Podcasts about negro problem

Prodigy is out this week. This week we talk about Old Ninja went a music festival, CJI vs ADCC, Trump's 34 felonies, 3 Body Problem, Resolution sizes, and more! Come follow us: http://www.beenhadproductions.com/bthanbti SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/bthanbtiI Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BthanBTI/ Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/bthanbti Twitter: @BthanBTI iTunes: https://itun.es/i6SJ6Pw YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/BlackerThanBlackTimesInfinity Rescue + Residence https://www.rescueresidence.org/ Donate: https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=34F4G4ZXQL8FA

Broadway Drumming 101 is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Greg Joseph is an in-demand drummer who has been a fixture on  the NYC music scene for over 25 years. He has played with such diverse musicians as Kevin Hays, Chris Potter, Steve Wilson, Ira Sullivan, Ted Kooshian, Michael Blake, Chiara Itzi, Tony Scherr, The Dave Berger Big Band, Nicole Henry, Yungchen Lhamo,The Absolute Ensemble, Madeleine Peyroux, Reverend Vince Anderson, Moses Patrou, Brian Charette, Swamp Dogg, Syl Johnson, The Artie Shaw Orchestra,Stew and the Negro Problem, Chris Bergson, Will Bernard, Ed Cherry, Akiko Tsuruga, and many others. Greg was also the drummer for Legally Blonde, the Musical on Broadway.Greg's organ trio, ”Greg Joseph and The Right Back,” will release their debut album, “Drop The Rock” in July 2023 on Sunnyside Records. The album features Larry Goldings on organ and Steve Cardenas on guitar.Originally from Long Island, NY, Greg is a graduate of The University of Miami. Greg lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter. When you become a subscriber of Broadway Drumming 101, you'll embark on a comprehensive journey into the world of drumming for Broadway musicals, gaining the knowledge and skills needed to thrive as a successful musician.For an incredibly affordable price of just $5 a month or $50 a year, you'll gain exclusive behind-the-scenes access to the daily life of a Broadway musician. Through our engaging YouTube videos, insightful bi-weekly podcasts, and informative articles, we'll provide you with invaluable insights on what it truly means to be a professional musician.What sets us apart is our commitment to independence. We have no ads, sponsors, investors, or corporate backers. Instead, we are a tight-knit team of passionate individuals dedicated to creating top-notch content for all those interested in what we have to offer.By contributing financially, you can directly support the continued production of high-quality content. Your generosity will help us maintain our small but dedicated core, ensuring that we can deliver valuable resources to everyone who shares our passion.Join us at Broadway Drumming 101 and unlock the secrets of drumming for Broadway musicals. Subscribe now and take your musical journey to new heights!If you'd like to become a voluntarily paid subscriber, subscribe here:If you'd like to support us without committing to a formal subscription or if you'd like to supplement your subscription cost (as many generous individuals do), there are various ways you can help fuel our passion for creating valuable content:* Buy us a cup of coffee, or even a week's worth, by visiting: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/BD101. Every contribution, no matter how small, goes a long way in sustaining our efforts.* Treat us to a few drinks at Manhattan prices by clicking here: https://ko-fi.com/broadwaydrumming101. Your support will directly impact our ability to continue delivering top-quality resources.* Support us through PayPal: https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/broadwaydrumming101. Your contribution will be greatly appreciated and will enable us to maintain our dedication to providing valuable content.* Use Venmo to contribute: https://account.venmo.com/u/broadwaydrumming101. Your generosity will directly support the ongoing production of high-quality resources for aspiring musicians.In addition to financial contributions, we also offer a range of merchandise that you can explore to further support us.Your support, whether through subscriptions, donations, or merchandise purchases, plays a crucial role in our ability to continue creating and sharing valuable content. We deeply appreciate your contributions as they enable us to thrive and provide you with the best possible resources. Thank you for being a part of Broadway Drumming 101!https://merchandise.broadwaydrumming101.comThanks!Clayton Craddock is an accomplished drummer and host of the popular Broadway Drumming 101 Podcast. With an impressive musical career, he has held the drum chair in numerous hit Broadway and off-Broadway musicals, showcasing his talent in productions like Tick, tick…BOOM!, Altar Boyz, Memphis The Musical, Lady Day At Emerson's Bar and Grill and Ain't Too Proud. He has been a sub drummer on Motown, The Color Purple, Rent, Little Shop of Horrors, Spongebob Squarepants-The Musical, Evita, Cats, Avenue Q, and The Big Apple Circus. The next project he's working on is The Hippest Trip – The Soul Train Musical.His skills have also taken him to the television screen, where he has performed on esteemed shows like Good Morning America, The Colbert Report, The View, The Jimmy Fallon Show, The CBS Early Show, the Today Show, and the 2010 and 2019 TONY Awards at Radio City. He's shared the stage with legends such as The Stylistics, Denise Williams, Chuck Berry, and Ben E. King. Notably, he appeared in the Netflix episode of DWYCK episode of Luke Cage with the Delfonics and the HBO version of Lady Day at Emerson's Bar and Grill.Be sure to subscribe to the Broadway Drumming 101 YouTube channel, where you can find more exciting content! Get full access to Broadway Drumming 101 at broadwaydrumming101.substack.com/subscribe

Frederick Douglass' 1890 speech on the proper but improper opinion and philosophy of the "The Negro Problem."I am not a historian, just a guy learning from history.Connect: drmatmonharrell.bio.linkMindful Log and episode written by Dr. Matmon HarrellBrown, L. (2005). Woodson, Carter G. In Encyclopedia of the Harlem Literary Renaissance. New York: Facts on File. Retrieved January 18, 2023, from online.infobase.com/Auth/Index?aid=101204&itemid=WE54&articleId=35019Du Bois, W. E. B., Back, L., & Solomos, J. (1999). PART ONE: Origins and transformations: Chapter 5: THE CONSERVATION OF RACES. In Theories of Race & Racism (pp. 79–86). Taylor & Francis Ltd / Books.Woodson, C. G. (1969). Century of Negro Migration. Century of Negro Migration, 1.Cooper, Anna Julia. “‘I Speak for the Colored Women of the South' Speech.” African-American History, Facts On File, online.infobase.com/Auth/Index?aid=101204&itemid=WE01&primarySourceId=4348. Accessed 18 Jan. 2023.Douglass, Frederick. “Speech on American Slavery.” African-American History, Facts On File, online.infobase.com/Auth/Index?aid=101204&itemid=WE01&primarySourceId=4445. Accessed 18 Jan. 2023.Douglass, Frederick. “Speech on ‘The Negro Problem.'” African-American History, Facts On File, online.infobase.com/Auth/Index?aid=101204&itemid=WE01&primarySourceId=4925. Accessed 18 Jan. 2023.Pickens, William, 1881-1954. The New Negro: His Political, Civil, And Mental Status: And Related Essays. New York: AMS Press, 1969.Gates Jr., Henry Louis. 2019. Stony The Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow. Penguin Press. New YorkMusic played within  this episode is provided by Podccastle & Garageband. Become a member at https://plus.acast.com/s/themindfulpharmd. