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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 underappreciated. Perhaps there is a singular performance caught on camera 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 cut the head off a bat. Again. Who’s to say? If “writing about music is like dancing about architecture,” making a film about Frank Lloyd Wright’s music is like dancing en pointe.
These films make music, ever intangible, a little less so. It’s a subject that will fascinate forever and in endless ways, and over the years, many talented directors have tried their best to capture the impossible for the sake of posterity.
Here are the ten best music documentaries streaming on Prime Video right now.
1. Long Strange Trip
Credit: Todd Williamson/January Images/Shutterstock To see also : 7 new movies and TV shows on Netflix, Prime Video, HBO Max and more this weekend (July 8).
Executive produced by Martin Scorsese, Amir Bar-Lev’s 2017 documentary on the Grateful Dead clearly took cues from the long-infamous traveling jam band it aimed to document, with a final runtime of nearly four hours the clock. After premiering in its entirety at Sundance and making a short run in theaters, Amazon took the documentary and split it into six episodes so you can enjoy this Journey in smaller doses in the privacy of your own home. Filmed nearly twenty years after Jerry Garcia’s death, the legendary hobbit-like frontman is only seen through archival footage, but the rest of the psychedelic gang appear in new interviews with jam and jam, man.
How to watch: (opens in new tab) Long Strange Trip (opens in 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 probably because of that long-term relationship, Mystify sometimes feels intimate, and sometimes overwhelming. Lowenstein originally hoped to make a biopic about the singer, but he couldn’t find anyone he thought was suitable for the lead role. Instead, Lowenstein dug into his attic full of backstage and on-the-road footage he’d collected of the band over the years. Mystify makes you feel so close, even with the huge issue of Hutchence’s death. The intimacy is reflected in Lowenstein’s ten-year interviews with the remaining band members of INXS and even more significantly with Hutchence’s girls, especially singer Kylie Minogue, who shares remarkable personal footage from their romance.
How to watch: (opens in new tab) Mystify: Michael Hutchence (opens in new tab) is now streaming on Prime Video. On the same subject : Is Where Crawdads Sing is on Netflix? (where to stream). (opens in a new tab)
3. The Decline of Western Civilization
Alice Bag as seen in “The Decline of Western Civilization. To see also : Netflix’s The Sea Beast, Everything Everywhere and 15 other new movies to watch this weekend.”
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Penelope Spheeris (Suburbia, Wayne’s World) directs this true documentary of the Los Angeles rock scene at the tail end of the 1970s, featuring performances by Black Flag, X, Alice Bag Band, the Circle Jerks, and the visceral Germs your skin. break out in hives, accompanied by truly unforgettable interviews with the sweaty audience, sneering all sticking a safety pin through places you don’t want to know. (German lead singer Darby Crash was photographed for the poster shortly before he killed himself.) This film is the first of a trilogy, followed by 1988’s hairspray-heavy The Decline of Western Civilization Part II:The Metal Years (available free on Prime) and 1998’s Part III (available for rent on Prime), which focuses on homeless street punks. For my money, the first Decay is where it’s really at – when the film premiered in July of 1981, the police chief wrote a letter demanding that the film not be shown in LA again, and what’s more punk rock than that?
4. Gimme Danger
How to watch: (opens in new tab)The Decline of Western Civilization (opens in new tab) is now streaming on Prime Video. (opens in a new tab)
Jim Jarmusch and Iggy Pop goof around on the red carpet for “Danger Gimme.”
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5. Hype!
Jim Jarmusch’s entire oeuvre oozes with a show-rock ashtray aesthetic, whether he’s shooting Tilda Swinton in a versatile vampire wig roaming the streets of Detroit in Only Lovers Left Alive or Iggy Pop doing much the same in real life true. 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 acclaimed East Villager. Formally simple in a way that’s not surprising coming from Jarmusch, the film has the friendly feel of someone working overtime to preach the gospel about something they love. Fortunately, Jarmusch doesn’t exhaust his subject (or audience) the way Edgar Wright did an ode to the Sparks Brothers; Like the concise songs written by the Stooges, Gimme Danger is in and out before you even notice, leaving you satisfactorily sad afterwards.
