By, heck, they don't make documentaries bemoaning the state of modern music like they used to.
Film-makers Andrew Shapter and Joel Rasmussen set out to make an apocalyptic altrock doc- Before the Music Dies - with next to no money and a burning conviction that a once radical art form has been reduced to a marketing tool for tampons.
Shunned by The Man, Shapter took his film underground - where it rapidly achieved indie cult status. He's just finished a US tour where free screenings attracted large crowds of whoopingly enthusiastic hipster musicians. At the subsequent Q+A sessions, Shapter occasionally verged on the messianic. In Philadelphia he compared himself to Michael Moore. Which is daft. Whatever his faults, Moore would never make the mistake of asking jam-band musicians for advice on how to start a revolution.
Before the Music Dies is an earnest, worthy and passionate low-budget attempt to excoriate the music industry for ignoring real talent, promoting lightweight no-talent flibbertigibbets and - shock horror - being obsessed with profit.
It's not that B4MD (as it cutely calls itself) doesn't do a good job teaching your granny how to suck eggs - the sections on the deregulation-driven homogenization of US pop radio is particularly chilling. And its impossible to fault the film's argument that capitalism destroys the very culture it seeks to exploit. It's just that nearly all the "real" musicians it trots out as the credible alternative to the likes of Ashlee Simpson suck like a prolapsing white dwarf star.
The featured performances are - with a few exceptions -awful. Horny-handed sloggers like the Dave Matthews Band, North Mississippi AllStars and Dave Hidalgo trudge through nightmarishly long retro-rock jam sessions.
But the most irritating part of B4MD is when it sneers at the fans of manufactured music. "Has Ashlee Simpson ever inspired you to do anything?" the interviewer asks a brace of teenage girls. Has Dave Mathews? To do what? Buy a shed?
The film-makers then prove how easy it is to make a manufactured pop hit by getting a beautiful teenage girl to record a tune casually bashed out by a 45-year-old male songwriter. The result is mediocre. But with the exception of performances by a young Billy Preston and the wonderful Erykah Badu, it's the only music in the movie that doesn't make you want to stick pencils in your ears.
Before the Music Dies is Grumpy Old Men for musos. The film's largely unexamined assumption that music is going to hell in a handbasket puts one in mind of an old Ray Lowry cartoon: Two aged sex-goths in Rancid Hell Spawn and Alien Sex Fiend T-shirts stare in disgust at young girls flocking to a Take That concert. "I remember when it were all Fields of the Nephilim around here," says one.
Of course, the rock jokes were much better back then.