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Repeal of anti-miscegenation laws, 1948–1967. In 1948, the California Supreme Court ruled in Perez v Sharp (1948) that the California anti-miscegenation laws violated the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, the first time since Reconstruction that a state court declared such laws unconstitutional, and making California the first state since Ohio in 1887 to overturn its anti-miscegenation law. The case raised constitutional questions in states which had similar laws, which led to the repeal or overturning of such laws in fourteen states by 1967. Sixteen states, mainly Southern states, were the exception. In any case, in the 1950s, the repeal of anti-miscegenation laws was still a controversial issue in the U.S., even among supporters of racial integration. In 1958, the political theorist Hannah Arendt, a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, who escaped from Europe during the Holocaust, wrote in an essay in response to the Little Rock Crisis, the Civil Rights struggle for the racial integration of public schools which took place in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957, that anti-miscegenation laws were an even deeper injustice than the racial segregation of public schools. The free choice of a spouse, she argued in Reflections on Little Rock, was "an elementary human right": "Even political rights, like the right to vote, and nearly all other rights enumerated in the Constitution, are secondary to the inalienable human rights to 'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness' proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence; and to this category the right to home and marriage unquestionably belongs." Arendt was severely criticized by fellow liberals, who feared that her essay would arouse the racist fears common among whites and thus hinder the struggle of African Americans for civil rights and racial integration. Commenting on the Supreme Court's ruling in Brown v Board of Education of Topeka against de jure racial segregation in education, Arendt argued that anti-miscegenation laws were more basic to racial segregation than racial segregation in education. Arendt's analysis of the centrality of laws against interracial marriage to white supremacy echoed the conclusions of Gunnar Myrdal. In his essay Social Trends in America and Strategic Approaches to the Negro Problem (1948), Myrdal ranked the social areas where restrictions were imposed by Southern whites on the freedom of African Americans through racial segregation from the least to the most important: jobs, courts and police, politics, basic public facilities, "social equality" including dancing and handshaking, and most importantly, marriage. This ranking was indeed reflective of the way in which the barriers against desegregation fell under the pressure of the protests of the emerging civil rights movement. First, legal segregation in the army, in education and in basic public services fell, then restrictions on the voting rights of African-Americans were lifted. These victories were ensured by the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But the bans on interracial marriage were the last to go, in 1967. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/law-school/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/law-school/support

Anna Julia Haywood Cooper was an American author, educator, sociologist, speaker, Black liberation activist, and one of the most prominent African-American scholars in United States history. In 1893, Cooper delivered a speech at the World's Congress of Representative Women in Chicago.I am not a historian...just a guy learning from History.Connect: https://drmatmonharrell.bio.link/Rate, Subscribe, ShareBrown, L. (2005). Woodson, Carter G. In Encyclopedia of the Harlem Literary Renaissance. New York: Facts on File. Retrieved January 18, 2023, from online.infobase.com/Auth/Index?aid=101204&itemid=WE54&articleId=35019Du Bois, W. E. B., Back, L., & Solomos, J. (1999). PART ONE: Origins and transformations: Chapter 5: THE CONSERVATION OF RACES. In Theories of Race & Racism (pp. 79–86). Taylor & Francis Ltd / Books.Woodson, C. G. (1969). Century of Negro Migration. Century of Negro Migration, 1.Cooper, Anna Julia. “‘I Speak for the Colored Women of the South' Speech.” African-American History, Facts On File, online.infobase.com/Auth/Index?aid=101204&itemid=WE01&primarySourceId=4348. Accessed 18 Jan. 2023.Douglass, Frederick. “Speech on American Slavery.” African-American History, Facts On File, online.infobase.com/Auth/Index?aid=101204&itemid=WE01&primarySourceId=4445. Accessed 18 Jan. 2023.Douglass, Frederick. “Speech on ‘The Negro Problem.'” African-American History, Facts On File, online.infobase.com/Auth/Index?aid=101204&itemid=WE01&primarySourceId=4925. Accessed 18 Jan. 2023.Pickens, William, 1881-1954. The New Negro: His Political, Civil, And Mental Status: And Related Essays. New York: AMS Press, 1969.Gates Jr., Henry Louis. 2019. Stony The Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow. Penguin Press. New YorkMusic played within this episode is provided by Podccastle & Garageband. Become a member at https://plus.acast.com/s/themindfulpharmd. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Carter G. Woodson founded "Negro History Week" in 1926. His passion to share the history of Blacks in America became ground zero for Black History Month. I am not a historian...just a guy learning from History.Connect: https://drmatmonharrell.bio.link/Rate, Subscribe, ShareReferencesBrown, L. (2005). Woodson, Carter G. In Encyclopedia of the Harlem Literary Renaissance. New York: Facts on File. Retrieved January 18, 2023, from online.infobase.com/Auth/Index?aid=101204&itemid=WE54&articleId=35019Du Bois, W. E. B., Back, L., & Solomos, J. (1999). PART ONE: Origins and transformations: Chapter 5: THE CONSERVATION OF RACES. In Theories of Race & Racism (pp. 79–86). Taylor & Francis Ltd / Books.Woodson, C. G. (1969). Century of Negro Migration. Century of Negro Migration, 1.Cooper, Anna Julia. “‘I Speak for the Colored Women of the South' Speech.” African-American History, Facts On File, online.infobase.com/Auth/Index?aid=101204&itemid=WE01&primarySourceId=4348. Accessed 18 Jan. 2023.Douglass, Frederick. “Speech on American Slavery.” African-American History, Facts On File, online.infobase.com/Auth/Index?aid=101204&itemid=WE01&primarySourceId=4445. Accessed 18 Jan. 2023.Douglass, Frederick. “Speech on ‘The Negro Problem.'” African-American History, Facts On File, online.infobase.com/Auth/Index?aid=101204&itemid=WE01&primarySourceId=4925. Accessed 18 Jan. 2023.Pickens, William, 1881-1954. The New Negro: His Political, Civil, And Mental Status: And Related Essays. New York: AMS Press, 1969.Gates Jr., Henry Louis. 2019. Stony The Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow. Penguin Press. New YorkMusic played within this episode is provided by Podccastle & Garageband. Become a member at https://plus.acast.com/s/themindfulpharmd. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (W.E.B), was the first African American to earn a Doctorate degree from Harvard University. Du Bois' web of civil rights activism included literary works as well as photography; which lead him to organize the creation of the Exhibit To American Negroes at the 1900 Paris Exposition. I am not a historian...just a guy learning from History.Connect: https://drmatmonharrell.bio.link/Rate, Subscribe, ShareBrown, L. (2005). Woodson, Carter G. In Encyclopedia of the Harlem Literary Renaissance. New York: Facts on File. Retrieved January 18, 2023, from online.infobase.com/Auth/Index?aid=101204&itemid=WE54&articleId=35019Du Bois, W. E. B., Back, L., & Solomos, J. (1999). PART ONE: Origins and transformations: Chapter 5: THE CONSERVATION OF RACES. In Theories of Race & Racism (pp. 79–86). Taylor & Francis Ltd / Books.Woodson, C. G. (1969). Century of Negro Migration. Century of Negro Migration, 1.Cooper, Anna Julia. “‘I Speak for the Colored Women of the South' Speech.” African-American History, Facts On File, online.infobase.com/Auth/Index?aid=101204&itemid=WE01&primarySourceId=4348. Accessed 18 Jan. 2023.Douglass, Frederick. “Speech on American Slavery.” African-American History, Facts On File, online.infobase.com/Auth/Index?aid=101204&itemid=WE01&primarySourceId=4445. Accessed 18 Jan. 2023.Douglass, Frederick. “Speech on ‘The Negro Problem.'” African-American History, Facts On File, online.infobase.com/Auth/Index?aid=101204&itemid=WE01&primarySourceId=4925. Accessed 18 Jan. 2023.Pickens, William, 1881-1954. The New Negro: His Political, Civil, And Mental Status: And Related Essays. New York: AMS Press, 1969.Gates Jr., Henry Louis. 2019. Stony The Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow. Penguin Press. New YorkMusic played within this episode is provided by Podccastle & Garageband. Become a member at https://plus.acast.com/s/themindfulpharmd. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

