PBS put together 10 hour long episodes for its documentary on the history rock. I will give it credit that it didn't whitewash the racism that was attached to its history like everything else in America at that time.
“It seemed like on Monday there was no rock ‘n’ roll,” says Robbie Robertson, recalling the early ‘50s in the first episode of “Rock & Roll,” a 10-hour PBS documentary series. “There was Perry Como and Patti Page and the Four Lads. . . . And then on Tuesday it was like all these people had been waiting in the chutes, ready to come charging out.”
If the former Band leader’s sense of weight and wonder sounds like Carl Sagan talking about the Big Bang, it’s fitting. “Rock & Roll,” co-produced by Boston public station WGBH and the BBC, argues that the supernova of Little Richard and Elvis Presley was, culturally speaking, the creation of a whole new universe. And from there it lays out the history of rock as a series of subsequent bangs that spawned musical galaxies.
Each hourlong segment chronicles the birth and evolution of a rock ‘n’ roll upheaval (or sometimes two related ones), from Episode 1’s examination of the first renegade explosions to the concluding segment’s look at how the ‘80s-90s rise of rap mirrors those early developments.
They could use a nice update which would be marvelous if the redid the entire series.
Open thread away.
