program similar to metamovie but for songs

#PROGRAM SIMILAR TO METAMOVIE BUT FOR SONGS MOVIE#

But Brian Eno’s quote about how only 30,000 people bought the Velvet Underground’s first album but every one of them started a band may not go far enough. Discounting a few in-name-only years after Reed’s departure, the group lasted from 1965 until 1970, during which it released four proper albums. Really everything about the Velvet Underground was brief, except its lasting influence: Nico’s time in the band, Cale’s tenure (which ended after two albums), its touring career, its very existence. One-by-one, the pair picked up the other collaborators who would define the band’s sound: expressive guitarist Sterling Morrison, no-nonsense drummer Maureen Tucker, artist Andy Warhol (who took the band on as a kind of project), and, for one album only, guest vocalist Nico, a German singer and actress whose striking looks and icy deadpan voice complemented Reed’s half-sung delivery. In the Brooklyn-born, suburbs-raised Lou Reed, he found an unlikely but remarkably simpatico creative partner, a student of doo-wop and beat poetry then working as an in-house songwriter for a bargain basement New York label. He’d arrived in New York to further his studies and fallen in with a group of like-minded musicians who saw in drone and repetition a way to break down musical borders. On the show, his discussion of having recently participated in a nearly 19-hour concert performance of an Erik Satie piece is greeted with peels of laughter.īut Cale had another secret: he was beyond caring, an exemplar of a ’60s bohemia that shared virtually no common ground with the flowers and sunshine of the era’s more visible counterculture. As a viola swells and squawks a black screen gives way to a clip of the game show I’ve Got a Secret featuring the man who’d produce those squawks a few years later: a young, unsmiling musician from Wales named John Cale. Director Todd Haynes establishes just how inhospitable in the opening moments of The Velvet Underground, his simply titled, hypnotically paced documentary about the band. A specific collision of personalities and circumstances allowed the group to take shape in an era that wasn’t naturally hospitable to its mix of chugging rock and roll, avant-garde classical music, and lyrical snapshots drawn from an underworld of drugs, dangerous assignations, and unexpected tenderness. The empathetic engagement of documentary filmmakers in the lives of their subjects seems, here, like the closest thing to an aesthetic suicide pact.The Velvet Underground were a band like none that had come before, but they didn’t emerge from nowhere.

#PROGRAM SIMILAR TO METAMOVIE BUT FOR SONGS MOVIE#

At the core of the movie is the question of why modern jazz seemed inseparable from drugs whether the music’s fusion of fury and intricacy, of intellectual complexity and daring self-revelation, of spiritual insight and streetwise experience-all arising from the distinctive pathos of black-American life-is bound to self-destructive abnegation, and whether, if it’s true of jazz, it’s true of modern art at large. The quartet of musicians, led by the pianist and composer Freddie Redd and the caustic-toned post-bop saxophonist Jackie McLean, perform brilliantly on-camera as they dramatize both the agonized wait and the needed high. What the filmmakers show, above all, is the music itself. She turns the story into a disturbing and self-accusing meta-movie, making two of the characters into documentary filmmakers and presenting the film as an edited version of the footage they shot. Shirley Clarke’s first feature is based on a play by Jack Gelber, about a group of junkies-including a quartet of jazz musicians-who are waiting in a run-down New York loft for their heroin dealer.

Program similar to metamovie but for songs