Uzi’s new song, “Chanel Boy” arrived today with a frenetic video and almost no warning. According to a press release, Uzi is now independent, with distribution and management through Roc Nation. That makes Uzi one of three artists to be exclusively managed and distributed by the imprint: Uzi, Jay-Z, and Rihanna. Roc Nation publishing will handle Uzi’s royalty checks, as well.
Uzi’s association with Roc Nation began back in 2019, when they were one of a handful of artists chafing under the terms of their record deal that Roc Nation helped renegotiate in their favor. Shortly after the signing, Uzi was able to release the original long-awaited album Eternal Atake, which had been held up by multiple issues, including seemingly unrelenting leaks of unfinished material. Since then, Uzi was able to put out Pink Tape and EA2, in addition to Lil Uzi Vert vs. the World 2, a deluxe edition/companion to EA.
With their contractual obligations behind them and the future wide open, it’s an exciting time to be a Lil Uzi Vert fan. You can watch the video for “Chanel Boy” above.
For nearly three decades now, Truck Festival has been one that UK indie music fans look forward to annually, since 1998. Now they can start planning for next year, as today (November 24), organizers announced the 2026.
Headlining from July 23 to 26 at Hill Farm in Oxfordshire are The Maccabees, CMAT, Two Door Cinema Club (celebrating 15 years of their debut album Tourist History), The Wombats, and The Libertines. Further down the poster are Kaiser Chiefs, The Vaccines (celebrating 15 years of their debut album What Did You Expect From The Vaccines?, Primal Scream, English Teacher, Rizzle Kicks, The K’s, Lottery Winners, Keo, Florence Road, The Cribs, Everything Everything, Friendly Fires, The Royston Club, Getdown Services, Willie J Healey, Westside Cowboy, Black Honey, Radio Free Alice, Vanessa Carlton (“because why not?,” per a press release), and more.
For tickets, the pre-sale kicks off November 27 at 6 p.m. GMT. That’ll be followed by the Tier 4 general-on sale on November 28 at 10 a.m. GMT.
The Wombats’ Dan Haggis says of the fest, “We’ve played Truck a few times now and it never disappoints, it’s always a highlight of our summer and we’re so excited to be back headlining it again in 2026! See you there.”
John Dell, Head Of Marketing, also noted, “We’re absolutely buzzing to announce the first wave of names for Truck 2026 after such an incredible demand already for tickets, bringing together some legends who’ve been responsible for Truck memories over the years as well as standout names we’ve been wanting to have at our warped party for years. To welcome a reformed The Maccabees to Truck is a real bucket list moment for us and to have CMAT back to claim her rightful spot as a UK festival headliner after 2025’s unforgettable set is going to be a really special occasion that shows the journey Truck has been on with countless artists.”
Zach Bryan recently got vulnerable and wrote about his recent journey with sobriety. Now, he has another big moment ahead of him: Today (November 24, he announced 2026 dates for the With Heaven On Tour.
It’s not just him, as he’s assembled a powerful roster of support acts, including MJ Lenderman, Alabama Shakes, Dijon, Kings Of Leon, and more.
For tickets, registration for the artist pre-sale is open now and the pre-sale starts December 3, here. The public on-sale follows December 5, here.
Find the full list of dates below.
Zach Bryan’s 2026 Tour Dates: With Heaven On Tour
03/07/2026 — St. Louis, MO – The Dome at America’s Center * ~
03/14/2026 — Tampa, FL – Raymond James Stadium * ~
03/21/2026 — San Antonio, TX – The Alamodome * ~
03/28/2026 — Baton Rouge, LA – Tiger Stadium * ~
04/11/2026 — Louisville, KY – L&N Federal Credit Union Stadium # ~
04/18/2026 — Charlotte, NC – Bank of America Stadium * ~
04/25/2026 — Lincoln, NE – Memorial Stadium # ~
05/02/2026 — Starkville, MS – Davis Wade Stadium $ ~
05/09/2026 — Cleveland, OH – Huntington Bank Field $ ~
05/27/2026 — San Sebastián, Spain – Donostia Arena ^ &
05/31/2026 — Berlin, Germany – Waldbühne ^ &
06/03/2026 — Oslo, Norway – Unity Arena ^ &
06/06/2026 — Copenhagen, Denmark – Parken ^ &
06/09/2026 — Eindhoven, Netherlands – Philips Stadion ^ &
06/12/2026 — Liverpool, UK – Anfield Stadium $ }
06/14/2026 — Edinburgh, UK – Scottish Gas Murrayfield $ }
06/16/2026 — London, UK – Tottenham Hotspur Stadium $ }
06/17/2026 — London, UK – Tottenham Hotspur Stadium $ }
06/20/2026 — Cork, Ireland – Páirc Uí Chaoimh $ }
06/21/2026 — Cork, Ireland – Páirc Uí Chaoimh $ }
06/23/2026 — Belfast, Northern Ireland – Boucher Playing Fields $ }
06/24/2026 — Belfast, Northern Ireland – Boucher Playing Fields $ }
07/31/2026 — San Diego, CA – Snapdragon Stadium ` }
08/01/2026 — San Diego, CA – Snapdragon Stadium ` }
08/07/2026 — Salt Lake City, UT – Rice-Eccles Stadium ` }
08/13/2026 — Denver, CO – Empower Field at Mile High ` }
08/14/2026 — Denver, CO – Empower Field at Mile High ` }
08/22/2026 — Arlington, TX – AT&T Stadium ` }
09/05/2026 — Glendale, AZ – State Farm Stadium ` }
09/18/2026 — Dover, DE – The Woodlands # @ }
09/19/2026 — Dover, DE – The Woodlands ! } @
10/02/2026 — Foxborough, MA – Gillette Stadium { @
10/03/2026 — Foxborough, MA – Gillette Stadium { @
10/10/2026 — Auburn, AL – Jordan-Hare Stadium { @
* with Caamp
~ with J.R. Carroll
# with Kings Of Leon
$ with Dijon
^ with Ben Howard
& with Keenan O’Meara
} with Fey Fili
` with MJ Lenderman
@ with Gabriella Rose
{ with Gregory Alan Isakov
! with Alabama Shakes
Trugoy The Dove — Dave — was the soul of De La Soul. The group’s first album in nine years, Cabin In The Sky, feels like a loving celebration of one of hip-hop’s most singular voices. Though only a handful of songs feature Dave’s captivating vocals, his spirit runs through the entire, powerful project. Still, selfishly, I wanted more. I wanted more Dave.
This career-spanning retrospective highlights the moments — past and present — where Trugoy truly shined. These are the tracks where Dave’s presence didn’t just complement De La’s brilliance, it elevated it. Revisiting them is more than nostalgia — it’s honoring a craftsman whose voice shaped generations. A tribute to the quiet genius whose art still echoes — forever fresh, forever De La.
20. De La Soul — “Foolin’” (2000)
Bars: “While you fools claim corners, we gon’ claim theories / Y’all some stickball n****s, we the World Series.”
This Art Official Intelligence: Mosaic Thump track standout showcases Dave’s charismatic chemistry with rhyme partner, Posdnous—a pass-the-mic masterwork.
19. De La Soul feat. 2 Chainz— “Whoodeeni” (2016)
Bars: “Life’s a bitch, but she’s seeing a therapist.”
2 Chainz got all the acclaim at the time, but it’s Dave who quietly steals the show with a sharp closing verse.
18. De La Soul — “Dog Eat Dog” (1996)
Bars: It’s a dog-eat-dog competition (No doubt) / I’ll be gone like you’re wishin’ (And I’m out) / ’Cause I ain’t got time for hangin’ around / When you’re f*ckin’ my love in all the wrong places.”
All hail Dave’s infectious hook. It ain’t gonna hurt nobody.
