Episode 1268 - Kelefa Sanneh
Marc:Lock the gates!
Marc:Alright, let's do this.
Marc:How are you, what the fuckers?
Marc:What the fuck buddies?
Marc:What the fuck sticks?
Marc:What the fuck doodles?
Marc:What's happening?
Marc:I'm Mark Maron.
Marc:This is my podcast.
Marc:How are you?
Marc:How's your head?
Marc:How are your hands?
Marc:How's your toe?
Marc:How's your feet?
Marc:How's your gut?
Marc:How's your gut garden?
Marc:Are you feeding your gut garden with probiotics so your poop is good?
Marc:What are you doing for yourself?
Marc:Before it gets away from me and before I forget how to pronounce his name properly, I would like to say that Khalifa Sene is here.
Marc:Khalifa is a journalist, a staff writer at The New Yorker.
Marc:He used to work at The New York Times.
Marc:He writes about music.
Marc:Years ago, the guy interviewed me at the New Yorker Festival 2015.
Marc:And then I hadn't seen or heard from him because I don't reach it.
Marc:I'm out of the fucking loop on just about everything.
Marc:It's amazing.
Marc:I know what's going on.
Marc:Maybe I don't.
Marc:I only seem to know the bad stuff.
Marc:Is there anything good happening?
Marc:There is.
Marc:There is.
Marc:George Clooney walked right up to me and talked to me.
Marc:Now, I know some of you think, hey, man, does that still like, you know, you've been doing this a long time.
Marc:You talk to a lot of big celebrities.
Marc:I mean, come on, dude.
Marc:Does that still have an impact on you?
Marc:Yes.
Marc:Yes, it does.
Marc:There are certain movie stars that are real fucking movie stars.
Marc:They have the effect that a movie star would have on a human.
Marc:Walked right up to me, said, hey, Mark, how you doing?
Marc:Walked right up to me.
Marc:I know some of you are like, so what?
Marc:Sure, you can think that.
Marc:But has George Clooney ever walked up to you and said, hey, your name?
Marc:Has he?
Marc:Mm hmm.
Marc:And went on a minute.
Marc:I'll tell you.
Marc:But wait, I got distracted.
Marc:Kelipha Sene is a guy who wrote a book.
Marc:It's called Major Labels, A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres.
Marc:He goes through all the genres of music that have defined and dominated the past 50 years.
Marc:Rock, R&B, country, punk, hip hop, dance, and pop.
Marc:And I thought this was sort of up my alley, but I don't know about you, but I see a book like that and I'm like, maybe I need to learn something.
Marc:Like there's, I definitely, I don't know that much.
Marc:You know, I buy a lot of records.
Marc:I'm always late to the party.
Marc:I've missed almost everything.
Marc:There's a huge chunk of time between like 1989 and maybe 2000 where I'm just all comedy all the time, not really focusing on music.
Marc:And then shifted a bit once I started getting into vinyl again.
Marc:And I'm just, it's all new.
Marc:Whole education, the whole world of music,
Marc:is new to me basically and i've been playing catch up but when i read this book there's a whole lot of black music that i just i don't know the history of i don't know the nuances of i don't know the different sub genres of r b hip-hop when it became soul when it became smooth jazz there's just a lot of black music i don't know about it bothers me
Marc:I know some jazz.
Marc:I know some hip hop.
Marc:I know some R&B.
Marc:I know some soul.
Marc:But mostly what everybody knows.
Marc:And it makes me feel limited because I like new music.
Marc:I don't know anything about dance, to be honest with you.
Marc:I know very little about hip hop in the big picture.
Marc:And I only know about old country for the most part, except for a few people.
Marc:What I'm trying to say is I'm a fucking dummy.
Marc:I'm not a poser.
Marc:I'll admit it.
Marc:I have a lot of records.
Marc:I listen to a lot of stuff, but I don't know how to contextualize anything.
Marc:And sometimes when you read these kind of books, you're like, all right, this is your context.
Marc:You decided it.
Marc:So let's lay it out.
Marc:Does it make sense?
Marc:Is it correct?
Marc:But I learned some stuff.
Marc:So that's going to happen.
Marc:The George Clooney thing.
Marc:Do you want me to talk about George Clooney?
Marc:I was invited to a screening of his new movie.
Marc:The tender bar.
Marc:It's a it's a kind of a coming of age.
Marc:Writes a passage movie about this kid.
Marc:Ty Sheridan is the kid.
Marc:Ben Affleck is the the bartender uncle.
Marc:Christopher Lloyd's in it as the old man.
Marc:Saw him at the screening.
Marc:I met that Ty Sheridan kid.
Marc:He's a nice kid.
Marc:He enjoys the show.
Marc:But I was just there to watch it.
Marc:And then I'm going to the bathroom.
Marc:Never met George Clooney.
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:I talk about him a lot.
Marc:And I don't know how many times I've talked about Michael Clayton on this show.
Marc:And I don't know how many times I've talked about that.
Marc:He's like a real movie star that's got the real chops.
Marc:He can do the business.
Marc:He can do the acting thing.
Marc:And he's a fucking movie star.
Marc:Like, you know, like old timey.
Marc:But whatever.
Marc:I'm just walking over to the bathroom and I notice he's walking in with with a group of people and he's just walking in the door and I'm over to the side walking to the bathroom and I kind of look over and I catch his eye and goes, hey, Mark, how you doing?
Marc:And I'm like, wow, I'm I'm pretty good, George.
Marc:Thank you.
Marc:Thank you for asking you.
Marc:He's like, I'm good.
Marc:I'm happy to be here.
Marc:I'm like, well, I'm I'm excited to see the movie.
Marc:And he goes, it's light.
Marc:And I'm like, you know what?
Marc:Light's good.
Marc:I could use light.
Marc:And he said, yeah, I bet you could.
Marc:I bet you could.
Marc:And I was like, wow, he knows something about me.
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:I don't know what the details are, but but I imagine that would be a proper response to me.
Marc:No matter what he knew, you seem to need something light.
Marc:But I was excited.
Marc:Is that wrong?
Marc:I was not starstruck, but I was like, how does George Clooney know me?
Marc:Is that weird?
Marc:I'm not going to assume anything, but there's still part of me that doesn't understand right now how George Clooney knows who I am.
Marc:Is that weird?
Marc:Huh?
Marc:Is it?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Clooney.
Marc:Great actor.
Marc:Seemingly a nice guy.
Marc:To me.
Marc:Very exciting.
Marc:And there's one line in the movie.
Marc:It won't spoil anything, but it spoiled my fucking brain for a day.
Marc:Not in a terrible way, but it forced me to have a realization that I don't know.
Marc:I'm certainly ready to have it.
Marc:But I was surprised at how much it affected me.
Marc:And it's a throwaway line.
Marc:And it has nothing to do with the movie per se.
Marc:You know, I've been processing grief for the last year and a half since Lynn Shelton passed away.
Marc:And you get a year out and you start to feel like, okay, I'm okay.
Marc:And I am okay.
Okay.
Marc:But then something happens to it just opens up the portal.
Marc:And it was really this simple line in the movie where he's describing this young kid is describing a college romance.
Marc:And he he was just talking about how why he might like the girl he thought he loved.
Marc:And he said, she gives me hope somehow.
Marc:And it was nebulous.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And then, like, I don't know why it stuck with me.
Marc:But all of a sudden I was thrown back into thinking about my relationship because I've been struggling with something.
Marc:And that is, you know, have I grown at all?
Marc:You know, am I a different person outside of just getting older and a little more exhausted with who I am in terms of bad habits or patterns of thought?
Marc:Just the fact of giving zero fucks as you get older.
Marc:I talked to Taraji P. Henson the other day and she said, all my fucks are behind me.
Marc:So there is, I like the way she said that.
Marc:You'll hear it when she says it later, whenever we put that up.
Marc:But...
Marc:But there was something that I was trying to identify with this hope thing because it struck me.
Marc:And I've been on the road a lot and I've been in hotel rooms a lot and I've been with my brain a lot.
Marc:And I'm starting to realize like not a lot has changed in terms of like I feel like I am once again kind of resentful and certain types of insecurity and self-loathing are happening again.
Marc:And a lot of things that I felt like I was moving past.
Marc:And obviously some of you listening to me are like, no, Mark.
Marc:We all hear it all the time.
Marc:Nothing has changed.
Marc:But there was a window there when I had surrendered to my love for Lynn and we began to engage it where I could feel like, you know, this made sense.
Marc:Her and I made sense the way our personalities were together, our age together, you know, and the possibilities of a future where I could see a full life ahead of me and sharing it with somebody else.
Marc:I could see it, you know, and it seemed good.
Marc:It seemed rich.
Marc:It seemed like a full thing in my mind.
Marc:And that all is gone.
Marc:And I think that's what it triggered, you know, that she gave me hope.
Marc:But it wasn't like, you know, I wasn't hanging anything on her.
Marc:It wasn't like I was, you know, like like putting that like this person's going to save me or anything.
Marc:It was the idea of who we were together and what that could look like, you know, gave me like it felt like hope to me when I saw it.
Marc:And I saw it a lot.
Marc:It led to my decision to sort of give in to the relationship and to my feelings.
Marc:And I've said before that there's people that knew her for years that had a whole life with her, and I did not.
Marc:And it was this sense of like, you know what, the rest of life is going to be okay.
Marc:with this person no matter what happens.
Marc:And I guess that's, I guess it feels like hope to me.
Marc:And I think now that like, it's totally dug in that that is not going to happen.
Marc:On top of that, whatever anger I might feel or whatever sadness I might feel around this loss,
Marc:But now I'm back to my own patterns of thought.
Marc:You have this small circle of life that I live in with myself, and I have to figure out how to open that back up again.
Marc:Yeah, I mean, I'm not trying to bum anybody out.
Marc:I saw a bunny in my yard just now.
Marc:Like 10 minutes ago, I saw a bunny, and I had to look up whether or not I could feed him cauliflower.
Marc:That's a whole story into itself.
Marc:A whole fucking story.
Marc:Look, right now, I'm going to talk to Kelifa Sene.
Marc:I want to learn.
Marc:It's called Major Labels, A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres.
Marc:It's now available wherever you get books.
Marc:We talk it out.
Guest:What was the event we did?
Guest:It was the New Yorker Festival.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:So we sat on a stage.
Guest:I interviewed you.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I accidentally made you cry.
Guest:You did?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But what did you do?
Guest:I played a couple clips because from the show I played a couple clips of you and Louie.
