2021 was a banner year for music documentaries from Questlove's summer of

Seoul to the eight-hour Beatles documentary Get Back, but those aren't the only

music documentaries worth celebrating. I'm Stephen Thompson and today we are

recommending some of the great 2021 music documentaries we missed on Pop

Culture Happy Hour from NPR. Joining me today is NPR Music and Powers. Welcome

back Anne. Hello Stephen. Also joining us is NPR TV critic Eric DeGun's

Eric. Let it let it let it. So when you go through the archives of this show we

did an episode on Summer of Seoul last summer and the three of us got together

to talk about Get Back just last month but we also missed a bunch of other

terrific documentaries about music. So many in fact that we thought we'd toss out

a few more recommendations in this episode. Now we could talk about all of them

but we cannot possibly get to them all and I'm going to start with you. Hit me

with a great music documentary from this past year. Maybe the best movie

period that I saw last year was the documentary by Todd Haynes, one of my favorite

filmmakers, called the Velvet Underground, about that completely groundbreaking

New York band, the band that invented punk rock some might say, okay set the scene.

So this movie came out in October. I saw this in the theater. It was the first movie I saw

in the theater and the last since the pandemic started and I wept for joy

because this is not your standard music documentary. This is a documentary made

by a noteworthy that visually captures and embodies what its subject does musically.

So Todd Haynes trying to figure out what happened when Lou Reed met John Kale and brought

Sterling Morrison and Motucker into this band in the middle of a moment in New York City,

...