17. De La Soul — “Don’t Push Me” (2025)
Bars: “You won’t see Obama on the five dollar bill / I’m still pissed off about Emmett Till.”
Tears in our eyes as Cabin In The Sky ends with Dave honoring Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five’s classic “The Message.”
16. De La Soul feat. Yummy Bingham— “Much More” (2004)
Bars: “Banner had ‘em on the hawk since Atlanta extravaganza / Gamma ray rap, I make The Hulk snap.”
With hype man encouragement from DJ Premier, Dave pops his collar and spanks his peers.
15. De La Soul — “Dinninit” (1996)
Bars: “Heard I’m sexin’ Sade and I bought her a fur / Battin’ eyes at Toni Braxton and I bought her a fur / Now I’m hittin’ Whitney Houston, oh, she bought me a fur?”
Didn’t Dave blow your mind this time?
14. De La Soul — “A Roller Skating Jam Named Saturdays” (1991)
Bars: “Oh, Mr. Sprinkler, Mr. Sprinkler / Wet me for one, Mr. Sprinkler.”
The festive fun takes a sharp turn as Dave perfectly navigates the song’s beat switch.
13. De La Soul — “Tread Water” (1989)
Bars: “Always look to the positive and never drop your head / For the water will engulf us if we do not dare to thread.”
Dave getting his Dr. Dolittle on is just delightful.
12. De La Soul — “Supa Emcees” (1996)
Bars: “Hey, whatever happened to the (emcee) / Times done changed for the (emcee) / Every woman and man wanna (emcee)/ But for what? I tell you, (emcee)-ing ain’t for you!”
Dave set the record straight: too many mics, very few capes.
11. De La Soul — “Keepin The Faith” (1991)
Bars: “Jody got a cat, but she won’t let it out / Oh, tough luck, ‘cause it makes Jack pout / Waiting on the wins, he moves to the next / Searching for the cheese, looking for the text.”
Trugoy tends to relationship counseling with tender love and care.
10. De La Soul — “The Package” (2025)
Bars: “Stay on the ticktock, but this ain’t the kiddy app.”
Please excuse Dave for being antisocial.
9. De La Soul — “Trying People” (2001)
Bars: “I figure excess will only bring an excessive amount of fuss / So when I’m gone, make sure the headstone reads, ‘He did it for us.’”
Patience is a privilege. Wise words from a decent man.
8. De La Soul feat. Common— “The Bizness” (1996)
Bars: “I speak divine of God theories, no need to be high / Always exhale the facts ‘cause I don’t inhale lie.”
The D-to-the-O, the-V-to-the-E, and can’t no other brother cook these delicacies. Chef up.
7. De La Soul — “Jenifa (Taught Me) (12’ Version)” (1989)
Bars: “Access to her code / Lovestruck Dove is Dove’s mode / Took a look, drooped my books / Jenifa, oh Jenny.”
This young lady got Dave goin’ crazy. My cherie amour.
6. De La Soul — “Oodles of O’s” (1991)
Bars: “I was John Doe, now I’m Mr. Jolicoeur.”
Nobody beats Dave’s clever wordplay.
5. De La Soul — “Ego Trippin’ (Part Two)” (1993)
Bars: “Skirts play wit’ it, ‘cause I’m slick like that / I’m the greatest MC in the world! / You gots to gimme, gimme mine, ‘cause I’m heavy when I weigh it / Watch the way I say it (ego trip).”
Here’s a toast to Dave’s best brags and boasts.
4. De La Soul — “Me, Myself and I” (1989)
Bars: “Mirror, mirror on the wall / Tell me, mirror, what is wrong? / Can it be my De La clothes? / Or is it just my De La song?”
Dave sets off the track that puts Long Island’s finest on the map.
3. De La Soul — “Itzsoweezee (HOT)” (1996)
Bars: “Why you acting all spicy and shiesty? / The only Italians you knew was icees.”
A rare Dave solo—and it shines like the summertime sun.
2. De La Soul — “Potholes In My Lawn” (1989)
Bars: “Everybody’s sayin’ what to do when sucker lunatics start diggin’ and chewin’ / They don’t know that the Soul don’t go for that / Potholes in my lawn / And that goes for my rhyme sheet / Which I concentrated so hard on, see.”
There’s still zero tolerance for rhyme biters and their copycat raps.
1. De La Soul — ”Stakes Is High” (1996)
Bars: “I’m sick of bitches shakin’ asses / I’m sick of talkin’ ‘bout blunts, sick of Versace glasses / Sick of slang, sick of half-ass awards shows / Sick of name-brand clothes / Sick of R&B bitches over bullshit tracks /Cocaine and crack, which brings sickness to Blacks.”
Considering the venue for Tyler, The Creator’s long-running festival, Camp Flog Gnaw Carnival, a rain delay was borderline inevitable at some point. Despite Southern California’s reputation, the area surrounding Dodger Stadium does, in fact, experience precipitation every so often, and 2025 — a year that has seen Los Angeles battered by both fire and ICE — just happened to be the year that decided to rain out the festival, as well.
But one of Tyler’s most endearing — and frustrating — traits is that he refuses to be deterred by setbacks. The same ornery impulse that drove him to terrorize 2DopeBoyz for years for not posting his early records now serves better angels, spurring him to move heaven and earth to ensure that Camp continued as usual. The one-week postponement meant borrowing, begging, and cutting deals to keep artists, vendors, and venue partners onboard, he revealed during his set.
Camp Flog Gnaw has been, and remains, a labor of love — the kind of love that sparks sleepless nights, that demands whirlwinds of activity as colleagues and contemporaries begin to wind down operations for the year, that prompts the creative mind to defy man and nature, the markets and the skies to make something shake. It’s why Tyler, The Creator simply can’t be canceled, and why not even a rain delay can keep Camp Flog Gnaw from being a home run.
That resilience was something of a running theme for the reshuffled roster — especially on Saturday’s Camp Stage lineup. From Samara Cyn, who played her first-ever show in 2019, only to have her career nearly derailed by COVID the next year but persevered to reach XXL‘s Freshman cover and receive co-signs from the likes of Lauryn Hill, Nas, and Smino, to PartyOf2, who started their band as Grouptherapy, a collective catharsis from the traumas and travails of life as child actors and survived the scarring departure of a core group member, it seemed like every artist to take the stage on Saturday had some kind of survival story.
Even Saturday’s closer, Childish Gambino, back for the first time since canceling his tour last year, had some surprising news for the crowd as he insisted there wasn’t enough time for him to play all his hits before curfew. With the help of a dazzling drone show, Glover revealed that he’d suffered a stroke — a setback that turned out to be a blessing in disguise, when it revealed a hole in his heart that he was able to have surgically closed.
It’s a scary thing to learn (I have some secondhand experience via a close friend), and the sense of relief and release he undoubtedly felt permeated his set, which ran the gamut from Camp classic “Bonfire” and Kauai game-changer “Sober” to Grammy-winner “Redbone” and a pointedly truncated “This Is America,” which he clearly has a few conflicted feelings about. “We gotta move,” he protested every time he cut a song a little short. Move we did, dancing out the accumulated stress of a truly toxic stretch of months that has felt like a personal attack on the city of angels.
I know I keep saying Flog Gnaw keeps improving on perfection, but what can I say? It’s true. Where so many other instances of founders and entrepreneurs tweaking their products and services can get annoying — we’re talking Google breaking search, Instagram’s pivot to video, and Elon turning Twitter into an everlasting dumpster fire of foreign bots pushing nasty ideologies of all sorts — Tyler keeps fine-tuning Camp Flog Gnaw in ways that actually improve the experience in ways you might not have even noticed needed fixing.
For example: Flipping the Gnaw stage opened up movement festival-wide, making performances from artists like BBTrickz and Alemeda feel more intimate while also making it easier to straight line from Gnaw to Flog (on opposite sides of the main Camp stage). Congestion never felt like the biggest problem at this fest, but that slight traffic relief was noticeable for me.