Guest:Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:That was a little emotional.
Guest:Before the fallout.
Guest:Before the fallout.
Guest:Right, yeah.
Guest:But that was less interesting even now to me than your history with him and just showing people what this show is capable of if there were some people in the audience who didn't know.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I heard from a lot of people who loved the event.
Guest:Yeah, I thought it was good.
Marc:It was fun.
Marc:Yeah, I mean, you never know what's going to happen with those events.
Marc:No, you don't.
Marc:And you know, sometimes you get a lot of the same questions.
Marc:And if I cried, then it must have been a little around the side.
Marc:Hopefully it wasn't from boredom and frustration.
Marc:No.
Marc:I definitely don't cry because of that.
Marc:I'm more likely to get angry.
Marc:So you did it.
Marc:You did the book about everything in music, except for you smartly said, not going to fuck with jazz.
Guest:You got to draw some lines.
Guest:I'll tell you, it was a grim day when I sat down and had an empty Google Doc.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I wrote, chapter one, rock and roll.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Was that grim for you?
Guest:That was not a happy feeling to realize I'd gotten myself into something like that.
Marc:Well, I mean, when did the work start?
Guest:Was this a pandemic book?
Guest:No.
Guest:No, it finished during the pandemic, but it started a year or so before.
Guest:I think I thought I could bang it out in a year.
Marc:A history of music, of modern music.
Marc:It's called Major Labels, A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres.
Marc:Well, at least you broke it down.
Guest:Yeah, I got to break it down for people.
Guest:I mean, you know-
Guest:On the other hand, this is what I've been doing kind of since the 90s.
Guest:I've been obsessed with music.
Guest:I know.
Marc:Well, what's the story?
Marc:You know, you do have, because I know in the beginning of the book, you do have, I don't know if, I don't want to use an insensitive word, but you have sort of an exotic past.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:Yes.
Guest:Exotic.
Guest:And where were you born?
Guest:That was the insensitive word you were worried?
Guest:I thought you were going to say tribal or something.
Marc:No, I don't know what descriptors are okay.
Guest:I mean, it is exotic to me.
Guest:It's exotic to me too.
Guest:My father grew up dodging hippos in a river.
Guest:My father came from a little village on a little island in a little country called Gambia in West Africa.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Dodging hippos?
Guest:Yeah, because he said that was the scariest animal when they'd go swimming.
Guest:Well, they're like fucking dinosaurs, not snakes.
Guest:Well, no, and hippos don't even eat people, right?
Marc:No, they're just big.
Guest:You just don't want to get... I guess you don't want to... If they kill you, it's just because they're assholes.
Guest:Or they didn't see you.
Guest:No, no, no.
Guest:They see you.
Guest:They're known to be very cantankerous, apparently.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:The hippo.
Guest:The hippo.
Guest:Are there still many left?
Guest:I think there are hippos.
Guest:I don't think the hippo is endangered.
Guest:Oh.
Marc:Well, that's good to know.
Marc:I've never seen a hippo.
Marc:Have you?
Guest:Yeah, I've seen a hippo in a safari driving around.
Guest:You went on one?
Guest:Yeah, like a photograph safari, not a gun safari.
Marc:Right, of course.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And you went on one of those?
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Where your dad's from?
Guest:No, actually, my mother is from South Africa, so I've been on some safaris there in South Africa.
Guest:See, now that to me, that's exotic to me.
Guest:It's also exotic.
Guest:My mother's white, so it's a different kind of exotic.
Guest:White South African?
Guest:White South African.
Guest:My father is black from Gambia.
Guest:They met in London.
Guest:They're both academics.
Marc:It's interesting, because it's like those are the spectrums of both of those races.
Marc:Sure.
Marc:If you're thinking white South African, I'm assuming Dutch heritage?
Marc:No, the other side, the English side.
Marc:Oh, okay.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But still, white, white.
Marc:White, yes, absolutely.
Marc:So they were both academics?
Marc:They're both academics.
Marc:Your mom, what was her academic?
Guest:My mother taught Yale students how to speak Zulu.
Guest:Wow.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So if you know any Yale students who know how to speak Zulu, it's probably because of my mother.
Guest:Did they both leave?
Guest:How did they meet?
Guest:They met at graduate school in London.
Guest:My father died a couple of years ago.
Guest:He was a historian of religion.
Guest:He grew up in a Muslim country and converted to Christianity like as a teenager and then made his life studying the history of Christianity and Islam.
Marc:Well, it seems that major label, the history of popular music in seven genres, is sort of a study of religion.
Guest:Yes, exactly.
Guest:Musical religion.
Guest:And, you know, my musical religion was punk rock.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Which is, you know, it seems like it's true for a lot of people or a surprising number of people, given that punk rock itself is, like, not all that popular.
Marc:I guess.
Marc:But, like, what was the music, you know, your dad came up with?
Marc:I mean, was there influence there?
Marc:Because I've recently been...
Marc:kind of reengaging with the music that my father loved.
Marc:But it's different than yours, I imagine.
Marc:What was it?
Marc:Well, like lately I've been playing some musical performances and I've been doing songs that he really liked.
Marc:It was mostly that 50s rock and roll.
Marc:I mean, he was a big buddy Holly guy.
Marc:But he liked, not the coasters, but the diamonds.
Marc:And they're just music from...
Marc:being a kid and driving in the station wagon with the American Graffiti soundtrack, you know, and that was his music.
Marc:But he seemed to be pretty partial to Buddy Holly.
Guest:Well, I had, yes, so that was not exactly what was playing in my household.
Guest:My father, you know, there's traditional music in the Gambia, and his family, my family, I guess, would be traditionally the patrons of the arts.
Guest:So there'd be griots singing songs of praise about people like us.
Guest:My father actually named me for two of the most famous compositions in that tradition.
Guest:My name is Kelifa, and so there's a composition called Kuruntu Kelifa and one called Kelifa Ba about this great warrior.
Guest:So there was that tradition.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I called it finger chopping music when I was a kid because it sounded to me like these people were chopping their fingers off and then screaming about it.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Because it's this very kind of intense keening sound.
Guest:I mean, it's amazing.
Guest:That's kind of punk rock.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:I mean, I realized that later, right?
Guest:The thing about punk rock is depending on how you define it, just about anything could be punk rock.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I mean, yeah, it becomes sort of like it's not just about music.
Guest:What, the Griots?
Marc:No, the punk rock.
Marc:When you say something's punk rock.
Guest:Well, it's a comparative term, right?
Guest:Punk rock means rebellion, defiance, fuck you.
Guest:So something, in a sense, can only be punk rock in relation to something else.
Guest:So where were you born?
Guest:I was born in England.
Guest:I lived for a couple years in Ghana, where my dad was teaching, and then he got a job in Scotland.
Guest:He's teaching religion in Ghana?
Guest:History of religion at the university there.
Guest:And then he got a job at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland.
Guest:So I lived in Scotland for a few years.
Guest:How old were you?
Guest:Do you remember?
Guest:Yeah, from two to when I was five.
Guest:And then I moved to America when I was five with a Scottish accent.
Yeah.
Guest:Skinny, brown-skinned, big-headed kid.
Guest:One of the worst accents, I might add.
Guest:I feel like it's considered charming.
Guest:It is.
Guest:It's got a role to it.
Guest:I remember someone from Scotland telling me that in the UK, a lot of call centers were located in Scotland because other people found the accent charming, and it sort of...
Guest:Yeah, it's sort of disarmed people who wanted to yell at a company.
Guest:They heard a Scottish voice at the end of the line.
Guest:It soothed them.
Guest:Yeah, but I don't think that as a five-year-old newly arrived in America, I'm not sure I had a soothing effect on my classmates and peers.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But I had, you know, I think like a lot of immigrants, I had this sense of wanting to figure out what America was and what was happening in America.
Marc:So what year, like, what are we talking?
Marc:I don't know how old you are.
Marc:You're younger than me.
Guest:I'm 45, so I arrived in 1981 as a five-year-old.
Marc:That's when I graduated high school.
Marc:So you're there.
Marc:Where'd you move?
Marc:Massachusetts.
Marc:Moved to Cambridge.
Marc:My dad got a gig at Harvard.
Marc:Really?
Marc:So you're in Cambridge.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Like, what street?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, for the first year, we lived across the road from the Divinity School on Francis Avenue.
Marc:I know exactly where that is.
Guest:Yeah, at a place called the Center for the Study of World Religions.
Marc:I walked by there because my cousins, they used to live right up on Spark Street.
Marc:Oh, okay.
Marc:Right next to that school, the Brown and Nichols School.
Marc:Sure.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then near the Star Market, probably.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah, right there, yeah.
Marc:Kind of by the Star Market.
Marc:It's by that fish store that's like right up C. Sparks, goes into Huron, is it, maybe?
Marc:Yeah, that sounds about right.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, okay.
Marc:Doesn't matter.
Marc:Cambridge.
Guest:Well, you know, Star Market and Stop and Shop were like the two supermarkets.
Guest:Star Market.
Guest:And I remember when I discovered punk rock.
Guest:Star Market.
Guest:I remember getting super into the Sex Pistols.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:And they have a bunch of, you know, there's the one album and there's a bunch of other recordings.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And they're playing Roadrunner.
Marc:Yeah, which is a Jonathan Richman song.
Guest:And they're singing about the Stop and Shop.
Marc:Stop and Shop, right.
Guest:I remember being like, how?
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Why?
Guest:And then it was later I realized, like, oh, Jonathan Richman was from Boston.
Marc:Right.
Marc:That whole album, did that record factor in?
Marc:It was already probably, you know, it was already out and gone.
Marc:Did the Modern Lovers factor in?
Marc:Not until later.
Guest:So, you know, I was kind of listening to regular stuff and rock and roll and kind of got into five.
Guest:No, no, no.
Guest:When I got older.
Guest:OK, when I was a kid, I was listening to more hip hop because that was the mid 80s.
Marc:I like that.
Marc:You talk about that in the book, because honestly, you know, I one thing I realized from reading as much of the book as I read, I tended to like I feel like I'm good on country like and also was sort of cramming.
Marc:But I feel like I'm OK on country.
Marc:I did realize he sort of used Dolly as a through line, which I liked.
Marc:But I'm very unclear.
Marc:And I have a lot of records.
Marc:And I consider myself a music guy.
Marc:But I'm not a music nerd.
Marc:And I don't claim to know everything.
Marc:But I always...
Marc:And I go to the record store and I'm like, man, I need some more black stuff.
