Protest Music Documentary on PBS (Sorta RR)
funky16corners
7,175 Posts
Anyone catch the documentary on PBS last night (narrated by Chuck D)about the history of protest music? Lots of cool footage, including some great film of the MC5. Maybe a little too much on Live-Aid and not enough on hip hop, but pretty cool nonetheless.
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I started to feel like I was watching music videos for old folks though. People who don't feel like it's o.k. to watch a music video without some sort of information involved. Every segment seemed to go by super quick and without much depth. And, it wasn't even close to being sequential. They jumped all over the place with time.
Plaese to elaborate senor Fatback....
yes, plaese to explain. i didn't see the whole thing, but it was sort of interesting. it was very cursory, i agree. i was mostly appalled by all the bad 80's haircuts going on, especially with Bono.
It was poorly organized and didn???t really make much sense. There were lots of weird parts that seemed to come out of nowhere. Chuck is not a good narrator (or radio host) IMO. Standard talking heads--narration--teaser video clips docu format is so Ken Burnsed the fuck out. Like another tired ass Rolling Stone best albums of all times jump off. ZZZZZZZZZZ.
How about releasing some concert footage all the way through? You know. Let people see stuff. I???m so fucking tired of this shit.
Oh and didn???t Peter Tosh write ???Get Up Stand Up????
i agree with all of this plus i am so sick of no clip longer than 10 seconds. and unless god is editing - it's going to be a mess when you do clip after clip after clip that is made for the attention span of a fly. give viewers a bit of fucking credit already.
i did enjoy dave marsh taking Bono to task.
So I turned it off and finished watching the second half of YO WATCH ME MOVE THIS BOAT ACROSS A MOUNTAIN IN THE AMAZON SO I CAN INVITE CARUSO TO THROW DOWN SOME HARPO IN THE JUNGLE.
...oh YOU might call it
I'm pretty sure Mssrs Marley & Tosh co-wrote said anthem....
I watched the whole thing start to finish. It had it's good points, Joe Hill, most of Graham Nash's observations.
Lots of low points too, a clip of the riots at the Chicago convention dated 1965, crediting Pete Seeger for writing We Will Overcome.
When you get to people like Bob Marley or Paul Robeson how are you going to explain their importance in 4 minutes? You can't thus you get Chuck D saying "Bob Marley had a huge impact on the 3rd world." True, but give examples and context, sorry no time, here's a film clip of Madona.
The worse part was Chuck D shilling for Phat Farm.
Dan
During that 5 minutes, chuck d did some really poor narration and made alot of weird hand gestures. Some old white dude in front of alot of records talked about bob marley. And then they interviewed that worthless dude from spearhead about it.
I think it was the spearhead that made me ultimately switch channels. COme on pbs! Spearhead?
On the positive note it was interesting to hear the guys and gals from Chumbawumba critiquing the Bono/Geldof approach as too compromised. The Joe Hill section was new for me. So I learned something there. Seeger got his due which nice since he suffered so much at the hands of the anti-commies. I also found Michael Franti's explanation bling-bling era hip-hop messaging was very insightful. It makes perfect sense that the battle has shifted from civil rights to economic opportunity. His plaintive wish that hip-hop would move from "I'm gonna get mine" to "We need to get ours" was so on point.
I was just about to make some crack about chumbawumba. So they were in it too? So there you got chumbawumba and spearhead together in the same show. If thats not enough to make you change the channel then god help you.
I liked the first Spearhead record and I certainly think he is an interesting dude.
I think I heard that Chumbawumba are pretty hard core anarchists or something like that. In the documentary, they were talking about being on the streets in Genoa protesting the WTO or G8 and Bono hugging "mass murderer" Putin. They are more active and involved than my fat ass, so I got nothing bad to say about them.