Even more noticeable was the decision to rotate the Flog stage from its east-west position to a parallel spacing with Camp facing south. OH MY GOODNESS. The last couple of years, watching acts like Kevin Abstract in the afternoon or even Denzel Curry after sunset, it had occurred to me that maybe facing the sun or trying to cram in fans from the right side of the stage weren’t the ideal eyelines. Apparently, Tyler’s team agreed, and the difference was — forgive me — night and day.
Seeing how every iteration of Camp Flog Gnaw actually adds something or makes little fixes with big impacts is even more encouraging in light of the last-minute postponement. It shows that the organizers not only know how to roll with the punches, but find ways to adjust for them before they even hit. If future fests face similar challenges from inclement weather, I wouldn’t be surprised if Tyler and co. find a way to make sunshine from scratch.
On Wednesday, one of the all-time greatest and most entertaining music documentaries will be made available in remastered and expanded form on Disney Plus. The Beatles Anthology originally aired on ABC back in 1995 as a three-part, six-hour miniseries. Then it was released on home video as a five-disc, 10-hour set, which only seems long if you haven’t seen it. But when you put on The Beatles Anthology — which mixes archival footage and live performances with contemporaneous interviews — the oft-told saga of The Fab Four’s rise to cultural dominance and subsequent break up is instantly gripping. And it’s perfect viewing for a long holiday weekend, whether it’s your first time or (in my case) your 27th.
The return of The Beatles Anthology got me thinking about one of my favorite subjects: music documentaries. I’ve spent a good part of my life watching them, and I’ve even gotten to help make them. It’s an art form I care a lot about. So, let’s explore some of the best music documentaries ever made, and analyze what makes them good.
PRE-LIST ENTERTAINMENT: I AM NOT COUNTING CONCERT FILMS (EXCEPT WHEN I DO)
All concert films are music documentaries. But not all music documentaries are concert films. I’m mostly interested in the ones that aren’t. I’m doing this because I already wrote a column on my favorite concert films. But I’m also doing it because a proper music documentary should delve beyond what happens on stage and into the lives of the musicians, giving the viewer a sense of who these people really are when they’re not “on.” Sometimes that happens via the deliberate intentions of the filmmakers, though it can just as often happen accidentally, because you happened to point a camera at someone and revealed some truth that the subject and their PR-handling minions mistakenly forgot to edit out. That’s the stuff I’m seeking out.
But what distinguishes a “concert film” from the sorts of music documentaries I’ll be focusing on? Many music documentaries, after all, include live performance footage. (That’s the “music” part of the equation.) At what point does a “concert film” stop being a concert film and become fodder for this column? Let’s start with an easy one: Jonathan Demme’s Stop Making Sense. Brilliant film. It gives the viewer the best possible view of a Talking Heads show, without any interviews to muck up the pacing. That’s what makes it an all-time great concert movie and not a music documentary by the specific parameters of this article.
Here’s a more difficult one: The Last Waltz. Like Stop Making Sense, it presents a live concert in cinematic form. But it also has post-show interviews with the members of The Band, along with some stand-alone filmed performances. Does The Last Waltz “delve” behind the scenes? It does. However, it’s still mostly a concert film — 80 percent at least — so I’m not counting it here.
How about The Song Remains The Same? You see Led Zeppelin doing their thing at Madison Square Garden in 1973, but then there’s all this other stuff that’s non-concert related, like Robert Plant chilling in the countryside or Jimmy Page hanging out at his creepy Aleister Crowley mansion. But that stuff doesn’t really fit the definition of “documentary.” (Unless Jimmy’s eyes really did authentically glow when he was off tour.) There’s also 1991: The Year Punk Broke, an indispensable snapshot of alt-rock right before the explosion of Nevermind featuring (along with Nirvana) Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr. and The Ramones. Wonderful movie, but a little too heavy on performances for this list.
Then there’s Woodstock, the nearly four-hour concert film from 1970 that includes large swaths of footage offering a sociological view of the audience members and late ’60s hippie culture they represent. I definitely could have put Woodstock here. It’s a concert film with obvious music documentary qualities. But I didn’t include it, because the “concert film” parts are way more entertaining than the “music documentary” parts. Any time you don’t see The Who or Sly & The Family Stone on screen, Woodstock gets pretty boring.
Let’s talk about these movies instead.
35. Wonderland (1977)
By not including concert films, I have freed up space for a subgenre of music documentaries I will refer to as “YouTube Obscurities.” These are the movies you stumble upon late at night when you should be in bed but instead are stuck in a YouTube rabbit hole at 2 a.m. Wonderland is a quintessential example of this phenomenon. A one-hour doc originally made for Dutch television, it follows some of the best and brightest musicians of the late-’70s LA music scene. Like many people who have discovered it, I was initially pointed to Wonderland by the algorithm because I’m a Warren Zevon fan, and Wonderland includes rare footage of the wild-man singer-songwriter hanging out on Sunset Boulevard, eating burritos, and meeting fans, who recognize him from the cover of his recently released debut album. But there are other cool snapshots of future music legends — there’s Linda Ronstadt offering a pocket history of the local scene in a low-rent hotel room while looking like the most beautiful woman who ever lived; Bonnie Raitt protesting sexism in the music industry by insisting her interview take place at Frederick’s Of Hollywood; and a very stoned Jackson Browne delineating the difference between LA musicians (cool, friendly, down to party) and players from New York City (cold, cynical, still down to party).
34. Pearl Jam Twenty (2011)
The most critical issue (if not full-on problem) with modern music documentaries concerns editorial independence and the increasing lack thereof. Many of my favorite music documentaries, as we will discover as this column unfolds, were made by filmmakers emboldened to tell their stories without interference from the subjects. It’s the only way to fully explore the most interesting parts of any musician’s story, which also happens to often (though not always) be the chapters that person doesn’t want exposed. There’s no question that many music documentaries — along with films about famous people in any field — are typically whitewashed of scandal, failure, and criticism. And that makes for worse movies.
And yet… it’s a simple reality that the only way any music documentary gets made is if 1) the subject agrees to be interviewed and (this is possibly more important) 2) they consent to their music being used. So, the trade-off — whether you’re making these films or watching them — is accepting that you’re not getting the “ugly, unvarnished truth” side of the story so that you can get all the other things that make a good doc worth watching.
That includes the kind of rare footage that pops up throughout Pearl Jam Twenty. Cameron Crowe’s film benefits from the director’s relationship with the band members going back to their pre-fame days. Without that connection, you wouldn’t get to see all the early clips of Pearl Jam slugging it out in clubs before the release of their mega-selling 1991 debut Ten, like the one where Eddie Vedder unleashes his rock-star venom on a bouncer and discovers his angsty on-stage persona in the process.
33. George Harrison: Living In The Material World (2011)
Pearl Jam Twenty is an example of a “put it on” movie, the most reliable subgenre of music documentary. Like the “YouTube Obscurities” brand of doc, the “put it on” movie is what you dial up when you want something to watch but can’t decide on what to watch. Only the “put it on” movie is even more re-watchable than the YouTube Obscurity, making it a valuable tool for general restfulness and mental acuity.
A hallmark of the “put it on” music doc is that one scene you must watch anytime you queue up the movie. If you don’t have (at least) that one scene, it’s not a real “put it on” movie. For Pearl Jam Twenty, it’s the scene where Chris Cornell breaks down while talking about the death of Andrew Wood, which is so sad and emotional that it’s almost unwatchable while also at the same time being extremely watchable. For Martin Scorsese’s George Harrison: Living In The Material World — a two-part, three-and-half-hour profile that originally aired on HBO — there are two scenes like that, one sad and one funny. The sad one is Ringo Starr talking about the last time he saw George, which I’m not going to describe because I won’t be able to finish this column. The funny one is Tom Petty talking about how George Harrison’s car trunk was filled with ukuleles, which I like to watch when I’m depressed (over George and Tom no longer being with us, among other tragedies).