Marc:Not meaning vinyl, you're talking about music.
Marc:No, I need more black music because I know blues okay, and I know some early R&B, but I get lost
Marc:And I do have records, I got James Brown records, Curtis Mayfield records, I got the OJ's record that you talk about, which I love and I've got, but not much hip hop.
Marc:Like I don't, just because it wasn't the music I specifically grew up with, I don't know how it all fits together.
Marc:So this was very helpful to me and I was very sort of like into the R&B chapter and then the hip hop chapter.
Marc:I needed that education because I don't know those nuances.
Marc:Right.
Marc:But anyway, sorry.
Guest:Well, I kind of wanted to do a friendly thing and an unfriendly thing in this book.
Guest:And the friendly thing is just to sort of give my view of how all this stuff fits together and how do we get from this to that.
Marc:And it is your view and it's not something that hasn't been attempted before.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Sure.
Marc:Okay, but you grew up, hip-hop was actually appealing to almost pre-teen kids.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:I mean, I'm however old, eight years old or something, or 10 years old in 1986.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You've got like Run DMC and the Beastie Boys.
Guest:Now, from a musical point of view, those Run DMC records were super radical.
Guest:They stripped everything out of the music, and it's just going to be a drum machine and two guys shouting at you.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Like a really radical thing.
Guest:But as a kid, I didn't realize that wasn't how you were previously supposed to make music.
Guest:I was like, this stuff's amazing.
Guest:Made sense to your brain.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it's funny and you can memorize what they're doing.
Guest:Teach you how to talk.
Guest:So I got into that and I was then I got into some like normal rock and roll Beatles and Stones and stuff.
Guest:And then.
Marc:Well, you grew up in Cambridge.
Guest:So you had to.
Guest:Where were you going to school?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I was, I was going to, I went to school in, uh, at public schools in Cambridge, Arlington and Belmont.
Guest:And then I went to Shady Hill, which is a private school in Cambridge.
Guest:But all those like, that's like towny land.
Guest:So you're kind of getting all of it, right?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But I was kind of too little for a lot of those divisions to apply.
Guest:Like, you know, when you're 10, 11 years old, it's just like a bunch of kids and they're kind of listening to what's on the radio or like what's cool.
Marc:Like what's on what?
Marc:BCN?
Guest:Yeah, BCN or whatever the pop station was at the time.
Guest:But I didn't really get deep into music until around my 14th birthday, and a friend of mine gives me a punk rock mixtape.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So now your dad's teaching at Harvard?
Guest:Harvard, yeah, and then he moves to Yale, and we move down to Connecticut.
Guest:Oh, but you're at Harvard at 14, and someone gives you the punk rock mixtape.
Guest:By then, we're living in Connecticut, and my friend gives me this punk rock mixtape.
Guest:What's on it?
Guest:What is on it?
Guest:Some Dead Kennedys, some Fugazi, some Sex Pistols.
Guest:I remember The Exploited, Sex and Violence, the song where those are the only words, Sex and Violence.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:And it just it really did blow my mind and I kind of have gone back and tried to figure out why it blew my mind and Because and one of the things I realized was like the the songs on the radio and on MTV that I kind of rejected when I got into punk yeah, we're really good and
Guest:Like if you listen to Vogue by Madonna or Poison by Belle Biv DeVoe, these are really interesting productions.
Guest:These are really important moments in musical history.
Marc:Yeah, but you don't know that's how you're going to look at music.
Guest:Exactly right.
Guest:And what punk teaches me is I think that you can have opinions about music.
Guest:That you can say, like, no, I'm setting all this other stuff aside, and I'm going to choose this.
Marc:But ultimately, like, I did a little research that, you know, and I guess you wrote a thesis in college about the idea of the dominance of rock.
Guest:I wrote an essay at the New York Times in 2004 about rockism.
Marc:Okay, is that where it was?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But the thing is, is what I realized when reading this book is that...
Marc:A lot of the reasons people engage with music, certainly when you're younger, is because it is magic.
Marc:And you can't quite explain why it moves you.
Marc:I mean, as you get more sophisticated and you understand things.
Marc:But ultimately, and the weird thing about the idea of rockism, is it turns out that you might have been a little off because it seems like some of those songs will last forever.
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Marc:Or, yeah, so it lasts as long as we do, anyways.
Marc:Yeah, forever.
Marc:I mean, I think Johnny B. Goode's in space.
Marc:Right, right.
Marc:But...
Marc:But it's a weird phenomenon that I always say as a comic that, you know, people don't want to hear jokes more than twice.
Marc:Right, right.
Marc:But they'll hear music over and over again for their entire life and it will change with their life.
Marc:Right.
Marc:So it's magic.
Guest:But it's magic, but it's also there's a it's magic, but that makes it sound a little more friendly than it is.
Guest:And the unfriendly thing I wanted to do in this book.
Guest:was talk about how part of loving music often means hating music, means hating something else, means hating what some other people listen to.
Guest:You got to fight.
Guest:You got to say, I don't want to be like those people.
Guest:I want to be like these people.
Guest:And then as you get older, you're sort of like, it's all okay.
Guest:Well, yes, to a certain extent, but I'm not sure that those impulses to like be part of a community and that means to not be part of some other community.
Guest:I'm not sure that ever really goes away.
Guest:I mean, I think any, I think to me, a genre is a musical community and to me, any community is defined by inclusion and exclusion.
Guest:So,
Marc:So this is how you approach... And you need a bit of both.
Marc:That's how you approached your history?
Marc:Was that, you know, that you were going to figure out who the prime movers were in each of these genres and subgenres, and then, you know, figure out how that defined the community.
Guest:Yeah, and figure out how people think about these things.
Guest:I mean, you know, rock and roll.
Guest:Like, what does rock and roll mean in the 70s?
Guest:And how is that changing?
Guest:How does it come to be that, like, if you say you like rock and roll in the 80s, like, maybe that means Motley Crue?
Guest:Right.
Marc:Right.
Marc:No, I get it.
Marc:How does rock morph or evolve from the beginning?
Marc:But I thought it was sort of – you know what I always found is interesting is that you've got to judge it against whatever sense of community you have or who the audience is.
Marc:You've got to define it against the charts.
Marc:Right.
Marc:So the charts are indicators.
Guest:The charts are indicators of how many people are listening, and that's the game that a lot of record companies are playing.
Marc:And how it's defined as a business, right?
Marc:Because they shift the names of the charts.
Guest:And for example, you're wearing the Aretha shirt.
Guest:You played Jerry Wexler in the Aretha movie.
Marc:How come you didn't mention Wexler?
Marc:I thought he came up with the term rhythm and blues.
Marc:As a genre.
Guest:I kind of somewhat arbitrarily start this book around 1970.
Guest:So there's some earlier stuff, but the idea is like the last 50 years.
Guest:My idea was that we sort of have an idea of this big explosion that happened in the 60s.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And I wanted to say something about, well, what happened since then?
Guest:How did everything get so fragmented and weird in the past half century?
Guest:Right.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And Aretha Franklin's a great example because she's this amazing talent.
Guest:And yet throughout her career, she maintains an obsession with the R&B charts.
Guest:Throughout her career, she's like, well, who's number one on R&B?
Guest:How can I get a number one R&B hit?
Guest:She was really interested in making R&B hits.
Guest:I think partly because that was one way to measure how am I resonating within this musical community.
Marc:Which at that time was the black audience.
Guest:Yes, which kind of still is in the world of R&B.
Marc:I thought that was, for me, very engaging.
Marc:Because I didn't know... When you talk about this ongoing arguments within the R&B community, I'm sort of like, there is?
Guest:Who's having them?
Guest:Right.
Guest:The idea in the 1980s that people would look at Prince and Michael Jackson and be like, are these guys sellouts?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That's so far from the way that we think of Prince today.
Marc:But is that an academic conversation or is that like, you know, on the ground conversation?
Marc:It's both, right?
Guest:Like when Whitney Houston gets booed at the Soul Train Awards because she's viewed by that audience as too pop and not R&B enough, that reflects something real in how she was perceived, right?
Guest:When Whitney Houston first comes out and is called the prom queen of soul, right?
Guest:There's this idea that like, oh, is she a quote unquote real R&B singer or is she just making...
Guest:And what is the difference?
Guest:And I think R&B is a good example because you have this push and pull within the genre.
Guest:You have people who really want pop success, who really want to reach a big audience and make more money and make a bigger impact.
Guest:But also, they want to feel like they're still accepted by the R&B audience.
Marc:Well, let's figure out how to talk about the actual expanse of the book in relation to your life.
Marc:So at 14, you're kind of doing the punk thing.
Guest:And that's it.
Guest:And literally, I put my Rolling Stones tapes aside, and I'm like, I'm never listening to this band again.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But that was- That's how it felt to me.
Guest:You were going to fight.
Marc:You were going to fight the fight.
Guest:It felt, well, yeah, or it wasn't even, I was going to like create my own thing and I was going to exist in this punk world and the rest of the world was crap.
Marc:So that was a life definer.
Guest:Oh, absolutely.
Guest:Like you shifted your identity.
Guest:Absolutely.
Guest:It's like I'm not, like that stuff is normal and the punk stuff is weird and has integrity and is interesting and is scary and is cool and that's where I want to be.
Marc:So you're in Connecticut and you're sitting there like you're getting what, Doc Martens?
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, but I never had, I was never that deep into the lifestyle.
Guest:Like I had my Doc Martens, I had some weird hair.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But it was mainly just being obsessed with records and trying to read about records and trying to learn about anything I could and saving up money to buy more.
Guest:I say records, it was actually cassettes mainly.
Guest:Saving up money to buy more music.
Marc:Were you young enough to where you had to sort of like, it was hard to get those records?
Marc:Absolutely.
Guest:It was hard to even find out which ones to get.
Marc:You had to have some fanzine connections?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:Or you had to guess based on what record label the thing was on.
Guest:Right.
Guest:People talk about people talk about gambling addiction and they say part of the addiction is losing as much as winning.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And there was something like that with record shopping.
Guest:Right.
Guest:You pay your 10 bucks.
Marc:You don't got to tell me.
Marc:And you come home and you're like, did I just waste my money?
Marc:And I'm buying old records, you know, like records that are known quantities.
Marc:And I'm sort of like, you know, I don't I don't you.
Marc:But you don't have any more records.
Guest:I have some, but I don't have... I was never that great at collecting, maybe because I was never... My tastes kind of kept changing.
Marc:Mine too, but I don't look at myself as a collector.
