HITSVILLE: THE MAKING OF MOTOWN: Record Label Doc Has Soul
Diana Ross was just announced to play at Glastonbury 2020. Stevie Wonder headlined a major London music festival earlier this year. These legends share DNA as alumni of the legendary record label Motown Records, whose output evidently continues to be appreciated today by audiences around the world.
Lovingly Cements a Concrete Legacy
These days, Motown is more of an adjective than a noun, used to describe the sense of creatives such as Beyoncé, CeeLo Green and Janelle Monae. Directors Gabe and Benjamin Turner conjure the spirit of Hitsville U.S.A, Motown’s first headquarters in Detroit. Hitsville: The Making of Motown has the great privilege of direct access to head honcho Berry Gordy, who does most of the talking when recounting the record label’s remarkable history.
This is unabashedly a hagiography – the filmmakers don’t have the bandwidth nor the interest to complicate Berry Gordy’s clean image, especially considering his ultra-positive attitude to leading this historical seminar, accompanied by his best friend Smokey Robinson. Hitsville: The Making of Motown is a loving and lively cementation of the concrete legacy of Berry Gordy’s pop music factory, perhaps the greatest epicentre of music in the 20th century.
Motown Records was modeled after a car manufacturing assembly line. Attracted by the gleaming end results, Gordy imagined he could do the same with artists what was done with cars. Whilst pop music manufacturing carries bad connotations, this was a machine that worked insanely well for the musicians on both a commercial and creative level. Gordy led sternly but flexibly, committing to a democratic approach that considered the opinions of everyone at the quality control table.
‘With the world exploding around me, how am I supposed to keep singing love songs?’
This documentary captures not only the big picture of the growth of Motown but the evolution of Gordy as a businessman as he came to understand that artists are well, not cars, and music was their expression as individuals. Despite his rejection for politicking, he acknowledged the responsibility for anyone with a huge public platform – this was particularly important in the 60’s when the Civil Rights Movement and Vietnam War gripped America, inspiring musicians at Motown such as Edwin Starr and Marvin Gaye to pen powerful anti-paeans about the state of the nation.
The dream access for any filmmaker wanting to make a film about the record label of getting both Berry and Smokey is highly rewarding, as the duo couldn’t be more thrilled to relay the history of the business to the Turner Brothers – a business that was ahead of even our current time in achieving equality, diversity and inclusion in all areas of the workplace – entertainingly rattling off facts and anecdotes within their detailed recap.
Placing them in the same room is a genius move, leading to some amazing exchanges on camera wherein they build upon each other’s memories, including an amusing parley on whether Marvin Gaye recorded I Heard It Through the Grapevine before Gladys Knight and the Pips.
It’s Good Enough With Gordy
Where the film is less engaging is in listening to the contributors who weren’t part of the label – Dr Dre, Lee Daniels, Jamie Foxx to name a few – and who don’t evidence a relationship with Motown beyond a source of inspiration. They’re there to help write the history book from their third-person perspective, a superfluous task considering the access here – Hitsville would have still worked if only Berry Gordy was interviewed.
Considering their inessential input, my cynical rationale for their presence is as a business interest to entice younger audiences, who, for example, may know Foxx from Baby Driver if not the great Martha Reeves record that features in the Edgar Wright actioner.
The most hardworking people on this film are the archive producers, researchers, and the visual effects team who make heavy use of Adobe After Effects to manipulate rare historical images for a rich three-dimensional effect and keep busy to ensure Hitsville is an awesome visual treat as well as an inherently awesome sonic one.
Hitsville: The Making of Motown: Conclusion
The pure joy of delving into the rise of some of the greatest singers the world has ever known makes Hitsville: The Making of Motown an instant gloomy day classic. There are moments that are as beautiful and surprising as any spectacle you’ve seen in the cinema this year.
My favourite examples are the footage of The Temptations recording My Girl – for those of us who never saw them live, listening to David Ruffin belt out the words on a big screen is almost an acceptable surrogate – and the mind-blowing aural depiction of how Marvin Gaye constructed What’s Going On layer by layer. As John Legend says, this was long before they could rely on machines to do half the work. It’s such a pleasure to watch the making of Motown, no matter how little or large you already know.
What are your favourite documentaries about record labels? Share below!
Watch Hitsville: The Making of Motown
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