32. The Promise: The Making Of Darkness On The Edge Of Town (2010)
This documentary was packaged with a box set commemorating the album and must be considered the finest “box set” music doc I have ever seen. Most of the time, this sort of movie doesn’t rise above “DVD extra” status. But The Promise is a real documentary, and an essential addition to the Springsteen canon. It’s also a “put it on” movie, thanks to the “stick!” scene, which breaks down Springsteen’s obsessive focus on the drum sound of Darkness and how he would always yell “stick!” when he could hear Max Weinberg’s stick on the drum kit. (When I interviewed Adam Granduciel of The War On Drugs, another studio obsessive, in 2017, we spent a few minutes talking about that specific scene.) It’s just one example of Bruce’s borderline psychosis during the making of his “samurai” record, where he chucked the romance of Born To Run and pursued the working-class arena-rock sound that ultimately defined him.
31. Muddy Track (2015)
Every now and then, an “authorized” music doc deliberately depicts the subject in a dire situation, usually to make a larger point about the brutality of touring or the awfulness of the music industry more generally. An example I’m not including on this list is Grant Gee’s Meeting People Is Easy, about Radiohead’s misery during their star-making OK Computer tour. That movie is designed to convey the drudgery of life on the road, and it’s almost too good at it, as Meeting People Is Easy is a drag to watch. (If only Gee had spent less time with Thom Yorke and more time with Ed O’Brien, who admitted to “doing a lot of Charlie on the OK Computer tour” in a recent interview).
A more entertaining spin on the “touring sucks” music doc is Muddy Track, a gonzo depiction of Neil Young’s ill-fated 1986-87 European tour. Directed by Young himself under his usual pseudonym Bernard Shakey, with a handheld video camera he dubs “Otto,” “Muddy Track unfurls one ‘bad vibes’ vignette after another, with shows plagued by bad weather, low ticket sales, and the creeping sense that Neil is over the hill and past his prime,” I wrote in 2024. “When the band screws up a song — given this is Crazy Horse, the screw ups are plentiful — we see an irate Neil cursing out the musicians. Whether this is real or staged is open to question; Neil seems predetermined to show the tour in a bad light. (As he gleefully instructs one camera operator, “Anything that’s bad happens, keep rolling.”).” Neil didn’t screen Muddy Track until 2015, and it was finally made available to the public as part of the Archives Vol. III box et. Had it come out in the late ’80s, Muddy Track might have seemed like nihilistic career suicide. But knowing that Neil later pulled out of his tailspin transforms the film into scummy comedy.
30. Anvil: The Story Of Anvil (2008)
Upon release, Anvil: The Story Of Anvil was marketed as a “real-life Spinal Tap” about a mostly forgotten Canadian heavy metal band from the ’80s trying to make a comeback 20 years later. But the two main band members — singer/guitarist Steve “Lips” Kudlow and drummer Robb Reiner — are too self-aware and grounded in blue-collar realities to fit that description. (Even if the drummer does have virtually the same name as This Is Spinal Tap’s director.) Instead, The Story Of Anvil is one of the best “touring sucks” documentaries ever made. Like Muddy Track starring less storied Canadians, it follows a band on a terrible European tour, which devolves from musical festivals with The Scorpions to sparsely attended club shows where they get stiffed by the owners. And it’s not like the guys in Anvil have a ranch in Northern California to which they can retreat to lick their wounds. The way Anvil tours is how most bands tour, which makes The Story Of Anvil the rare music doc focused not on the trials and triumphs of famous stars, but rather the everyday failures and modest successes of regular schlubs.
29. Talihina Sky: The Story Of Kings Of Leon (2011)
The Story Of Anvil was likened to This Is Spinal Tap because it’s a funny movie about a metal band. But Talihina Sky is actually more like Spinal Tap, as it’s a fly-on-the-wall documentary about a band that doesn’t realize they’re being funny. A retrospective that covers the most successful and compelling years of Kings Of Leon’s career in the 2000s, the film puts extra focus on the period when they were poised to become the biggest rock band in the world. As I wrote not long after its release, “I’m not sure if there’s a specific moment in the film that captures exactly what went wrong with Kings Of Leon. Here’s what Talihina Sky does have: Lots of scenes where bitchin’ guys in fabulous haircuts smoke weed on private jets. And a couple of scenes where [frontman Caleb] Followill nurses a half-empty bottle of Jameson and muses about his family, religion, and how record-label guys picking out singles from an album is like watching a ‘smut film.’” The most memorable scene recalls the Chris Holmes sequence from The Decline Of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years” — which we’ll be discussing soon — “where Followill jokes about shooting heroin to kill his pre-show boredom while his mother looks on backstage.”
Not enough people talk about this movie. Or even remember that it exists. That changes now.
28. Amy (2015)
Another important music documentary subgenre is the “cautionary tale.” Talihina Sky has some cautionary tale elements, especially when viewed with the knowledge that Kings Of Leon’s career fell off a cliff shortly after the film was released. But most of the time, a “cautionary tale” music documentary takes place after the subject has died, and therefore functions as a forensic accounting of their rise, fall, and demise. Few films are as thorough with the “forensic accounting” approach as Asif Kapadia’s Amy, which utilizes a robust supply of home video to tell the story of Amy Winehouse and her deeply depressing progression from naturally funny and preternaturally talented teen to perpetually intoxicated and cruelly hounded pop star. Because this is a film with no spoilers — unless you are somehow interested in Winehouse without knowing her fate — the earlier, happier scenes are actually sadder. The way Kapadia lays it out, the slow but steady tractor beam of self-destruction that drew in Winehouse feels like an unstoppable force, given that she was cursed with loving some truly awful people (her boorish father, her idiot husband) who, of course, deftly avoided the wreckage that befell her.
27. Kurt & Courtney (1998)
This isn’t exactly a criticism of Amy, but an aspect of the film left unacknowledged is that Kapadia is guilty of the same prurient interest in Winehouse’s downfall as the ghoulish media vultures that covered it in real time. He is infinitely more thoughtful and sensitive in his approach, but his film nevertheless hinges on the audience’s interest in exploring the sordid details of her private life. This same dynamic plays out in other “cautionary tale” music docs that take a moralistic stand against the systems that facilitated the subject’s demise; It can be hard for a filmmaker to reckon with being part of the very same diseased show-business apparatus. In his controversial “was Kurt Cobain murdered?” documentary Kurt & Courtney, Nick Broomfield takes the next step by recognizing that apparatus and in his own film’s complicity in it. At the time, Broomfield was accused of endorsing the conspiracy theory that Courtney Love had her husband killed. His tabloid methods and irreverent on-screen persona don’t exactly dispel that perception, but anyone who watches the film will see that Broomfield is more interested in the hangers-on and bottom feeders that operated in Cobain’s orbit and continued to live off his name after he died. That’s the real conspiracy at the heart of his film — it’s not about how he died, but how he was forced to carry on after death.
26. Jimi Hendrix (1973)
One of the original “cautionary tale” music docs, about one of the ultimate cautionary tales in modern music. Jimi Hendrix is such a mythical figure that getting to the bottom of the “real” guy seems all but impossible. This film doesn’t quite get there, but it does benefit from coming out just three years after his death. So many people who were close to him were still alive — his dad, his lady friends, his peers like Eric Clapton and Pete Townshend — and their memories weren’t yet completely clouded by being interviewed for a million other Hendrix movies. It feels like the closest thing to experiencing Hendrix in real time as you can get more than 50 years later.