Marc:In my mind, I'm still just buying stuff I like to listen to.
Marc:But then all of a sudden, I just got in a shipment of 30 records that I bought in St.
Marc:Louis, a lot of jazz records, actually.
Marc:And yesterday, I was like, I got to go over to the record store.
Marc:I'm like, dude, you didn't even listen to the ones you just got.
Marc:Right, right.
Marc:You got to go get what?
Marc:Right.
Marc:What do you got to get?
Marc:So then you got to question what's happening.
Guest:Well, for me, I realized it was less about acquisition and more about curiosity.
Guest:Right.
Guest:It was more like, OK, OK, this punk rock and like what's happening in this punk scene there.
Guest:And then beyond a certain point, it was like, well, what's happening in the techno clubs or like what's happening in the world of hip hop or what's happening.
Marc:But you weren't thinking that then.
Guest:No, but over the next few years.
Marc:Who are your punk people?
Marc:Who are your bands?
Marc:Who are you loyal to?
Marc:Like, what was the ones that sort of like I got to get all of these?
Guest:Well, I mean, I think, you know, bands like Dead Kennedys were very influential to me, but it was a wide range of stuff from like Minor Threat to like Japanese noise music to all sorts of- Like Boris?
Guest:Well, earlier than that, more like Boredoms.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And there was a whole kind of subgenre where it was actually pretty close to just static.
Guest:Like I wanted the weirdest stuff you could find.
Marc:That's so funny because for me when I was a kid and I had a friend at the record store next door who turned me on to like Fred Frith.
Marc:Mm-hmm.
Marc:And like to me or the residents, that was the equivalent to that.
Marc:Absolutely.
Guest:Absolutely.
Guest:And but again, the thing about punk is it's a very unstable way to think about the world, because once you start thinking like, I want bands that bands should define the rule, should defy the rules of how music is made, no matter how.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But then the next step is like, well, who says bands should be defiant?
Guest:Right.
Guest:Who made that rule?
Guest:Right.
Guest:And so and so then you're being dragged back to the stones.
Guest:Well, yeah, then you're then you're gravitating towards other things that defy rules in other ways.
Guest:And I remember I remember going to a dancehall reggae concert that blew my mind because of the energy and the chaos of it.
Guest:And I got I got started to get obsessed with hip hop and started to hear the kind of audacity of hip hop and started to really fall in love with that.
Guest:I started to fall in love with R&B and hearing some of the production and modern R&B, you know, stuff that Timbaland was doing.
Marc:And this is all when you were in your teens?
Guest:This is later.
Guest:This is, you know, maybe when I'm 20, 21.
Guest:So where'd you go to college?
Guest:I went to Harvard.
Guest:That's fancy.
Guest:It's a fancy college, and it had a very fancy radio station where they were obsessed with punk rock, where you have to take a semester-long... You have to take an exam.
Guest:What were you studying?
Guest:I was studying comparative literature.
Marc:But were you doing anything like a minor in music or they don't have that?
Guest:No, I was doing music just like on the side.
Guest:I was doing, I was at this radio station.
Guest:Comparative literature.
Guest:Is that Henry Gates?
Guest:Yeah, I worked on his academic journal, which was called Transition, which was a journal of race and culture.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:But especially in the early years, I just wanted to do radio shows and organize punk shows.
Guest:Host them?
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:And you organized punk shows?
Marc:You produced them?
Guest:Yeah, we're part of a crew of people who have some band play in the basement of a health food store or whatever.
Guest:Would you bring them in, the band?
Guest:You mean bring them in to where?
Guest:Were you booking concerts?
Guest:Yeah, I mean, booking makes it sound more fancy than it was.
Marc:But with punk rock, you know, they kind of need people to sort of find them a place.
Marc:So, like, what kind of bands?
Marc:Who were they?
Guest:And I wasn't, you know, I wasn't the ringleader, but I recently was going through my old stuff and found a flyer for a Rhode Island band called Drop Dead.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:It's a kind of furious, like, animal rights hardcore band.
Guest:Did you know Dung Beetle?
Guest:I've heard of Dung Beetle on your show probably for the first time.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But I realized, so yes, I was doing kind of all that stuff.
Guest:And I was working in record stores.
Marc:Which record store?
Guest:Let's see.
Guest:The first one I worked at was Discount Records in Harvard Square.
Guest:Oh, yeah, yeah.
Guest:And then I worked at Pipeline Records, which my friends owned.
Guest:I spent a year working in the warehouse of Newbery Comics records.
Guest:I took a year off from Harvard to spend a year working in the warehouse of Newbery Comics.
Marc:As a learning thing?
Guest:Just because that was all I cared about.
Guest:Music was all I cared about.
Marc:Was it still on vinyl or that was CD time?
Guest:That was CD time.
Guest:My job was to put stickers on CDs, like price stickers.
Marc:So you saw everything coming in?
Guest:Yeah, I remember the day there was a Red Hot Chili Peppers album that came out.
Guest:I think the One Hot Minute, the one with Dave Navarro on it.
Guest:And I remember that because all I did from 9 to 5 that day was just put stickers on that CD.
Guest:Non-stop.
Guest:But it was great.
Guest:It's a big record, I guess.
Guest:There was a warehouse stereo.
Guest:And so you got to hear what your fellow workers were into.
Guest:And it was just another way to be around music.
Marc:So what disciplines did you learn?
Marc:Because like...
Marc:In reading the book I realized that the amount of reading that you had to do like there had to be an approach to this thing and it seems that you wrote you read a tremendous amount of biographies and autobiographies of people within all of these genres yeah and and media coverage from the time so that so you like in setting up to do the research of a history of popular music
Marc:What were you drawing from in terms of your experience in organization?
Marc:Was it something you learned?
Marc:Did you have to whiteboard it?
Guest:No, I didn't whiteboard.
Guest:I eventually became a pop music critic at the New York Times.
Guest:So you've been writing about music a long time.
Guest:Yeah, and then went to the New Yorker where I've been for 13 years now.
Guest:Right, so the research element was second nature.
Guest:Yeah, and I think over the course of those years, hopefully I learned how to get a little better at telling a story.
Guest:I wanted this book to feel like a series of stories, not like an encyclopedia.
Marc:Well, I thought it was interesting that you sort of basically opened with grand funk.
Marc:You know, out of...
Marc:Everybody out of anything.
Marc:And this is like this is a band that because I'm in the vinyl hole.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And I remember grand funk when I was a kid.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Because, you know, I grew up in that time.
Marc:But, you know, I'm trying to reassess them as a band.
Marc:But your basic example in terms of the rock part, the rock and roll part of this is that they're important because they were a band no one gave a shit about, but they were huge.
Marc:Right.
Guest:And it kind of creates this crisis of faith among a certain number of people who love and write about rock music.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Which is like, is this even our genre anymore?
Guest:What does rock and roll even mean?
Guest:We thought rock and roll was cool, but maybe now rock and roll is popular and not that cool.
Guest:And maybe this idea that we take for granted today, that there's going to be bands that are beloved by the critics and bands that are selling out arenas, and maybe those won't be the same bands, that was kind of a new idea back then.
Guest:Right.
Marc:Right.
Marc:But and then you're able to sort of like, you know, move through, you know, kind of pick up towards the towards the end of the 60s and on into the 70s and how these these genres struggle to maintain relevance.
Marc:But like so much of it is rarely, it seems, on the conscious part of the artists.
Marc:And it more becomes about that relationship with the actual labels themselves.
Marc:Right.
Guest:Yeah, it's a bit of both, right?
Guest:I mean, one of the things about genres and one of the ways in which you can think about genres is you can rebel against them, right?
Guest:You can be a country singer who's like, hell no, I'm not putting a string section on my album.
Guest:You can be a country singer who says, no, I'm not going to use Nashville studio musicians, I'm going to use my touring band, right?
Guest:But those decisions...
Guest:Even by making those decisions, you're rebelling against country music, but you're also showing that you're part of that community.
Guest:Because if you're a different kind of artist, you never even think about string sections.
Marc:I like that whole thing, that line in there about country and that like it's really it's sort of like being Jewish.
Marc:It's like you don't have to be religious to be Jewish.
Marc:It's an identity.
Marc:So if you're Jewish, you're Jewish.
Marc:Really?
Marc:It's the same with country.
Marc:It doesn't matter.
Guest:That was dumb.
Guest:Dolly Parton's thing, right?
Guest:And Dolly Parton was going to be country even when she was making disco records.
Marc:It didn't matter.
Marc:Because she's country.
Guest:And that's an interesting way to think about country, right?
Guest:Because that means, one of the things that means is it's like kind of a closed society.
Guest:Like if you're not born into it, you're not in it.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But at the same time, that means there's like a certain amount of freedom.
Guest:That once you're in it, you can do whatever.
Guest:And that actually turns out to be true in a lot of genres.
Guest:I talk about this with hair metal.
Guest:And the hair metal bands, their whole thing was like, we look super rock and roll.
Guest:We're the most rock and roll.
Guest:But for a lot of them, their big hits were power ballads.
Marc:Well, that was always the weird thing about Alice Cooper.
Marc:You know, Alice Cooper is that like most of his hits, a lot of them are kind of sweet.
Marc:Right.
Marc:You know, and he's like, this is a guy that was like best friends with Bernie Taupin.
Marc:Right.
Guest:And so if you look the part and act the part, sometimes you have more freedom to do other stuff that isn't traditionally what people do.
Guest:You see that in country music today, where you see these songs that are like about people are singing, I'm really country, I'm the countryest, I like to do country stuff, and they'll be rapping.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Or they'll be doing it with a beat.
Guest:And the idea is my identity is cultural.
Guest:Therefore, I have more freedom to explore different kinds of music.
Marc:But then there's always within it.
Marc:It must be so hard to do a book like this because there are these movements within it.
Marc:There's been several different times where like new country or alt country or, you know, whatever's happening now with Sturgill and Margo and that crew.
Marc:Casey Musgraves.
Marc:Yeah, that there's a kind of resurgence of outlaw country format.
Marc:Sure.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And even the and even the outlaw country thing, right, turns out to be this this weird hybrid because it's it's not exactly a revival because it doesn't exactly sound like any of the records that came before.
Marc:No, I think it was a completely sort of weird, you know, time appropriate integrity they were trying to capture that there was something about that time.
Marc:Right.
Marc:The early 70s where these guys like Willie and Waylon were like they didn't want to.
Marc:to make those kind of horn-oriented, Nashville-driven records because it didn't speak to what was happening.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And that was another way of being country.