My guest is Eszter Balint and her story is really unusual. It's so unusual, in fact, that her latest project is a memoir. She was born in Hungary and lived there until she was about 10 years old. But the rise in communism at that time forced artists who were more avant garde, like Eszter's family, to leave the country. She found herself in New York City with her immediate and extended family, creating the Squat Theater where some of the most amazing artists created their work. Eszter worked with a diverse array of people. Sometimes she was behind the scenes with sun Ra, while other times she was right in the middle of it all, from acting in Jim JArmusch movies to playing violin in a Jean Michel Basquiat production. So it shouldn't be a surprise that she began writing and performing her own material. And when the acting bug reappeared, she went to LA. But she eventually came back to New York, raised a family and got back to music. Her aforementioned new project is a combination theater production and accompanying album, called I Hate Memory that pairs her with Stew from Stew & The Negro Problem. She's got shows coming up in NYC, so check out her Instagram page @eszter.balint. Pick up I Hate Memory on Bandcamp or wherever you get music. Follow us @PerformanceAnx on Instagram & Twitter. Reach out there or theperformanceanxietypod@gmail.com. We have merch at performanceanx.threadless.com. We accept cups of coffee at ko-fi.com/performanceanxiety. Now let's dive head-first into this chat with Eszter Balint on Performance Anxiety on the Pantheon Podcast Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As we're in the period between Christmas and New Year, the gap between episodes is going to be longer than normal, and the podcast proper is going to be back on January the ninth. So nobody has to wait around for another fortnight for a new episode, I thought I'd upload some old Patreon bonus episodes to fill the gap. Every year around Christmas the bonus episodes I do tend to be on Christmas songs and so this week I'm uploading three of those. These are older episodes, so don't have the same production values as more recent episodes, and are also shorter than more recent bonuses, but I hope they're still worth listening to. Hello, and welcome to this week's second Patreon bonus episode. I'm recording this on December the twenty-third, so whether you hear this before Christmas is largely down to how quickly we can get the main episode edited and uploaded. Hopefully, this is going up on Christmas Eve and you're all feeling appropriately festive. Normally for the Patreon bonuses in the last week of December I choose a particularly Christmassy record from the time period we're covering in the main podcast -- usually a perennial Christmas hit like something off the Phil Spector Christmas album or the Elvis Christmas album. However, this year we're in the mid sixties, a period when none of the big hits of US or UK Christmas music were released, because it's after the peak of US Christmas music and before the peak of UK Christmas music. There were Christmas albums by people like James Brown, but they weren't major parts of the discography. So today, we're going to have a brief run-through of the Beatles' Christmas records. These were flexi-discs -- which for those of you who are too young to remember them were records pressed on very, very, thin, cheap plastic, which used to be attached to things like kids' comics or cereal boxes as promotional gimmicks -- sent out to members of the group's fan club. In a way, these were the Beatles' very own Patreon bonuses, sent out to fans and supporters, and not essential works, but hopefully interesting and fun. They very rarely had anything like a full song, being mostly made up of sketches and recorded messages, and other than a limited-edition vinyl reissue a few years back they've never been put on general release -- though one song from the discs, "Christmas Time is Here Again", *was* released as a B-side of the CD single of "Free as A Bird" in 1995: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Christmas Time is Here Again"] Other than that, the Christmas records remain one of those parts of the Beatles catalogue which have never seen a proper widespread release. The first record was made on October the 17th 1963, at the same recording session as "I Want to Hold Your Hand", at the instigation of Tony Barrow, the group's publicist, who also came up with a script for the group to depart from: [Excerpt, the Beatles' first Christmas record] Barrow apparently edited the recording himself, using scissors and tape, and much of that was just taking out the swearing. Incidentally, I've seen some American sources talking about the word "Crimble" being a word that the Beatles made up themselves, but it's actually a fairly standard bit of Scouse slang. The second Christmas record was recorded at the end of the sessions for Beatles For Sale and was much the same kind of thing, though this time they incorporated sound effects: [Excerpt: The Beatles' Second Christmas Record] That was never sent to American fans. Instead, they got a cardboard copy of an edited version of the first record (it's possible to make records out of cardboard, but they can only be played a handful of times). They wouldn't get another Christmas record until 1968, though British fans kept receiving them. The third record sees the group parodying other people's hits, including a brief rendition of "It's the Same Old Song" interrupted by George Harrison saying they can't sing it because of copyright, and an attempt to sing Barry McGuire's "Eve of Destruction" and "Auld Lang Syne" at the same time: [Excerpt: The Beatles' Third Christmas Record] The fourth record, from 1966, was recorded during the early sessions for "Strawberry Fields Forever", and titled "Pantomime: Everywhere It's Christmas". For those outside the UK and its sphere of cultural influence, pantomime is a British Xmas stage tradition which is very hard to explain if you've not experienced it, involving performances that are ostensibly of fairy stories like Cinderella or Snow White, but also usually involving drag performances -- the male lead is usually played by a young woman, while there's usually an old woman character played by a man in drag -- with audience participation, songs, and old jokes of the "I do declare, the Prince's balls get bigger every year!" type. As the title suggests, then, the 1966 Christmas record is an attempt at an actual narrative of sorts, though a surreal, incoherent one. It comes across very much like the Goon show -- though like one of the later episodes where Milligan has lost all sense of narrative coherence: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Pantomime: Everywhere It's Christmas"] it's probably the best of the group's Christmas efforts, and certainly the most fully realised to this point. The 1967 Christmas record, "Christmas Time is Here Again", is even more ambitious. It's another narrative, which sees the group playing a fictitious group called the Ravellers, auditioning for the BBC: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Christmas Time is Here Again"] It also features parodies of broadcasting formats, which I've seen a few people suggest were inspired by the Bonzo Dog Band's then-recent Craig Torso Show radio performances, but which seem to me more indicative just of a general shared sense of humour: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Christmas