Yahoo Lifestyle ‘Ladies & Gentlemen… 50 Years of SNL Music’ Is a Spectacular, Definitive History of the Most Influential Music Stage in America: TV Review
No matter how a person might feel about “Saturday Night Live”’s jokes or cast or host choices, there’s absolutely no denying that for the better part of the last half century, it has been the most consistently powerful platform in America for musicians, whether they’re superstars, rising stars or falling stars.
Virtually every major artist has performed on it, and for musicians on the rise, it’s a sign that they have almost arrived, that they’ve attained enough popularity or curiosity or — perhaps most important — controversy for the show to take a chance on them. It was the first mainstream American television show to feature new wave (Devo 1978), hip-hop (Funky Four Plus One 1981), hardcore punk (Fear, also 1981, although the Sex Pistols were booked in January of 1978 but pulled out because they split up), and many other sub-genres.
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What serious music fan can’t remember a classic performance on the show, if not a dozen, if not 50? David Bowie — who delivered arguably the best all-time “SNL” performance in 1979 — the Rolling Stones, Paul McCartney, Tupac, Rihanna, Mariah Carey, Alicia Keys, Jack White, Radiohead, Lenny Kravitz, Tom Waits, Coldplay, Bon Jovi, Taylor Swift, Mary J. Blige, Donald Glover, U2, Miley Cyrus, Billie Eilish, Billy Joel, No Doubt, Tom Petty, Elton John, Olivia Rodrigo, Bruno Mars, and Prince are just a few of the artists who have appeared on the show, and (usually briefly) in this doc.
In terms of its musical guests, “SNL” has no real parallel in American television history — the closest in terms of influence is probably the much more conservative “Ed Sullivan Show” during the 1960s — and for decades, many of the musicians who perform on it not only grew up on the show, they were introduced to their some of their favorite artists on it. As Dave Grohl says in the sprawling, awesome, “Ladies & Gentlemen… 50 Years of SNL Music,” which airs tonight on NBC, seeing the B-52s on the show in 1980 was a live-changing experience, because “I felt weird, and they were weird too.”
And for an artist, it’s the great proving ground: If they can deliver on that stage, it might not mean that they can deliver for a full album or concert — remember, Hothouse Flowers and Sleigh Bells have performed on the show too — but it does prove that they’ve got enough talent and/or charisma, or good-enough songs, to command a tough platform.
So how do you cram that history and legacy into a documentary? (For that matter, how do you write about it in a thousand words or less?) Directors Oz Rodriguez (an Emmy-winning “SNL” vet) and Questlove (Grammy-and-Oscar-winning director of “The Summer of Soul,” leader and drummer of the Roots and musical director of “The Tonight Show”) have done a masterful job of what we’ll call selective comprehensiveness: Even though the doc is three hours long and loaded with interviews with many of the above musicians — along with show founder Lorne Michaels and longtime actors and executives, from Jane Curtin and Jimmy Fallon to many behind-the-scenes people — it never falls into the kind of hubristic self-congratulation that is in so many MTV documentaries about itself.
Yes, you’ve got many major musicians testifying about the show’s importance and influence and how excited and nervous they were to perform on it — “Dude, ‘SNL’ is hard,” Billie Eilish says — but it never feels like they’re exaggerating. (The only time the history feels revisionist is the retrospective look back at Sinead O’Connor’s deeply controversial and much-criticized — and prescient — statement about the Catholic church on the show in 1992, wherein she ripped up a photo of Pope John Paul as a comment against child abuse.)
The long, long history that follows isn’t something that can really be digested in a single or even several sittings: It’s divided into chapters by topic: introducing various genres of music like hip-hop and punk; controversy, with Elvis Costello, Ashlee Simpson’s failed lip-synching; and dealing with tragedy, like 9/11 and the COVID-19 pandemic.
Yet it doesn’t only cover musical guests: There are also extensive segments on their parodies (from John Belushi’s Joe Cocker to Jimmy Fallon’s Mick Jagger to Maya Rudolph’s Beyonce) and Lonely Island’s pioneering digital shorts, which ended up numbering over a hundred.
And nothing can prepare the viewer for the brilliant montage that opens it: a six-minute, Questlove-helmed video DJ mix that overlays decades of songs and performances as a mind-blowing, classic megamix. We could go into greater detail but it wouldn’t do it justice — he deserves an Emmy for it alone.
There are so many great performances and stories that repeated viewings are almost necessary (the New York Times has helpfully compiled 38 of the best), and the viewer truly gets a sense of how the music on the show evolved and the ethos behind it — as Miley Cyrus says, a certain amount of controversy is the most attractive thing to Michaels, who himself says when discussing Costello’s life-changing 1978 appearance (replacing the Sex Pistols), where he abruptly switched songs in mid-performance, “I’ll read occasionally, ‘so-and-so is banned [from the show] for life.’ We’ve never banned anyone, we’re way too crass and opportunistic. If something’s hot we’re going to have it on.”
We could go on, but trust us — it’s well worth watching, probably more than once.
‘Ladies & Gentlemen… 50 Years of SNL Music’ airs on NBC at 8 p.m. on NBC.
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