Rockumentaries

doemaarFrom time to time I like to watch documentaries about pop and rock music… in the past I saw a really good one on Nico and more recently there was a very nice one on gabber / hardcore…

This weekend I saw two… one on Dutch band Doe Maar… an 80’s band which played reggae inspired pop music… in a very short period of time they became the biggest thing in Holland… the best thing about this documentary were the very open conversations with the band members reflecting on the past… they pictured the two driving musicians and they themselves told about their difference views on music and the band… it was nice to see how they still got along very well after all these years… without being frustrated or being in a fight as you often hear in such cases…

The other thing was something I never realised… they became very popular with a very young audience… teens and even younger… this frustrated them as they made serious music and were no boy band as we know boy bands today, created especially for such a specific young audience and to make some cash…

The band told this was also the reason they split up… that they did not find that their music reached the people it was meant for and did not come across as intended… funny detail is that I used to listen to this band a lot… when I was very young… when I was about 7 years old…

imihendrixAnother documentary I saw was on Jimi Hendrix… a musician I never liked before… I have never bought any of his music… even though I am a big fan of 60’s music… it never triggered me or made sense to me… the documentary was great with lots of old footage and some friends of him still alive telling about him…

The footage from Monterey Pop Festival in 1967 is legendary and I knew some of the images but never saw it this way before… his performance was amazing… how he played the guitar and how the whole performance was turned into a ritual with as climax setting the guitar on fire and summoning the fire to rise…

And… surprisingly I liked quite a lot of the music of Jimi Hendrix which was featured on the documentary and I will get into this soon to see if I like his work better now as in the past…