NPR - stuffy or sexy?

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:

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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

NPR HR graciously covers the Jaws Of Life rental fee required for all Steve's dental visits

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.

― IF (Terrorist) Yes, Explain (man alive), Monday, October 9, 2017 11:58 AM (two hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i feel like i once argued this to you on here, to a rebuttal of 'theyre just high qual live recordings bruv'. i feel vindicated now thank u

ha! that sounds very plausible. I mean the sound quality of the recording is very nice imo, just the curation is terrible.

But then again it looks like they do at least one per week, so I guess I can't totally fault them for not having 50+ good artists per year.

lol there was a recent one by a band called The Oh Hellos. Perfect.

Blind Pilot
October 21, 2016 • The band's shimmery folk-pop sound, with its vibraphone and overarching vibrancy, is perfectly suited to the space behind Bob Boilen's desk.

The Secret Sisters
September 12, 2016 • The Alabama sibling duo's music can be hymn-like: plain but powerful, heartsick and hopeful. Watch The Secret Sisters perform a river ballad, a hymn and a song capturing some old-fashioned loneliness.

Oh god please no

car talk is actually good though

i kinda don't mind steve inskeep. when he was temporarily replaced by mary whatever i really hated that bc her voice is so annoying like really bad annoying and i don't like how she says the letter S

mary louise kelly, hate her

NPR repeatedly referred to Ocasio-Cortez as wanting to abolish the "Federal Immigration Agency" this morning, instead of abolishing ICE. There is no such agency as the Federal Immigration Agency, there are like six different agencies that deal with immigration. ICE is just the police state wing.

keep thinking that, sheeple

"Coming up, the puzzle with Will Shortz and an interview with Cathy Guisewhite!" I don't think I've ever turned anything off so fast.

If you take the name of Cathy's boyfriend and rearrange the letters, you end up with this word that perfectly describes Will Shortz. What is it?

I can't help but be a little fascinated by Will because of his association with the world's greatest sport (table tennis). But it's almost comical how reluctant and low energy a presence he is on air

he might be the most npr person on npr

i was going to come to this thread to complain about on being with krista tippett. now that farmers' market season has returned i'm driving at 7:30 a.m. on sundays and she makes me want to drive into a wall mmm yeah

i've seen people mock her by calling her 'christian tidbit' lol

weekend NPR is the absolute worst with car talk being the only exception

wait wait dont tell me is p good but theres a show called "ask me another" and it might be worse than prarie home companion, yikes

oh god that one is horrible. it has that particular self-satisfied npr sense of humor. you know the people they play around fundraising time, regular people they have recorded talking about how they love npr. so proud of themselves, for nothing.

onnnnn beinggggg

wait wait don't tell me is awful, the panelists think they're 10x funnier than they actually are

When I graduated many, many years ago, my sweet mother gifted me a multi-volume CD box set of many, many hours of Wait Wait Don't Tell Me. She knew I listened to NPR, and I guess I must've mentioned that I sometimes listened to Wait Wait on Saturday mornings, but I guess I didn't make it clear that my listening was entirely passive and my appreciation of it mostly ironic. Anyway, it was very sweet of her and so that's why I waited a few months before placing it directly into the trash can. I like to think that a few days later a 75 year old white liberal dumpster diver's day had been made.

man I listened to All Things Considered this evening and almost turned it off, the reporters were so terrible (this was after suffering through fucking kai ryssdal's marketplace, why is this still on?). There was a back and forth between host and reporter and the reporter was clearly reading written responses in a completely flat, inflectionless tone, and also sounded like she was in junior high. Asking someone I know who works with NPR what the deal is he simply said "you get what you pay for"

I get irritated at NPR more than I used to but i haven’t been able to tell if it’s worse than it used to be or I just have less patience with middlebrow milquetoast journalism than I used to.

i'd welcome middlebrow milquetoast journalism, it's the barely coherent junior-high level reading of something prewritten and pretending it's an off the cuff conversation that made me cringe.

I stopped listening after they became a PR machine for Iraq War II in 2003, and it seems like I haven’t missed anything.

i'd welcome middlebrow milquetoast journalism, it's the barely coherent junior-high level reading of something prewritten and pretending it's an off the cuff conversation that made me cringe.

xxxxp years ago when my wife and i were listening to npr and marketplace started and it got to that part where kai does his "this... is marketplace" intro and she just says "there is no way that guy doesn't have skeletons in his closet."

ATL has a strong NPR station, there is tons of very relevant and well-done local programming.

But yeah, the national stuff is mostly shit.

i'm here for On the Media and basically nothing else; you can read my scathing criticisms on the other thread

...where it appears we all had a version of this same conversation

Is it fashionable to dislike NPR?

I got very attached to WNYC when I lived in New York and I still listen to some of their daytime programming, Brian Lehrer etc. And On the Media is still good, it survived its tumult. But yeah the actual NPR stuff feels pretty flimsy.

when is somebody going to finally take Scott Simon off to the glue factory??