I saw the Dua Lipa song exploder
Then I saw the "classic albums" stuff - on Amazon Prime I believe
Dua Lipa was basically laptop-slinging jingle/hook writers, writing by recipe and doing all the work. Then Lipa comes in, does what they tell her to do, writes the lyrics and then calls it her song. No band playing together, lots of samples and laptops, etc -- very depressing.
The classic albums series are epic soul-searching adventure stories of bands and studios squeezing everything they had, and everything they were onto tape. They are stories of artists bonded by fate and busting ass to forge new ground, to make something unlike anything that had come before that would remain relevant throughout and beyond their lifetime --
very inspiring.
Examples:
- Judas Priest were slamming silverware drawers onto the kitchen floor trying to literally boost "metal" in their metal. They banged on guitar cases (and compressed the s*** out of it) trying to get a bull whip sound because their actual bullwhip sounded horrible. And they were doing their album in a big house because the studio they started in was small, dead acoustics, etc. and they wanted arena metal - turns out the secret to arena metal is in the stairway entry room.
- And then there was Peter Gabriel who is so slow at writing and so prone to distraction his engineer shattered three of his house phones and locked him into a barn to keep him focused and writing.
- There are trash can lids in one of Steely Dan's epic hits; they isolate them on the board, and their engineer confesses everyone except except Fagan and Becker were completely lost and clueless if all the stuff they were recording would ever come together or sound good.
- Who's Next was actually a pivot - the third attempt at doing a second album after the first two attempts were complete disasters 1) doing a follow-up rock opera, and 2) doing some bizarre live interaction/performance music evolution with live audience thing.
- On Fleetwood Mac Rumors they wore out the tape and had to MANUALLY sync a backup recording of the drums to the finished takes -- before SYMPTE or other sync. Yes, some poor schmuck with a golden ear and the dexterity of brain surgeon had to sit there with headphones and his thumb on the tape flange listening for the slightest phase slip and compensating in real time. The stories go on and on.
Song exploder did not "esplode" much of anything for me, but I'll give it another chance.