Streaming shows on music & race, offer delights & anger

 Bill Knight column for 6-21, 22 or 23, 2021

 

TV viewers who appreciate music from the 1960s and ’70s will enjoy the songs and senses in a couple of new shows streaming in the next few weeks, and people of all ages should appreciate two mini-series that depict the heritage – and horror – in our country’s past.

First, two documentaries – “Summer of Soul” (on Hulu) and “1971” (on Apple TV+) – feature the likes of Sly & the Family Stone, Curtis Mayfield, B.B. King, Gil Scott-Heron and more. Streaming offers more opportunity, more variety and MORE, period, so documentaries are flourishing, and three of four recommended productions are documentaries, and the fourth dramatizes facts from an historical novel.

All four spark a range of emotions: Joy and rage, tears and pride, doubt and confirmation.

* “Summer of Soul: Or … When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised,” the first directing effort by Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, is a film featuring never-released footage from 1969’s Harlem Cultural Festival, recalled as “the Black Woodstock,” having happened the same summer. Held over six weeks, the festival series celebrated history and culture, and Questlove’s film has performances by Stevie Wonder, Gladys Knight & the Pips, the 5th Dimension, Herbie Mann, Mahalia Jackson, the Chambers Brothers and more, with security by the Black Panther Party, plus recent observations by Chris Rock, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Jesse Jackson and others. It won the August Award and the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival.

* “1971: The Year That Music Changed Everything,” co-directed by Asif Kapadia, Danielle Peck and James Rogan, in eight episodes features a mix of music and comments by Marvin Gaye, the Rolling Stones, James Brown, War, Alice Cooper, Iggy Pop, Joni Mitchell, Bill Withers, Bob Marley, Elton John, Graham Nash, Carole King, Jim Morrison, Tina Turner …) and archival remarks from John Lennon and behind-the-scenes moments of Bob Dylan rehearsing with George Harrison), all to focus on that fractured time.

 “There was a huge divide in America because of Viet Nam,” says Pretenders singer Chrissie Hynde, who was a student at Kent State when soldiers shot student protestors, killing four. “Shocked! Yeah!”

* “Exterminate All the Brutes” (HBO Max), directed by Raoul Peck (who did the acclaimed “I Am Not Your Negro,” based on James Baldwin’s works), will stir different reflections, letting audiences bear witness to six centuries of hate and brutality based on colonialism and White supremacy, from the Crusades and Spanish Inquisition through the genocide of Native Americans after Columbus and the enslavement of Africans to the Holocaust and anti-immigrant sentiments still alive through neo-Nazis and other Right-wingers.

Stemming in part from Europe’s legacy of racism against the Irish, Slavs, Jews and Roma (sometimes known by the derogatory term Gypsies), the four-part series, which has villainous dramatizations by actor Josh Hartnett, can be overwhelming, but it should leave an indelible impression.

 “You already know enough,” said the late historian Sven Lindquist. “What is missing is the courage to understand what we know and to draw conclusions.”

* Finally, “The Underground Railroad” (Amazon Prime), directed by Barry Jenkins (“Moonlight”), is a stirring narrative following people portrayed by Aaron Pierre and Thuso Mbedu escaping bondage from Georgia through South Carolina, North Carolina and Tennessee. It’s emotional and difficult to watch, even as the actors seem to peer directly at us, as if to say, “See?”

Throughout, it’s hoped that glimpses of evil may help generate empathy and understanding.

Seeing and hearing such productions makes one wonder whether there are occasional exceptions to FCC chair Newton Minow’s 1961 description of television as a “vast wasteland.”