Instead of that happening, I'm just going to try and convince you it's worth taking the time. Oh yeah, and this is regardless of what you think of the album. Despite having the album making process as part of each episode, it's about so much more than that, so, so much more.
Okay, I've found a clip. It's not the greatest clip for encapsulating everything the documentary is about, and it doesn't cover the sheer range of styles and content, but I quite like it. In a way it contains the most important part of the entire series.
It's not quite under 3 minutes, but ah well, you're lucky to get a clip anyway.
That clip is from the best episode from the series (joint 1st with the other 7) New Orleans, and displays the sort of heart that you get from the people telling the story, and the people involved in the story. It's full on, 100% musical education, and from the type of teacher who really cares that you learn about it. There's both history of people and the history or tech, providing a wide interest for fans of both or either.
The New Orleans episode focuses mainly on the people of the city and their musical heritage, including 101 people I've never heard of before, and 5 or 6 that I have. There is so little I knew going into it, and yet, so much of what I didn't know about, I also apparently thoroughly enjoyed. You'll be the same, I guarantee it. With the episode being focused on New Orleans, you expect a number of topics to be covered, and they are, but everything links back to the history of the city's music. Residents claiming to be 'ashamed' of the historical tag of being one of the largest slavers destinations in the entirety of the united states, but along with this, the kinds of sounds, rhythms and styles that it brought along with it and helped shape the city into what has become known for musically throughout the world.
Oh yeah, and the album to accompany the series, well, the series actually accompanies the album, but I'm not reviewing the album. Each episode contains a whole host of musicians, most of whom inspire the track for that particular episode, and a select few play on the song. You can genuinely feel the influences in the final pieces, and it's even presented in the form of a music video right at the end of each episode. Fully stylized, thought out and shot in the space where it was recorded (except for the Las Vegas one, that place was barely big enough to fit the band).
Finally, as a bit of an after thought I may as well mention the style of the doc, even though to me it barely matters in this case, I'm all about the content it provides. But on an international stage and with so much money pumped into the project, it needs to be engaging, and I think it does this fairly well, blending a lot of archive footage along with what they shot on site, and incorporating a wide range of historical photography. I'll happily admit that Dave Grohl isn't the greatest director around, but these episodes are far from shameful - they play out like a huge 8 hour passion project by an excited 45 year old child. It works out as a teacher talking about all of his/her favorite artists, and then after talking about each one they get the opinion of each one, and after the opinion that artist plays you some music. There is so much music in the episode it's a marvel in itself. None of it feels forced, it all flows in a way, and carries you through history. There are some sections which just play through songs with faces and names and photos, there are so many introductions to be made that it's impossible to link them all in a coherent narrative, so I'll let these sections slide. Anyway, it's TV, it has it's own recognised series narrative, it's fine, see how easy it is to justify everything?
I'm going to steal a quote from a tweet I've just seen, to paraphrase, 'Real music isn't just style, one flavour. Music is a banquet.'
Welcome to one of the longest spanning, most varied and most consumable banquets of modern times.
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