BB Video - $5 Cover: Craig Brewer's New MTV Series on Local Indie Music Life
(Download MP4, or watch on YouTube)
In today's Boing Boing Video (brought to you in part by WEPC.com), director Craig Brewer (Hustle and Flow , Black Snake Moan ) talks to us about his latest project: the MTV online series $5 Cover, which chronicles the internet-age lives and dreams of struggling musicians in Memphis, Tennessee.
$5 Cover is described as "a rough-and-tumble show set in the clubs, bars, and all-night cafes of present-day Memphis," and follows "young musicians as they fight for love, inspiration, and money to pay the rent." These are real people, but this is not reality schlock.
When I first saw clips of the series in production during a visit to the MTV offices, I knew it was going to be great. I grew up an MTV teen, but am not generally a fan of MTV's present-day on-air programming. I've felt for some time like the network no longer produced stuff I'd find interesting.
But this is different. Maybe part of what allowed something this authentic and engaging to incubate at MTV is the fact that this is primarily an online series.
And then there's the fact that Brewer is at the helm. I'm a big fan of his big-screen work, and he clearly loves the stories at the heart of $5 Cover -- the lives and art of musicians who are his own community, in Memphis.
Boing Boing asked Brewer how the internet is changing what it means to be an independent artist, and how technology is changing the nature of what "local music" means. He talks to us about why he created the show, how this is different than directing for film or television, and why all of this matters so much to him.
When MTV sent us a DVD of the completed episodes, Boing Boing Video's editor and I watched them all, back to back, and then vowed to buy some of the music online. I'm not kidding, it's that great. We went particularly nuts about Amy Lavere, an artist featured in the first part of the Boing Boing Video episode. She's from Memphis, by way of TX and Louisiana. Al Kapone was another personal fave.
More about $5 Cover: New episodes premiere Friday nights at midnight on MTV and at Fivedollarcover.com throughout May. There are mini-documentaries about what went on in each week's episode here, and Flipside Memphis gives you an even deeper dive into the Memphis culture. The entire video series, along with music videos and other related video, is available on iTunes for download to own. The soundtrack is available digitally through services including iTunes and Rhapsody, and I've been googling my way to the artists' websites and myspaces and discovering lots more on my own.
RSS feed for new episodes here, YouTube channel here, subscribe on iTunes here. Get Twitter updates every time there's a new ep by following @boingboingvideo, and here are blog post archives for Boing Boing Video. (Special thanks to Boing Boing's video hosting partner Episodic)
Sponsor shout-out: Boing Boing Video is brought to you in part by WEPC.com, in partnership with Intel and Asus. WePC.com is a site where users come together to "share ideas, images and inspiration about the ideal PC." Participants' designs, feature ideas and community feedback will be evaluated by ASUS and "could influence the blueprint for an actual notebook PC built by ASUS with Intel inside."
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What's with the advertisements in the main column? Keep ads on the right hand side, please! Or on top. Or the very bottom.
#1: Unless BB's doing a bad job of ad sales, inline ads pay better.
They've gotta keep the lights on somehow.
What a shocker, the actual show is geographically crippled. Looks great, but you just turned away 5 and a half billion members of your potential audience. Nice one.
It's worth pointing out that Brewer insisted on using a totally local crew for this. I think MTV had the idea they'd shoot it in LA, but the entire cast and crew, everyone behind the camera, and everyone on the set was from Memphis, and everything was shot in and around town. It is of and by the local arts community.
The Flipside Memphis link above also has a bunch of actual documentary footage shot in conjunction with the project: http://www.livefrommemphis.com/lfmtv/flipside
Loving the show so far has been a really refreshing change for MTV. It's a really intereting look into Memphis and new musicians.
Thanks, keep up the great work.
The show is fantastic so far - can't wait to see the rest - hopefully this marks a new era of experimentation and the start of a return to cool for MTV.
Re: #3... Gareth, what do you mean by "geographically crippled?"
