fig. a: Metallica’s Deliverance by Rockumentary
My copy of Mapping the Rockumentary: Images of Sound and Fury (Edinburgh University Press, 2021) showed up on our front door last Sunday.
fig. b: Uli M. Schüppel’s The Road to God Knows Where (1990) as it appears in the opening montage of Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard’s 20,000 Days on Earth (2014), roughly 12,152 days into the life of Nick Cave
This book includes my essay "Minimum and Maximum Rock 'n' Roll: Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds and Rockumentary Form," which deals primarily with two films and two radically different approaches to the popular music documentary: The Road to God Knows Where (1990) and 20,000 Days on Earth (2014). Whereas The Road to God Knows Where can be seen as a ultra-minimalist “anti-rockumentary,” 20,000 Days on Earth is a maximalist meta-documentary, and one of the greatest works of “nonfiction” (the film goes to great lengths to blur the lines between fiction and nonfiction) in the last 20+ years, in my opinion.
There’s lots of great material in this collection, spanning folk, jazz, pop, psych, punk, post-punk, metal, country, indie, K-pop, prog, and, yes, rock, and encompassing a wide variety of perspectives and approaches. It’s a book that aims to vastly expand our understanding of the rockumentary genre, its history, and its potential. All told there are 25 chapters broken up into five categories—histories, gender, aesthetics & politics, counter-cultures, and futures—plus an introduction.
I’d like to thank the editors of this fine book, Gunnar Iversen and Scott MacKenzie, for their vision and diligence. It truly was a pleasure working on this project.
aj