How to watch: Gimme Danger (opens in new tab) is now streaming on Prime Video. (opens in a new tab)
6. Sound City
Even if the only claim this documentary had was that it included footage of Nirvana’s first performance of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” at the OK Hotel in Seattle in April 1991, it would That’s still amazing. As it stands, Doug Pray’s 1996 doc looking back at the pan-flash popularity of the grunge scene and how it changed an entire city today reads like the Rosetta Stone of Gen X texts, with its talking points to all – including some surprising prefaces. – teen tykes who follow under “The Man!” – embodying that moment’s precise vibe of natty thrift store clothes and the anti-capitalist tendencies behind them. There’s also a whole bevy of performances 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) There’s Hype! (Opens in a new tab) now streaming on Prime Video. (opens in a new tab)
Dave Grohl arrives at a screening of his film “Sound City” during the 2013 SXSW Film and Music Festival in Austin, Texas SXSW 2013
7. Shine a Light
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Many of the best music docs find their directors nerding out over something they love and want to share with the world. Perhaps the nerdiest of them all is Sound City, the 2013 feature-length 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 Van Nuys, California. , a recording studio, and the gargantuan console that shaped four decades worth of music. An integral part of the sound of everyone from Fleetwood Mac (whose story of the band’s accidental formation is a sweet alternative to the usual stories of their later self-destruction) to Black Sabbath and, yes, Nirvana themselves, Sound City Studios was unknown. icon in need of proper historical foundation and appreciation. This doc is a music nerd’s dream, and Grohl manages to pull in some notable names for interviews. Wait to see who enters the final essay.
How to watch: Sound City (opens in new tab) is now streaming on Prime Video. (Opens in a new tab)
8. Mr. Dynamite: The Rise of James Brown
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OK, so it’s not Gimme Shelter, but what is? This is the other remarkable documentary about an obscure band called the Rolling Stones, and since Shine a Light was made nearly 40 years after the Maysles brothers caught bloody lightning in a bottle at Altamont, the band being documented at a quite different point in their. occupations. These rock gods are a bit long in the tooth by now; It wasn’t exactly the Stones performing in 2006 in 1969, and neither was the audience, the dig? For example, all the drugged hippies have turned into Bill and Hillary Clinton. But since Martin Scorsese is sympathizing with the devils this time around, Shine a Light gives you the full rock vérité show, one pouty-lipped chicken dance after another. As Mick Jagger himself joked, this is the only Scorsese film that does not include the song “Gimme Shelter”; we are in the capable hands of true Marty fans.
9. Prince: Sign o’ the Times
How to watch: Shine a Light (opens in 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 “Dearest Working Man in Show Business” is that it’s not nearly long enough at just shy of two hours, and that it’s only surf some of its highlights. subjects (including Brown’s history of domestic abuse, which is only briefly mentioned) but almost all of them. Then again, some people’s lives are so rich and meaningful and in so many different contexts that I don’t think any length could do it, and there are some entertainers that we just want to watch to be entertained, and those two meet and they meet hard in the big red showman and big soul that James Brown called himself. Will anything but stand back and marvel at him tearing down the roof every night he shows up? I want someone to throw a blanket over my shoulder and carry me out after watching him do his thing; I don’t know if I’ll ever understand how he managed to pull off such performances.
10. P!nk: All I Know So Far
How to watch: (opens in a new tab) Mr. Dynamite: The Rise of James Brown (opens in new tab) now streaming on Prime Video. (opens in a new tab)
Edge! Horn! Sheila E. drumming furiously in a white one-legged suit! More edge! A man wearing a funeral cloak playing the saxophone! Sunglasses with rims! If you can dream it, Prince’s 1987 concert tour film showed you can be there, and can sing two octaves higher, and can add an edge to boot. In theory he was meant to capture his shows in Europe that year, Prince wasn’t happy with the majority of the actual tour footage that resulted, so naturally he ended up reshooting 80% of it on a sound stage Paisley Park’s own studios in Minnesota. That might explain the disconnect between Prince and his music on a visible European tour and an audience made up of corn-fed Midwestern sorority girls and frat dudes. Although the film was a famous flop, it is still ninety minutes of Prince being a sexual rock as it could be, and therefore, it is a very sacred document of supreme reigning purple.
How to watch: (opens in new tab)Sign o’ the Times (opens in new tab) is now streaming on Prime Video. (opens in a new tab)
