There was a time when music documentaries promised revelations. They were carved out as artefacts for the curious and the critical, not shrines built to cement sainthood. But now, you can predict every frame before hitting play.
The same template is dragged out, airbrushed for gloss, and paraded around like a cultural gift when it is nothing but pre-approved canonising for artists already propped up on enough critical scaffolding to survive the next ten cultural apocalypses.
There’s the grainy footage of a provincial childhood, then the adolescent struggle, followed by rapid ascent, decadent peak, the crash, the comeback (if they’re alive), or the elegiac fade-out (if they’re not). All of it stitched together with interviews from tired industry heads who have been saying the same things about “influence” and “genius” for decades. It is not history, it is a hagiography – and the creativity of the medium is rotting.
Cut and Paste Myths in Modern Music Documentaries
In the past five years, you could play a drinking game with these documentaries and barely make it through half an hour sober. Whether it’s Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry, Lewis Capaldi: How I’m Feeling Now, or Amy, you get the same saccharine sentimentality, the same framing devices, and the same suspension of criticality.
These films tell you who to mourn, who to admire, and who to place on a plinth, while any real investigation into the context around their career is either lazily skimmed over or ignored entirely. The artist becomes a myth, their surroundings fade into irrelevance, and their audience is expected to consume the story without so much as an eyebrow raised. These are not documentaries, they’re cinematic candles at the altar.
Music documentaries have become less about music and more about personality packaging. The industry has found yet another way to repackage someone’s trauma, wrap it in soft lighting, and ship it to streaming platforms in time for award season. Even when the artist in question is still alive, the tone has become pre-emptively funereal. There is a hunger for a fall, and if there hasn’t been one yet, the narrative will dig until it finds one.
Who Is This For?
These documentaries are not made for the curious. They are not made for those who want to understand the lineage of a genre, the shifting cultural tides that shaped a sound, or the strange, tangled path a movement took before it entered the mainstream. They are made for fans who want to see their favourites fluffed for ninety minutes. There is no challenge, no scrutiny, no real journalism. You’re more likely to find thoughtful analysis in a 30-minute YouTube video produced in someone’s bedroom than in a glossy Netflix production signed off by a team of executive producers with marketing degrees.
Take the Before Bauhaus: How Goth Became Goth video essay on YouTube, for example – it traces the cultural roots of goth not through chart data and glossy interviews but through socio-political context, artistic genealogy, and actual music analysis. It doesn’t fawn, it educates. It doesn’t bend the narrative to make one band look like a genesis point, it unpicks the lineage like someone who still gives a damn about what the music means and where it came from. These are the kinds of insights you should be able to expect from the medium, yet they’re nowhere to be found in most modern music documentaries.
Sanitised, Safe and Approved by PR
The real crime is how little risk any of these films are willing to take. Even when the subject matter is ripe for critical analysis – think the industry’s treatment of female artists, the commodification of mental health struggles, or the systemic rot under major labels – it is tiptoed around like it’s made of glass. We’re left with tearful confessionals from inner circles and family members but no exploration of why these artists struggled, beyond vague gestures at fame being “hard”.
These documentaries are safe because safe sells. They are commissioned by the same companies that also hold the rights to the music and the image, and the merchandise. There’s no incentive to challenge the narrative, to reveal the contradictions, or to question how the machinery of fame operates. They leave you with the emotional resonance of a shampoo advert and about as much cultural insight.
This is where The Punk Singer broke the mould. It didn’t just track Kathleen Hanna’s career like a Wikipedia article set to music. It contextualised her work, her politics, the scenes that shaped her, and the way her art interacted with feminism in real time. It challenged its audience to understand her as an artist and as a part of a larger cultural resistance. It dared to be messy, it dared to be critical, and it left you with something to actually think about.
The Echo Chamber of Hero Worship
The hero-worship format dulls everything it touches. It robs the subject of their humanity and erases the world around them. It repeats the same origin stories as if each artist materialised in a vacuum, untouched by the cultural and political conditions that shape music. It is a conveyor belt of icons, each one getting their turn under the halo-light of posthumous praise or pre-mortem adulation.
And there’s no shortage of these films. Miss Americana, Shawn Mendes: In Wonder, Wham!, Oasis: Supersonic – even when they do touch on struggle or conflict, it is rarely anything more than surface-deep, treated as a minor beat in the rhythm of a pre-destined rise. Some of the more recent announcements include documentaries about BTS, Olivia Rodrigo, and even a second round of Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck-style deep dives. What they all share is a refusal to get their hands dirty.
The artists might be compelling, but their stories are flattened. The real guts of their music, their context, their contradictions, are left unexamined because hero worship has no room for nuance. You can’t question a saint.
Conclusion: The Need for Critical Curiosity
There is nothing wrong with admiration. But when admiration becomes the only lens through which we’re allowed to view an artist, we’ve lost the plot. Music documentaries should open new windows, not just polish the stained glass. They should investigate, not validate. And they should value truth over tidiness.
It’s not that artists don’t deserve to have their stories told – but they deserve more than this. They deserve a medium that respects the chaos of creativity, the context of culture, and the complexity of being a human being in the music industry. Until the formula is broken, the best revelations will continue to come from independent video essayists who aren’t afraid to question, to dig deeper, and to put the music back at the centre of the story.
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Article by Amelia Vandergast