The 50th anniversary of Saturday Night Live has recently been celebrated with a Peacock docuseries about its history, a Jason Reitman movie about its origin, and magazine cover shoots highlighting the endless parade of stars who got their start in Studio 8H. That is to say nothing about the previous anniversary specials and documentaries and books and oral histories that have rehashed and contextualized SNL’s place in American culture many times over. It’s tempting to feel like there couldn’t possibly be anything new to say about SNL. But then came Ladies & Gentlemen … 50 Years of SNL Music.
The two-hour-plus documentary serves as a thoroughly spectacular salute to the pop stars and songs that gave the NBC late-night show its reputation as a launching pad for musicians, as well as budding comedians. Co-directed by Questlove and Oz Rodriguez, a regular, longtime director of shorts at SNL, the documentary offers a comprehensive, dynamic, and genuinely exciting tour through five decades of rock, hip-hop, punk, and other genres as manifested within the walls of 30 Rock. It debuted earlier this week on NBC and is now streaming on Peacock. If for some reason you’ve been hesitant to check it out, here are five reasons why you should stop what you’re doing and immediately press play on this journalistic mixtape featuring performances from some of the greatest musical artists (and funny people pretending to be great musical artists) of all time.
1.
The opening montage is amazing
Another director might have kicked off this documentary with a series of talking-head shots of influential people speaking about why music has played such a significant role in SNL’s success. There’s a tiny bit of that in the seven-minute montage at the top of Ladies & Gentlemen, but mostly, it’s an auditory and visual roller-coaster ride through major SNL musical moments, crafted with the kind of infectious, surprising flow that only a DJ as seasoned as Questlove could give.
When the aggressive drumbeat of “Take Me Out,” knocked out by Franz Ferdinand during a 2005 episode, gets looped in to Nelly’s performance of “Hot in Herre,” each positioned side by side in a split screen, the two songs sound like they were always intended to complement each other. And not only is the slide between Queen performing “Under Pressure,” Dave Matthews singing “Ants Marching,” and Vanilla Ice shuffle-dancing through “Ice Ice Baby” worthy of being blasted through a boom box, it also efficiently communicates the vast differences and common denominators among the show’s musical guests over the years. From the get-go, this banger of an intro demonstrates the approach of the whole documentary, with Questlove and Rodriguez gliding naturally from one subject to the next.
2.
It features clips that you have probably never seen or completely forgot about
Generally speaking, it’s pretty easy to find clips of old SNL sketches online. Musical performances are more challenging to track down because of rights issues that often keep them out of circulation. Because of that, more of the old footage in Ladies & Gentlemen feels rare; either you’ve never seen it or you saw it once, so long ago that you completely forgot about it. Which is why it’s thrilling to see a barely lit Prince grooving his heart out to “Partyup” in 1981, David Bowie wearing a plastic tuxedo while singing “The Man Who Sold the World,” or the Funky 4 + 1, a Bronx-based rap group who only got on the show because host Debbie Harry insisted on it, launching into national television’s first rap performance, also in 1981. Even the stuff that doesn’t involve actual performances — like video of Charles Barkley and the members of Nirvana clowning around while shooting a promo — has the feel of a precious artifact that’s finally been unearthed.
3.
It’s thorough — really thorough
Questlove has said that he watched every single episode of SNL while working on this project, and it shows. Ladies & Gentlemen covers every era of the show and doesn’t over-dwell on the early years the way some SNL histories have a tendency to do. While it spends the most time on rock and rap, it captures the diversity of genres — country, reggae, classical — that have infused the air in Studio 8H.
It also gets nitty-gritty, documenting an extremely busy week in the life of Bad Bunny and Billie Eilish, two stars who recently served as both host and musical guest. It pays tribute to the musical impressions and compositions of certain cast members. (Eddie Murphy, who rarely speaks for these sorts of SNL lookbacks, discusses his takes on James Brown and Stevie Wonder, while a whole section focuses on the influence of the Lonely Island.) And it explores how SNL can act as a megaphone both for the success of careers (Adele’s popularity bump after her first SNL appearance is covered) and for political causes. Sinead O’Connor’s famous 1992 appearance, where she ripped up a picture of the Pope during her cover of Bob Marley’s “War,” is shown in its entirety, as is a portion of the dress rehearsal, when she held up a picture of a young child so SNL’s crew wouldn’t know what she had planned. If Questlove and Rodriguez left out a significant, relevant angle on SNL music, I can’t figure out what it is.
4.
The behind-the-scenes footage of controversial moments will make you as tense as someone who actually works at SNL
Remember when Ashlee Simpson came out onstage at SNL in 2004 to sing her second song and the track she had already performed played by accident, revealing that she was lip-syncing the whole time? This documentary does, and it replays the moment from the perspective of the control room, where a director keeps yelling “Wrong song, wrong song!” Even more compelling is the audio of Kanye West in 2016 after he realizes lighting designers have removed some of the reflective material on his set. He immediately walks offstage and starts yelling “I am 50 percent more influential than any other human being! Don’t fuck with me!” to seemingly no one in particular. These moments keep the documentary from being too laudatory and also provide a visceral sense of what it’s like to actually be smack in the middle of the fray on a live-show night when things go off the rails.
5.
It does not shy away from critiquing SNL itself.
This documentary doesn’t shy away from considering some negative moments in SNL music. It touches on some truly disastrous performances, including Miles Davis in 1981, off his game and constantly turning his back to camera, and a cacophonous Captain Beefheart in 1980. (There is no mention of Lana Del Rey’s famously off performance in 2012, but Questlove has said he asked to interview her and she declined.)
More importantly, the documentary slyly highlights the hypocrisy now embedded in the DNA of a onetime bastion of rebelliousness becoming more and more mainstream over the years. The discussion of the O’Connor controversy acknowledges how swiftly the public threw her under the bus for making a statement that was ultimately about abuse in the Catholic church, something O’Connor had endured herself. The willingness to speak on it now after the late O’Connor is gone — “There was a part of me that just admired the bravery of what she had done, and also the absolute sincerity of it,” says Lorne Michaels — also highlights how grotesque it is that no one was willing to say such things at the time when she really needed the support. Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine recounts SNL’s hilariously paradoxical decision to book the band as musical guest in 1996 on the same week that Steve Forbes, the rich editor-in-chief of Forbes magazine, a former Republican presidential candidate and possibly the only person less equipped than Elon Musk to helm SNL, was the host. “How ironic,” Morello says drily. “Let’s see how that works out.” Let’s just say that Rage Against the Machine ended up getting escorted out of 8H before they got to perform their second song.
In some ways, the most rock-and-roll thing SNL could have ever done was end when Michaels first departed the show in 1980. It would have been remembered forever as the anti-Establishment late-night shit stirrer that went hard and flamed out, much like some of the artists who performed on it. But it became part of the mainstream, a fact that gives it power and influence while inevitably diluting the countercultural vibe that initially made it so great. Questlove and Rodriguez illustrate all that while also lovingly conveying a massive amount of history with concision and verve. Ladies & Gentlemen … 50 Years of SNL Music is a killer tribute album that you want to listen to again as soon as the last song fades.