Guest:And one of the ironies is that over the years, a lot of the biggest country acts have defined themselves by saying, like, I'm not like those Nashville guys.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:George Strait comes along after that, and he's like, I'm not like this stuff.
Guest:I'm doing real, pure, straight-ahead country, not like this Nashville stuff.
Guest:Right.
Marc:Well, it's interesting because I don't know how many people know about that sound or why that still holds up as this mythic sort of pushback.
Marc:But like that generation of guys, George Stray's generation of guys, you know, that was pretty country.
Guest:Yes, it was country in a different sense.
Guest:Even Reba McIntyre comes out and her whole thing is like, I'm not going to give you this polished, smooth stuff they're doing in Nashville.
Guest:I'm going to give you something else.
Guest:Done in Nashville, though.
Guest:Well, yeah, and 10 years later, Garth Brooks comes along talking the same way, saying, well, Nashville's kind of lost its way.
Guest:I'm going to give you some real country music.
Guest:So it's a mythic Nashville.
Guest:Well, yeah, it's a little bit like the way politicians talk about Washington, right?
Guest:Sure.
Guest:These people in Washington are like, dude, you've been in the Senate for 20 years.
Marc:That's right.
Marc:I could never lock into Garth Brooks, and I don't follow country that much, but I do have a lot of old country records.
Marc:I did watch the Ken Burns series, which was amazing, right?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:In terms of laying that out.
Marc:But like...
Marc:What did you, in investigating, like, you use rock, R&B, and country as, you know, you're laying the groundwork with that.
Marc:And then you move into punk, hip-hop, and dance.
Marc:But in pop, was that another one?
Guest:Pop, yeah.
Guest:Pop is the seventh genre.
Guest:It might not even be a genre at all.
Guest:It's kind of hard to tell.
Guest:My contention... I dropped off at dance.
Guest:My contention is that pop music sort of, you know, it's used as a catch-all term and it's used as kind of a negative term.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Like, you're pop if you don't belong to any other community.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Or you're pop if you've left your community.
Marc:You used to be an R&B act and now you've gone pop.
Marc:I guess so, but it seems like, you know, like these labels, sometimes it's just semantics because, you know, pop runs through all of it.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:You know, from the beginning.
Marc:But if you're the Carpenters in the 70s... Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:It's not merely semantic that a big part of their identity and a big part of what they thought about was that they weren't rock and roll and they weren't considered rock and roll.
Guest:And sometimes they tried to push back by, you know, putting an electric guitar solo on the album.
Guest:Sometimes in interviews, Richard Carpenter was like really bummed out about this.
Guest:Like, we're cool just like Led Zeppelin.
Guest:Why are you guys viewing us as just a pop act?
Guest:And so it really does shape a lot of times the way people make music, even if they don't think it does.
Guest:And what you see in the 80s, kind of for the first time, is a bunch of artists, I talk a lot about Boy George, but a bunch of these British artists really waving the flag for pop and saying, we're pop acts, we're not rock and roll acts.
Guest:In fact, they're saying rock and roll is lame, it's old, it's tired, it's played out.
Guest:pop is cool, it's new, it's shiny, it's fun, and we're gonna reject rock and roll and be pop.
Guest:And that...
Guest:That turned out to be, so not all those bands turned out to be super popular, right?
Guest:If we talk about ABC and Scritty Politi.
Guest:Haircut 100.
Guest:Haircut 100.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Thompson Twins.
Guest:But that way of thinking turned out to be really influential.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Really influential to this idea of rockism, this idea that maybe there's a different way to think about music.
Guest:How do you define rockism?
Guest:Rockism is taking the ideals of rock and roll and applying them to all the other genres.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So the idea is that if you're a pop singer or an R&B singer or something else, you're cool insofar as what you're doing feels like rock and roll.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So, right.
Guest:Is it, you know, is it feeling?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It's treating that feeling like the supreme thing.
Guest:You mean like rock star?
Yeah.
Guest:Well, even those values of rock and roll and applying them everywhere.
Guest:So the idea that music should be kind of scruffy, should be kind of raw, should be kind of loud, should be kind of rebellious, right?
Guest:And the question that you ask is like, well, what about music that's like kind of clean, kind of slick, kind of fun, kind of friendly?
Guest:And one of the ideas of this idea of rockism is that if that's what you're looking for, if you're looking for like Bruce Springsteen's Everywhere You Look,
Guest:You might miss Anita Baker and Luther Vandross, right?
Guest:You might miss these amazing, incredibly smooth black R&B records.
Marc:Well, I mean, I think that your separation is important, though, too, because, you know, the whole kind of evolution of R&B and, you know, and it's sort of the kind of movement from race records, right?
Marc:As they used to be called.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And then the sort of struggle for R&B's identity through people like Barry Gordy and then through people who are sort of anti-Gordy's.
Marc:Right.
Marc:In terms of like, you know, I didn't realize there was an argument around sort of like, why you got to make this for white people?
Marc:Right.
Marc:Yes.
Guest:Why betray us?
Guest:That's kind of the central argument.
Marc:In R&B.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And, you know, there's this moment, I think, in 1981 where Billboard renames its R&B chart.
Guest:It renames it black music.
Marc:Yeah.
Yeah.
Guest:Isn't that the same as race records?
Marc:Yeah, kind of, right?
Guest:And people don't know exactly how to feel about that.
Guest:Because in one sense, you're kind of, are you saying that like this is, is this just segregation?
Guest:Like what are we doing?
Guest:Or in another sense, you could think of black music as an inclusive term.
Guest:Meaning like, okay, what's playing on these radio stations isn't just R&B, like it might be jazz, it might be a little bit of hip hop, it might be something that's even closer to easy listening.
Guest:So in a way you can think of black music as an inclusive term, but it's also a very...
Marc:exclusive way of thinking yeah but I it's interesting it really depends on you know what point of view you're coming from in the sense that you know if you're black and and want it to be identified as black music in an almost fuck you way thank you right but if you're you're black and and is looking to expand the audience you're like what are you doing right and especially and this is where it gets also in America yeah 12% of the population is black yeah
Guest:So the existence of black music as a genre where listeners and musicians are disproportionately black means that you will also have white genres.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Which is so like, can we, how do we think about that?
Guest:Can we, can we, is it possible to celebrate white music as white music?
Marc:Is it possible?
Marc:Uh, I don't, I, right now, I don't know.
Marc:Well, in other words, when you look at white music- I think most people assume country is pretty white and rocky to a degree.
Guest:There's a desire for, sometimes in those discussions, that those genres should be more integrated.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, yeah, of course, but it's one of those things that everything should be more integrated.
Marc:Well, should it?
Marc:Well, should black music be more integrated?
Marc:Let me let me rephrase it.
Marc:Is that when in in in when people say that, like even in the sense of like, you know, having friends or diversifying entertainment.
Marc:Right.
Marc:So that, you know, that writers room should be more inclusive and that the people working in film and television should represent what the population looks like just on an employment level.
Marc:But there does come to a point where you're like, well, this isn't my life.
Marc:So on that level, you can't send out applications for more diverse friends.
Marc:After a certain point, you can feel the way you're going to feel and appreciate what's happening, but you can't diversify your life after a certain point without it looking weird.
Guest:Well, there's also the reality of black people, in this case, being a minority.
Guest:So if a genre, if the audience and the musicians, if a genre kind of looks like America and is diverse in that sense, that means that black people will be a minority.
Marc:No, like, I think that you're correct.
Marc:I don't think that those need to be diversified.
Marc:Right.
Marc:I think that these are identities and they're driven by cultural identity and by community identity and also by musical identity.
Marc:And, you know, you put them all together as separate things and you can sort of see the fabric of America.
Marc:But no, I don't think that you there needs to be more white drummers.
Marc:Well, but what I'm saying is that's kind of what you get, right?
Guest:If black people are disproportionately drawn to quote unquote black genres, both as musicians and as listeners, then you're going to have non-black people disproportionately drawn to some non-black genres.
Guest:Like you don't get one without the other.
Guest:Yeah, but is that a problem?
Guest:Well, that's the question.
Guest:When you look at country music, is it a problem that country music is white music?
Guest:Is it a problem that rock and roll comes to be perceived as white music?
Marc:Well, you know, it's weird is that at some different points in all of these genres, it seems that they kind of want to be more black.
Yeah.
Marc:Some of them.
Guest:I mean, again, rock and roll is self-conscious about this, right?
Guest:Like the Rolling Stones and bands in the 70s are self-conscious about the fact that they're not blues guys.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:But they love the blues guys.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I write about how you can hear Brown Sugar, right?
Guest:This crazy song about kind of interracial sex and slavery maybe.
Guest:Yeah, kind of.
Guest:But maybe it's a song about like white English guys who hear black music and their blood runs hot, right?
Guest:Maybe it's a song about the Rolling Stones being self-conscious about their position as white.
Marc:I always thought it was a song about a slave ship captain fucking a slave woman.
Marc:But I'm saying in that, you can hear it as the Rolling Stones are those slave ship captains.
Marc:I guess so.
Marc:I guess if you read into it, I mean, there is...
Marc:But you make a sort of interesting case around a lot of the language of some of these songs, not only in rock and roll, but in rap as well.
Marc:Is it a point of contention when these things seem insensitive and that's being fairly diplomatic?
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:But again, that's related to the unfriendly thing I was hoping to do in this book, which was sort of make a case that, at least in music, there's a lot of upsides to division.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Not just diversity, but divisiveness.
Guest:Right.
Guest:The fact that certain songs, certain bands, certain genres are kind of repulsive.
Guest:Right.
Guest:in a literal sense.
Guest:They're pushing certain people out.
Guest:And that's what helps create the kind of diversity of the musical landscape.
Guest:And those of us, people like me, people like you who love listening to a bunch of different genres, those different genres only exist because other people before us cared enough to really be devoted to a thing.
Marc:Right, but I think also you're speaking just sort of like a premise that's been around for a while, that if there is relatively healthy competitiveness amongst artists, that's how the art evolves or breaks off.
Guest:Yes, and usually that competitiveness happens in some sense within genres or sub-genres.
Guest:You have to care enough about death metal so that you can get really into discussions of different guitar tones and you're drawing from things in death metal that an outsider wouldn't necessarily hear.
Guest:And that intensity is really exciting.
Guest:For music nerds of that ilk.
Guest:But for non-nerds tend to enjoy that intensity too, right?
Guest:In other words, you don't have to be super into the history of hip hop and battle rapping to watch 8 Mile and fall in love with Eminem.
