This is the title of a music documentary that is also a movie about noise. It is about simplicity and style, in relation to their opposites. And on a more distant level, it is about facts that are increasingly more difficult to recognize, entrenched as these often are inside layers of complexity and nuance. I am reminded of matters less musical, such as economies, capital markets, business models, products, solutions… but I digress. We begin with Jimmy Page.
It Might Get Loud is a documentary about succeeding generations of musicians, about three guitarists in particular, who each – uniquely – defines his genre and is symbolic of his period. With Mr. Page we witness the birth of hard rock through the eyes of its leading pioneer, who rose to fame in an era of discovery and humor. Had he not gone the way of the Chicago Blues cum double-necked guitar played with a bow, he may have embarked on a career in biological research. He says so on live television, in black and white, age 15.
We proceed to the pop transformation, commercialization, and studio layering of rock music, as engineered by U2′s Edge. (Or is it the Edge?) The name itself seems as though run through a graphic equalizer, and here we are introduced to material that requires eighteen pedals, five synthesizers, a mainframe computer, and five hundred takes, in order to produce one sound. All the while, Bono is running in circles around the arena with a giant Facebook flag. (Not really, I made that up, because Bono is also a venture capitalist, and his fund owns a stake.)
Finally, we come to the meticulously choreographed, tortured, forced, and almost raunchy sounds of Jack White, whose art consists almost entirely of fitting, as it were, a square peg into a round hole. We watch Jack manufacture an electric guitar from a soda bottle and a wooden board with nails and hammer. We watch concert footage of a solo in which his fingers start to bleed. We see Jack ripping upholstery to shreds. Such hard work, such determined energy, such seriousness: Jack is an entrepreneur, he iterates.
In short, we see the music and its constituencies move farther and farther away from the purity and essence from which the genre began, as each generation adds its mark, and with each mark an added layer of distortion. But nothing in this documentary – none of the interviews, none of the interaction between the three symbols of disparate styles and historical periods – seems as genuine and is as profoundly touching as two scenes in which we are alone with Jimmy Page – present time – in two relaxed and private moments. In the first scene, he is in what seems like a small studio, although is not much more than a closet-size room, where he plays the guitar lines of “Ramble On,” lost inside the melody, without accompanying vocals, sound effects, overdubbing, or other instrumentation. And we sense that he could go on this way forever.
In the other scene, Mr. Page is in his music library, surrounded by shelves stacked with vinyl records and CDs. We notice the joy on his face and we feel his enthusiasm as he spins a couple of tracks on the record player, all the while providing commentary, play by play, and drawing our attention to special aspects in the playing. One track is Link Wray’s “Rumble,” a sequence of which actually causes our teacher to burst out laughing, as if at an inside joke. The other track is “Can’t Be Satisfied” by Muddy Waters. Mr. Page here points out that there are only two instruments in the recording – bass and guitar, both acoustic – as he demonstrates for us in the air.
There is beauty in simplicity, and there is simplicity in true things. That is perhaps the most important theme behind this documentary about music and electric guitarists. As times become more complex, and as the instruments we use more difficult to master, arriving at simple truths can be a nearly impossible task that requires heavier and heavier labor. I am, as I often am, reminded of Ludwig Wittgenstein, who wrote his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus – a series of short blurbs that follows a logical sequence, and which has become the foundation of modern philosophy and so much else – in the chaos of a battle field. It begins with “The world is everything that is the case / The world is the totality of facts, not of things”… and ends with the following: “Whereof one cannot speak thereof one must remain silent.”
It might get loud. This movie is about more than music.
