In #TheMusicThatMadeUs, senior journalist Lakshmi Govindrajan Javeri chronicles the impact that musicians and their art have on our lives, how they mould the industry by rewriting its rules and how they shape us into the people we become: their greatest legacies.
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It is at the very core of human nature to be interested in and intrigued by what us going on in someone else’s life. Not always with a sense of schadenfreude, but a more fundamental tendency to simply satiate one’s curiosity. With artists, once the flurry of vicarious excitement settles, we are greatly affected by what inspires them or the historical contexts that have birthed some of their most magnificent works.
Documenting that for public consumption is not just a responsible thing to do, it is also a way to set misplaced narratives straight, amend records and in the process alter perspectives. Ask Yoko Ono, who is enjoying an overwhelming wave of support over 50 years since the vilest comments equated her with the personification of a deal breaker.
The biggest documentary of 2021 that has captured the interests of even non-Beatles and non-music fans has been Peter Jackson’s The Beatles: Get Back. Chronicling the process of how the band put together their album Let It Be, the three-part docuseries used footage from half a century ago to offer us a fly-on-the-wall look at interpersonal band dynamics, the creative experience, and how the mundane appears to be in the lives of demigods. Through incredibly restored video and music footage, the series decisively but subtly reiterated something we long suspected: Yoko Ono did not break up The Beatles. The Beatles broke up The Beatles.
Just like music biographies and autobiographies give uninhibited expression to the personal lives of artists, music documentaries become very engaging storytellers as they draw us deep into a world that we find so familiar because we are music fans, but so unfamiliar because there is only so much that we honestly know.
Even if information has been trickling steadily, it is not until it is convincingly conveyed to us that we realise the true magnitude of what has been spoken.
Take, for instance, The New York Times’ Framing Britney Spears on Netflix. In the recent years, the absurdity and outright cruelty surrounding the controversial conservatorship in Spears' life has been documented in multiple documentaries. While this one is not the most incisive of them all, is cast new light on just how damaging the paparazzi culture was, and how it contributed significantly to her father’s move to take control of her career, her finances, and in effect, her life.
Similarly, we thought we knew everything about the infamous Nipplegate; the incident that brought the delightful phrase “wardrobe malfunction” into our lexicon. The New York Times once again has done a superlative job in grabbing our attention to yet another woman being so wrongly maligned — like an easy and convincing scapegoat— for simply having a mind of her own, and not toeing the nauseating lines of patriarchy. In Malfunction: The Dressing Down of Janet Jackson, we see how a shrewd Justin Timberlake was able to resurrect his career with some ego-placating grovelling but Jackson standing her ground cost her more than her career; it cost her her sense of self-worth.
Demi Lovato took us to the emotional cleaners when she put out a four-part series on YouTube Originals, Demi Lovato: Dancing with the Devil. Touching upon a host of troubling parts of her life, including her near fatal overdose, being raped at 15, and being sexually assaulted and left for dead, this series is painful to watch and excruciating to comprehend. To think that despite that, she has been able to put out the music that she does is a jaw-dropping realisation.
Abuse seems to a damning constant with artists where even the likes of Tina Turner have had to endure — at the hands of Ike Turner no less. HBO’s Tina narrates through archival footage and interviews the rise, resurrection, and superstardom of the legendary chanteuse, and uses a good deal of candour to paint as honest a picture as possible.
Every documentary this year has not been so distressing. Billie Eilish’s The World’s A Little Blurry (Apple TV+) looks at the rapid ascent of a teen icon with everyday footage of her home and recordings, to show us how exhilarating and exhausting that life can be. This has also been the year of a Beach Boy on display with Brian Wilson: Long Promised Road, a multi-part detailed understanding of a paradigm shift called 1971: The Year That Music Changed Everything (Apple TV+), and a poignant look at the extraordinarily private battle with AIDS that consumed the greatest frontman of all time, in BBC’s Freddie Mercury: The Final Act.
There have also been documentaries that promised much but offered disappointingly little like Justin Bieber: Our World and P!nk: All I know So Far. Both designed as concert films that literally offer backstage access, they were distilled so much that we are left with an almost unrecognisable experience from artists we thought we knew so well.
Music documentaries are such rare opportunities to help us understand the life that made the music that made us. Barring a few superficial endeavours, 2021 has brought us so much closer to artists and their works. In fact, it has been the year where the music, in so many ways, has remade us.
Senior journalist Lakshmi Govindrajan Javeri has spent a good part of two decades chronicling the arts, culture and lifestyles.
source https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/2021-the-year-that-music-documentaries-changed-the-way-we-look-at-our-favourite-artists-10210261.html