Time is Here Again"] But that record has become most famous for having one of the closest things on any of these records to a full song, the title track "Christmas Time is Here Again": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Christmas Time is Here Again"] As well as later being issued as the B-side of a CD single, that was also remade by Ringo as a solo record: [Excerpt: Ringo Starr, "Christmas Time is Here Again"] Although my favourite use of the song is actually as an interpolation, with slightly altered lyrics, in "Xmas Again" by Stew of the Negro Problem, one of my favourite current songwriters: [Excerpt: Stew, "Xmas Again"] "Christmas Time is Here Again" would be the last Christmas record the group would make together. For their final two Christmas releases, they recorded their parts separately and got their friend, the DJ Kenny Everett, who was known at this point for his tricks with tape editing, and who shared their sense of humour (he later went on to become a successful TV comedian) to collage them together into something listenable. The highlight of the 1968 record comes from George's contribution. George, a lover of the ukulele, got Tiny Tim to record his version of "Nowhere Man" for the record: [Excerpt: Tiny Tim, "Nowhere Man"] And for the seventh and final Christmas single, recorded after the group had split up but before the split was announced, Everett once again cobbled it together from separate recordings, this time a chat between John and Yoko, Ringo improvising a song and plugging his new film, and Paul singing an original Christmas song: [Excerpt: Paul McCartney, "Merry, Merry, Year"] George's contribution was a single sentence. In 1970, the fan club members got one final record -- an actual vinyl album, compiling all the previous Christmas records in one place. All the Beatles would in future record solo Christmas singles, some of which became perennial classics, but there would never be another Beatles Christmas record [Excerpt, the end of the third Beatles Christmas record]

While I'm still on hiatus, I invited questions from listeners. This is an hour-long podcast answering some of them. (Another hour-long Q&A for Patreon backers only will go up next week). Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ There is a Mixcloud of the music excerpted here which can be found at https://www.mixcloud.com/AndrewHickey/500-songs-supplemental-qa-edition/ Click below for a transcript: Hello and welcome to the Q&A  episode I'm doing while I'm working on creating a backlog. I'm making good progress on that, and still hoping and expecting to have episode 151 up some time in early August, though I don't have an exact date yet. I was quite surprised by the response to my request for questions, both at the amount of it and at where it came from. I initially expected to get a fair few comments on the main podcast, and a handful on the Patreon, and then I could do a reasonable-length Q&A podcast from the former and a shorter one from the latter. Instead, I only got a couple of questions on the main episode, but so many on the Patreon that I had to stop people asking only a day or so after posting the request for questions. So instead of doing one reasonable length podcast and one shorter one, I'm actually doing two longer ones. What I'm going to do is do all the questions asked publicly, plus all the questions that have been asked multiple times, in this one, then next week I'm going to put up the more niche questions just for Patreon backers. However, I'm not going to answer *all* of the questions. I got so many questions so quickly that there's not space to answer them all, and several of them were along the lines of "is artist X going to get an episode?" which is a question I generally don't answer -- though I will answer a couple of those if there's something interesting to say about them. But also, there are some I've not answered for another reason. As you may have noticed, I have a somewhat odd worldview, and look at the world from a different angle from most people sometimes. Now there were several questions where someone asked something that seems like a perfectly reasonable question, but contains a whole lot of hidden assumptions that that person hadn't even considered -- about music history, or about the process of writing and researching, or something else. Now, to answer that kind of question at all often means unpacking those hidden assumptions, which can sometimes make for an interesting answer -- after all, a lot of the podcast so far has been me telling people that what they thought they knew about music history was wrong -- but when it's a question being asked by an individual and you answer that way, it can sometimes, frankly, make you look like a horribly unpleasant person, or even a bully. "Don't you even know the most basic things about historical research? I do! You fool! Hey everyone else listening, this person thinks you do research in *this* way, but everyone knows you do it *that* way!" Now, that is never how I would intend such answers to come across -- nobody can be blamed for not knowing what they don't know -- but there are some questions where no matter how I phrased the answer, it came across sounding like that. I'll try to hold those over for future Q&A episodes if I can think of ways of unpicking the answers in such a way that I'm not being unconscionably rude to people who were asking perfectly reasonable questions. Some of the answers that follow might still sound a bit like that to be honest, but if you asked a question and my answer sounds like that to you, please know that it wasn't meant to. There's a lot to get through, so let's begin: Steve from Canada asks: “Which influential artist or group has been the most challenging to get information on in the last 50 podcasts? We know there has been a lot written about the Beatles, Beach Boys, Motown as an entity, the Monkees and the Rolling Stones, but you mentioned in a tweet that there's very little about some bands like the Turtles, who are an interesting story. I had never heard of Dino Valenti before this broadcast – but he appeared a lot in the last batch – so it got me curious. [Excerpt: The Move, “Useless Information”] In the last fifty episodes there's not been a single one that's made it to the podcast where it was at all difficult to get information. The problem with many of them is that there's *too much* information out there, rather than there not being enough. No matter how many books one reads on the Beatles, one can never read more than a fraction of them, and there's huge amounts of writing on the Rolling Stones, on Hendrix, on the Doors, on the Byrds... and when you're writing about those people, you *know* that you're going to miss out something or get something wrong, because there's one more book out there you haven't read which proves that one of the stories you're telling is false. This is one of the reasons the episodes have got so much longer, and taken so much more time. That wasn't the case in the first hundred episodes -- there were a lot of artists I covered there, like Gene and Eunice, or the Chords, or Jesse Belvin, or Vince Taylor who there's very little information about. And there are some coming up who there's far less information about than people in the last fifty episodes. But every episode since the Beatles has had a surfeit of information. There is one exception -- I wanted to do a full episode on "Rescue Me" by Fontella Bass, because it would be an interesting lens through which to look at how Chess coped with the change in Black musical styles in the sixties. But there was so little information available about her I ended up relegating it to a Patreon bonus episode, because she makes those earlier artists look well-documented. Which leads nicely into the next question. Nora Tillman asks "Forgive this question if you've answered it before: is there literally a list somewhere with 500 songs you've chosen? Has the list changed since you first composed it? Also, when did you first conceive