NPR - stuffy or sexy?

Just pulling this up 'cus of a thing on skot's FB. Interested in the new (maybe) slightly more central (maybe) place NPR has in pop culture; like how it's sort of an Apple-ish boutique brand of news. In my childhood, I remember it as a stuffy ol' bastion of the gentry – Lawrence Welk, Robert J Lurtsema, BBC World Service. Now, though, it seems to be a widely-acknowledged signifier of a social/politicical ideology incrementally left of center – but only in the way that doesn't raise ripples. The Starbucks-Intellegencia Tribune. Or ... maybe this is just my station, my perception, my baggage? Curious, though, about other perceptions of it.

read that as 'raise nipples' that is all

oh damn, that is some good radio

there's some pretty good content on npr. i rarely seek it out but this american life is generally interesting and thoughtfully constructed. i think it's just a signifier of college educated liberals, a huge demographic

I can't deal with a lot of their shows - Diane Rehm works too hard to give the shills she sometimes have on room to air their bullshit, and Terry Gross is still the worst, and A Prairie Home Companion is an abomination, etc. - but my local NPR station (KERA) has a really good afternoon interview program called Think that justifies my tiny donation to them every year. The local NPR music station is usually pretty bland but has its heart in the right place.

This American Life is usually p. bad, to my mind, kind of a logical outgrowth of liberal arts creative writing classes.* The more earnest, Studs Terkely bits are all right, and the few hour length pieces are often interesting.

The Moth is too often about adults behaving badly, and I find that there's a lot of 'aren't I a naughty?" mugging. Lots of wry, slightly acid retellings of Unpleasant Life Experienes, too. Maybe this is just my experience, but I'd like this more if there was a bit less posturing.

Best of all is Glynn Washington's 'Snap Judgement' which - despite a a few goofy segments here and there – feels more alive than the other two combined. The Halloween episodes (spooky stories) are the very, very best.

* In defense of TAL, there was an excellent segment by Ben Calhoun two weeks ago. It was about the politically-motivated occupancy of a school board by Hasidic and ultra-Orthodox Jews, and the semi-deliberate, semi-unintended (perhaps) defunding of school programs in a majority Black/Latino area. Excellent, complicated segment: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/534/a-not-so-simple-majority

I like car talk and wait wait don't tell me and gene demby online. I like npr but it's like listening to my mother sometimes bc she listens to npr and then talks about what she heard on it to me.

OK, so I heard a rerun of Terry Gross being interviewed by Marc Maron yesterday, and I came away with a lot more respect for her. Mostly as an interview subject - Maron is capable of getting stuff from his subjects that she cannot - but still, I turned off the radio respecting the amount of thought and effort she must put into her work.

And then today comes around. I always seem to be in the car when Fresh Air is on, and today she had Kent Jones, who directed the new Hitchcock/Truffaut doc. After the intro, it more or less started like this.

TG: So, the shower scene from Psycho is probably Hitchcock's best known sequence. Even if you haven't seen it you probably know about it.
KJ: Right.
TG: The film starts with Janet Leigh, who is a real estate secretary. A client drops off $40,000 to buy a property, and her boss tells her to deposit in the bank immediately...

And I think to myself, hmm, what question could she possibly be leading up to?

TG: But instead of depositing it in the bank, she steals the money. She doesn't seem like a bad person, but you're wondering what she's going to do. Is she going to keep it? Is she going to return it? And she pulls into a motel and she meets the man working there, who is very shy and nervous. He's built up all this suspense. And then she goes to take a shower ...

At this point Kent Jones is sort of waiting to see where she's going with this, as am I. After a pause:

KJ: Um, well, as you said, everyone is pretty familiar with this scene.

You can tell he really doesn't want to spoil it, but she pressures him to go on.

KJ: And, um, she gets hacked to pieces.

OK, I think, never mind that TG saying people are familiar with Psycho and its shower scene basically negates the need to recount the first 30 minutes of the film, and never mind that she essentially leads with a giant spoiler for those handful of people unfamiliar with it. I'm kind of groaning at the lameness of it, but I think, OK, she's interviewing the director of a doc about Truffaut interviewing Hitchcock. Why did she lead with Psycho, and why did she decide her question needed this epic preamble? So there I am, primed for a doozy, and ...

TG: So Hitchcock reportedly shot the shower scene in slow-motion. Can you explain why he did that?

Jaw drops.

No, Terry Gross, no! Why did you do that?! Bad interviewer! Bad! What was the point!

And like that, all the good will from the day before basically evaporated.

marketplace is the offender for me. Kai Ryssdal...god I hate this guy's smug ass voice. Please just speak with normal inflections. You are not Jon Stewart.

I still will mostly defend Terry Gross -- I think she's good at getting people to open up and at stepping out of the way/not trying to show off how knowledgeable she is (though sometimes to a fault).

Marketplace does irritate me with its superficial, sunny, quick take on everything.

Worth pointing out that neither of those shows are actually produced by "NPR", but no one seems to make the distinction.

That's splitting hairs. They are as inextricable from NPR as, I dunno, This American Life or Prairie Home Companion. Lose those, and Fresh Air, and Marketplace, and NPR is just well-produced news and talk radio.

