Podcasts

I can't think of any favorite music podcasts off the top of my head, but given how many in depth essays I've seen, read or enjoyed about all sorts of music stuff, I can't imagine it would be that much harder to do a podcast, not least because you can actually incorporate the music. Like the first (only?) season of Cocaine and Rhinestones, that was great stuff. There must be countless others, just as there are a million good movie podcasts, I just haven't felt the need to seek them out.

But yeah, this 1980 one sucked.

I have Hanging Out With Audiophiles (Jamie Lidell interviews musicians/engineers/producers)
The Trap Set w/ Joe Wong (interviews musicians)
And Introducing (Chris Wade & Molly go over an artist's career usually using their memoir as a source, with a guest into that artist - quality varies greatly)
Mike Watt's radio show feed

Trap Set is really great

the Prince Paul podcast What Had Happened Was is great fun, PP is v funny with some great stories
the Joy Division/New Order podcast Transmissions is ok, has all new interviews with everyone but glosses over a lot of stuff (e.g. completely ignores that the RCA album sessions happened) and the presenter sounds like she's hosting a show for children, v mismatched imo

The Good Old Grateful Deadcast is excellent. I am a GD nerd and generally scoff at any official production from what’s left of the band’s business arm but this is great. Tons of trivia and side trips and content that I never knew existed. The episodes so far use the two 1970 albums as jumping-off points. Not sure if they are planning to go beyond those albums.

loved What Had Happened Was, Paul is just such a genial nerd and enthusiastic conversationalist, and host Mike Eagle usually struck the right balance of nerd/fan and guide to push him to more anecdotes.

Chris Molanphy's Hit Parade on Slate is good if you're interested enough in the month's subject to listen - the recent two-parter on Jim Steinman was fun.

("good" ie as good as a radio programme when radio stations paid people who knew stuff about music.) ((eg that one works with no original research, but say What Had Happened Was could have been 3x better with resources to interview other ppl from Paul's career war stories))

yeah Hit Parade is good value

You Don't Know Mojack is a fave of mine, but I grew up on the SST Records catalog and am willing to deep dive on many of the outliers. (Mojack's episode on Negativland's Escape From Noise and the extended Mark Hosler interview is A+++)

I can't really recommend Turned Out A Punk or Protonic Reversal as a rule, but they can be great if there's a good guest on. TOAP had Vanessa and Michael from Pylon on successive episodes and Protonic's two parter with Jerry Casale of Devo is totally great.

I love the Mojack podcast and am working through it slowly, but I've no idea why those guys seem to think we'd be interested in 15/20 mins of shambling back-and-forth about their latest obscure Punk 7-inch purchases at the beginning of every show, it's too much.

It's like, 'enough fellas, tell me where we're at with Zoogz Rift already!!!'

thanks to ET for the Negativland rec, thanks to Mares for the skip warning

Recent Mojack interviews I really liked: Sylvia Juncosa, John Golden, and Scott Colby (had no idea who he was - tracked down a copy of SST 151 and dig it). And yes, skip over the beginning,.

Also from the "can't really recommend unless the guests are great" file: Paisley Stage, Raspberry & Rhyme (paisley underground podcast), The Devil's Music with Pleasant Gehman (her chat with Belinda Carlisle was far more interesting than the Go-Gos documentary)

Lydia Lunch's podcast is worth checking in with, but there's a good chance that she'll end up talking about herself 100% of the time if the guest is boring. Was listening to her fan-girl out to Martin Rev this afternoon - hilarious.

Reply All is something very rare: a great podcast with unbearable hosts.

― JRN, Tuesday, 10 March 2020 15:04 (nine months ago) link

ugh, this is very otm. good stories, can't stand the hosts

they're like two oscar presenters doing a smug scripted routine with each other. awful

The Devil's Music with Pleasant Gehman (her chat with Belinda Carlisle was far more interesting than the Go-Gos documentary

― Elvis Telecom, Tuesday, December 22, 2020 5:31 AM

Seconding this rec - also the recent episodes with John Doe and Kid Congo Powers worth a listen. The conversations tend to drift to "partying" instead of music per se, but Gehman is exactly the kind of veteran scenester who you would want to hear chatting with these figures. She's been there, done that etc. (Approx every other episode is about the occult instead of music).

A friend recently recommended the Murder Ballads podcast, which I guess does a deep dive into specific songs (like Stagger Lee).

they're like two oscar presenters doing a smug scripted routine with each other. awful

I think a lot of hosts are the worst thing about podcasts. Always so smug, always in the way of the story, always pushing the inane babble to the fore when it should be background.

