I hope he does better by Country than he did by Jazz, I pretty much hated that series. I read in looking into it from your comment that he claims he didn't know much about country music before he started work on his documentary, the same bad way he started out with Jazz. Other than him depending on some notoriously tunnel-visioned reactionaries as his chosen experts - something he'd had trouble with in The Civil War - the thing I hated the most, and most of all was his use of short clips from recordings AND THEN TALKING OVER THE FRIGGIN' MUSIC JUST ABOUT EVERY TIME HE DID IT.
As if you can "do a documentary" about music WHILE BEING SO DISRESPECTFUL OF THE MUSIC AS TO NOT MAKE IT THE PRIMARY FOCUS OF THE THING.
I'd think spending, 14 hours or however long Burns' documentary is listening to the music, listening to the stories it tells, would leave you knowing more about it than watching anything Burns or any other movie maker is likely to come up with. Even more so would be to pick up a guitar and learn few songs, try to write your own. Country is a simpler musical form than jazz, for the most part, it can be pretty simple, like the blues that it is the cousin of when it's not identical to it. Both could be a credible starting step to jazz so a beginner can learn a lot by making the effort, even if they conclude they've failed at it. That would be a far, far better use for your 14 hours or however many you might spend when you've watched it over and over and over again during PBS's eternal fundraising repetitions of it. Turning off the friggin' TV is the first step. The computer, too.
Update: Here I'll save you a good part of the time you'd otherwise spend watching Ken Burns, here's about a third of what you need to know.
Slate has a fair to middlin' review of the whole thing, which told me more about country music than I knew. To update the cliche: making movies about music is like dancing about architecture.
ReplyDeleteCountry music is not a subject I'm terribly interested in, and I'm kinda tired of Burns and the 16 hour slog.
I like a little of the less commercial part of it, lots of it is pretty much pop music.
DeleteI'll grant Ken Burns that at least his documentaries have some documentary content, the hours I ill spent in my youth watching Fredrick Weisman's are hours I regret every second of. It was one of the ironies that even as Burns and his chosen experts elevated the 3-minute pieces of the kind of jazz they favored over later, longer jazz, they did it in such a long form. I never had anything against Wynton Marsalis and his brother till I saw them in that botch. It's a shame that it indoctrinated so many people in such a narrow, distorted view of the music and ended by pretty much declaring it dead and to be treated like the museum specimen that Marsalis treats it as. It was worse than just a waste of time.