"let's do the numbers! boppity bippity boo boo boop" fuck you

lol

I will take Terry Gross's ostensibly "dumb questions" over the guy (and yeah, it's usually a guy) whose questions are so overloaded with information and opinion that they hardly leave room for an answer beyond "yeah, you're right"

the MOTH style of storytelling is so fuckin unbearable. samey samey

serves you right for not listening to fmu

Yeah can't stand moth

Michael Ian Black interview on Terry Gross was a little weird -- she seemed really way too interested in the fact that people sometimes mistake him for gay and spent like 1/3 of the interview on it.

this David Greene on Morning Edition uses formulaic "therapist voice" ALL THE TIME

so fucking annoying

the MOTH style of storytelling is so fuckin unbearable. samey samey

yeah. they apparently have a structure that they more or less impose on their storytellers in the name of 'developing' them

TAL just replayed the Richard Price episode from 2008 (which I think was also a Moth story, confusingly?). It's a great story but the audience is so awful and reacts so inappropriately to what is actually a horrifying police story.

let me guess, they chortle knowingly

for a minute I forgot they have occasional live shows and was wondering about your mental health

They guffaw even, at what seem like really inappropriate moments. The story is very upsetting.

the way he delivers it though does feel kinda like a stand-up routine. i wasn't entirely sure what he was doing with it either.

yeah that's true, his delivery was a little weird. It didn't start out like it was going to go in that direction.

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/362/got-you-pegged

Act 1 for those interested

I gotta say I love Code Switch, the new NPR podcast.

there's a new girl who does the support/benefactor spots and her delivery is so affectedly smooth and precisely enunciated it makes me wanna hurl

Cokie Roberts: Commentator Says Supporters of Donald Trump Are 'Morally Tainted'

brass fucking balls

Diane Rhem's last show will air today. (Fear not, she says she wants a podcast!)

I thought her show was a good way to dig under the surface of headlines . . .The show topics were always prescient and she seemed to get good guests.

Beyond the standard NPR liberal bias, she didn't inject much of her personal life into the show. If she had any great auses or passions, I wasn't aware of them.

Her voice never bothered me at all.

Any superfans or h4t3rz?

"sexy npr" is a rather disappointing GIS.

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Bh02IobCbGM/TdCH3WaZ3RI/AAAAAAAAGU4/HEgQmmpX2CM/s1600/cokie.jpg

One of my youtube habits is to go through random "Tiny Desk Concerts" videos, and I'm shocked at how awful the vast majority of them are. I don't think the people selecting these bands have any taste at all, they just want stuff that superficially has that cloying "Tiny Desk" aesthetic, and occasionally this formula accidentally results in a great performance by a great band. Or maybe it's just that most bands suck, in general.

that aesthetic makes my skin crawl but the christian scott and gucci mane tiny desk concerts are so good i can try to overlook the national playing ukeleles or whatever

The NPR music people seem to sincerely like/love most of the music they highlight.

Steve Innskeep is a straight up dealbreaker when it comes to me listening to npr for morning news

pinegrove tiny desk is also incredible

I used to think KEXP Live was kinda corny and twee. Then Tiny Desk comes around

I guess I'm just surprised at how many corny, mediocre, old-man-hat style bands there are in the world.

Steve Innskeep is a straight up dealbreaker when it comes to me listening to npr for morning news

you mean that if it's no inskeep, it's not a must-listen, or that if it is inskeep, you'd rather listen to nothing at all?

i didn't binge-listen to NPR until i had a temp job in data entry for about a year. i'd spend the entire day mindlessly QCing spreadsheet data with headphones on, and really began to rely on NPR and other talk radio to get me through the day. morning edition was an important part of the routine. i'd listen to it all the way across the workbridge from morning arrival to lunch. i started to like this steve inskeep character, or just the reliable tenor of his voice, really.

then i took a few years off from morning edition, and whenever i heard snippets of it i subconsciously associated it with entering and reviewing spreadsheet data for hours on end, so i'd turn it off. now when i listen to morning edition, steve inskeep often actively pisses me off, and i'm not sure why. i think it has something to do with the way he blankly describes everything with the same tone, his weak interview questions, and even weaker follow-up questions. i haven't heard him do a segment on antifa, but listening to steve inskeep talk about antifa and both-sides it to death sounds like torture.

the twist at the end of all of this? i am steve inskeep

I did a quick search and this came up:

Steve Inskeep at Amazon - Low Prices on Steve Inskeep. (Ad)
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steve inskeep is death

i have literally no idea how i missed the christian scott tiny desk concert when it came out but holy shit

@Karl yeah I just can't stomach him. He seems to be actively trying to change the tone of NPR to something a little looser, hipper, more irreverent; which mayyy not be a bad idea -- he's just not the guy to do it

this party is officially started

https://i.imgur.com/2CJvcqz.jpg

that is not how I imagined his appearance

I was ok with him but now I'm having second thoughts

there's gotta be a bitchin' rat tail back there

steve inskeep shows up at your party at 5:30 pm before you even get home from work, talks to you non-stop for the next two hours as you scramble with preparations, and then leaves the party at 8:45pm because he has to get up super early the next morning

oh shit i'm steve