A lot of people have their particular love affairs with bands that couldn't find a commercial hook with Google and a Geiger counter, and for whom larger success has proved elusive. This one's mine.
This documentary is smashing. Your basic university students form a socialist punk band, can't play, learn to play, learn to play like angels, get signed to major labels twice, don't set the world aflame, keep their day jobs, stay together anyway. They remain a fully functional family.
There's a glimpse into their creative process (I'd be happy with their castoffs). The sequence is worth a rewind and review. It helps to explain their first major album cover: wailing away at the typewriter until you approach (something that can be mistaken for) art.
I admire that they approached the apparatus that could have transformed them into "stars" and did not become its collateral damage.
The apparatus is not there to further the cause of art, or to take it upon itself to expand the horizons of the audience. The apparatus is judged on whether or not it can move units of product. That's the only measure of its success. If they can convince you, however, that it's art, or can be mistaken for art, if the route that they take is to convince you that it's art, then that will work to move units of product as well as anything else. The apparatus hopes to capitalize on a preexisting following, or convince the uninitiated that they can't live without it. But moving product is the metric.
Understanding comes when you realize that this applies to the things you like as well as the things you don't.
"The dealer is not interested in art," said the late, great art forger Eric Hebborn. "He's interested, well, basically, money. A work of art is as good or bad as the price it fetches."
Believe it or not, this was an essay about comic books.
