I last paused to take stock of my listening in Q1 2023. Now we’re well into Q3, and you’d be forgiven for thinking I’d given up on listening to podcasts. Well, you’d be wrong! Here’s a belated update of what I’ve thought about what I’ve heard over the last few months – new and new-to-me releases alike.
An AI artist’s impression of me listening to things lately
I picked this one up after it caught my attention in the list of Ambies award winners. Maybe it was the colourful tile art? Maybe the bilingual aspect appealed to the part of my brain that sends me on a biennial ill-fated quest to learn a new language? Regardless, I really enjoyed this series. One of the best things a podcast can do is make you feel immersed in a new and wonderful world, and in Ídolo, that’s the world of the narcocarridos — the drug ballads. Like a Mexican take on outlaw country, this genre has found an audience on both sides of the US-Mexico border, and Chalino Sánchez was one of its brightest stars – until he was murdered after a show. That crime gives the the podcast its investigative framework, but it’s so much more than just a grisly who-did-it. Chalino’s music meant a lot to the team behind this podcast, and you can tell that by the way they focus on his life, his culture and his music, not just his tragic death. Plus, the show features a bespoke narcocorrido for its ending theme. Who needs copyrighted music anyway?
One of podcasting’s superpowers is its ability to serve very niche needs. Life of the Record is a case in point. Who wants in-depth oral histories going track-by-track through cult classic albums by acts like the Pixies, or Low, or even Neu? The answer is me, extremely so. This is the perfect prescription – no bullshit, no interviewer, just musicians talking at length, with songs used to illustrate their reminiscing. There’s a nice big back-catalog too, so you can skim through and pick and choose any artists that tickle your fancy. One for the music nerds.
Did not enjoy this at all. I dip into this feed any time I see a subject that interests me, and I always get burned. When will I learn?
The problem is that I am interested in the subjects covered on British Scandal. The podcast, however, proceeds from the premise that I am not, and that I need to be hooked by other means. One of those means is a kind of audio-reenactment, a style of narration that puts you in the scene and in the heads of the people involved as if you were listening to a fiction audiobook. This necessarily involves a lot of poetic license-taking and pure speculation — I happen to think you should be able to find drama in recounting real historical events without just making up people’s inner monologues, but maybe that’s just me.
The real turn-off moments come when Matt Forde interrupts this story with forced banter about what we’ve just heard. Who wants this? Forde is unfunny at the best of times, and in this context he actively interrupts and belittles any kind of story-telling. Is this supposed to appeal to someone who will only listen to a history podcast when it contains eight minutes of the worst banter you’ve ever heard? I’m sure there are lots of people who enjoy this but I don’t understand it.
Now THIS is what I want. A solid middlebrow history podcast, some well-crafted narration, nicely-judged sound design. Dan Jones is just so soothing, not talking down to the listener but delivering narration with a quiet, contagious enthusiasm. The series zooms in and out at the right times, picking up on details and then sweeping the action forward with summary. One for the history dads out there. (He’s just started on Season 3, too)
Just when you think you’re over scam stories in podcasting, another great series comes along and hooks you. This story, about the suspicions that emerge around a sick girl running a charity, is murky, tragic, slightly sordid and uncomfortable. But it’s handled deftly and with grace by the team behind the show, who move expertly from retrospective storytelling to a meta-investigation, and eventually deliver an ending that must have taken some serious journalistic expertise. This goes to show how good the BBC still is in the podcasting space.
As maybe my all-time favourite podcast followed up its Erotic 80s season with an Erotic 90s sequel that promised to be bigger, better and badder, I was totally titillated. And I’ve mostly enjoyed it! Buuuuuut… At times the new season has lost me and I haven’t finished episodes. Part of that is a problem of scale. Erotic 80s discussed sex in Hollywood in the 80s with each episode focusing on an event in one calendar year of the decade. Meanwhile, at its mid-season break, Erotic 90s has reached 14 episodes and is only at 1995. There’s no thread left un-pulled, no rabbit-hole that isn’t burrowed into, and that sheer breadth and sprawl occasionally leaves you wondering what the point is.
I think the focus on the 90s is both a blessing and a curse. To me, host and writer Karina Longworth is at her best close-analyzing movies and biographies, and placing them into a historical context, like the McCarthy era or LA in the 60s. Conversely, I find her accounts of recent history can sometimes become… what’s the opposite of disinterested? Look, this 90s era is her wheelhouse, as she occasionally mentions – it’s when she really began to become a Hollywood nerd. At its best, that passion and firsthand insight can elevate her storytelling. But at its worst, the host’s interest in the minutiae of the subject outpaces the listeners – and it feels like you’re listening to Karina Longworth arguing with 30 year-old alt-weekly magazine articles.
A really interesting attempt to contextualise and canonise some very recent history. The Blog Era tells the story of how the hip-hop genre, the music industry, and our culture more broadly, changed rapidly with the proliferation of the Internet, in an era they call, well, you guessed it. The show is both by and for nerds who frequented hip-hop blogs in the 2000s, and as someone who lurked occasionally, I admire the project here. These guys are making the case for the importance of their community, respecting a cultural moment that might otherwise be dismissed. The show is well put-together and goes along at a good clip, even if it unfortunately has to avoid playing a lot of the music it references, for licensing reasons. But I do wonder how this all sounds to someone not already invested in this topic. The hosts are connected in the hip-hop scene and have access to a lot of the people who “were there” so to speak, and these people seem pleasant enough – but most of their stories are just “I went on the Internet a lot in 2007”. Is there a way to tell a story about an online community through another medium, while keeping it compelling to a general audience? It’s an interesting question but I’m not sure The Blog Era has it completely worked out.