25. The Devil And Daniel Johnston (2005)
The rare “cautionary tale” music doc about a person who was, at the time, still alive. And yet The Devil And Daniel Johnston is at least as harrowing as Amy, charting the multiple mental breakdowns of the titular indie singer-songwriter. In the film, Johnston routinely insists that he is fighting a losing battle with Satan, and the circumstances of his life often support that belief. Calamities that would represent major life touchstones for most people — attack a friend with a hammer, force an old woman to jump out a window, crash an airplane your elderly father is piloting — happen to Johnston on the regular. These events are paralleled with Johnston’s achievements, which put the movie in an additional music doc subgenre, the “cult hero story.” (Notable films in this category include Searching For Sugarman, about the obscure ’70s rocker Sixto Rodriguez, and Jandek On Corwood, about the enigmatic lo-fi artist Jandek.) A key component of the “cult hero story” music doc is arguing that the subject, while mostly unknown, has secret importance to the larger music culture. This usually leads to dubious hyperbole: In The Devil And Daniel Johnston, a former manager claims that Johnston’s collection of self-recorded tapes from the ’80s is better than Robert Johnson’s body of work. (Spoiler alert: It’s not. He’s still good, though.)
24. A Poem Is A Naked Person (1974)
Getting back to the concert film vs. music documentary question: A great concert film relies on the talent and charisma of the musicians — if either is lacking, the film dies — whereas a great music documentary must be centered on people who can hold your attention even when they’re not playing music. This is why “cult hero story” docs work so well despite the subjects not having wide name recognition. You can be absorbed by Daniel Johnston’s life without ever hearing “True Love Will Find You In The End.”
No other maker of music docs takes to this maxim like Les Blank. In short films like 1968’s The Blues According To Lightnin’ Hopkins (about the titular Texas blues artist) and 1973’s Hot Pepper (about “zydeco king” Clifton Chenier), Blank adopts an immersive approach, largely forgoing interviews in favor of implanting his camera in a backwoods American community and allowing the viewer to soak up the sounds, sights, and flavors. (You can see both films and more excellent Blank-directed music docs on The Criterion Channel.) For A Poem Is A Naked Person, Blank applies this method to a more famous musician, Leon Russell, by putting him in the context of his home base of 1970s Tulsa, Oklahoma. It’s hardly a conventional music movie — we spend as much time with Willie Nelson and George Jones as we do the proprietor of a local parachute jumping contest — but few filmmakers can put you in a specific place and time as vividly. That it’s only tangentially about Russell is to the film’s benefit. As one of his fans says in the movie, “I am here to see the people. And Leon Russell also.”
23. Heartworn Highways (1981)
Like a Les Blank film not directed by Les Blank, Heartworn Highways takes a fly-on-the-wall view of the burgeoning Outlaw culture bubbling under 1970s country in Nashville and Austin, following artists who were on their way to becoming widely emulated icons, including Townes Van Zandt, Guy Clark, Steve Earle, Rodney Crowell, and David Allan Coe, among others. One thing that’s immediately apparent: Outlaw music did not pay back in the day! These guys are poor, down-and-out characters who live in trailer parks and dilapidated houses populated by crusty drunkards and friendly dogs named Geraldine. To this day, blow-dried Americana wannabes watch this film and try to imitate the articulate dirtbags depicted within. But as Heartworn Highways makes plain, it’s a long and hard road toward that kind of lived-in greatness.
22. Heavy Metal Parking Lot (1986)
Perhaps the most famous of all “subculture” music documentaries. Filmmakers John Heyn and Jeff Krulik aren’t as artful as Blank; they simply took a video camera to the Capital Centre in Landover, Maryland on May 31, 1986, and shot a collection of mulleted winos and sleeveless potheads hanging outside a Judas Priest/Dokken concert. But they achieved roughly the same result, which is the preservation of a world that can only exist today when you watch this movie. The way this 15-minute short manages to present fully-formed and indelible characters is a miracle of economy — the lecherous 20-year-old with the underaged girlfriend, the skinny Steve Perry clone who sings an off-key “Livin’ After Midnight,” the prickly kid who thinks punk rock should be shot to Mars, they all live in my heart.
21. Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story By Martin Scorsese (2019)
Here we have the first instance of a music documentary that also showed up on my concert films list. (It came in a little higher there, at No. 22.) So, how can I justify also putting it here? In that other column, I described Rolling Thunder Revue as “a work of criticism that comments on other concert films. Many of the interviews are pushing deliberate exaggerations, fabrications, pranks, and goofs, in a manner that is meant not only to obfuscate the truth but to suggest this kind of film can’t ever really purport to present ‘truth.’” I go on to maintain that it should be considered a concert film because “the music and the tomfoolery tend to exist side by side. Stefan van Dorp does not step on Bob Dylan screaming out “Isis,” and vice versa.” I stand by that. However, I also believe that this film also qualifies as a music documentary — or, rather, a music documentary about music documentaries and the narratives they create — because the Stefan van Dorp side of the equation is equally important to the music.
20. U2: Rattle & Hum (1988)
This was also on my concert films list, which felt like a contrarian opinion given the movie’s checkered reputation. Even U2 seems to regard Rattle & Hum as an unfortunate boondoggle. (Or else we would have surely gotten a 4K Ultra edition by now. Some of us sickos, by the way, would love that!) My case for this deserving dual status as a great music documentary is that the part of Rattle & Hum that makes it a worthy concert film — the immaculately filmed live footage – is not what anybody ever talks about. What’s remembered are the scenes where U2 is accidentally revealing their true selves. (Or, specifically in the case of Bono, his uncontainable egotism.) This is the band that will film themselves visiting Elvis’ grave or coaching B.B. King how to play their ersatz blues songs without any apparent shame. They can’t help themselves. And they won’t listen to anybody who might tell them to edit those parts out. Thank goodness for that.
INTERMISSION: THE BEST MUSIC DOCUMENTARY THAT WE WILL NEVER SEE
I am convinced that if I ever saw Ezra Edelman’s nine-hour documentary about Prince — commissioned and then held back by Netflix, because they were once smart and now they are cowardly — I would put it at the top of this list.
Ezra Edelman, if this column by some chance came up on Google Alerts because it includes your name: Hook me up with a screener link!
Back to the list.
19. Oasis: Supersonic (2016)
Incredible “put it on” movie, no question. Also, a doc where you could take all the music out and still have high entertainment value. Just have Noel and Liam Gallagher’s interviews and enjoy your two hours. I just have two issues: The first is that it ends before the making of Be Here Now. Which is like wrapping up Goodfellas before the helicopter sequence. Would Goodfellas still be a good movie without that? Sure. But it wouldn’t be Goodfellas.
18. Long Strange Trip (2017)
The other problem with Oasis: Supersonic is that it should have been a longer, multi-part documentary. That’s not something I normally ask for. The streaming era has pumped loads of carbohydrates into the documentary industry. So many films now are bloated out into two or three parts when a tight 90 minutes would be sufficient. But there are exceptions where you actually want more time with the subjects. (I realize many people wouldn’t want to spend five minutes with Noel and Liam, much less five hours. All I can say is: We are not the same.)
Few rock bands demanded the multi-part doc treatment more than the Grateful Dead. Fortunately, Amir Bar-Lev rises to the occasion with telling their epic story, giving proper due to the triumphs and the tragedies in a manner that feels honest and unencumbered even though all the surviving members participated. The critical (and proper) decision, for one, to end the film with Jerry Garcia’s death — rather than explore the post-Jerry years with Dead And Company and other subsequent Dead iterations — surely must have ruffled some feathers in the band’s famously prickly camp. Not to mention Bar-Lev’s implicit argument that their non-stop tour schedule hastened Jerry’s demise.
Sure enough, when I interviewed Mickey Hart in 2017, he poo-pooed the film. “The Grateful Dead isn’t sad, mostly we’re a bunch of bloody yucks and we’re funny. We have great fun. That movie wasn’t fun. It’s not a date movie. That’s the only thing I can say about it.” Take that as an endorsement.
