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For decades relegated to lone VHS copies buried in college libraries, Dan Graham’s dense DIY documentary traces a history of rock‘n’roll in which Patti Smith is, to quote the film itself, “the Mary Magdalene to the fallen rock idols of the 60s.” Graham primarily draws a line between the ecstatic trances of 18th-century Shakers to the performative primitivism of art-punk (via Patti and Sonic Youth) and the ascendant circle-pit culture of hardcore bands Black Flag and Minor Threat. In the film’s second half, however, he branches out to Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, the hippie counterculture and even Jerry Lee Lewis as part of a mesmerizing thesis on rock as embodied belief system (at one point, an archival recording of a theological conversation between Lewis and Sun Records’ Sam Phillips is revelatory). The VHS aesthetics and crude editing take a second to get used to (they’re raw even by 1984’s tape-to-tape standards), but it’s all appropriately punk— collaged together with the seams showing.

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‘A lot of what we used to associate with music — it being an indicator of tribalism — I think we’re seeing that more in food these days, instead,’ Gold says. ‘If you’re vegan, or a conscious omnivore, or nose-to-tail person, or a gluten-free person — those people get together and self-identify.’

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At the same time the very idea of MTV was feeding fears that music was becoming ever more superficial (check out the Mobius strip of Dire Straits’ “Money For Nothing,” which both came from the POV of a character dismissive of video stars and had an acclaimed video), MTV Unplugged played a critical role in the development of authenticity policing. The idea that pop stars — entertainers — had to prove themselves in stripped-down formats went hand in hand with the suspicion that they were inauthentic in the first place, an idea that music videos didn’t invent but certainly advanced. (Milli Vanilli released Girl You Know It’s True in 1989, the same year MTV debuted Unplugged.)

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Pitchfork: He develops the Consumer Guide format, which you describe as a ‘management strategy’ for the flow of music he was receiving, as well as a ‘commentary’ on criticism itself.

DP: Again, Christgau is hyper-aware. When he creates the Consumer Guide, he’s trying to figure out how to manage the workload of being a rock critic, which at that moment paled in comparison to the amount of music being produced today, but it’s still an incredible amount of music. You have to remember, he’s getting this music on record. He’s not skipping through tracks and listening to the first five seconds and then going to the next thing, as we’ve all done. He can, and does, listen to music for eight hours a day and still not listen to the entire stack of music. So, writing these short reviews and giving them letter grades was a way of saying, ‘How can I condense this workload and comment on what it means to be a critic?’

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For all the fuss made over Bowie’s hair, costumes and poses, it’s the way his voice has shifted over the years that interests me most. The changes have been as subtle as the outfits were overt. Listen to Hunky Dory or Ziggy, and all his vowels are flat, his mouth’s nearly closed, his voice is resonating off the back of his front teeth, and he cuts right through all those twelve-string guitars and tinny pianos like the knife of his namesake. But as you go further, through Aladdin Sane and Diamond Dogs to the Berlin years and beyond, a weird thing starts to happen: the voice migrates toward the back of his throat, his jaw drops, his vowels open, and he sounds ever more like his hero Scott Walker, whose spooky intonation on 1977’s Nite Flights is almost a dead ringer for Bowie’s, except that it’s really the other way around. (…)

I always wondered why this happened, and whether it was something he did on purpose. Singers’ voices tend to age in interesting ways, sometimes gracefully, sometimes not. Joni Mitchell’s, burnt (with grim purpose, one suspects) to a dry husk by cigarettes, is an extreme example, as is Robert Plant’s, whose much-abused high register has deserted him, though he seems to delight in combing through its damaged remains. Dylan, of course, went through a phase in which his voice seemed to give up on the very idea of singing (though I have an affection for the weird Jim Nabors-like ‘country’ voice of Self Portrait and Nashville Skyline). Closer to the present, Michael Stipe’s voice, originally grave and gritty, turned dark and husky, then brightened, cheered up, and became strangely weightless; Bill Callahan’s voice opened, dived, and doesn’t yet seem to have found the bottom; Gil Scott-Heron’s oratory ripened into a splendid growl; Lou Reed’s went kind of warbly, lost its once-unassailable authority and eerie tenderness, and hasn’t been able (or perhaps doesn’t want) to find it again.