of this list?" [Excerpt: John Reed and the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company, "As Someday it May Happen"] Many people have asked this question, or variations upon it. The answer is yes and no. I made a list when I started that had roughly two hundred songs I knew needed to be on there, plus about the same number again of artists who needed to be covered but whose precise songs I hadn't decided on. To make the initial list I pulled a list out of my own head, and then I also checked a couple of other five-hundred-song lists -- the ones put out by Rolling Stone magazine and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame -- not because I wanted to use their lists; I have very little time for rock critical orthodoxy, as most of my listeners will likely have realised by now, but because I wanted to double-check that I hadn't missed anything obvious out, and that if I was missing something off their lists, I knew *why* I was missing it. To take a ludicrous example, I wouldn't want to get to the end of the 1960s and have someone say "Wait a minute, what about the Beatles?" and think "I *knew* I'd forgotten something!" Then, at the start of each fifty-episode season, I put together a more rigorous list of the fifty songs coming up, in order. Those lists *can* still change with the research -- for example, very early on in the research for the podcast, I discovered that even though I was completely unfamiliar with "Ko Ko Mo" by Gene and Eunice, it was a hugely important and influential record at the time, and so I swapped that in for another song. Or more recently, I initially intended to have the Doors only have one episode, but when I realised how much I was having to include in that episode I decided to give them a second one. And sometimes things happen the other way -- I planned to do full episodes on Jackie Shane and Fontella Bass, but for both of them I couldn't find enough information to get a decent episode done, so they ended up being moved to Patreon episodes. But generally speaking that fifty-song list for a year's episodes is going to remain largely unchanged. I know where I'm going, I know what most of the major beats of the story are, but I'm giving myself enough flexibility to deviate if I find something I need to include. Connected with this, Rob Johnson asks how I can be confident I'll get back to some stories in later episodes. Well, like I say, I have a pretty much absolute idea of what I'm going to do in the next year, and there are a lot of individual episodes where I know the structure of the episode long before we get to it. As an example here... I don't want to give too much away, and I'm generally not going to be answering questions about "will artist X be appearing?", but Rob also asked about one artist. I can tell you that that artist is one who will not be getting a full episode -- and I already said in the Patreon episode about that artist that they won't -- but as I also said in that episode they *will* get a significant amount of time in another episode, which I now know is going to be 180, which will also deal with another artist from the same state with the same forename, even though it's actually about two English bands. I've had the structure of that episode planned out since literally before I started writing episode one. On the other hand, episode 190 is a song that wasn't originally going to be included at all. I was going to do a 1967 song by the same artist, but then found out that a fact I'd been going to use was disputed, which meant that track didn't need to be covered, but the artist still did, to finish off a story I'd started in a previous episode. Patrick asks:"I am currently in the middle of reading 1971: Never a Dull Moment by David Hepworth and I'm aware that Apple TV have produced a documentary on how music changed that year as well and I was wondering what your opinion on that subject matter? I imagine you will be going into some detail on future podcasts, but until recently I never knew people considered 1971 as a year that brought about those changes." [Excerpt: Rod Stewart, "Angel"] I've not yet read Hepworth's book, but that it's named after an album which came out in 1972 (which is the album that track we just heard came from) says something about how the idea that any one year can in itself be a turning point for music is a little overstated -- and the Apple documentary is based on Hepworth's book, so it's not really multiple people making that argument. Now, as it happens, 1971 is one of the break points for the podcast -- episodes 200 and 201 are both records from July 1971, and both records that one could argue were in their own way signifiers of turning points in rock music history. And as with 1967 it's going to have more than its fair share of records, as it bridges the gap of two seasons. But I think one could make similar arguments for many, many years, and 1971 is  not one of the most compelling cases. I can't say more before I read Hepworth's book, which won't be for a few months yet. I'm instinctively dubious of these "this year was the big year that changed everything" narratives, but Hepworth's a knowledgeable enough writer that I wouldn't want to dismiss his thesis without even reading the book. Roger Pannell asks I'm a fairly recent joiner-in too so you may have answered this before. What is the theme tune to the podcast please. [Excerpt: The Boswell Sisters, “Rock and Roll”] The theme song to the podcast is "Rock and Roll" by the Boswell Sisters. The version I use is not actually the version that was released as a single, but a very similar performance that was used in the film Transatlantic Merry-Go-Round in 1931. I chose it in part because it may well be the first ever record to contain the phrase "rock and roll" (though as I've said many times there's no first anything, and there are certainly many records which talk about rocking and/or rolling -- just none I know of with that phrase) so it evokes rock and roll history, partly because the recording is out of copyright, and partly just because I like the Boswell Sisters. Several people asked questions along the lines of this one from Christopher Burnett "Just curious if there's any future episodes planned on any non-UK or non-North American songs? The bonus episodes on the Mops and Kyu Sakamoto were fascinating." [Excerpt: Kyu Sakamoto, "Sukiyaki"] Sadly, there won't be as many episodes on musicians from outside the UK and North America as I'd like. The focus of the podcast is going to be firmly on British, American, Irish, and Canadian musicians, with a handful from other Anglophone countries like Australia and Jamaica. There *are* going to be a small number of episodes on non-Anglophone musicians, but very few. Sadly, any work of history which engages with injustices still replicates some of those injustices, and one of the big injustices in rock history is that most rock musicians have been very insular, and there has been very little influence from outside the Anglophone world, which means that I can't talk much about influential records made by musicians from elsewhere.  