Yes, there is really a problem with the pro podcaster voices, there are maybe 3 or 4 common types and all are annoying in different ways, cannot understand why they insist on putting them on, guess they think inane banter is what people want to hear, no need to shift tone when doing the adverts either, but it really does ruin so many podcasts for me.

take it from a caster, good hosting is hard

oh I know, I am one too

What happened to the Trap Set? Been a while since any new episodes.

It's like morning DJs. Literally the last thing I want to hear in the morning is inane banter on the radio.

I do like it when they don't take the ads seriously, or at least struggle with them.

I think what we find annoying about these hosts is what a lot of their listeners find endearing

it can be a bit like small talk at work. it is painful for me, but other people seem to live for it.

Cocaine and Rhinestones, that was great stuff

i blew through this in the early days of covid. really enjoyed it, even if large doses of Coe's voice/ cadence could be a lot. really appreciated his enthusiasm and personal lens that often had very little to do with his 'lineage'. hope there will be more.

like i never thought i could really be invested in The Judds but by the end of that ep i was feeling it

Louder Than a Riot--an NPR podcast about Hip Hop and mass incarceration--was pretty good. Followed the Bobby Shmurda and Mac (from No Limit) cases.

My friend suspects Coe (who had said the entire second season was going to be just George Jones) might have had some kind of a breakdown. I don't know if that's based on personal knowledge or not.

https://www.savingcountrymusic.com/what-happened-to-tyler-mahan-coe-of-cocaine-rhinestones/

oof that’s a bummer.

Last i knew he was working on an entire season devoted to George Jones - if that is true then i will happily wait for that!

He still has a thousand Patreon subs - a case study in inertia.

I enjoy Reply All and I think Alex's voice is fine. But as I've probably said upthread, PJ talks way too fast, barely articulates his consonants, and is an inveterate up-talker, which makes me crazy.

Any serious broadcaster shouldn't be uptalking to such a degree, it makes you sound like you don't trust the words you're saying.

But, omfg the new guy, his voice actually is almost completely unlistenable, I'm sure his journalism skills are great but how did anyone *ever* think he'd make a good broadcaster with a voice like that?

Fwiw, I have no problem with the voices of the reply all hosts. I feel the episode about the mystery song is very entertaining even if the whole dramatic arc/search seems a bit fabricated, a bit Rube Goldberg.

I have not listened to the 1980 podcast, but I did see Hanif give a memorable poetry feature a year or two back. He’s a good writer and the crowd energy/atmosphere was way more intense then I expected.

It's crazy that the so not gonna happen episode is now iconic

Forgot to mention episode 22 last month! But episode 23 is live...

https://www.megaphonic.fm/bythebywater/23

Last week I got an email from Sruthi about Reply All’s Test Kitchen series. I had been avoiding listening but once I did I felt gaslit. The truth is RA and specifically PJ and Sruthi contributed to a near identical toxic dynamic at Gimlet. This will be a longer thread, apologies.

— Eric Eddings (@eeddings) February 16, 2021

re: PJ

Tough listen because the main host has a voice like a Daniel Clowes character (mouth-breath-y, slack jaw, excessive saliva?)... not to mention the Arnold Horschack machine-gun laugh.

It's a voice that made me pine for Starly Kine's if you can believe that.

― Jersey Al (Albert R. Broccoli), Sunday, October 16, 2016 3:45 PM (four years ago)

I've occasionally wondered if he might be a PoS in real life, aside from his near-unlistenably manic uptalking and unforgivable (for a broadcaster) absence of spoken clarity and diction.

That thread is pretty inside baseball for someone that knows what Reply All is yet has only heard one episode (guess which one!?). Can someone sum it up?

yeah this is all kinda mystifying to me?

reply all has a series now on bon appetit and the racist and toxic workplace that ba is/was. a black person who worked at gimlet media is pointing out that basically it's exactly how they describe ba in the podcast series

Gimlet workers unionized in 2019 partly because of issues with diversity (and representation after Gimlet sold itself to Spotify for $230 million)

PJ and Sruthi out

That escalated quickly

I guess it's getting overlooked that one of the Invisibilia hosts accused someone who works on Radiolab of sexually harassing her at a work event

Vogt certainly isn't making excuses, which is a nice change from the way these things usually go. I have to say that as far as toxic workplace blowups go, this one feels pretty minor. They didn't support a union drive and also they were aloof from the rest of the Gimlet crowd — not great behavior, but also sort of what you'd expect from the franchise players? Reply All is the main reason Gimlet exists in the first place. I don't really think this is on par with Bon Appetit or other such examples. Seems more like normal office politics to me.