 This video is brought to you by Nebula. If you want to watch an extended cut of it, head on over to the link in the description and check out Nebula today. Hey there, it's me again, Noah, probably better known as Polyphonic. The response to my face reveal was honestly just really, really heartwarming to me. You guys were super kind and it seemed like people really liked me talking unscripted openly about some of these music questions. So I thought, hey, why not try this again? You know, if you don't like this, that's fine. I'll have another video essay coming in another week. But this channel's always been about experimentation, so I want to experiment with doing more on-camera stuff. So today what we're going to do is just have a little talk about one of my favorite topics, music documentaries. If you've watched literally any of my videos, it'll come as no surprise to you that I'm a big fan of music documentaries. But honestly, I feel like they're just something that don't get discussed enough in my circles. And you know, I think that there's a lot of music fans out there who haven't really watched or maybe aren't even aware of some of the great music docs that have been made over the last, I don't know, half century or so. So today I just want to shout out some of my favorites. This is going to be pretty unscripted, super casual. I hope you enjoy it. Let's do the whole, let's take a closer look and drop the pracks and, you know, this thing. Before I get into my list here, I want to say that this is not like a ranking. This is just some of my personal favorites. And also I'm not going to be including concert films in this, which means no live at Pompeii, no stop making sense. If that's something that you guys want to see me talk about, just let me know. I could do that in the future too, if you guys like this format. We're just trying shit out here, guys. We're just trying shit out. Alright, let's get to the actual docs. First and foremost, I got a shout out. My man, Kenny Burns. What is there to say about Ken Burns? He's probably the greatest documentarian. No, he's definitely the greatest documentarian of our era, probably the greatest documentarian ever. His series on country and jazz are probably my top two favorite docu-series ever. There are these sprawling comprehensive looks at the entire history of the genre, and they are just spectacular. With the length that Ken Burns has, he's able to really go into depth and highlight all of these incredible artists. They're written, fantastic Ken Burns voice, can't be matched, and he uses a ton of brilliant archival footage. His approach is very minimal. He relies on the power of photographs and subtle pieces of sound design, and in doing so little, he allows the story to breathe so much and creates these rich, rich narratives. I think personally that watching country or jazz is the best way to get into either of these musical genres. Country in particular taught me how to love country music when I watched it a couple years ago, and I listen to a lot of country now, so I owe that to Ken Burns. If you've got any sort of curiosity about either of these or really just about music in general, I think these documentaries are must watch. Ken Burns is the goat. He's amazing. He is one of my biggest idols, and I think that everyone at some point in their life should watch a Ken Burns documentary. Next up, we're going to go with something that is sort of a completely different approach to Ken Burns minimalism. We've got The Velvet Underground by Todd Haynes. This documentary is just gorgeous. It's beautifully edited. It's stylized. It's abstract. It really captures the spirit of the avant-garde New York movement that really birthed The Velvet Underground. Haynes is a fantastic director. He has such an eye for style. He's also directed two of my favorite biopics in Don't Look Back and Velvet Goldmine, which, by the way, again, if you like this video, maybe I'll do one on biopics, too, because I got a lot of opinions on that, but we're not talking about that today. The Velvet Underground documentary feels, you know, if I can't pat myself too much on the back, it feels video essay-esque in its visuals. It's a documentary that I would have loved to make. You know, it's one that, since watching it, I've tried to pull a lot of thoughts from what Todd Haynes does visually there. And then in terms of the actual content, you know, it's incredible. There's really, really great interviews. I particularly find the stuff talking about drone music and John Kale really interesting. And Haynes also does a great job of framing Lou Reed, who is such a fascinating, difficult character in music history. The whole thing captures the weirdness of the Velvet Underground, the experimental edge of the Velvet Underground, and it does a good job of exploring just why they are such an important band and, you know, what they're all about. So if you're a Velvet Underground fan, highly, highly recommend that. Next up is Matanga Maya MIA. That's a documentary that came out a couple years back on MIA, who I think is a really underrated figure in music history. She's