17. We Jam Econo: The Story Of The Minutemen (2005)
The Grateful Dead demanded a multi-part doc because they made enough music (and drama) to warrant that amount of time. The Minutemen, meanwhile, didn’t last nearly as long. And they also didn’t have the nearly same level of interpersonal rancor. In fact, the relationship of Mike Watt and D. Boon is one of rock’s great love stories, with a crushingly tragic, Shakespearian twist at the end. Like Our Band Could Be Your Life in celluloid form, We Jam Econo is an essential retelling of American indie rock’s earliest days. But more than that, this is one of the loveliest movies about friendship I have ever seen. May we all find someone who misses us after we’re gone like Mike Watt aches for the memory of his buddy D.
16. Rush: Beyond The Lighted Stage (2010)
The same movie as We Jam Econo — three guys in a band, the drummer is a virtuoso, the guitarist and bassist are in love with each other from childhood, and they all end up becoming legends. The particulars are different but that’s the important stuff.
15. All You Need Is Love: The Story Of Popular Music (1977)
Hands down the most ambitious doc on this list. Originally a 17-part series that aired on the BBC in 1977, All You Need Is Love is an attempt to encapsulate the entire history of 20th century music up to that point, from rock and country to blues and jazz to swing and ragtime. Director Tony Palmer is an opinionated fan, which animates the film’s passionate point of view while also opening up some inevitable blind spots and biases. (His view of Black American “authenticity,” for one, will surely strike some viewers as problematic in retrospect.) Palmer’s timing was also inopportune — the last episode speculates on the future of music right before punk and disco took over as transformational forces. Setting all that aside, All You Need Is Love offers a motherlode of insights and pleasures, starting with the interviews Palmer was able to land. This series is old enough to have a foot in a distant time, when people like Bing Crosby, Dizzy Gillespie, and Hoagy Charmichael were still around and available to speak. And then there’s the notorious interview with Phil Spector, where the subsequently disgraced producer is seen in his darkened mansion, drunkenly bashing out his old hits on an acoustic guitar with the world’s worst toupee perched atop his head. In those moments, All You Need Is Love is like a music history book come to life.
14. No Direction Home (2005)
Having worked on a few documentaries myself, I’ve come to appreciate the challenges of securing all the interviews you need to make a movie like this really work. It’s harder than it looks! When you work behind the scenes, you understand how often these interviews fall through. You set up an interview, you secure a location to film, and then the guy gets a sore throat and can’t make it. So, you have to find somebody else to shoot that day or else you’ve wasted money on the location. And then you hope the sore throat guy feels better by the time you leave town in a few days.
I think about that now when I re-watch No Direction Home, Martin Scorsese’s first Bob Dylan doc. Like All You Need Is Love, it’s more valuable with each passing year for all the many important people who were captured on film that are no longer with us. Allen Ginsberg, Pete Seeger, Liam Clancy, Dave Van Ronk, Suze Rotolo — they all come back to life whenever you put this movie on, underscoring that Dylan’s story (especially in his early years) is as much about a community as it is about one man.
13. The Beatles: Get Back (2021)
The “event” music documentary of the decade. When this dropped at the tail end of the COVID shutdown, it felt like a blast of oxygen after months of suffocation. As the closest possible approximation of actually hanging out with The Beatles in early 1969, Get Back would have found a big audience regardless of the outside circumstances. That the movie came out, however, at a time when many of us were deprived for so long of in-person hangs, it had an extra layer of vicarious pleasure. Beyond that, it’s fair to say that a movie like Get Back — a multi-hour deep dive on the making of a not terribly distinguished record — could not be made about any other band. Not only because few bands were filmed as often as The Beatles, but also because few bands can hold your attention as rapturously. They don’t even have to do much; Wearing some of the most spectacular combinations of coats, ties, and hats known to man is more than enough.
12. David Bowie: Cracked Actor (1975)
An all-time “YouTube Obscurities” classic. Though YouTube has made Cracked Actor less obscure than it might have otherwise been. Originally made for the BBC, Cracked Actor is an hour-long profile of Bowie during his Young Americans period, when he was subsisting solely on cocaine and cartons of milk. He is, simultaneously, at peak glamorousness and peak “he’s so skinny and stoned he could die at any minute” precariousness. The most memorable sequence shows David riding in the back of a limousine sailing through the California mountains, sucking on his milk carton and listening to Aretha Franklin’s “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman.”
The best things that can be said of Cracked Actor now are 1) how incredible it is that Bowie survived this era and 2) how unlikely such a film about a major star would get made (or shown) today.
11. The Kids Are Alright (1979)
I wonder if this movie also wouldn’t be made today, since on paper it sounds like making a YouTube playlist. In lieu of the usual talking-head interviews, director Jeff Stein creates a narrative about The Who by stitching together archival concert clips, contemporary live footage, TV interviews, variety show appearances, and various bits of anarchy. It was an innovative approach at the time, and the film’s lack of pretense and sentiment is still refreshing in the field of classic-rock movies typically overstuffed with worshipful puffery. In The Kids Are Alright, the music and busted-up gear are more than enough.
10. Classic Albums: Steely Dan, Aja (1999)
I could do a column just on the Classic Albums series, which launched in the late-’90s as a British television export before expanding to home video and various streaming outlets. From the beginning, the makers were able to secure the cooperation of all the important parties in some of the biggest bands of all time, from Pink Floyd to Fleetwood Mac to U2. And despite scant running times of about 50 minutes, all the installments manage to cram in loads of useful background information about how the albums were conceived, written, and recorded, with the musicians breaking down tracks while fiddling with expensive soundboards.
I have seen all but a small handful of episodes. The series represents the pinnacle of “put it on” music doc comfort food. And the best of the bunch is Aja. It’s definitely the one I have watched the most times. First, you have Donald Fagen and Walter Becker discussing, on camera, their methods with uncommon openness and (mostly) without evasive snark. And then you have the participation of critical session musicians like Bernard Purdie and Chuck Rainey, who isolate and recreate their instrumental contributions to the album. And, finally, there’s the record itself, a monolith of ’70s LA studio perfection that is extremely well-suited for this kind analysis.
9. History Of The Eagles (2013)
The rare music doc where hating the band in question might actually make the viewing experience more enjoyable. I used to hate the Eagles, but this movie changed my mind. Not because it makes Don Henley and Glenn Frey seem like sympathetic figures. It actually does the opposite — by the end they seem like even bigger dicks than they were at the start. But, like Kobe Bryant when he adopted “mamba mentality” and went full heel, leaning into their dickishness makes the Eagles more endearing as the defining boomer band that ushered rock music from hippie country-rock innocence to cold-blooded, endless reunion tour capitalism. You might not love them, but they will earn your grudging respect.
8. I Am Trying To Break Your Heart: A Film About Wilco (2002)
In the entry about Get Back, I neglected to introduce another important music documentary subgenre: the “making of the album” movie. Though in Get Back, the creation of what became Let It Be seems less important than observing The Beatles in a semi-casual environment. In I Am Trying To Break Your Heart, the album matters more because Wilco is working on possibly the greatest indie-rock LP of the 21st century, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. But the drama, like it was with The Beatles, does ultimately reside in the deteriorating relationship between the two most important members, Jeff Tweedy and Jay Bennett. While sticklers for the “making of the album” aspects of I Am Trying To Break Your Heart can rightly complain that Jim O’Rourke was at least equally important and doesn’t show up here at all, this nonetheless remains one of the two definitive rock docs of the last 25 years. And it’s certainly the most notable instance of a rock star puking on camera after a song mixing-inspired panic attack.
