Season 1 • Episode 17
LatestThe film opens at a pop festival. Drug-smoking is very much in evidence. “These fellows will answer to God” says the Rev Jack Wyrtzen, “for all the pollution and evil they have spread around the world.” “The thing about rock n roll” says Lester Bangs, “is that it is totally about adolescence, and about consumerism brought in the highest degree”. In fact, as the film begins to point out, neither of these extreme points of view is true. Tangerine Dream perform religious music in Coventry Cathedral. Stomu Yamash’ta, a spectacular Japanese percussionist, clearly has nothing to do with adolescence: and no-one could describe Mike Oldfield as the product of consumerism.
A 17-part television documentary series on the history of modern pop music covering some of the many different genres that have fallen under the label of "popular music" between the mid-19th century and 1976, including folk, ragtime, Tin Pan Alley, vaudeville and music hall, musical theatre, country, swing, jazz, blues, R&B, rock 'n' roll and others.
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