Guest:In fact, the moment-
Guest:And part of what people responded to when they watched 8 Mile and heard Lose Yourself was Eminem's intensity about rapping.
Guest:Like, they didn't want to be rap nerds, but they loved that Eminem is a rap nerd.
Guest:And that's appealing.
Guest:That intensity, I think, is appealing to us even if we don't want to take the plunge and go deep into any particular genre.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Well, I mean, that's also his character.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Right.
Marc:So, I mean, and it's pretty clear in the book that all these artists, once there's a shift in how the music is evolving, will make an attempt to change with it.
Marc:And I think some of the more tragic attempts are around hair metal guys going for the grunge look.
Marc:Also, when you realize that it's just show business for so many people.
Guest:And I think it's easy to write...
Guest:I think, you know, this book unapologetically talks about charts and success and sales because I think it's easy to write that stuff out and to imagine that musicians are existing in a bubble and they're just expressing themselves and whatever happens, happens.
Guest:And, you know, I think the business part of show business is really important.
Guest:You had, um, my former, I was at the Times for six years.
Guest:Um, Ben Ratliff was one of my colleagues, just like one of the most careful and like intelligent listeners I've ever come across.
Guest:Jazz guy.
Guest:Jazz guy.
Marc:I talked to him.
Guest:I heard your conversation.
Guest:And he can listen to any, not just jazz, like you give him a metal record and he'll like, he'll hear some stuff.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Oh really?
Guest:And Ben Ratliff has, has written about how genres are kind of a record company plot.
Guest:They're kind of the thing that the industry uses to try to sell us music.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And I think I agree with that, but my question is, not all plots succeed.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And why have genres succeeded?
Guest:Like, why do people respond to that?
Guest:Why do people wave the flag for hip-hop the way they do?
Guest:Why do people even now write songs, country songs, about being country?
Guest:Well, what do you make of that?
Guest:Is it a tribal thing?
Guest:It's a tribal thing.
Guest:It's a community thing.
Guest:And part of the reason we listen to music is for that sense of community.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And, you know, part of what genre gives you is this idea that there's a whole bunch of people thinking about some of the same stuff I'm thinking about.
Guest:And that doesn't mean we can't go outside of those limits.
Guest:But one of the things I've noticed throughout the 50 years that this book covers is there's always these moments when it feels like genres are disappearing.
Guest:And people are saying, man, can't we all just, like, come together and break down the boundaries and musical freedom?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And you see that like in the late 70s in the disco era where it seems like everything's going disco and Rolling Stones disco and Star Wars disco and Bee Gees disco and Dolly Parton disco.
Guest:And like maybe this is just what music sounds like now.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But but didn't isn't that like as an example.
Marc:So clearly a profit driven thing.
Guest:It's profit driven, but it's also kind of cool.
Guest:The idea that the idea that you can have that kind of diversity on the dance floor is really cool.
Guest:The idea that like Diana from the beginning.
Guest:of disco that you know the way it started was diversity even even the idea that diana ross yeah and the rolling stones right who were kind of considered part of the same genre when diana ross was in the supremes and they were all considered part of the rock and roll explosion of the mid-60s then they kind of diverge and by the late 70s diana ross and the rolling stones are like making disco records well it's a groove right so it's really just sort of like we're you know we're a band we're musicians yeah
Marc:This is the groove.
Marc:It's bringing people together.
Marc:And there's something really inspiring about that.
Marc:But somehow the Stones did it specifically Stones-y.
Marc:Of course.
Marc:Well, they do everything specifically Stones-y.
Marc:But, you know, it's sort of interesting when I really think about it.
Marc:Because I don't like Diana Ross as a performer, as a singer, her style is relative to her.
Marc:But whereas the Stones, I mean, Charlie's got to lay into that goddamn beat.
Marc:Yes, he does.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yes, he does.
Marc:And and it doesn't sound like like even listening to some girls that the disco songs on that album or on Emotional Rescue, like they don't sound like disco songs to me.
Guest:No, but you can tell that they're all kind of part of this moment.
Guest:And you can understand why there was this worry among some people in the late 70s and into the 80s that these genres were disappearing.
Guest:Right.
Guest:There's a worry that like, look, with with Michael Jackson and Prince being as popular as they are, maybe like R&B is just going to like dissolve into pop music.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And what keeps happening is that those moments of coming together tend to be followed by moments of backlash and moments of people saying like, no, I don't want to be like you.
Guest:I don't want to listen to what you're listening to.
Marc:But those are new artists, right?
Marc:Those are artists that are sort of like, fuck this.
Marc:Right.
Marc:This is what I'm about.
Marc:This is what I came up in.
Marc:This is my world.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And we're going to take it back.
Guest:And I feel like we're living through one of those moments now where genre starts to seem kind of old fashioned and like, isn't it all just one music and like Lil Nas X and Post Malone making kind of similar sounding stuff.
Marc:But isn't
Marc:Isn't that also relative to the way we hear music?
Marc:I mean, like, you know, like so much of this this book, like I didn't know any of that stuff about the Philadelphia sound because I'm an idiot or the stations that were defining or that station that defined that the smooth quiet storm.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Howard University.
Marc:Right.
Marc:That these were the labels paid attention to that and formats, you know, were driven by personalities who made decisions.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So now when, you know, it's unclear how everyone's really getting their music.
Marc:Right.
Marc:You know.
Marc:Streaming and.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:However, or even Sirius Radio.
Marc:But that as an entity, the idea of satellite radio, that's what's... How does that make everything not seem the same?
Marc:Right.
Guest:And that's what a lot of people are wondering in this moment.
Guest:And I don't... If I were better at predicting the future and predicting hits, I'd be a record executive.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I'm very much not.
Guest:But I do observe that throughout history, those moments when everyone comes together...
Guest:are the moments when some other people start to get frustrated or angry or disgusted and say, I don't want to be listening to the same stuff you're listening to.
Marc:But that always seems genre specific still, too.
Marc:I mean, because where else is there left to go?
Marc:On some level.
Marc:What do you mean?
Marc:Well, I mean, like, it seems like every turn is sort of turned, you know, musically in terms of rock is or hip hop is in that it really becomes about nuance that's going to change.
Guest:It can seem like that within genres, but I don't think that anyone thought at the dawn of the night at the dawn of the 1980s, you might have thought the same thing.
Guest:I don't think anyone would have predicted the trajectory of hip hop or the trajectory of techno.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Right.
Guest:At the dawn of the 1980s, it might have seemed like, oh, we've kind of done everything.
Guest:We've had progressive rock.
Guest:Now we have synthesizers and everyone's kind of getting together in these electronic grooves.
Guest:And that's it.
Guest:We're out of music.
Marc:Well, it seems that what ultimately happens is somebody decides to go back and reconfigure what was.
Guest:That's wonderful.
Marc:thing that happens another thing that happens is technology yeah and a third thing that happens is just that like humans are inventive and so when there are communities of people they find stuff to do that doesn't sound like other communities right well i guess like i guess what's throwing me is that when it comes down to community definition or the art that comes out of a particular genre that there's always individuals doing out there shit that that you know is beyond anything that's happening right and you're sort of like wow that's he's out at the edge of it but
Marc:But that's just one guy or one woman or one artist.
Marc:Right.
Marc:It doesn't become a community standard.
Marc:Right.
Marc:So like my hip hop understanding or the albums that I do have are pretty standard.
Marc:You know what I mean?
Marc:But I know that there was just reading about that.
Marc:There was an argument about auto tunering, which makes sense.
Marc:Right.
Marc:You know, and technology was to make sense.
Guest:He releases death of auto tune saying that basically all these auto tune vocals are sort of like ruining hip hop.
Guest:And it's time to get back to, quote unquote, real hip hop.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Where are we at now?
Guest:Well, now we're at this moment when hip-hop is kind of... Sometimes it feels like it's dissolving a little bit.
Guest:There's a lot of... The line between singing and rapping is getting really blurry.
Marc:I noticed that.
Marc:And then also, what's with these guys... Again, it's all new to me, the history of hip-hop in your book.
Marc:I have to go back and I didn't know a lot of the songs.
Marc:Not because I'm some sort of dumb white person.
Marc:It was just never my music.
Marc:I mean, I have more soul records than I have hip-hop records because I would check in with hip-hop.
Marc:Like if someone says you got to listen, you know, I've got all the early Kanye stuff and Jay Z and even some like I actually have the ghetto boys for something like there were times where I'm like, I've got to listen to this.
Marc:Right.
Marc:But I never locked into it.
Marc:Right.
Marc:With my heart, you know, and it's not a race driven thing.
Marc:It's just a music style.
Guest:But that's one of the things I learned when I had this ridiculous and ridiculously fun job as a music critic for the New York Times, right?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Which is, again, it's absurd, right?
Guest:The idea that you're going to be in the newspaper a few times a week telling everyone which records are good.
Marc:Sure.
Marc:It's a really weird job.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:But one of the things I learned, two things I learned.
Guest:One was that no matter what I thought I was into, there was someone out there who was a real expert.
Guest:And that was never going to be me.
Guest:Is that true?
Guest:I could be really into death metal, but there's someone who does nothing but death metal every day for decades.
Guest:But your job is- There's someone who lives so deep into it.
Guest:I know, but you are a contextualizer.
Guest:Right.
Guest:That's your job.
Guest:So that was the other thing I learned was if I'm interested in something-
Guest:You know, I can learn about.
Guest:And I think that anyone who cares about music will care about some stuff more than they care about other stuff like that's fine and normal.
Guest:So all I'm what I'm trying to do in the book is just try to explain, like, here's the appeal of this kind of music to these people who love it.
Guest:And here's why some other people love this stuff.
Guest:And none of us will ever love it all or should even want to love it all.
Guest:Of course.
Guest:To love everything would mean that you had actually no musical taste at all.
Marc:Right.
Marc:It's just passive.
Marc:But no, but I also think what you do is you choose your people to drive your story about what defines these genres.
Marc:And I think you did a very good job with that.
Marc:Thanks.
Marc:Because now I have to reassess that period of R&B that became that kind of smooth thing.
Marc:And I get it.
Guest:Have you listened to the Smokey Robinson Quiet Storm album?
Guest:No.
Guest:That's amazing.
Guest:It is?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It's really, yes, because it's like another, it shows you kind of another path for R&B, right?
Guest:And, you know, coming on the heels of, you know, these years of Stax and Volt and stuff getting kind of gritty.
Guest:Yeah, I have that stuff.
