Ladies and Gentlemen…50 Years of SNL Music is a recontextualized contemporary songbook

I have a confession: I’ve been a Saturday Night Live watcher, devotee, critic when I didn’t think it was any good, and junkie when I thought it was funny as shit all my life. From the beginning I was obsessed with the show and all the inappropriateness it brought from the jump. 

Maybe I didn’t understand all the petty, messy Chevy Chase snark at its inception, but its “I don’t care” boldness to have Beethoven, played with attitude by the energy force known as Belushi, sniff a little cocaine (it was prevalent in the ’70s, I guess) and then start playing Ray Charles—that’s ballsy, Jack. Brilliant. Even a 9-year-old kid staying way up past his bedtime could figure that out. Those “Not Ready For Prime Time Players” always felt real. Like they wanted to take things way out, to extremes, from the start, and it still transmitted funny somehow.

And then, the live music. 

Gritty, scruffy…at times, it resembled what you expected to see on or at the left of the terrestrial radio dial. (Dang longhairs.) Especially in the ’70s and into the ’80s, the music reflected the counter-culture of New York. What you’d expect to see late at night on a New York public access channel: Sun Ra rearranging the planets from Studio 8H, Gil Scott-Heron asking America “What’s the Word,” Patti Smith covering The Who’s “My Generation,” Frank Zappa using announcer Don Pardo’s voice to communicate lyrics on a chalkboard, Devo playing “Satisfaction.” It could be anything. These could be acts performing at CBGB. That’s the specialness of OG SNL. The immediateness of the moment. Even when they didn’t even know exactly what the show was, it still retained that distinctiveness.

As a kid who grew up on ’70s and ’80s music shows—Dick Clark, Soul Train and Solid Gold, primarily—SNL live performances kinda had them all beat. It could all go to hell, down in flames in a matter of seconds. This live music segment, along with crazy David Letterman musical performances, showcased all the artists who didn’t pop up on Casey Kasem’s American Top 40 for long-distance dedications. Belushi making fun of Joe Cocker, Belushi bringing the punk band Fear into the studio with a school bus full of slam-dancing mohawks and dyed hair mosh-pit enthusiasts, and a very young Eddie Murphy in the back of the drummer, pretty much drumming up some shit. This is where all the risk was at.

And let’s be honest, Dick Clark was kinda square, no disrespect. Don Cornelius on Soul Train could be very endearing to James Brown, Stevie, and Aretha; heck, even a drunk-looking David Bowie or an enthusiastic Yellow Magic Orchestra, but at the same time, talk out the side of his neck when it came to hip-hop artists. De La Soul was not lying with the lyric “Don don’t like rap” from “Pass The Plugs” off of “De La Soul Is Dead.”

With the 50th anniversary of Saturday Night Live coming up, many things, even a Jason Reitman movie, have been brought into clearer focus about the American comedy show. But always remember, those musical performances tell their own, very strong stories.

That’s what Amir “Questlove” Thompson gets as producer of a documentary about the music of SNL. He’s busy these days. Rather, the pursuits—film projects—he’s been working on for the past couple of years have come to the surface in the first quarter of 2025. Between said documentary about 50 years of Saturday Night Live music, currently streaming on Peacock, and his Sly Lives! (aka The Burden of Black Genius) documentary on Sly Stone debuting at Sundance this past January, the Academy Award-winning director of 2022’s Summer of Soul (… Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised) and Tonight Show musician has homed in on something non-music playing directors sometimes overlook. The cultural timestamp of a musical performance speaks chapters and volumes within seconds.

“Editing films teaches you so much more about how to be effective as a storyteller than any medium that I know of,” he stated in a recent interview with Variety.

Ladies and Gentlemen … 50 Years of SNL Music opens with a segment that pits discordant artists against, with, and versus one another, very much in DJ mash-up style. Recontextualizing live performances over 50 years in several minutes, dropping out melodies of one song and adding the beat of the incoming song. Taking the foot-stomping of Usher’s “Yeah,” overlaying the vocals from Funky Four Plus One More’s performance—the first hip-hop group on SNL courtesy of Blondie—with an actual DJ down in the music pit, facing the camera, spinning records live, with “Hollaback Girl” lyrics on one side and Eminem’s “Guess Who’s Back” on the other. It continues, this channel surfing through the ages, Run DMC’s “Walk This Way” blended with Hall and Oates’ “I Can’t Go For That (No Can Do)”.

These songs, all coming from various points in the SNL library, take on a type of contemporary musical songbook persona. Cher’s “I Found Someone,” blended with “MMMBop,” and “Under Pressure” by Queen interspersed with Dave Matthews Band lends itself to a cherubic and simultaneously insufferable high school reunion playlist. This complete, pulling-from-the-vaults showcase took 11 months to put together and stretched to 17 minutes, according to reports, until it was decided a good solid five minutes would get the point across.

“I thought, what am I going to add to the table that’s different from anybody else?” Questlove said in an interview about the segment. “My music gave me a third language that maybe other documentarians don’t have. I’ve got to stretch that muscle.”

The same strength that the show SNL started as: speaking to a generation that had not yet seen their comedic perspective showcased on a mainstream platform. As Lorne Michaels, founder and executive producer of SNL, who bestowed the action of somehow documenting the music of SNL to Questlove, states during the musical visual mix about the show’s modest origins: “Remember, when we came on the air (October 11, 1975) we are following Watergate, the last helicopter out of Vietnam, the city (NYC) is broke, the church is being questioned, and so everything seemed, if not crumbling, at least open to question. So in that moment in time, we just came on and did a show we wanted to see, and music was a big part of that.”

These performances speak for themselves quite loudly, and the remainder of the documentary—actors, musicians, and anybody else who happened to be at SNL—speaks quite loudly about the role music played, albeit the opening theme song, musical performers, musical skits, digital shorts, or in some cases where the performer, as in Kanye, is the performance, not the song.

But even his shenanigans don’t come close to observing Sun Ra rearranging the cosmos, The Lonely Island spreading Yuletide cheer by their “D*ck In A Box” viral skit, or Fred Armisen’s skit about a dad band playing at his daughter’s wedding with Dave Grohl on drums and a punk manifesto rolled out to the wrong crowd. Even the OG skit of Paul Simon singing in a turkey suit. See, sometimes effective performance is rooted, not in self, but in concepts that lack one iota of seriousness.

That’s Saturday Night Live.

Treble is supported by its patrons. Become a member of our Patreon, get access to subscriber benefits, and help an independent media outlet continue delivering articles like these.