The Death of Discovery in the Boom of Music Documentaries

There was a time when music documentaries promised revelations. They were carved out as artefacts for the curious and the critical, not shrines built to cement sainthood. But now, you can predict every frame before hitting play. The same template is dragged out, airbrushed for gloss, and paraded around like a cultural gift when it is nothing but pre-approved canonising for artists already propped up on enough critical scaffolding to survive the next ten cultural apocalypses. There’s the grainy footage of a provincial childhood, then the adolescent struggle, followed by rapid ascent, decadent peak, the crash, the comeback (if they’re alive), or the elegiac fade-out (if they’re not). All of it stitched together with interviews from tired industry heads who have been saying the same things about “influence” and “genius” for decades. It is not history, it is a hagiography – and the creativity of the medium is rotting. Cut and Paste Myths in Modern Music Documentaries In the past five years, you could play a drinking game with these documentaries and barely make it through half an hour sober. Whether it’s Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry, Lewis Capaldi: How I’m Feeling Now, or Amy, you get the […]

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