Shine a light
So I recently saw the new Rolling Stones Concert Film, it's called shine a light and it's directed by Martin Scorcese. It was a really enjoyable film, I saw it at the imax theatre at the Henry Ford. The film was shot wonderfully and had great performances.
The stones have yet to age, they seemed to be rocking just as hard as they were 25 years ago. Mick Jagger did his incredible rock walk as he strutted down the stage shaking his hips and Keith Richards made it abundantly clear that he is possibly the coolest person in the history of the world.
To me the real lesson from the film was authenticity; I'm starting to think that hipster uber irony and smirking sarcasm in music is a bad thing for the art form. It's hard to imagine Keith being like "I did this crazy solo and the audience bought into it, it was like I was totally rockin hard, isn't that hilarious?".
Dan Kennedy also writes about this in his amazing book Rock On: an office power ballad. He talks about having a hard time picturing Kiss laughing at their material. Now I admit that Kiss was ridiculously heavy handed and I have a hard time not laughing at them, but I still find his point to be valid.
I sometimes worry that we're still paying the price for the god awful shit storm that was metal music when I was finishing high school. I suppose after that stinking piece of shit we needed some levity.
Popular music seems to revolve around emo kids and quirky singer song writers (I'm not going to include rap with pop music here because I honestly don't understand it and don't know shit about it). A lot of the singer songwriter crowd seems to be about being as unthreatening as possible, which is a distant from the days of terrifying metal bands trying to look like space monsters (Gwar still kicks ass).
The stones have yet to age, they seemed to be rocking just as hard as they were 25 years ago. Mick Jagger did his incredible rock walk as he strutted down the stage shaking his hips and Keith Richards made it abundantly clear that he is possibly the coolest person in the history of the world.
To me the real lesson from the film was authenticity; I'm starting to think that hipster uber irony and smirking sarcasm in music is a bad thing for the art form. It's hard to imagine Keith being like "I did this crazy solo and the audience bought into it, it was like I was totally rockin hard, isn't that hilarious?".
Dan Kennedy also writes about this in his amazing book Rock On: an office power ballad. He talks about having a hard time picturing Kiss laughing at their material. Now I admit that Kiss was ridiculously heavy handed and I have a hard time not laughing at them, but I still find his point to be valid.
I sometimes worry that we're still paying the price for the god awful shit storm that was metal music when I was finishing high school. I suppose after that stinking piece of shit we needed some levity.
Popular music seems to revolve around emo kids and quirky singer song writers (I'm not going to include rap with pop music here because I honestly don't understand it and don't know shit about it). A lot of the singer songwriter crowd seems to be about being as unthreatening as possible, which is a distant from the days of terrifying metal bands trying to look like space monsters (Gwar still kicks ass).