Why are Music Biopics so Bad? (with Keith Phipps)
Pop Pantheon
DJ Louie XIV
4.7 • 630 Ratings
🗓️ 23 May 2024
⏱️ 52 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The most recent in a long lineage of music biopics, Back to Black, which purports to chronicle the life of the late great Amy Winehouse came out in the US last week. The film received mostly negative reviews and underperformed at the box office. So why are these movies, generally speaking, so unsuccessful and why do we keep making then? Movie Critic Keith Phipps join DJ Louie to discuss Back to Black, the history of music biopics, why the good ones are good and why most of them are so bad.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Pop Pantheon, the podcast where we completely overanalyze all of your favorite pop stars and then rank them in the official Pop Pantheon. |
| 0:17.7 | This is your host, DJ Louie the 14th. |
| 0:20.0 | And I want to remind you to please rate review and subscribe to Pop Pantheon wherever This is your host, DJ Louis the 14th, and I want to remind you to |
| 0:20.8 | please rate review and subscribe to Pop Pantheon wherever you're listening to it now. Please find our social media at Pop Pantheon Pod. I'm at DJ, L-O-U-I-E-X-I-B on Twitter and Instagram. We have merch at Pop Pantheonpod.com. We have our Patreon channel, Pop Pantheon, all access at patreon.com slash Pop Pantheon, where we do weekly bonus episodes of the show. |
| 0:40.7 | This past week, we talked about Billy Eilish's Hit Me Hard and Soft with the LA Times Michael Wood. |
| 0:46.8 | And we're doing so much good content over there. |
| 0:49.1 | You can also subscribe for the audio only directly in the Apple Podcast app. |
| 0:54.2 | Gorgeous, gorgeous has two pride parties coming up. |
| 0:56.9 | One is on June 15th in Los Angeles. |
| 0:59.1 | The other is on June 28th here in Brooklyn. |
| 1:01.7 | Both have ticket links in the show notes of this episode. |
| 1:04.1 | So hope to see everybody at Gorgeous Gorgeous Pride across our great nation. |
| 1:09.1 | So for this week's Pop Pantheon, a recent biopic came out on an |
| 1:12.7 | artist that means a lot to me, Amy Winehouse. It was called Back to Black. I saw it over the weekend. |
| 1:16.9 | I did not enjoy it as I don't enjoy most music biopics on artists that I care about. And even |
| 1:22.0 | artists that I wish I could learn to care about more through these biopics because I think they |
| 1:25.8 | mostly suck. So as a result of that and because I wanted to get into why these movies are so hard to make |
| 1:31.6 | and so hard to make well, we invited movie critic Keith Phipps onto the show to talk about both |
| 1:37.3 | the Amy Winehouse biopic, what is not successful about it for the most part, what is successful |
| 1:42.6 | about it, and more broadly the history of this genre, the biopic, and why it is so hard to make good ones. And when there are good ones, why they're good. So here's my conversation about music biopics with Keith Phipps. Okay, so I am here with movie and culture writer Keith Phipps, who also authors the Substack, The Reveal with Scott Tobias, which can be found |
| 2:01.9 | at reveal.substack.com. Keith, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. We're here to talk about |
| 2:07.4 | a film we both saw. Yeah, a film we both saw and a milieu of films, I would say that is sometimes |
... |
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