All You Need Is Love - Series 1 - Complete

Most helpful review All You Need Is Love - Series 1 - Complete

• It's All Too Much

   

  By JamieBton (2 reviews) from Brighton , 26 Sep 2008

  [Highly rated reviewer]

  Music documentaries nowadays are slick - lots of talking heads, rare footage - the history, at least of rock'n'roll, and of other notable genres, country, blues, jazz, have been told, from various angles, ad infinitum. There are accepted wisdoms about music that are rarely questioned. When Tony Palmer's 17-part series was first broadcast in 1977, things were not so slick. And his history of popular music attempts to cover, with an unashamedly American, and to a lesser extent British, bias, pretty much the 20th century up to that point. Its value is in the number of interviews with musicians and songwriters no longer around to tell their stories (Hoagy Carmichael is particularly entertaining), and his quirky take on popular music has a certain charm. It was a massive and ambitious undertaking at the time, and that must be acknowledged. But its flaws are many - too many to mention, but here are a few... The first six or seven episodes, chronologically, take every opportunity to show white performers in blackface make-up, and illustrate the way watered-down versions of black music were made acceptable to a wider audience - but from then on, James Brown is overlooked, as are many Motown acts, and many of the major blues and jazz names (Howling Wolf, Charles Mingus) are missed out in favour of forgotten or obscure artists. In fact, black music gets a pretty raw deal generally, as an episode on rhythm and blues spends 15 minutes talking about white gospel and about Pat Boone, a man who gets far, far too much air time. In rock'n'roll, Jerry Lee Lewis is hardly offscreen, while Little Richard and Chuck Berry are very poorly served. In a 'protest' episode, British folk singer Leon Rosselson gets to perform a whole song, while Bob Dylan is barely mentioned in passing. And it goes on, right up to the final episode, where Black Oak Arkansas and Tangerine Dream represent 'new directions', while the late great music critic Lester Bangs is a lone voice of sanity, his every utterance predicting the puink movement that would blow away, temporarily, the tired and flabby '70s rock that clogs up most of the last couple of epsiodes. A historical document, in more ways than one.

  • Was this review helpful to you?
  • (7) Yes |
  •  No (0)

  Report this review

All reviews