7. Metallica: Some Kind Of Monster (2004)
Getting back to Get Back: A lesson of that film is that the making of a solid-but-not-great (or even plain old mediocre) album can be more narratively satisfying than the creation of a masterpiece. This is convincingly confirmed by Some Kind Of Monster, the Metallica movie about the recording of 2003’s “actually not that bad” mid-career turning point St. Anger. If Wilco was a band on the verge of falling apart during the making of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, then Metallica feels like they’re being held together by Scotch tape and expensive therapy sessions. Anyone inclined to position this purely as a “real-life Spinal Tap” ought to reconsider their level of respect for Metallica, who consented to participating in (and paying for) a film that exposed their vulnerabilities in ways no other macho rock band would dare. You could argue that Lars Ulrich simply doesn’t have the self-awareness to not put himself on film talking about his art collection — or that James Hetfield lacks the shame to conceal his rehab stint — but that severely undersells the courageousness of this project. Never forget this was the band that made Lulu. They do not fear your mockery.
6. Dig! (2004)
I’ll quote myself from earlier this year: “Dig! checks a lot of boxes for things that I love — rock ‘n’ roll, musical rivalries, comically large sideburns, performative decadence, delusional dreamers, tragicomic buffoonery. But above all, Dig! is the most quotable rock doc you will ever see. And almost all those quotes come from [Anton] Newcombe, who might be a genius and definitely is an asshole. This gives him the unique ability to claim that he is ‘kicking off a musical revolution’ with a straight face. (What Jack Black does ironically Anton Newcombe declares with Klaus Kinski-level maniacal seriousness.)
Here’s a quick sublist of the five best quotes from Dig!
5. “No one’s gonna say ‘fuck you’ to me on MY stage with MY band!”
4. “This song is about love and it’s called, well, ‘Love.’”
3. “The Beatles were for sale, I gave it away.”
2. “I never do anything wrong. That’s why I never say I’m sorry.”
1. “You fucking broke my sitar, motherfucker!”)
5. Runnin’ Down A Dream (2007)
The second greatest “put it on” music doc of all time, though at least two circumstances work against it: 1) Director Peter Bogdanovich, an otherwise brilliant New Hollywood era filmmaker whose ascot-wearing demeanor is diametrically opposed to the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle embodied by Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers; 2) The expansive four-hour running time, which again runs contrary to the “don’t bore us, get to the chorus” mentality of this band. Alas, neither factor at all impedes on the quality of Runnin’ Down A Dream. The essential quality of all “put it on” music docs is hang-time ability. Do you want to spend time with these people or not? In the history of music, few bands have ever had more hang-time ability than The Heartbreakers.
4. The Beatles Anthology (1995)
The No. 1 greatest “put it on” music doc of all time. Decades before Get Back, it was the original Beatles “event” documentary when it aired over the Thanksgiving holiday in 1995. Then I purchased the DVD and continued to watch it even as TVs got bigger and the resolution grew worse. For all the times The Beatles story has been told and retold, this remains the single most entertaining iteration, mostly because it comes from the guys themselves (with occasional input from compatriots and collaborators like George Martin and Neil Aspinall). The Beatles story is like Greek mythology — no matter how many times you hear the same stories, there’s always something to keep you interested. With The Beatles Anthology, especially in retrospect, the new wrinkle is experiencing these tales through the prism of the 1990s Beatles. This incarnation is as specific as any ’60s mirco-era — George’s multi-colored jacket, Ringo’s ponytail, Paul’s decision to do an on-camera interview while piloting a tugboat for some reason. I can’t wait to experience it all again in high-def!
3. The Decline Of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years (1988)
This hair-metal masterpiece is widely referenced and beloved by all music doc fans. Among the only critics is the director, the great Penelope Spheeris, who expressed her misgivings when I interviewed her in 2015. “It’s so frivolous on a lot of levels,” she insisted. “Thank god it got a little deeper with Megadeth and Chris Holmes, but you know, all I cared about was being able to document a certain point in history so future generations could see it.” I could not disagree more about the frivolous part. The Decline Of Western Civilization Part II must be counted among the finest works of sociology in the canon of great music docs. This is especially true of the Chris Holmes sequence she referenced, in which the guitarist for the boorish LA band WASP is seen chugging vodka in his swimming pool while his mother looks on. Never has there been a more apt metaphor for rock excess. But even here, Spheeris wasn’t sure she nailed it. “I felt like we got nothing,” Spheeris said of the scene. “When the interview was over, I told the [director of photography], Jeff Zimmerman, ‘We’ve got to figure out some way we can get some money to shoot this again because we didn’t get it.’ I cut it together out of desperation and hoped that it would be OK. I never in the editing room went, ‘Wow, this is a major statement.’ And the weirdest thing is that’s the part of the movie that everybody talks about now.”
Penelope, wherever you are: You made a top-three music doc of all time. I salute you.
2. Don’t Look Back (1967)
The top two films are notable for 1) the participation of the subject and 2) the editorial independence of the filmmakers. Neither film can be broadly classified as “positive” depictions of the artists in question, and yet they are both iconic films that ultimately make their subjects look incredibly cool, even when their actions are questionable and even hazardous. There is a lesson here for contemporary acts who view a potential documentary as PR management for their brand. The films that actually matter and last for the long haul have some dirt in them. The dirt works. The dirt is attractive. Cleanliness meanwhile fades quickly and then is forgotten.
1. Gimme Shelter (1970)
I gave this one the smallest of edges because Bob Dylan torturing journalists is ever so slightly less dramatic than the Hells Angels brutalizing hippies at Altamont. This movie is so rich and detailed (despite a svelte 91-minute running time) that you even get to know the maniacs in the crowd. The drugged out naked lady trying to climb on stage. The dead-eyed Angel Sonny Barger trying to murder Mick Jagger with his sociopathic stare. The tripping dude who looks like a wolf man slowly losing his mind while the Stones play “Under My Thumb.” Gimme Shelter also topped my concert films list, and it would also do well if I ever make a “legitimately scary” horror movies list. One of the greatest American films of any genre.
On her Short N’ Sweet tour, Sabrina Carpenter has made it a tradition to “arrest” people on the grounds of being too hot. So far, she has gotten an impressive roster of celebrities involved in the bit, including but not limited to Marcello Hernandez (as his Saturday Night Live character Domingo), Anne Hathaway, Nicole Kidman, Salma Hayek, Gigi Hadid, Margaret Qualley and Jack Antonoff, Ayo Edebiri and Clairo, Olivia Dean, Millie Bobby Brown, and Joe Keery (Djo).
Well, the tour wrapped up last week with a run of shows at Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles. At the final date yesterday (November 23), Carpenter had one final arrest to make and she made it count, recruiting Muppets icon Miss Piggy (here’s a video). Amid a brief chat, Piggy said she was enjoying the show, but she did have some notes she’d share privately later. Eventually, a security guard (a bear puppet) carried out the arrest and escourted Miss Piggy away.
Check out the setlist from the final show below.
Sabrina Carpenter’s Short N’ Sweet Tour Setlist: November 23, 2025 at Crypto.com Arena, Los Angeles, California
At a Manchester concert this past summer, Billie Eilishtold the audience, “So you may have noticed that there are more cameras than usual in here. Basically, I can’t say much about it, but what I can say is that I’m working on something very, very special with somebody named James Cameron and it’s going to be in 3D.”
Now we know exactly what’s going: On Instagram hours ago, Eilish shared a photo of herself with Cameron and announced, “HIT ME HARD AND SOFT: THE TOUR (LIVE IN 3D) coming to theatres on march 20th 2026 !!!! this has been one of my favorite tours everrrrrr and being able to capture it and co-direct this film with @jamescameronofficial has truly been a dream come true. can’t wait for you all to see it.”
