten best music documentaries currently streaming on Prime Video.
1. Long Strange Trip
Credit: Todd Williamson/January Images/Shutterstock This may interest you : U.S. Postal Service Honors Mariachi, the Traditional Music of Mexico.
Executive produced by Martin Scorsese, Amir Bar-Lev’s 2017 documentary about the Grateful Dead clearly took its cues from the infamous, long-running traveling jam band it set out to document, with a final runtime of nearly four hours. After premiering in its entirety at Sundance and making a brief run in theaters, the documentary was picked up by Amazon and split into six episodes so you can enjoy this tour in smaller doses in the privacy of your own home. Filmed almost twenty years after Jerry Garcia’s passing, the legendary hobbit-like frontman of Death’s Necessity is only seen here via archive footage, but the rest of the psychedelic gang pop up in new interviews to jam and jam, man.
How to watch: (opens in a new tab)Long Strange Trip (opens in a new tab) is now streaming on Prime Video. (opens in a new tab)
2. Mystify: Michael Hutchence
Richard Lowenstein directed nearly twenty music videos for Michael Hutchence’s band INXS before the lead singer’s untimely death in 1997, and presumably because of that long-standing relationship, Mystify feels incredibly intimate at times, sometimes overwhelming. Lowenstein had initially hoped to make a biopic about the singer, but he could not find anyone he thought was suitable for the lead role. Instead, Lowenstein dug into his attic full of backstage and road footage he had collected from the band over the years. Mystify makes you feel that closeness throughout, even when the question of Hutchence’s death looms large. The intimacy is evident in the interviews Lowenstein conducted over a decade with INXS’s remaining band members and even more specifically with Hutchence’s girlfriends, particularly singer Kylie Minogue, who share some remarkably personal footage from their romance.
How to watch: (opens in a new tab) Mystify: Michael Hutchence (opens in a new tab) is now streaming on Prime Video. This may interest you : 10 epic Chinese video games that are not ‘gendered effect’ you should try. (opens in a new tab)
3. The Decline of Western Civilization
Alice Bag as seen in “The Decline of Western Civilization. On the same subject : San Diego weekend art events: Teen-Versionary, Park Social Exploration Day, ‘NextGen’ and more.”
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Penelope Spheeris (Suburbia, Wayne’s World) directs this truly legendary document of Los Angeles’ late 1970s punk rock scene, featuring performances by Black Flag, X, Alice Bag Band, Circle Jerks and the Germs that are so visceral your skin might break out in hives, along with truly unforgettable interviews with the sweaty, taunting crowd all sticking safety pins through places you don’t want to know. (Germs frontman Darby Crash was photographed for the poster shortly before he took his own life.) This film is the first in a trilogy, following 1988’s hairspray-heavy The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years (also available for free on Prime) and 1998’s Part III (available for rent on Prime), which focuses on homeless street punks. For my money, the first Decline is where it really is – when the film premiered in July 1981, the police chief wrote a letter demanding that the film never be shown in L.A. again, and what’s more punk rock than that?
4. Gimme Danger
How to watch: (opens in a new tab) The Decline of Western Civilization (opens in a new tab) is now streaming on Prime Video. (opens in a new tab)
Jim Jarmusch and Iggy Pop fool around on the red carpet for ‘Gimme Danger’.
Credit: Dave Allocca/Starpix/Shutterstock
5. Hype!
Indie aficionado Jim Jarmusch’s entire oeuvre drips with a frothy, rock-show ashtray aesthetic, whether he’s shooting Tilda Swinton in a messy vampire wig wandering the streets of Detroit in Only Lovers Left Alive or Iggy Pop doing pretty much the same thing in real life . Gimme Danger, the story of the Stooges, is Jarmusch’s second music documentary, and there’s no one better suited for the gig than the magnificently coiffed East Villager. Formally simple in a way that’s a little surprising coming from Jarmusch, the film has the friendly feel of someone working overtime to preach the gospel of a thing they love. Fortunately, Jarmusch never exhausts his subject (or viewers) the way Edgar Wright’s ode to the Sparks Brothers did; like the terse songs that the Stooges wrote, Gimme Danger is in and out before you even notice, leaving you satisfactorily dazed in its wake.
