For the Record: An Incomplete History of Music (dir. Trent Burton; Cosmic Shambles, 2026)
Boy, did I want to love this series more than I actually do. Even after watching it all in sequence, and seeing the ways it falls short—in the case of a couple episodes, damn near falls apart—part of me wants to root for it, just because I want more of its like in the world. Hell, part of me wants what follows to be Notes Toward a Supercut, a guided tour of the parts you’ll want to pay attention to, skipping over the rest—a box set that needs editing, just what a busy person needs.
Obviously, I have a weakness for the big-picture overview. For the Record: An Incomplete History of Music is a recent nine-episode series produced by the British documentary-makers Cosmic Shambles and uploaded straight to YouTube, and it casts its net wide—dauntingly, tantalizingly, and at its best engagingly so.
It took four years to make and involves more than a hundred interviews, as well as numerous secondary sources, many of them clearly taken from carefully combing cheaply available historical archives. Bob Dylan, looking as if he’d rather be anywhere else—whatever; he says something legible about songwriting, good enough. They smartly hook the idea of the blues on some good B. B. King footage. The series is tangential as well as huge in scope, and that flightiness plays a part in its failures as well as its successes.
And yes, YouTube—not as secondary source or network default, but as native ground. It’s sobering to consider that a work as ambitious as this series had to go straight to YouTube, as well as be crowdfunded. It does not say anything good, even as we accept it as inevitable.