got an incredible, incredible story personally, but also just in terms of music. Her early albums are doing some noise, glitch, hip hop stuff that, you know, she practically invented the sound that Kanye would use on Yeezus. She's doing death grip style stuff before death grips. Like, she's this really important figure that I think often doesn't really get her due. In this documentary, we see her rise to stardom. Because this film was shot by Steve Loveridge, who is a personal friend of MIA, he was able to get access to a ton of just like personal home footage of this early internet age, you know, photo booth videos of MIA. On the one hand, a lot of this footage is very sort of shaky and low quality. But personally, I kind of feel like that underlines MIA's aesthetic. That early, you know, early internet glitchy like feel, it comes through in the visuals. So personally, I think that it really works. And in general, like this is just a really cool documentary about a really interesting figure. So, check it out. You know, I feel like I keep saying, check it out at the end of this. But these are all documentaries you should probably watch if you like music. And that brings us to, you know, probably the most important music documentary ever made. D.A. Pennebakers Don't Look Back. It'll come as no surprise to you that I love a Dylan documentary. Dylan, you know, he's everything to me. He is my personal favorite musician. He's one of the artists that really, really got me into analyzing music like I do. And Don't Look Back is essential Dylan ephemera. It's a fly on the wall look at a UK tour that's really a turning point in Dylan's career. His star is rising. He's been dubbed the voice of a generation. Everyone is sort of asking everything of him. Fans are chasing him and he's kind of going a little paranoid. The pressure is sort of starting to get at him. It's a really, really interesting point in the career of one of the most important people in music history. And it's shot beautifully. Pennebaker shoots it on black and white 16 millimeter film. And that sort of grainy film look creates a distinctly Dylan aesthetic that's been parodied. You know, the Dewey Cox scenes where he's doing Dylan stuff is a lot of that's inspired by the look of Don't Look Back. And I think in a lot of people's minds, you know, when they think of Dylan, they think of Dylan as he appears in Don't Look Back. This documentary was really one of the very earliest rock documentaries and it set a gold standard. It's not just, you know, a great music documentary. It's one of the most important documentaries ever made. If you walk away from this and watch one music documentary, it should be Don't Look Back. It's just a complete essential for any music fan. Speaking of Dylan documentaries, I'd be remiss if I didn't also mention No Direction Home. This is probably my personal favorite music documentary outside of Ken Burns. It's directed by Martin Scorsese, who's, you know, one of the greatest directors of all time. It really does a great job sort of building on the mythos of Dylan that was started way back with Don't Look Back. It frames Dylan as this sort of shapeshifter, this trickster music god, you know, almost this ethereal figure, which I think is a classic characterization of Dylan and an essential characterization of Dylan. It does a great job of situating him within music history and within the Greenwich Village scene. You see a lot of the influences that shaped Dylan and that's really cool. And then there's just incredible, incredible interviews. The interview clips with Dave Van Ronck and Tommy Clancy are particularly insightful. You're getting these open conversations with people who knew Dylan when he was sort of just this young kid entering the Greenwich scene. And you know, people who went on to see him change the world. So they have a very unique perspective on who Dylan is. And the whole thing is sort of framed with these bounce backs where the framing device is the 66 tour where Dylan, you know, got called Judas on stage, got booed constantly. The tour that really sort of led to him stepping away from the spotlight for a long time. And then it cuts between that tour and everything building up to it. You know, Dylan's origins in Minnesota, Dylan's coming to New York, Dylan's civil rights activism, all of this. And then all of this sort of culminates and ends in a magnificent live performance of like a Rolling Stone. If you don't get the Dylan hype, you know, if you don't understand why people love Bob Dylan so much, and also if you don't understand why he's so important to music history, No Direction Home will teach you all of that. I want to end off with a quick little rapid fire of a couple more, you know, that I love. And this is not meant to be a comprehensive list. And you know, there's lots of great documentaries that I still need to watch. I still haven't seen Montage of Heck, which I've heard is absolutely incredible. And I'm sure I'll love. But yeah, I haven't seen that. So I can't properly recommend it to you yet. But here are some that I have seen. Amy is essential. It's