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Morgan Neville: The Making of an American Idol
Tweet Morgan Neville is one of the premier film chroniclers of popular American music and culture, having directed, written, or produced definitive docs on Hank Williams, Sam Phillips, Muddy Waters,...
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Shut Up & Sing
Tweet Directed by Barbara Kopple, Cecilia Peck USA, 2006 Genre: Country How did America’s most popular country band become its most reviled overnight? The Dixie Chicks were C&W sweethearts,...
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Fund It: Kick Out the Bucks Redux for MC5 Documentary
Tweet Last spring, having finally prevailed in a long court fight over music rights issues, the makers of the great lost rock doc of the last decade, MC5: A True Testimonial, appealed to the masses to...
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Phil Ochs: There But for Fortune
Tweet Director Kenneth Bowser’s chronicle of Phil Ochs, the troubled, iconoclastic singer/songwriter and icon of the 1960s counterculture left who killed himself in 1976 after struggling for years...
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Cold War Kids
Tweet On August 19, 1991, while Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev holidayed at his Crimean dacha, hard-liners in his government seized power, aiming to reverse the tide of glasnost and perestroika...
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Sing Your Song
Tweet Suzanne Rostock’s Oscar-shortlisted profile of the legendary singer, actor, and humanitarian Harry Belafonte traces his career as a performer and the popularizer of Calypso music while on his...
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Today in Music (Film): The US vs. John Lennon
Tweet Something that happened in music history on this date, and a music documentary that goes with it. Simple. On this leap day in 1972, John Lennon’s non-immigrant US visa expired, kicking off his...
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CIMMfest Preview: Punk and Politics in Pinochet’s Chile
Tweet Pank: The Rise of Punk in Chile tells the story of the young men and women who melded the loud, fast, angry ethos of punk – plus a pinch of Dada – to the specific political and cultural...
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Rebel Rockin’ All Over the World: Morello Releases Free Global Music Film
Tweet Tom Morello seems to be everywhere these days – contributing to Springsteen tracks here, commenting in a Detroit rock documentary there – but on this May Day, he kind of is everywhere. To...
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Under African Skies
Tweet Directed by Joe Berlinger USA, 2012 Genre: Singer-Songwriter, World Music – Africa As an aspiring African music enthusiast in the 1980s, I never really got Paul Simon’s Graceland. At the time it...
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Sympathy for the Devil
Tweet Directed by Jean-Luc Godard UK, 1968 Genre: Rock As the Rolling Stones gear up for their 50th anniversary concerts, a look back across 44 of those years at Jean-Luc Godard’s music...
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Let Fury Have the Hour
Tweet Clash fans will recognize the title as a line from the transcendent London Calling anthem “Clampdown,” and Joe Strummer’s ringing call to arms against going along to get along in a society that...
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Podcast #31: Let Fury Have the Hour
Tweet Numerous films have explored music as a form of protest, and at first glance Let Fury Have the Hour seems cut from the same cloth, with its all-star cast of politically minded artists. But not...
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Beijing Punk
Tweet Directed by Shaun M. Jefford USA, 2010 Genre: Punk In 2008, as Beijing hosted the Summer Olympics, filmmaker Shaun M. Jefford walked the streets of the Chinese capital with a cameraman in tow,...
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Musicwood: A Music Documentary That Speaks for the Trees
Tweet Alaskan guitarist Sergius Gregory strums at the foot of a Sitka spruce in Musicwood. All photos copyright Helpman Productions. Musicwood is both an environmental documentary and a music...
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Serbian Heat: Rob Stewart and the Unlikely Odyssey of ‘Slaughter Nick’
Tweet Rob Stewart performing with Serbian punk band Atheist Rap in the documentary Slaughter Nick for President. To me, the early ’90s TV show Sweating Bullets – a sort of Baywatch-meets-Magnum PI...
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Revolution Rock: Inside the Pussy Riot Story
Tweet In the first weeks of 2012, Pussy Riot seemed like a colorful sideshow to the swelling demonstrations in Moscow over Vladimir Putin’s imminent re-election/re-acclamation as Russia’s president: a...
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Shield and Spear: Free South Africa?
Tweet South African performer Gazelle in Shield and Spear Apartheid is dead and South Africa is democratic. But how truly free is it? Petter Ringbom’s new documentary Shield and Spear examines that...
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Rikki Stein: Fela Forever
Tweet Rikki Stein has spent more than four decades in the music business as a producer, promoter, manager, and tireless champion of African culture, and he shows no sign of slowing down. On the...
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