Music news. Beyond the headlines.
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Devon Price likes his guitars loud and his lyrics worth paying attention to. He's never understood why a little distortion, a missed note, or an awkward vocal take should automatically count against a record. Sometimes that's the best part.
Punk, grunge, indie, and alternative rock are his usual territory, although his playlists have a habit of wandering into places that would surprise anyone judging him by his record collection. He's a sucker for a well-written chorus, regardless of genre, and has a habit of defending albums that everyone else seems to have dismissed.
His opinions can be stubborn, but they're rarely permanent. Devon enjoys returning to records he once disliked to see whether time has changed his mind. Sometimes it does. Other times, he remembers exactly why he stopped listening in the first place.
Country music gets documented better than most people expect, partly because the stories are genuinely good and partly because Nashville has always understood that its own history is an asset. The most useful starting point is not a feature film at all. **Ken Burns’ Country Music** is an eight-part series…
Jazz documentaries face a problem that other genres do not. A concert film of a jazz set has a harder time than a rock show, because the improvisation that makes the music exciting can make the footage feel shapeless to anyone who wasn’t there. The films that work find a…
Festival seating on a hill in Bethel, New York, half a million people, and a crew of filmmakers who did not entirely know what they were shooting. Woodstock came out in 1970 and set the terms that every concert film has worked under since. By the end of the decade…
Hulu does not have Netflix’s volume, but its smaller music-documentary selection often leans toward archival discoveries and people whose contributions were pushed outside the familiar version of music history. Hulu changes its catalog regularly, so availability should be confirmed before watching. The pick here runs older and stranger than on…
Netflix has more music documentaries than just about anyone, which is both the appeal and the problem. For every film that feels built to last, there’s a glossy artist profile that probably could have been a podcast. This page is selective rather than exhaustive. Netflix’s catalog moves quickly, particularly around…
A great music documentary does more than preserve a performance or repeat a familiar biography. It catches the moment when an artist, a scene or an audience becomes something larger, then shows the work, conflict and chance behind it. These 27 films span concert landmarks, intimate portraits and recovered history.…
Soul and R&B have a documentary advantage that other genres do not. The music was often recorded in rooms where somebody happened to have a camera, and a lot of that footage sat in warehouses for decades before anyone thought to look at it. Summer of Soul is the famous…
Ed Sheeran’s two Gillette Stadium concerts remain scheduled for September 25th and 26th, but an approaching nor’easter has created a new threat to a weekend already reshaped by the loss of every advertised support act, schedule changes and an unusual refund intervention from Massachusetts officials. As of late September 24th,…
A temporary restraining order has been granted against Dolly Parton’s nephew and former longtime security chief Bryan Seaver as a dispute over the late country singer’s business interests moves into court. She’s Alive, LLC, an entity Parton created to protect aspects of her business and legacy, and longtime manager Danny…
Suno has disclosed that its new V6 AI music models were trained partly on “creations” from its own community, adding a new layer to its escalating copyright fight with Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment. The AI music company said September 22nd that V6 was trained using licensed content…