a really, really painful watch. You know, it's a celebration of Amy Winehouse's music, but it's also an intimate look at the impact that fame can have on one's mental health. I've only ever watched it once, and I can't really imagine watching it again, because watching it once is it's a really painful, really heavy experience, especially for anyone that's dealt with mental illness or anybody that has a close family member or close friends that have dealt with mental illness. It's a really heavy watch, but it's definitely worth it. 20 feet from stardom, on the other hand, is just a light, really fun watch about backup singers. It's just this really novel documentary that highlights some figures that need more love, and the bits on Mary Clayton are especially good. She's one of the underappreciated vocal geniuses of her time. Somewhere of soul, Questlove's Documentarial debut is fantastic. It's a really well-edited story of a cultural event that I genuinely hadn't heard of before the documentary came out. It's got some really, really great archival footage, some fun interviews, and the real highlights are the concert footage stuff. Nina Simone's performance is transcendental, and Stevie Wonder's amazing. You're seeing this transitional point Stevie Wonder between little Stevie Wonder of Motown and Stevie Wonder's classic period, so it's a great time seeing him too. In general, it's a really fun, exciting documentary about a big overlooked moment in black cultural history. And we'll round it out with Get Back, Peter Jackson's Beatles documentary. That thing is slow-moving, it takes its time, it really marinates in a lot of nothingness, but that's also kind of the point of it. I think it's one of the most genuine looks at the process of genius. It's not pitching the Beatles as these people who are hit with sparks of inspiration and suddenly write songs with this sort of mythical energy. It shows them very much as workmen who come in and sit down and shoot the shit with nothing and play around, and then eventually, from this sort of very dull workman-like process, genius eventually emerges. And the real meat of this, if you don't feel like watching 8,000 hours of the Beatles sitting around being sassy to each other, then at least look up the scene of Paul McCartney writing Get Back. There's this sort of scene where he's messing around and he finally starts to figure it out, and then throughout the documentary, they rework that song, they try to arrange it, they do all this different stuff. It's a really cool, honest look at the creative process. And also, it's a new perspective on the Beatles breakup, and personally, I think it really vindicates Yoko Ono, who did nothing wrong and just was hated because she was a woman. So yeah, I think Get Back is a ton of fun. If you're in the market for longer documentaries, you can probably get more meat out of each minute, watching something like Ken Burns, but at the same time, I mean, it's the Beatles, you get to be voyeuristic with the Beatles. It's really cool. It's super, super novel and super cool. So yeah, hopefully I've given you a couple things to add to your watch list, or I'm sure a lot of you have seen a lot of these. If you have, it's probably just nice to hear someone talk about them and mention them. I don't know. I like when people talk about stuff that I like. Please let me know what you think of this format. It's, like I said, it's very new. I'm sure there's still kinks that I'm ironing out, but I really like this. It's nice to be me a little and to just get excited about music. So if you like this, please let me know. And yeah, I'd love to do this for concert films, for, you know, general music films like Almost Famous for Music Biopics. I don't know. I think this could be a little bit of a series if there's interest in that. And hey, if you really liked this and, you know, wished that I talked about more documentaries, I've got good news for you. I made an extended cut of this video on Nebula with just a couple other mentions of some bonus documentaries that I think you should check out. It's nothing special, but if you want to help support me and you want to see more content, go check that out on Nebula. Nebula, you know, you know the deal with Nebula. It's streaming service created by and for creators. You can watch my original content on there, a lot of other original content. Lindsay Ellis is there doing new stuff. There's all sorts of great creators, Jetleg, the game. So if that sounds cool to you, you should check out the link below. Going there will get you 40% off an annual plan. So you can sign up for a little more than 250 a month. And if you sign up with that link, you'll also get access to classes. So, you know, if you like seeing my face and hearing me talk about music stuff, great news. There's a whole class on there where I talk about my approaches to analyzing music. I really believe in Nebula. It's something that I have helped build and it's something that I just think is really awesome and you should check out. And hey, thanks for watching and thanks for indulging me in this weirdness. Okay, bye!