Locked down, confined by quarantine measures and stay at home restrictions, I found myself working off music reviewing steam for this column with new albums released last year. In my spare time, I watched films and followed episodic TV shows where modern music provides the thematic spine.
And hey, were some of them worthy of sitting through an hour or two before bedtime.
Here are four personal favorites.
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Netflix (2020)
The film tells the entwined story of acclaimed Black blues singer Ma Rainey and the four musicians huddled in a cramped studio readying to record songs for a label owned by white businessmen. Ma’s initial posturing as a prima donna artist is off-putting on surface until midway through the movie, she tells her own agenda to offset the exploitative nature of working with white people interested only in the financial windfall from the engagement. The four mostly ageing studio musicians have their own moments of haughty prejudice against a young rising trumpet player named Levee (played with astonishing punkish fire by the late Chadwick Boseman) until his own emotional ‘levee’ breaks down amid a harrowing personal tale of gang rape and murderous resbak. These edgy entanglements end in disaster – in soured professional affairs and untimely death. Critics would draw conclusions that the mischievously titled Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is otherwise symptomatic of the continuing social tension between the Whites and the Blacks in the land of milk and honey.
Punk!, Epix (2019)
This four-part docuseries connects the rise of ‘70s punk through the eyes and first-hand observations of living legends like Iggy Pop, Johnny Rotten, Marky Ramone, Debbie Harry. Dave Grohl, and more. It’s entertaining in the sense that most of personalities are seated in a red couch while narrating their own involvement with punk or sharing rare scenes from a well-documented era.
The series makes for an enjoyable journey for someone who has sustained interest in the genre since 1978. On the whole, Punk! Is a first stop for any millennial wondering about a musical eruption that his older friends would say gave rise to alternative music, post-punk and all those curiosities. From here, tread courageously to punk’s historical trawls that now litter Youtube and various social media platforms. Gabba gabba hey, indeed!
Vinyl, HBO (2016)
Directed by Martin Scorsese (The Departed, The Boardwalk Empire) and executive produced by Rolling Stones’ Mick Jagger, Vinyl is a ten-episode single season tornado twirl through the drugs, sex and rock and roll that arguably fueled the US record industry in the Seventies. The drug of choice is cocaine, sniffed voraciously by Riche Finestra (played to hoodlum-ish finesse by actor Bobby Canavale), founder and president of American Century Records, to fire up his senses in his search for new music and new acts that will take his financially strapped company to better times. Sex is the lure to get a new artists into the fold, the most notorious being when a lowly office secretary bedded the lead singer of a punk band (plus a threesome in the next segment) to get the group signed to her employer’s label. Rock and roll is all over the place; at one juncture, the A & R’s decide the fate of artists ranging from Slade to Alice Cooper. Speaking of coup, the featured fictional punk band named the Nasty Bits is fronted by one Kip Stevens, who’s actually Mick’s son, Jagger Jr. There’s also a gaggle of appearances by famous acts like The Velvet Underground, David Bowie, and Chic’s Nile Rogers, among others.
In the heat of the moment, label boss Finestra killed a double-dealing associate and hid the corpse away with the help of a low-level mobster. The ensuing police inquiry into the supposedly missing (but really dead) man is a background irritant that would have pushed the series to a second season, which unfortunately has yet materialize.
Blinded by the Light, Warner Bros. (2019)
It’s 1987 and a British-Pakistani teener named Javed dreams of becoming a writer. The problem is, his father holds sway in important family decisions and he firmly believes his only son must graduate from the university, get a white collar job and raise a family. Outside political tension arising from Thatcherism and the white supremacist front conspire to prevent Javed from leaving his hometown to find new opportunities to sharpen his writing skills.
Javed accidentally bumps a stranger at school which leads to his introduction to the music of Bruce Springsteen at a time when “synth is the future” and Bruce belongs to another era. The Boss’ music becomes the soundtrack of his young life that pays off in a big win at a literary competition in the USA and the chance to visit Springsteen’s birthplace.
Personally, it’s my second re-introduction to the music of Bruce Springsteen after in January last year, I chanced upon “Springsteen and I,” a 2013 documentary featuring loving notes from devoted fans from around the world, This time, it again felt good listening and listening once more to “Thunder Road,” “Backstreets,” “and Hungry Heart” which somehow also served as my backgrounder to reviewing The Boss’ latest “Letter To You” on these very pages.
I must say that my interest in music remains even when it is peripheral to the feature presentation. I like the cool ‘50s jazz inspired sounds in the detective series “Bosch,” the early ’00s rap metal score in the police corruption drama, “The Shield” and the sometimes loud, often sensual tracks in “The Deuce,” a chronicle of the porn industry in the Seventies.