Kelly-Ann doesn’t need to listen to Bob Dylan, she needs to watch great film, made 50 years ago or last week, so that she can make her own art. This notion of greatness and sentimentality that these showrunners cling to is not only bogus but anathema to young people. Vinyl and Roadies are shows that pretend, stupidly, that the world lacks Beyoncé. It takes less than a minute for Roadies to expose someone’s breasts, and only five minutes before someone declares that Bob Dylan was the greatest who ever lived. “Jimi Hendrix and Kurt Cobain didn’t die to become a crop top at Urban Outfitters,” someone yells on Roadies – an exclamation on the same idea. That show was made with Mick Jagger’s help, and seemed to embody the idea that no one’s made good music since he stopped making it – so maybe 1982. Roadies also shares some delusions with Vinyl, Scorsese’s drama about a 1970s record label that HBO renewed and then canceled. In the real world, it’s slightly more complex. In his world, corporate suits would force artists to sacrifice tradition and their romantic ideas of music, while plucky peons fight back. Just as Sorkin decided to remake the news and fight for the integrity of 24-hour cable – an institution three Snapchats from extinction – Crowe responds to a desolate music industry by reinventing touring. Roadies most resembles The Newsroom in the pantheon of old-white-man-idea TV. There’s something to be said about the nobility of the men and women who support art from the wings of the stage, but if this girl is driven by her own vision, why should she be praised for sublimating that to a bunch of guys who don’t know her name?
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Kelly-Ann is Crowe’s idea of a virtuous hero, a woman who gives up her dreams of making art so she can bask in the second-hand glory of a rock band by rigging their lights. Inevitably, she doesn’t just return to the tour but runs back into the arena – carrying a skateboard, which you’d think she would use. I’m worker bee No1 on the bus.” Kelly-Ann struggles with the concept of a job, but ultimately gives up giving it up with a fiery speech – “you either love what you do or you get the fuck out” – that also inspires the band to change their setlist for once.
![old man doing the say anything boombox scene old man doing the say anything boombox scene](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/zcnXZqXeMh4/hqdefault.jpg)
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“I have to be a fan of something or I’m nothing,” she complains at one point. The center of the story, though, is Kelly-Ann (Imogen Poots), who plans to leave the tour for film school because she doesn’t love “her” band like she used to. His replacement is the frontman’s childhood best friend, Bill (Luke Wilson), who proves his classic rock credibility by saying: “When all the other kids were reading Sounder, I was reading Hammer of the Gods.” Bill’s will-they-won’t-they foil is Sheila (Carla Gugino, criminally wasted), a pragmatic roadie who’s mostly in it for the money. Reg quickly fires the roadies’ beloved leader, who’s the kind of dinosaur who wears a Lynyrd Skynyrd memento around his neck and says things like, “when you’re looking at me you’re looking at the history of American rock n’ roll.” We find the gang in crisis, with a histrionic consultant named Reg (Rafe Spall) joins the tour to make the band make money. Roadies revolves around a group of music diehards who would give their lives for the Stanton House Band, a Mumford and Sons-esque trio that somehow fills arenas. The result is always the same: the exultation of the past at the expense of the future – an attempt to rewrite the world to fit somebody’s outdated ideology.
#Old man doing the say anything boombox scene tv
The latest travesty to hit the airwaves is Roadies, a show about a rock tour crew imagined up by Cameron Crowe, the writer and director of Almost Famous.Īlong with Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom and Martin Scorsese’s Vinyl, Roadies is emblematic of a plague of what happens when TV executives let old men with an axe to grind do whatever they want.
![old man doing the say anything boombox scene old man doing the say anything boombox scene](https://c8.alamy.com/comp/2FYJRTC/elderly-man-standing-and-holding-a-boombox-radio-isolated-on-white-background-2FYJRTC.jpg)
Please, please, stop giving old white men television shows.