Watching the show, it may be hard for some people to get completely wrapped around the close-knit vibe of our music scene here in Memphis. I promise you, it's all on the up and up.
I hope people will get the sense that beyond critical acclaim, there's a lot of love both in and around this project. Craig, Alan Spearman (who did $5 Cover Amplified), Christopher Reyes, Sarah Fleming and Brad Phelan (who put together Flipside Memphis) all outdid themselves in putting this together. It's a blueprint for what is possible.
@kerry, I believe gareth is referring to the fact that end users outside of the US are blocked from viewing the $5 Cover episodes over at MTV.com. BB imposes no such geographic limitations. the MTV blocking is a function of content licensing provisions, I know it's awful for would-be viewers, but I also understand why this happens.
Thanks Xeni... I thought that might have been it.
I'm from Memphis and I can see already that this show will make up for how he (brewer) offended people with Hustle and Flow (he didn't offend me). I love this new docu-drama with actual substance. MTV should be proud of themselves too. Valerie June is my girl!! She is the hot black chick with beautiful dreads. She plays guitar where I work and is a total sweet heart. Just listen to her lyrics. Thanks for mentioning this in your blog.
Re: The geographical crippling: I get the impression (at least from the BBTV video - the only one I'm "allowed" to see) that the point of the show is to make it as available as possible. This makes it doubly stupid.
The fact that it's been done so cludgily just makes me laugh, too - the player continued to buffer the video while telling me I was not allowed to view it. I suspect that the underlying web service providing the content is completely unprotected, in which case it would be trivial to open up the Flash app, remove the IP detection code, and play the thing on a local machine (with the app accessing the web service).
(I just can't be bothered to get hold of a quasi-legal copy of Flash Pro, learn Action Script and do it.)
Anyway 'grats to Craig Brewer on an awesome concept for a show. I truly believe that this is the future of art. I hope you can do more like this, and that others follow suit.
Now just get MTV to take their stupid region-locking off.
I'm in Taiwan, and geographical crippling pisses me off bigtime -- but I have to tell you: I can watch all these $5 Cover episodes just fine. So if MTV are OK with me having access to this show out here, I'm wondering which countries they're actually blocking?
Anyway, I love what Craig Brewer and the Memphis musicians/artists are doing with this. I hope this whole approach catches on, not just in Austin and Argentina(!) but planetwide. Perhaps this time, after so many false starts, we really are seeing the future of music....
And check out the excellent Live from Daryl's House for another great model of how music and the interwebs can work together so that everyone wins.
Re: geographical crippling, it's crippled for viewers in the UK which is "amusing" as when I click on an episode it first vends an add which is UK specific and then barfs when the main feature loads.
Shame, looked like a great show, will never know now.
Loudersoft, I'd add to your comment that it's not just the Memphis music scene; there's a thriving community of musicians, filmmakers, photographers, sculptors, painters, writers, and artists of every stripe here. I hope that comes across in the series.
Who is the guy playing at 3:40 in, the zither/drums/keyboard thing is hot!
That's Paul Taylor, Amy LaVere's real-life boyfriend.
thanks MadMolecule, I'd love to find that full song.
Some of these musicians are quite talented, but why does the dialog sound about as real as an episode of some Disney Channel tweener sitcom?
Love this idea, it's very similar in spirit to what I've been trying to do with Lo-Fi Saint Louis for the last 4 years. What Craig says about celebrating local music echos my sentiments exactly. Good for him on having the clout to get something like this on MTV.
#19 JAYERANDOM, perhaps our lives are closer to the reality of tweener telenovelas than you realize.
Hello foreigners - check the MySpace page - they've got episodes up - not sure if they're geo-blocked - I'm in the US... Also, it's a different player... myspace.com/5dollarcover
I'd love to see this move to other cities for the following seasons. I know the DC rock scene is particularly tight-knit, with a lot of member-sharing going on (I think I'm in something like 5 bands now, it's hard to keep track). Of course, no one actually "makes a living" on it, theres no money and not a lot of local support even for critically acclaimed groups like Bellflur and Deleted Scenes.