Also, in a lot of cases most of the writing about them is in other languages, and I'm shamefully monolingual (I have enough schoolboy French not to embarrass myself, but not enough to read a biography without a dictionary to hand, and that's it). There *will* be quite a few bonus episodes on musicians from non-Anglophone countries though, because this *is* something that I'm very aware of as a flaw, and if I can find ways of bringing the wider story into the podcast I will definitely do so, even if it means changing my plans somewhat, but I'm afraid they'll largely be confined to Patreon bonuses rather than mainline episodes. Ed Cunard asks "Is there a particular set of songs you're not looking forward to because you don't care for them, but intend to dive into due to their importance?" [Excerpt: Jackie Shane, "Don't Play That Song"] There are several, and there already have been some, but I'm not going to say what they are as part of anything to do with the podcast (sometimes I might talk about how much I hate a particular record on my personal Twitter account or something, but I try not to on the podcast's account, and I'm certainly not going to in an episode of the podcast itself). One of the things I try to do with the podcast is to put the case forward as to why records were important, why people liked them at the time, what they got out of them. I can't do that if I make it about my own personal tastes. I know for a fact that there are people who have come away from episodes on records I utterly despise saying "Wow! I never liked that record before, but I do now!" and that to me shows that I have succeeded -- I've widened people's appreciation for music they couldn't appreciate before. Of course, it's impossible to keep my own tastes from showing through totally, but even there people tend to notice much more my like or dislike for certain people rather than for their music, and I don't feel anything like as bad for showing that. So I have a policy generally of just never saying which records in the list I actually like and which I hate. You'll often be able to tell from things I talk about elsewhere, but I don't want anyone to listen to an episode and be prejudiced not only against the artist but against the episode  by knowing going in that I dislike them, and I also don't want anyone to feel like their favourite band is being given short shrift. There are several records coming up that I dislike myself but where I know people are excited about hearing the episode, and the last thing I want to do is have those people who are currently excited go in disappointed before they even hear it. Matt Murch asks: "Do you anticipate tackling the shift in rock toward harder, more seriously conceptual moves in 1969 into 1970, with acts like Led Zeppelin, The Who (again), Bowie, etc. or lighter soul/pop artists such as Donna Summer, Carly Simon or the Carpenters? Also, without giving too much away, is there anything surprising you've found in your research that you're excited to cover? [Excerpt: Robert Plant, "If I Were a Carpenter"] OK, for the first question... I don't want to say exactly who will and won't be covered in future episodes, because when I say "yes, X will be covered" or "no, Y will not be covered", it invites a lot of follow-up discussion along the lines of "why is X in there and not Y?" and I end up having to explain my working, when the episodes themselves are basically me explaining my working. What I will say is this... the attitude I'm taking towards who gets included and who gets excluded is, at least in part, influenced by an idea in cognitive linguistics called prototype theory. According to this theory, categories aren't strictly bounded like in Aristotelian thought -- things don't have strict essences that mean they definitely are or aren't members of categories. But rather, categories have fuzzy boundaries, and there are things at the centre that are the most typical examples of the category, and things at the border that are less typical. For example, a robin is a very "birdy" bird -- it's very near the centre of the category of bird, it has a lot of birdness -- while an ostrich is still a bird, but much less birdy, it's sort of in the fuzzy boundary area. When you ask people to name a bird, they're more likely to name a robin than an ostrich, and if you ask them “is an ostrich a bird?” they take longer to answer than they do when asked about robins. In the same way, a sofa is nearer the centre of the category of "furniture" than a wardrobe is. Now, I am using an exceptionally wide definition of what counts as rock music, but at the same time, in order for it to be a history of rock music, I do have to spend more time in the centre of the concept than around the periphery. My definition would encompass all the artists you name, but I'm pretty sure that everyone would agree that the first three artists you name are much closer to the centre of the concept of "rock music" than the last three. That's not to say anyone on either list is definitely getting covered or is definitely *not* getting covered -- while I have to spend more time in the centre than the periphery, I do have to spend some time on the periphery, and my hope is to cover as many subgenres and styles as I can -- but that should give an idea of how I'm approaching this. As for the second question -- there's relatively little that's surprising that I've uncovered in my research so far, but that's to be expected. The period from about 1965 through about 1975 is the most over-covered period of rock music history, and so the basic facts for almost every act are very, very well known to people with even a casual interest. For the stuff I'm doing in the next year or so, like the songs I've covered for the last year, it's unlikely that anything exciting will come up until very late in the research process, the times when I'm pulling everything together and notice one little detail that's out of place and pull on that thread and find the whole story unravelling. Which may well mean, of course, that there *are* no such surprising things. That's always a possibility in periods where we're looking at things that have been dealt with a million times before, and this next year may largely be me telling stories that have already been told. Which is still of value, because I'm putting them into a larger context of the already-released episodes, but we'll see if anything truly surprising happens. I certainly hope it does. James Kosmicki asks "Google Podcasts doesn't seem to have any of the first 100 episodes - are they listed under a different name perhaps?" [Excerpt: REM, "Disappear"] I get a number of questions like this, about various podcast apps and sites, and I'm afraid my answer is always the same -- there's nothing I can do about this, and it's something you'd have to take up with the site in question. Google Podcasts picks up episodes from the RSS feed I provide, the same as every other site or app. It's using the right feed, that feed has every episode in it, and other sites and apps are working OK with it. In general, I suggest that rather than streaming sites like Google Podcasts or Stitcher or Spotify, where the site acts as a middleman and they serve the podcast to you from their servers, people should use a dedicated podcast app like RadioPublic or Pocketcasts or gPodder, where rather than going from a library of podcast episodes that some third party has stored, you're downloading the files direct from the original server, but I understand that sometimes those apps are more difficult to use, especially for less tech-savvy people. But generally, if an episode is in some way faulty or missing on the 500songs.com webpage, that's something I can do something about. If it's showing up wrong on Spotify or Google Podcasts or Stitcher or whatever, that's a problem at their end. Sorry. Darren Johnson asks "were there any songs that surprised you? Which one made the biggest change between what you thought you knew and what you learned researching it?" [Excerpt: The Turtles, "Goodbye Surprise"] Well, there have been a few, in different ways. The most surprising thing for me actually was in the most recent episode when I discovered the true story behind the "bigger than Jesus" controversy during my reading. That was a story I'd known one way for my entire life -- literally I think I first read about that story when I was six or seven -- and it turned out that not one thing I'd read on the subject had explained what had really happened. But then there are other things like the story of "Ko Ko Mo", which was a record I wasn't even planning on covering at first, but which turned out to be one of the most important records of the fifties. But I actually get surprised relatively little by big-picture things. I'll often discover fun details or new connections between things I hadn't noticed before, but the basic outlines of the story never change that much -- I've been reading about music history