Like me, Agnes Varnum of IndieWire saw a whole lot of music documentaries at the recent South By Southwest Film Festival, and like me, her ass probably got pretty tired doing it. Even if you aren't straddling both sides of the movie critic/film critic fence, or particularly fond of the you-got-your-chocolate-in-my-peanut-butter synergy of music and film that SxSW is peddling, you can't help but notice that there are more rock documentaries (and rap documentaries, and jazz documentaries, and minimalist concert music documentaries) being made than ever before, and, as Varnum puts it, "2008 will be the year of the music doc".
With the question of what out of the way, though, we have to approach the question of why. While it's nice that some of these films are being made -- especially ones that painstakingly gather together footage and concert material from influential, if lesser-known, musical figures, as with The Upsetter, the Lee "Scratch" Perry doc that tipped at SxSW this year. And it's undeniably a good thing when a masterful filmmaker like Martin Scorsese turns his hand to the job for a band he really cares about, like in Shine a Light. But there's such a flood of rock docs these days that you have to wonder if it's not so much a golden age of musical documentaries as it is another manifestation of the document-everything zeitgeist that's been made possible by media oversaturation and cheap, easy access to digital cameras. Fifty years from now, is anyone going to care about the brief eruption of the microgenre of nerdcore? As much as I loved them, is Tad really worth making a feature-length documentary about? Has everyone already seen all the great movies in the history of film, that they can spare the time to see an hour and a half-long documentary about Harry Potter-inspired "wizard rock"?
At this rate, it's only going to be a few years before we get making-of documentaries about the rock documentaries, and then, inevitably, documentaries about the documentarians. At which point I'm going to have to become one of those old cranks who won't listen to anything not released on vinyl before 1966...