She discussed working with Cameron a few months ago in a Wall Street Journal interview, saying (as CinemaBlend notes):
“Well, it’s been an insanely amazing, surreal experience working with James Cameron. I’m really excited for all of it, and I’m so excited for the fans to experience this 3D situation that we’re working on. It’s nothing I’ve ever done, and I haven’t seen anything really like it, and I’m just kind of blown away at every step of the process. He spends the entire show [gestures framing hands] in front of every single, like all of the screens, and he just never quits. He never yawns, and he’s so respectful of what I want.”
Keeping up with new music can be exhausting, even impossible. From the weekly album releases to standalone singles dropping on a daily basis, the amount of music is so vast it’s easy for something to slip through the cracks. Even following along with the Uproxx recommendations on a daily basis can be a lot to ask, so every Monday we’re offering up this rundown of the best new music this week.
This week saw Tate McRae continue boosting her biggest album yet and BigXthaPlug add yet another huge collaborator to his contacts. Yeah, it was a great week for new music. Check out the highlights below.
So Close To What is worth celebrating, as the project became McRae’s first No. 1 album upon its release earlier this year. McRae revived the project last week with a deluxe edition, which includes “Nobody’s Girl” and its accompanying lo-fi video.
BigXthaPlug — “Cold” Feat. Post Malone
A few years ago, neither BigXthaPlug nor Post Malone were making country music. Now, they find themselves among the genre’s biggest stars, and they met up last week on the emotional “Cold.”
The Kid Laroi — “A Perfect World”
Laroi had a new album finished… but then he scrapped it. In its place, he made another new album: Before I Forget, which he announced last week. He also dropped the throwback pop/R&B single “A Perfect World.”
Skrillex — “While You Were Sleeping”
Skrillex has had a surprising 2025. Earlier in the year, he came out of nowhere to drop the album F*ck U Skrillex You Think Ur Andy Warhol But Ur Not!! and last week, he delivered another surprise release, the five-track Hit Me Where It Hurts X EP.
Peso Pluma and Tito Double P — “Intro”
Peso Pluma and Tito Double P are two of the strongest forces in música Mexicana and they’re also cousins. Unsurprisingly, then, they teamed up last week on “Intro,” a cinematic number that sees Pluma returning to his roots.
Fred Again.., Sammy Virji, and Winny — “Winny”
We’re a couple months into Fred Again..’s ten-week drop of new USB songs, which means we’re nearly at the end. His latest is the bassy and thumping “Winny,” a link-up with Sammy Virji and Winny.
Tobias Jesso Jr. — “Waiting Around”
Jesso is best known as a songwriter to the stars, but a decade ago, he had some buzz of his own going with his debut solo album Goon. He just got back to that with a long-awaited new LP, Shine, which features highlights like the tender “Waiting Around.”
Rico Nasty — “Pepper”
It’s only been a few months since Rico dropped her latest album, Nasty. She apparently had more material ready to go, though, as she came through last week with “Pepper,” an intense song that sees Rico getting in her lyrical bag.
Kelly Lee Owens — “Lose Your Head”
Owens has stated that her new EP Kelly is about “embodying sound and those collective, physical experiences we only really have in clubs or at music events.” Now that the projects out, it’s clear that mission was accomplished on bangers like “Lose Your Head.”
Labrinth — “Implosion”
Labrinth has a new album, Cosmic Opera: Act I, set for the top of next year. His scope is always ambitious and he proves that on “Implosion,” which successfully melds symphonic and electronic elements.
Welcome to SNX DLX, your weekly roundup of the best sneakers to hit the internet. It’s time to accept it — this year in sneakers has essentially come to a close. Yes, there are six more weeks of 2025 left, but this is usually the time of year where new releases come to a halt, replaced instead by re-releases and best sellers aimed at the general holiday audience. A few gems will still slip through the cracks, but this is probably the last time this year we’re going to get a release week this strong.
But keep your eyes open, because even though traditionally this time of year is slow, there are always a handful of special surprise releases aimed at the holiday. And if you’re too busy for all of that, let us do it for you! Here are this week’s best new sneaker drops, and where to find them!
Joe Freshgoods x New Balance 2010 Cub With Eucalyptus
One of our favorite New Balance collaborators is back with the brand! Chicago based designer Joe Freshgood has linked up with New Balance this week to do what he does best — revamp classics from the 2000s era, outfitting them with modern design touches that elevate the original designs.
The ABZORB 2010 features a synthetic upper with printed bouclé textile overlays over diamond knit mesh underlays. Rounding out the design are some reflective elements throughout, and a slight yellowing and aged finish.
The Joe Freshgoods x New Balance 2010 Cub with Eucalyptus is out now for a retail price of $179.99. Pick up a pair at New Balance.
The Dark Ice Wine 992 doesn’t have any hype or an exciting collaborator attached — it’s simply a great shoe in a great colorway. As much as we love the Joe Freshgoods release, this is kind of what New Balance does best! This 992 sports a suede and mesh upper with synthetic overlays, reflective accents, and a combo ENCAP and C-CAP midsole for a comfortable and supportive step.
The real selling point is this beautiful colorway though, which combines purple tones with black and a contrasting orange “N” logo.
The New Balance Made in USA 992 Dark Ice Wine is out now for a retail price of $199.99. Pick up a pair at New Balance.
In many ways the Jordan 10 represents a special moment in the Jordan lineage. It’s not only the first double digit Jordan, laying the groundwork for the look and feel of what was to come, but it’s also the design Jordan first wore on his return to the court after a brief retirement. It represents a new start, and for that alone it’s one of the most interesting Jordan silhouettes. It certainly helps that it looks dope as well.
This week’s version features a dark and stealthy combination of charcoal grey and black. If Darth Vader played basketball, he’d be rocking these.
The Nike Air Jordan 10 Charred Grey and Black is out now for a retail price of $215. Pick up a pair via the Nike SNKRS app.
Nigo x Nike Air Force 3 Low Phantom and Night Stadium
For Nigo’s latest with Nike, the designer looked to the art of kintsugi, the Japanese tradition of repairing broken pottery, for this fused together take on the Air Force 3. The sneaker sports a textured leather upper with off-center charcoal and white color blocking, with gold accents.
This release proves once again that Nigo has still got it!
The Nigo x Nike Air Force 3 Low Phantom and Night Stadium is out now for a retail price of $170. Pick up a pair via the Nike SNKRS app.
The Vomero silhouette has enjoyed a bit of a renaissance, whether or not that renewed interest will translate to variants like the Vomero Plus remains to be seen, but we’re rooting for the chance! The Plus takes the basic shape of the Vomero, ditches most of the plastic, and embraces a more comfort-focused lifestyle design. The sneaker sports a light mesh upper and a full-length ZoomX foam for a cushioned and responsive step.
The Nike Vomero Plus Sail and Baroque Brown is out now for a retail price of $180. Pick up a pair via the Nike SNKRS app.
Nike Kobę 9 Low Protro EM University Red and Metallic Gold
First released in 2014, the Kobe 9 Protro EM University Red and Metallic Gold features a colorway meant to evoke China, with its vibrant red mesh upper, glittering gold accents, and snake-inspired pattern work on the tongue. But this sneaker isn’t just a show piece, it’s also designed with play in mind.
Aside from being ultra lightweight and breathable, this Protro 9 sports a React foam middle, a carbon fiber plate outfitted outsole, and multidirectional tread for fast change-ups.
The Nike Kobe 9 Low Protro EM University Red and Metallic Gold is set to drop on November 22nd at 7:00 AM PST for a retail price of $190. Pick up a pair via the Nike SNKRS app.
Luxurious and elevated — that’s how we’d best describe this week’s Women’s Jordan 3 Sail and Pale Ivory. The sneaker sports a tumbled leather upper with suede mudguards, a super clean icy blue outsole, and gold hardware. It’s a sneaker designed for royalty!
The Nike Women’s Air Jordan 3 Sail and Pale Ivory is set to drop on November 22nd at 7:00 AM PST for a retail price of $205. Pick up a pair via the Nike SNKRS app.
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