We’re Living in a Golden Age of Music Documentaries: Five Breakdowns

Over the last year or so, you could go to the movies and/or turn on your TV, and see feature-length docs on Grace Jones, the Tragically Hip, Lady Gaga, Elvis (both an original-recipe cradle-to-grave portrait and an extra-crispy dive into how his decline reflects our current national mindset), Eric Clapton, the Avett Brothers, Deer Tick, Ed Sheeran, music mogul Clive Davis, a semi-obscure free-jazz drummer, a multi-chapter series on hip-hop, two Peal Jam shows at Wrigley Field, not one but two Whitney Houston postmortems and a two-part look at the very publication you are reading right now. This is assuming that you had already caught up with the recent-to-recent–ish nonfiction looks at Sharon Jones, Jawbreaker, the Grateful Dead, Amy Winehouse, Bad Brains singer H.R., John Coltrane, Nick Cave, Nina Simone, trumpeter Lee Morgan, the history of Bad Boy Records and stem-to-stern looks at both D.C. and East Bay punk.