Guest:You hear like, you see this album, like on the cover, Smokey Robinson is kneeling next to a horse.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Like, what's going on?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And this was a big shift.
Guest:Yes, and it was a different way to think about this.
Guest:Here's a different way R&B could provide pleasure.
Guest:Not by being kind of bluesy and greasy, but by being sort of smooth and refined.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, I think as a musical value, that's an example of the kind of thing that if you think about music through rock and roll, it's easy to sort of to put that to the side.
Guest:And one of the reasons why it's worthwhile thinking about genres is because sometimes it can help you identify your blind spots, right?
Guest:It can help you identify, like, not just the country music that sounds like Waylon Jennings, but like the Shania Twain records of the 1990s.
Guest:The Mutt Lang records.
Guest:Which sound like they were made in a lab by a robot.
Marc:Right.
Guest:Who liked rock.
Guest:Who liked rock and all sorts of stuff, right?
Guest:At a certain point, she releases, I believe it's up, in three different versions.
Guest:There's the pop version, the country version, and the world music version.
Marc:That's money.
Guest:That's money, but it's a fascinating phenomenon.
Marc:I guess so.
Guest:And it's a moment of people saying, again, asking this question, like, well, what is country?
Guest:If you're Shania Twain and you're a woman from Canada, no particular accent.
Guest:It's George Jones, man.
Guest:It is also George Jones.
Guest:But if it's just George Jones, then it becomes something in a museum, right?
Guest:No, I get it.
Guest:I get it.
Guest:The reason people still fight about country in a way that they don't necessarily fight about some other genres is that it keeps changing.
Marc:But the funny thing is, there was that period where the Byrds and Graham Parsons and Emmyl Harris and all those people were just shunned by country.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:Even the Eagles didn't get a lot of country airplay in the 70s.
Marc:And then everything that they did has been integrated into country.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:I mean, Lou Harris goes on to have country hits in the 80s.
Guest:And even now, you know, one of the biggest country album of the year is probably by this guy Morgan Wallen.
Guest:And it's a double album.
Guest:It's drawn from rock.
Guest:It's drawn from hip hop, all sorts of stuff.
Guest:But it's very culturally country.
Guest:And, you know, that kind of got, you know, that got heightened when he's caught on camera earlier this year.
Guest:Oh, that guy.
Guest:Talking to his friends and uses the N-word.
Guest:And so he gets kicked off of country radio for a few months.
Guest:But his country fan base never abandons him.
Guest:And that's a good example of how, musically, that audience is totally happy to hear him using hip-hop beats and drawing from these other modern genres.
Guest:But culturally, they're claiming him as one of their own.
Marc:And that's an example of how these divisions... And you're just hoping it's not because he said the N-word.
Guest:Well, I mean, again, I try to be more descriptive than prescriptive in this book.
Guest:In other words, I try to... Country music, I've always heard it as world music because this is a place with different values and this is a community that I was not born into.
Guest:And I'm going to try to, like, figure out and learn to love this music, which I did, and learn about what's happening in this community.
Guest:And sometimes part of the way you get musical diversity is...
Guest:is that these communities, it's not just like, oh, they're different, they like different stuff.
Guest:It's like, no, these communities can be at war with each other.
Guest:These communities can do things that other communities say, this is really screwed up, or this is really dangerous, or this is really bad.
Guest:So I think it's important not to sanitize this and imagine like, oh, people are just doing different things.
Guest:No, sometimes these are real fights.
Marc:The way you talk about hip-hop and the way you sort of flesh out the different, you know, things that were conflicting in terms of people who wanted a message, people who didn't want a message, people who wanted it to be a little easier spoken than people that kind of pushed the envelope.
Marc:But the idea that there was something performative and also honoring of this sort of language of the community in terms of even telling those big, you know, brassy stories about conquest.
Marc:Right.
Marc:women and money and guns, was always part of the bullshit.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:And there is, I think, especially now, but I think it's throughout the history of popular music, there is a desire that you hear for musicians to be a little more reasonable, a little more decent.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Right?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And obviously, that's a thing that music can do, right?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That's a thing that Bruce Springsteen is a good example.
Guest:Seems like a very decent guy, and that's really part of his appeal and part of what makes his music powerful.
Marc:But it's also manufactured to a certain degree.
Marc:Well, it's all manufactured, right?
Marc:Right.
Marc:So you're saying people should make different decisions about their acts.
Marc:No, I'm not saying you're saying that, but that's what it comes down to.
Marc:The part of the integrity of the gangster rap thing was that at some point people believed it.
Marc:And white kids believed it and black kids believed it.
Guest:And plausibility and believability remains, I mean, has always been central to hip hop.
Guest:That question of like, because you're not singing, you're doing something that's more like talking.
Guest:So as soon as you open your mouth and start talking, as you well know, you're confronted with this issue of like, who the hell are you?
Guest:Right.
Guest:Why are you talking to me?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Why should I believe anything you say?
Guest:And so because of that, rappers tend to be obsessed with credibility and social standing and showing you or finding ways to let you know that they should be believed.
Guest:And Jay-Z does this in a really kind of interesting way where he says, I'm not a rapper.
Marc:It also was kind of popping my brain a little bit about how that, you know, aligning yourself with as a brand with other brands became this sort of like you're winning thing.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Whereas like, you know, a decade ago, it would have been like, what the fuck are you doing?
Marc:Right.
Marc:Right.
Marc:So, you know, that kind of honesty, I guess, is of the time.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:And success and realizing ambition is now something that is, you know, impressive.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:And it's also it's also like a more transparent approach.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Like the idea was like for a rock and roll band.
Guest:Historically, you don't ever want to like sing a song about like, I just fired my manager and hired a new manager.
Guest:You know what I mean?
Guest:Like you don't want to talk about the behind the scenes stuff.
Marc:Whereas hip hop is unless you're fucking off a label.
Guest:Yes, yes.
Guest:If you're Sex Pistols singing EMI, then sure.
Guest:But hip hop is maybe partly because it has so many more words or maybe because there is this idea that the guy's sort of talking to you.
Guest:There is this tendency to bring everything in.
Guest:I just signed this deal.
Guest:I'm doing this thing.
Guest:I'm in the studio.
Guest:Even the hip hop tradition of introducing yourself.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I am one to my right.
Guest:Like, it's like, well, I'm telling you who I am.
Guest:I'm introducing myself the way I would if I were giving a speech.
Marc:Well, it seems like, you know, like as those things go, that hip hop in terms of its ability to to kind of like, you know,
Marc:Take not chances, but to incorporate things.
Marc:It almost seems infinite more than anything else.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And I think, you know, when you said that that that hip hop and usually it's used for jazz or stand up comedy, obviously, is a is one of the only true American art forms.
Marc:You know, it seems like those type of things like jazz and stand up that, you know, come out of these sort of mixing of traditions.
Marc:But in jazz in the same way, it seems that there's no end to hip hop's ability to evolve.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:And sometimes it seems like it's evolving beyond rapping.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Of course.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Which is interesting because like, well, well, if hip hop doesn't mean rapping.
Guest:Like, what does it mean?
Marc:As opposed to R&B?
Guest:Yeah, as opposed to singing, yes.
Guest:And when you hear someone like Drake going back and forth between rapping and singing, or you hear someone like Future, where you're not even sure sometimes, or Travis Scott, like, is that rapping?
Guest:Is that singing?
Guest:These lines kind of get blurred in an interesting way.
Marc:But it seems like that issue is still the kind of like, is R&B obsolete as a defining genre?
Marc:Right.
Marc:And has hip hop eaten it?
Guest:Right.
Guest:And the answer so far has been no, partly on the musical sense, because hip hop has been still mainly rapping, but also socially, because race is still salient.
Guest:That's what I say in the R&B chapter, is that as long as you have black singers...
Guest:who are listened to disproportionately by black people.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And that's kind of like a group, a thing you can identify.
Guest:All ages.
Guest:Yeah, all ages.
Marc:Because older black people are going to be nostalgic, and there's still that world.
Marc:Right.
Marc:So some of these soul has been integrated into classic hip formats, but there's still a world of music that old black people listen to that I know nothing about.
Marc:Right.
Guest:You mean, you talking about, like, Frankie Beverly and Mays, that kind of stuff?
Guest:Sure, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:And I think that, again, there is, I think we're living in a moment where there is a great desire to say, like, to say that divisions are kind of bad and to say, in this society, at this moment, can't we, like, come together a little more?
Guest:Can't we, you know, do we have to kind of hate each other this much?
Guest:Those divisions create a certain amount of frustration or a certain amount of anger or a certain amount of disdain, like...
Guest:Those people over there that we don't hang out with, like, yeah, we can say we respect everyone, but deep down, like, fuck those people.
Guest:And I think that that impulse is a very human impulse.
Guest:I think that's a very American impulse.
Guest:And I think it often lives side by side.
Guest:Fuck those people.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:And I think that lives side by side with this desire for greater commingling and greater acceptance and greater freedom.
Guest:And I think in the history of music and in the history of genres, you see both and you see this push and pull.
Guest:There was a country song a few years ago by Eric Church called Springsteen, which was about falling in love with a girl at a Bruce Springsteen concert.
Guest:It was a huge hit in country.
Guest:And I was like, oh, that's fascinating.
Guest:Like Springsteen as a signifier of like country identity.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, partly because of the way genres change and because Springsteen no longer sounds like mainstream music.
Guest:Now it's sonically, it's closer to country in terms of the guitars and some of the other stuff.
Guest:And then this summer, there was a song by this guy, Aaron Lewis from Stained.
Guest:He's like a rock singer.
Guest:He's now a country singer called Am I the Only One?
Guest:It's a kind of like anti-liberal protest song.
Guest:And he sings Am I the Only One Who Stopped Singing Along Every Time They Play a Springsteen Song.
Guest:So now Springsteen is a divisive figure within the world of country music.
Guest:Country saying like, we're country, we're not like that Springsteen guy.
Guest:And I think that, again, that push and pull, that wanting to be all listening to the same music, but also liking the idea that we have an identity that sets us apart in some way...
Guest:Again, I think that's something that's hard to eliminate from the human experience or the human listening experience.
Marc:Yeah, but there's something disconcerting to me and upsetting to me about using Springsteen as this example of some kind of woke liberal asshole that we've got to push back on, that because of the culture we're living in and how tribal it's become and how shallow it's become, I can't see anything outside of...