How to watch: Gimme Danger (opens in a new tab) is now streaming on Prime Video. (opens in a new tab)
6. Sound City
Even if this documentary’s only claim to fame was that it included footage of Nirvana’s very first performance of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” at the OK Hotel in Seattle in April 1991, it would still be pretty impressive. As it stands, Doug Pray’s 1996 doc looks back at the pan-flash popularity of the grunge scene and the way it changed an entire city, today as the Rosetta Stone of Gen X texts, with all its talking heads—including several adorable ones pre-teens who go on about “The Man!” – encapsulates the moment’s precise vibe of fine thrift store clothes and the anti-capitalist leanings behind them. It also features a slew of appearances by flannel-clad acts near and dear to X’er’s hearts, from Soundgarden and Pearl Jam to 7 Year Bitch, Mudhoney, the Melvins and the Gits. So dig out your favorite piece and rock out!
How to watch: (opens in a new tab)Hype!(opens in a new tab) is now streaming on Prime Video. (opens in a new tab)
Dave Grohl arrives at a screening of the film ‘Sound City’ during the SXSW Film and Music Festival, in Austin, Texas SXSW 2013
7. Shine a Light
Credit: Jack Plunkett/Invision/AP/Shutterstock
Many of the best music docs capture their directors geeking out over something they geekily love and want to geekily share with the world. The nerdiest of them all might just be Sound City, the 2013 directorial debut from Dave Grohl, in which the Foo Fighters frontman gives us a 107-minute ode to the walls, floors and corner toilets of a Van Nuys, California. , recording studio and the giant console inside that shaped four decades of music. Integral into the sound of everyone from Fleetwood Mac (whose story of the band accidentally forming there is a cute alternative to the usual stories of their later self-destruction) to Black Sabbath and, yes, Nirvana themselves, Sound City Studios was an unsung icon which needs proper historical establishment and appreciation. This doctor is a music geek’s dream, and Grohl manages to find some impressive names for interviews. Just wait until you see who shows up in the final act.
How to watch: Sound City (opens in a new tab) is now streaming on Prime Video.(opens in a new tab)
8. Mr. Dynamite: The Rise of James Brown
Credit: Jacob Cohl/Concert Promotions International/Kobal/Shutterstock
Okay, so it’s no Gimme Shelter, but what is? This is the second notable documentary about an obscure band called the Rolling Stones, and since Shine a Light was made almost 40 years after the Maysles brothers captured bloody light in a bottle at Altamont, it documents the band at a very different time in their careers. These stone gods are a bit long in the tooth now; The Stones performing in 2006 are not exactly the Stones performing in 1969, and neither is the audience. For example, all the drugged hippies have turned into Bill and Hillary Clinton. But since it’s Martin Scorsese sympathizing with these devils this time around, Shine a Light gives you the whole vérité rock show, one chicken dance after another. As Mick Jagger himself joked, this is the only Scorsese film not to include the song “Gimme Shelter” in it; we are in the capable hands of a true fan with Marty.
9. Prince: Sign o’ the Times
How to watch: Shine a Light (opens in a new tab) is now streaming on Prime Video. (opens in a new tab)
My main complaint about director Alex Gibney’s 2014 documentary about the so-called “Hardest Working Man in Show Business” is that, at one minute shy of two hours, it isn’t nearly long enough, and that it skims past not only several of the most important. topics (including Brown’s history of domestic violence, which is only briefly discussed), but almost all of them. Then again, some people’s lives are so rich and so meaningful and in so many different contexts that I don’t think I know if any length can do that, and some entertainers we just want to see entertain, and the twain meet and they meet hard in the big hair and bigger soul showman who called himself James Brown. Want anything but to just stand back and gape in awe that he tears the roof off every night he shows up? I need someone to throw a blanket over my shoulders and carry me off after watching him do his thing; I don’t know if I will ever understand how he was able to pull off such feats.
10. P!nk: All I Know So Far
Here’s how to see: (opens in a new tab)Mr. Dynamite: The Rise of James Brown (opens in a new tab) is now streaming on Prime Video. (opens in a new tab)
Fringe! Horn! Sheila E. drums furiously in a one-legged white cat suit! More Fringe! A guy wearing a funeral robe playing the saxophone! Sunglasses with fringes! If you can dream it, Prince’s 1987 concert tour film showed you can be it, and it can sing it two octaves higher, and it can add fringe. Theoretically meant to capture his shows in Europe that year, Prince was unhappy with most of the actual tour recordings that resulted, so naturally he ended up re-shooting 80% of them on the soundstages of his own Paisley Park Studios in Minnesota. That might explain the link between Prince and his music on an apparent European tour and an audience made up of corn-fed Midwestern sorority girls and fraternity gods. Even though the film was a notorious flop, it’s still ninety minutes of Prince as a sex-rock weirdo as only he could be, and as such, it’s a most sacred document that purple reigns supreme.
How to watch: (opens in a new tab)Sign o’ the Times (opens in a new tab) is now streaming on Prime Video.(opens in a new tab)