literally since I learned how to read, and while I do a deep dive for each episode, it's very rare that I discover anything that totally changes my perspective. There is always a process of reevaluation going on, and a change in the emphases in my thought, so for example when I started the project I knew Johnny Otis would come up a fair bit in the early years, and knew he was a major figure, but was still not giving him the full credit he deserved in my head. The same goes for Jesse Belvin, and as far as background figures go Lester Sill and Milt Gabler. But all of these were people I already knew were important, i just hadn't connected all the dots in my head. I've also come to appreciate some musicians more than I did previously. But there are very few really major surprises, which is probably to be expected -- I got into this already knowing a *LOT*, because otherwise I wouldn't have thought this was a project I could take on. Tracey Germa -- and I'm sorry, I don't know if that's pronounced with a hard or soft G, so my apologies if I mispronounced it -- asks: "Hi Andrew. We love everything about the podcast, but are especially impressed with the way you couch your trigger warnings and how you embed social commentary into your analysis of the music. You have such a kind approach to understanding human experiences and at the same time you don't balk at saying the hard things some folks don't want to hear about their music heroes. So, the question is - where does your social justice/equity/inclusion/suffer no fools side come from? Your family? Your own experiences? School/training?” [Excerpt: Elvis Costello and the Attractions, "Little Triggers"] Well, firstly, I have to say that people do say  this kind of thing to me quite a lot, and I'm grateful when they say it, but I never really feel comfortable with it, because frankly I think I do very close to the absolute minimum, and I get by because of the horribly low expectations our society has for allocishet white men, which means that making even the tiniest effort possible to be a decent human being looks far more impressive by comparison than it actually is. I genuinely think I don't do a very good job of this at all, although I do try, and that's not false modesty there. But to accept the premise of the question for a moment, there are a couple of answers. My parents are both fairly progressive both politically and culturally,  for the time and place where they raised me. They both had strong political convictions, and while they didn't have access to much culture other than what was on TV or in charting records or what have you -- there was no bookshop or record shop in our town, and obviously no Internet back then -- they liked the stuff out of that mix that was forward-thinking, and so was anti-racist, accepting of queerness, and so on. From a very early age, I was listening to things like "Glad to be Gay" by the Tom Robinson Band. So from before I really even understood what those concepts were, I knew that the people I admired thought that homophobia and racism were bad things. I was also bullied a lot at school, because I was autistic and fat and wore glasses and a bunch of other reasons. So I hated bullying and never wanted to be a bully. I get very, very, *very* angry at cruelty and at abuses of power -- as almost all autistic people do, actually. And then, in my twenties and thirties, for a variety of reasons I ended up having a social circle that was predominantly queer and/or disabled and/or people with mental health difficulties. And when you're around people like that, and you don't want to be a bully, you learn to at least try to take their feelings into consideration, though I slipped up a great deal for a long time, and still don't get everything right. So that's the "social justice" side of things. The other side, the "understanding human experiences" side... well, everyone has done awful things at times, and I would hope that none of us would be judged by our worst behaviours. "Use every man to his desert and who should 'scape whipping?" and all that. But that doesn't mean those worst behaviours aren't bad, and that they don't hurt people, and denying that only compounds the injustice. People are complicated, societies are complicated, and everyone is capable of great good and great evil. In general I tend to avoid a lot of the worst things the musicians I talk about did, because the podcast *is* about the music, but when their behaviour affects the music, or when I would otherwise be in danger of giving a truly inaccurate picture of someone, I have to talk about those things. You can't talk about Jerry Lee Lewis without talking about how his third marriage derailed his career, you can't talk about Sam Cooke without talking about his death, and to treat those subjects honestly you have to talk about the reprehensible sides of their character. Of course, in the case of someone like Lewis, there seems to be little *but* a reprehensible side, while someone like Cooke could be a horrible, horrible person, but even the people he hurt the most also loved him dearly because of his admirable qualities. You *have* to cover both aspects of someone like him if you want to be honest, and if you're not going to be honest why bother trying to do history at all? Lester Dragstedt says (and I apologise if I mispronounced that): "I absolutely love this podcast and the perspective you bring. My only niggle is that the sound samples are mixed so low. When listening to your commentary about a song at voice level my fingers are always at the volume knob to turn up when the song comes in." [Excerpt: Bjork, "It's Oh So Quiet"] This is something that gets raised a lot, but it's not something that's ever going to change. When I started the podcast, I had the music levels higher, and got complaints about that, so I started mixing them lower. I then got complaints about *that*, so I did a poll of my Patreon backers to see what they thought, and by about a sixty-forty margin they wanted the levels to be lower, as they are now, rather than higher as they were earlier. Basically, there seem to be two groups of listeners. One group mostly listens with headphones, and doesn't like it when the music gets louder, because it hurts their ears. The other group mostly listens in their cars, and the music gets lost in the engine noise. That's a gross oversimplification, and there are headphone listeners who want the music louder and car listeners who want the music quieter, but the listenership does seem to split roughly that way, and there are slightly more headphone listeners. Now, it's literally *impossible* for me to please everyone, so I've given up trying with this, and it's *not* going to change. Partly because the majority of my backers voted one way, partly because it's just easier to leave things the way they are rather than mess with them given that no matter what I do someone will be unhappy, and partly because both Tilt when he edits the podcast and I when I listen back and tweak his edit are using headphones, and *we* don't want to hurt our ears either. Eric Peterson asks "if we are basically in 1967 that is when we start seeing Country artists like Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings - the Man who Survived the Day the Music Died - start to bring more rock songs into their recordings and start to set the ground work in many ways for Country Rock ... how do you envision bringing the role they play in the History of Rock and Roll into the podcast?" [Excerpt: The Del McCoury Band, "Nashville Cats"] I will of course be dealing with country rock as one of the subgenres I discuss -- though there's only one real country-rock track coming up in the next fifty, but there'll be more as I get into the seventies, and there are several artists coming up with at least some country influence. But I won't be looking at straight country musicians like Jennings or Cash except through the lens of rock musicians they inspired -- things like me talking about Johnny Cash briefly in the intro to the "Hey