Guest:the the very seemingly real threat of fascism so i can't it's hard for me to assess things like that other than like what the fuck is happening ah see and that that's your own kind of pushback right and and you know again i think certainly in the the punk rock that converted me to a music obsessive in 1990 it was very tribal and in some ways quite shallow right
Guest:Right.
Guest:Where's punk rock now?
Guest:Well, it's funny.
Guest:Punk rock seems to have a resurgence every few years.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Meaning something slightly different.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Because one of the ironies was, as I was getting into all this punk rock stuff and I hate the mainstream.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Like a year or two later, Nirvana comes along and like every kid is wearing Doc Martens.
Guest:Right.
Guest:At the time, I was annoyed, of course.
Guest:In retrospect, like that's amazing and funny.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But they kind of took it to a different place.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:And everyone, you know, and Green Day takes it to a different place and Avril Lavigne and Blink-182.
Guest:And now you have like another resurgence with Olivia Rodrigo drawing from punk records.
Guest:That's one of the biggest pop records of the year.
Guest:She's a Disney actress who makes this great sort of punk and pop breakup record called Sour.
Marc:Well, it's sort of interesting.
Marc:So that means it's always been designed for 14 year olds.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Maybe that is, I mean, if you can tap into sort of 14-year-old angst and annoyance, there's always going to be a ready supply of people who want to hear that.
Guest:And some of us are not 14.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Yeah, right.
Guest:And you see a crossover now where you see rappers like this guy MGK reinventing themselves as like punk singers.
Guest:So the kind of eternal return of punk music may be because of its simplicity.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:is something that I definitely would not have predicted when I was getting obsessed with it.
Guest:And the thing that keeps it fresh is that it keeps meaning something slightly different.
Marc:You know, it's not, you would think in how we're talking about this book, it was 900 pages, but you got it in, man.
Marc:You were able to sort of really focus the through lines.
Guest:It's only half that length.
Guest:It's about 450 pages.
Guest:It's designed to fit nicely on the back of your toilet.
Marc:No, no, this is definitely not a toilet book.
Marc:It is 450 pages.
Marc:Huh.
Marc:So it's not 1,000 pages.
Marc:It's not 1,000 pages.
Guest:And again, I think to me all this- This is nice paper, I guess, because it doesn't look like 400 pages.
Guest:No, it doesn't.
Guest:It's not intimidating.
Guest:But to me, hopefully that sense of delight comes through because that's been the thing I felt all my life.
Guest:When I heard punk and then hearing other kinds of music is-
Guest:I'm just delighted and surprised over and over again.
Guest:And one of the things that often has been the most educational for me is popularity.
Guest:Often I'll hear a song that's super popular and my first reaction will be like, huh, I wouldn't have thought that would be a big hit.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then you listen to it again and again.
Guest:And maybe it's Stockholm Syndrome.
Marc:Sure.
Guest:Just like give into it.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Well, that you're signing up for.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:You're volunteering for it.
Guest:Yes, but maybe that's how pop music works, partly, right?
Guest:Of course.
Guest:It sort of grows on you in this slightly insidious way.
Marc:Yeah, there's a lot of stuff that I was like, I don't like that stuff.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And then I put myself through it, and eventually it takes, sometimes 30 years after the fact.
Guest:Well, sometimes you might not even know, right?
Guest:You might be in the supermarket, and some song comes on, and you sing along to it.
Marc:But also you start to make exceptions and your ability to appreciate expands.
Marc:And that's why I think that as you get older, some music falls off and some music gets deeper.
Marc:I don't know why that is, but I find that there's stuff that I always liked that when I listen to it now, just because of my education or my exposure to other things, other music, my appreciation becomes deeper, which is the best that can happen.
Guest:But isn't it still, I find that on some level it can still be related to this question of like, who do you think you are?
Guest:And by listening to a certain record or a certain genre, you can become, at least for a moment, the kind of person who listens to that music.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:That's right.
Marc:I think that's right.
Marc:But you can still be you.
Marc:And if you're that self-conscious about celebrating your ability to listen to a certain type of music and that you're that guy now, I don't know if you can talk about that all the time.
Guest:No, but even if it's not a conscious thing you're doing, you could maybe moving to it or you're singing it.
Guest:I get it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I get it.
Guest:You're vibing to it.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Yeah, I get it.
Guest:You might, you know.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:In the next year, you might become someone who's like obsessed with techno music and you could be that guy.
Marc:Yeah, I don't know.
Marc:I have found that like I usually, because my sense of self is more tenuous than I let on.
Marc:that I'm wary of letting myself become that guy, you know, because I'm not sure that I want to, I don't want to be the techno guy.
Marc:I think I'm a little old to surrender to techno.
Guest:Techno's old too, so it might go together well.
Marc:But wait, did you never have that sense of that music was helping you form your identity?
Marc:Of course.
Marc:Of course.
Marc:Over and over again.
Marc:I mean, I remember early on the first time, like I got this box of records from the R&B record store that was next to where I worked in high school that they weren't going to play in the store.
Marc:And so many of those records became sort of essential to me.
Marc:I mean, Nighthawks at the Diner, Tom Waits' double live album was in there.
Marc:And I dressed like Tom Waits as a sophomore in high school as best I could.
Marc:I would definitely base my identity off of certain music, and I was definitely excited about being turned on to art rock at a young age and sort of thinking of myself as an artist, like I was a photographer.
Marc:So it all sort of coincided.
Marc:And then I remember there was a guy who worked at that record store, took me to his house, and we made a mixtape of all the fucking soul music.
Marc:That came out during Otis Redding's period, like Sam and Dave, Otis Redding, Aretha, all that stuff.
Marc:So I would know, you know, and he hit me to that.
Marc:And then the other guy there turned me on to Eno and Fred Frith and Robert Fripp and the residents.
Marc:So I got like, because of that place, you know, it was all defining.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so much of that has to do with scarcity, right?
Guest:So much of that has to do with like, it was hard to hear that stuff.
Guest:It was hard to be able to afford it if you were a kid and you needed some way in, you needed maybe someone to show you.
Marc:You needed someone to contextualize it for it.
Marc:Like, you know, if you weren't sitting there listening to a soul station, you know, how was I going to get that?
Marc:I mean, I did listen to oldies because my dad turned me on to oldies and I was kind of fascinated with it.
Marc:But for somebody to sit me down and go, this is this era of what you've pointed out was when it became soul music.
Marc:Right.
Marc:So for that all to be put together for me and to hear how that went, it was kind of mind-blowing.
Guest:And I think sometimes there's a fear that because we're living in a post-scarcity era when it comes to music, you have...
Guest:All there all the time.
Guest:It's all there all the time.
Guest:I think there's a fear that those musical communities will kind of disintegrate.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But I think the reason we have musical communities is because we love community.
Guest:And so I think there will be new ways to build those communities.
Guest:And certainly one thing we've learned about the social media era is it doesn't necessarily always bring us all together.
Guest:There's ways in which it can exaggerate certain divisions.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Well, I mean, I hope the national discourse somehow kind of softens.
Marc:And if music is going to be the facilitator of that, I'm all for it.
Guest:But I also think that if the national discourse doesn't soften and digs in and these groups become, everything becomes more divisive and more oppositional.
Marc:You think we're going to get some good music out of that?
Guest:I'm not saying that it's better or worse, but I want to hear what those other people are listening to.
Guest:I want to know what those records are.
Marc:Yeah, I wonder, do you feel like there's new stuff coming out on that side that's defining or sort of buttressing those points of view that is something we don't know about?
Guest:Well, I think, you know, I think often the most exciting records tend not to be explicitly political, but I think it's also important to know that music can kind of gain associations and gain identity even after it's released, right?
Guest:Of course, yeah.
Guest:When Morgan Wallen puts out his record, in some ways it's kind of this inclusive record in a certain way, even though, you know, even though in certain ways it's a little exclusive.
Guest:He has a lyric of a beer don't buzz with that hip-hop cuz, but it damn sure do to a little nitty-gritty, right?
Guest:His idea is like...
Guest:He's maybe drawing a boundary and drawing a distinction, even though he happens to be a hip-hop fan.
Guest:Then when he's caught on tape saying the N-word and he's banished and he kind of comes back, now he's a much more polarizing figure than he was a year ago.
Marc:Yeah, right.
Marc:I get it.
Marc:And I've never listened to one note of his music.
Marc:It's a good record.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:I just got the new Billie Eilish record.
Marc:You like it?
Marc:I do.
Marc:Do you?
Guest:I like it.
Guest:I think I like the previous one better.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But that whole phenomenon is fascinating, right?
Guest:And the idea that one question that people have is if it's possible for people to seemingly emerge from nowhere and become everywhere, does that mean that they go back to nowhere quicker too?
Guest:Maybe, sometimes.
Guest:Or does that just mean that there's just more stuff out there?
Marc:I just like, I can't like, you know, I try to keep up.
Marc:I don't know quite how to keep up.
Marc:It's not, it's not possible.
Guest:No one can keep up with everything.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It's just, and, and you know, you're kind of picking and choosing and you're hearing something there, hearing something here.
Guest:I think that's always been true.
Guest:I think now maybe there's, it's easier to imagine that you somehow could keep up with everything.
Marc:I've gotten very vinyl specific.
Marc:So that keeps me somewhat in the past.
Guest:It's a limiting principle.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And, and also, but I get new vinyl and I'll listen to it when I can.
Marc:But all right, so I appreciate the book and thanks for opening my mind or at least give me the information that I needed to kind of have a little more grounded sense of R&B.
Marc:One door opens, another door closes, right?
Marc:Kind of.
Marc:Or else they all stay open and then you just get exhausted.
Marc:That's right.
Marc:Thanks for talking, man.
Guest:Thanks, Mark.
Marc:Okay, that was Kalefa Sene.
Marc:The book is called Major Labels, A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres.
Marc:It's now available wherever you get books.
Marc:Kalefa Sene.
Marc:God, I hope that's correct.
Marc:Now I'll play my new Stratocaster clean with a little wobbly.
Marc:You know what?
Marc:You know what?
Marc:I'm going to send some love to the guy that made this thing.
Marc:Because I know who he is.
Marc:It's a Fender master built.
Marc:They make it look old.
Marc:So they actually have to put more time into it.
Marc:But the guy who built mine, a Fender custom shop master builder, Carlos Ruben Lopez Jr., made a fucking magic guitar.
Marc:And I love it.
Marc:So there you go.
Marc:Okay, I'm going to play it now.
.
Guest:.
Guest:guitar solo
Marc:Umar lives.
Marc:Monkey and La Fonda.
Marc:Cat angels are fucking everywhere, man.