The Music Documentary Returns to the Mean

Jason Heller at The AV Club examines the music documentary through the lens of Searching for Sugarman:

[T]he documentary’s subject: Detroit native Sixto Rodriguez, better known as simply Rodriguez, a singer-songwriter who recorded two obscure albums in the early ’70s before effectively disappearing from the music scene.
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[T]he gist of Searching For Sugar Man is how the forgotten Rodriguez experienced a huge revival—unbeknown to Rodriguez himself—in, of all places, South Africa.

Heller's argument is against the trend of music documentaries over-lionizing their subjects. In this case, the talking heads describe Rodriguez as being on par with Dylan.

The next Dylan: It’s a whopping claim that’s been made so many times about so many singer-songwriters, it’s become a cliché.

One would hope that by we as a culture would be tired of searching for a novelty that changes everything. For one, it's not realistic. For another, it causes a lot of ballyhoo that inevitably disappoints.

Take this year's most-hyped rediscovery, featured in A Band Called Death:

But the narrative that resulted from the film was that Death invented punk, which is as overreaching a claim as saying Rodriguez was second only to Dylan. Proto-punk, as it became retroactively known, was embodied by many bands that formed slightly before, or at roughly the same time, as The Ramones in the early ’70s. That fact doesn’t make Death less interesting—it makes the band more so, part of a proto-punk continuum rather than lone outliers. 

I got wind of the band a couple of years ago. I now assume that this was a bit of underground advance publicity, leaking a digital copy of their album to the grey-market mp3 blogs. I wasn't especially impressed. Heller sums it up nicely; if you like that sort of thing, Death is the sort of thing you'd like.

The larger issue is that the media documentary in general is in decline after a great run. It's mainly because of this tendency to present their subjects as the greatest whatever you've never heard of. The reason these subjects are obscure is because--can you figure it out?--they deserve to be obscure.

That's not to say that they're bad but that they don't fit into mainstream tastes. The greats of music are fascinating because their progressions could be said to dictate changes in the mainstream. Dylan going electric or The Beatles becoming a studio band, for example. But this kind of narrative isn't appropriate for an also-ran whose work wasn't appreciated when it came out.

Heller highlights an older documentary that got it right, the Klaus Nomi doc The Nomi Song. I found it enjoyable because it places Nomi in his context as a part of the New York New Wave scene that broke out, however briefly.

New Wave was driven less by philosophy, like hippie or punk culture, and more by the thought, "Hey, we're a new generation. We should be doing something different!" Nomi was a male soprano and had a fey and alien look and presence that was heightened by his foreignness. He was presented in manner that emphasized his strangeness and had some success on the pop charts.

The Nomi Song does it right. There's no reason to pretend that Nomi changed music forever or that he's a neglected genius. He had unique body of work and sprung from a unique movement. The best music documentaries give us an understanding of the artist, his goals, influences and life. This lifts them out of footnote status and gives potential new fans a way to think about them.

One of my favorite artists is Scott Walker but I wouldn't have pursued his work if I hadn't seen Scott Walker: 30 Century Man. He's the perfect subject for a rediscovery-style music documentary because his work and career went through so many changes that it's difficult to find an entry point for newcomers. In the same respect, Who Is Harry Nilsson (And Why Is Everybody Talkin' About Him?) is good as well.

The problem with this kind of hyperbolic filmmaking, ironically, is that it overshadows the best qualities that obscure artists truly possess. While these artists sometimes live tragic lives, their obscurity isn’t a tragedy in and of itself. They’re usually obscure for a reason: They didn’t make music that was palatable to people at the time, or they weren’t able to devote the relentless energy it takes to become famous, or they simply did what millions of musicians do every day: create music for the love of it. By elevating them to the dubious status of noble losers, this new wave of documentaries perpetuates an empty myth that doesn’t do them justice.