In a
recent New Yorker (paywalled link to article), Hua Hsu wrote a favorable review of the fanworky film
Pavements, which is about the band Pavement. He liked it. But he also considered the big picture:
Just as a generation of young people now picture Timothee Chalamet's wispy mustache when they think of Dylan, it's likely that many fans understand N.W.A., Queen, Bob Marley, and Elvis Presley almost solely through their recent, varnished bio-pics. There are Bruce Springsteen and Michael Jackson movies due for release this year, as well as four separate Beatles ones slated for 2028. Perhaps pop-music history will soon exist only in the form of authorized, brand-managed hagiographies. Netflix recently announced that a nine-hour documentary about the complicated genius of Prince, directed by the Oscar-winner Ezra Edelman, would not be released, because of concerns raised by the artist's estate. Even in the lower-stakes world of publishing, a celebrity can mobilize her fan base against anything deemed unofficial. Adoring books about hip-hop musicians such as Mac Miller and De La Soul have been criticized by the artists or their estates -- basically for being journalistic endeavors.
When careers are seen as intellectual property -- and when, with the decline of album sales, one's back catalogue becomes an even more valuable resource -- legacies will be guarded with a lawyerly vigilance. Messiness gets edited out in the name of a few key narrative turning points. The possibility that an artist today would ever offer the kind of access that Metallica gave for "Some Kind of Monster," a 2004 documentary that famously featured the band in therapy, seems as likely as the prospect of American politicians welcoming the scrutiny of reporters.
In the absence of friction, contemporary bio-pics are just a series of boring victory laps. Intention and accidents, theft and boorish behavior: it all gets folded into the myth-serving lore. And it makes fools of us fans. The magic of pop music isn't just the star on the stage; it's how the crowd sways, and what fans do afterward with the feelings inspired by the show. All this made "Pavements" feel more exceptional. It seemed to exist adjacent to the band. A true fanatic's take, it aspires to be as heady and as weird as the band itself. Perry's aggressively clever story about Pavement is different from what mine would be, yet I recognized a fellow-traveler. In making something so intensely loving, he points out the banality of modern-day fandom, in which we're all expected to be brand ambassadors, reciting someone else's gospel.
I think he's right about the branding and the IP monetization. I believe musicians should be paid for their work, and paid well. But I also remember making mixtapes, impossible now because of DRM, so we are reduced to sharing playlists and hoping the recipients have a compatible streaming service. Sometimes I feel sad about my long gone vinyl collection which included a significant number of one-off bootleg pressings of various artists. As our individual access to creative technology increases (entire films made on smartphones now), our fannish field of operation becomes more heavily policed and gatekept. Official merch is never as interesting as the fan productions. I wonder how many of our fandomI forget debates are influenced by an internalized version of this policing and gatekeeping? Not to mention the external problem of legal liability.
I forget where I read an article about the cancelled Prince documentary but it sounded like it would have been amazing. I don't really have the heart to look for it.
source: Hsu, Hua. "You're Killing Me: Pavement Inspires a Strange, Ironic, Loving Bio-pic."
New Yorker, 26 May 2025, 66-67.
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solarbird
