It’s an uncool show, and cynics will hate it. It’s a show about ideals and sticking to them. It’s a show about telling the man to go fuck himself. Carla Gugino is blithe perfection, and Imogen Poots is the Penny Lane of Roadies, someone who works not for money, but out of the belief that music can still mean something, that it still possesses a transcendent, transformative power that lives with you after the last guitar string has been plucked. I don’t really know what it’s about yet, but I love it. It’s about getting goosebumps when Eddie Vedder’s voice crescendos, or hearing the Head and the Heart sing during sound check. It’s about hearing songs you’ve heard a hundred times in a hundred different contexts, or songs you’ve never heard that stick to you because of a particular scene. It’s about the potent combination of music and a glance, or a smile, or a knowing nod. Roadies is not about story, it’s about a vibe. Without this, life would be meaningless.” - Empire Records “This music is the glue of the world, Mark. I’m not entirely clear what that has to do with a Showtime series about a rock band’s road crew, except that Roadies recalls so much of what even I missed out on in the 70s: Lives driven not by politics or causes or effectuating change one tweet at a time, but lives driven by our hearts, by music, by song lyrics and poetry, by a desire not to change a world that couldn’t be changed, but to succeed in spite of it. The dreamers have been replaced by doers, and while that may make them more effective, that sense of dare-to-be-greatness has been lost. It’s a vocal, powerful generation, but it’s one that’s had its starry-eyed idealism stripped from them by the politics of social media, or maybe it’s because they understand better than some of us that starry-eyed idealism and $4.50 will only buy them a cup of coffee at Starbucks. The new generation with its Bernie-powered progressivism, its identity politics, and its 1 percent activism seems to be so understandably driven by disaffection and anger that they’ve forgotten about the romanticism of the process. Somewhere along the way, I think it might have become uncool to be uncool. I don’t know how many Cameron Crowe fans there are left in the world. Showtime’s new series Roadies comes from Cameron Crowe, who wrote and directed the pilot.
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