Joe" episode. I think Cocaine and Rhinestones is already doing a better job of covering country music than I ever could, and so those people will only touch the story tangentially. Nili Marcia says: "If one asks a person what's in that room it would not occur to one in 100 to mention the air that fills it. Something so ubiquitous as riff--I don't know what a riff actually is! Will you please define riff, preferably with examples." Now this is something I actually thought I'd explained way back in episode one, and I have a distinct memory of doing so, but I must have cut that part out -- maybe I recorded it so badly that part couldn't be salvaged, which happened sometimes in the early days -- because I just checked and there's no explanation there. I would have come back to this at some point if I hadn't been thinking all along that I'd covered it right at the start, because you're right, it is a term that needs definition. A riff is, simply, a repeated, prominent, instrumental figure. The term started out in jazz, and there it was a term for a phrase that would be passed back and forth between different instruments -- a trumpet might play a phrase, then a saxophone copy it, then back to the trumpet, then back to the saxophone. But quickly it became a term for a repeated figure that becomes the main accompaniment part of a song, over which an instrumentalist might solo or a singer might sing, but which you remember in its own right. A few examples of well-known riffs might include "Smoke on the Water" by Deep Purple: [Excerpt: Deep Purple, "Smoke on the Water"] "I Feel Fine" by the Beatles: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I Feel Fine"] "Last Train to Clarksville" by the Monkees: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Last Train to Clarksville"] The bass part in “Under Pressure” by Queen and David Bowie: [Excerpt: Queen and David Bowie, “Under Pressure”] Or the Kingsmen's version of "Louie Louie": [Excerpt: The Kingsmen, "Louie Louie"] Basically, if you can think of a very short, prominent, instrumental idea that gets repeated over and over, that's a riff. Erik Pedersen says "I love the long episodes and I suspect you do too -- thoroughness. of this kind is something few get the opportunity to do -- but have you ever, after having written a long one, decided to cut them significantly? Are there audio outtakes you might string together one day?" [Excerpt: Bing Crosby and Les Paul, "It's Been a Long, Long Time"] I do like *having* done the long episodes, and sometimes I enjoy doing them, but other times I find it frustrating that an episode takes so long, because there are other stories I want to move on to. I'm trying for more of a balance over the next year, and we'll see how that works out. I want to tell the story in the depth it deserves, and the longer episodes allow me to do that, and to experiment with narrative styles and so on, but I also want to get the podcast finished before I die of old age. Almost every episode has stuff that gets cut, but it's usually in the writing or recording stage -- I'll realise a bit of the episode is boring and just skip it while I'm recording, or I'll cut out an anecdote or something because it looks like it's going to be a flabby episode and I want to tighten it up, or sometimes I'll realise that because of my mild speech impediments a sentence is literally unspeakable, and I'll rework it. It's very, very rare that I'll cut anything once it's been recorded, and if I do it's generally because when I listen back after it's been edited I'll realise I'm repeating myself or I made a mistake and need to cut a sentence because I said the wrong name, that sort of thing. I delete all the audio outtakes, but even if I didn't there would be nothing worth releasing. A few odd, out of context sentences, the occasional paragraph just repeating something I'd already said, a handful of actual incorrect facts, and a lot of me burping, or trying to say a difficult name three times in a row, or swearing when the phone rings in the middle of a long section. Lucy Hewitt says "Something that interests me, and that I'm sure you will cover is how listeners consume music and if that has an impact. In my lifetime we've moved from a record player which is fixed in one room to having a music collection with you wherever you go, and from hoping that the song you want to hear might be played on the radio to calling it up whenever you want. Add in the rise of music videos, and MTV, and the way in which people access music has changed a lot over the decades. But has that affected the music itself?" [Excerpt: Bow Wow Wow "C30 C60 C90 Go!"] It absolutely has affected the music itself in all sorts of ways, some of which I've touched on already and some of which I will deal with as we go through the story, though the story I'm telling will end around the time of Napster and so won't involve streaming services and so forth. But every technology change leads to a change in the sound of music in both obvious and non-obvious ways. When AM radio was the most dominant form of broadcasting, there was no point releasing singles in stereo, because at that time there were no stereo AM stations. The records also had to be very compressed, so the sound would cut through the noise and interference. Those records would often be very bass-heavy and have a very full, packed, sound. In the seventies, with the rise of eight-track players, you'd often end up with soft-rock and what would later get termed yacht rock having huge success. That music, which is very ethereal and full of high frequencies, is affected less negatively by some of the problems that came with eight-track players, like the tape stretching slightly. Then post-1974 and the OPEC oil crisis, vinyl became more expensive, which meant that records started being made much thinner, which meant you couldn't cut grooves as deeply, which meant you lost bass response, which again changed the sound of records – and also explains why when CDs came out, people started thinking they sounded better than records, because they *did* sound better than the stuff that was being pressed in the late seventies and early eighties, which was so thin it was almost transparent, even though they sounded nowhere near as good as the heavy vinyl pressings of the fifties and sixties. And then the amount of music one could pack into a CD encouraged longer tracks... A lot of eighties Hi-NRG and dance-pop music, like the records made by Stock, Aitken, and Waterman, has almost no bass but lots of skittering high-end percussion sounds -- tons of synthesised sleighbells and hi-hats and so on -- because a lot of disco equipment had frequency-activated lights, and the more high-end stuff was going on, the more the disco lights flashed... We'll look at a lot of these changes as we go along, but every single new format, every new way of playing an old format, every change in music technology, changes what music gets made quite dramatically. Lucas Hubert asks: “Black Sabbath being around the corner, how do you plan on dealing with Heavy Metal? I feel like for now, what is popular and what has had a big impact in Rock history coincide. But that kind of change with metal, no? (Plus, prog and metal are more based on albums than singles, I think.)” [Excerpt: Black Sabbath, “Sabbath Bloody Sabbath”] I plan on dealing with metal the same way I've been dealing with every other subgenre. We are, yes, getting into a period where influence and commercial success don't correlate quite as firmly as they did in the early years -- though really we've already been there for quite some time. I've done two episodes so far on the Byrds, a group who only had three top-twenty singles in the US and two in the UK, but only did a bonus episode on Herman's Hermits, who had fourteen in the US and seventeen in the UK. I covered Little Richard but didn't cover Pat Boone, even though Boone had the bigger hits with Richard's songs. In every subgenre there are going to be massive influences who had no hits, and people who had lots of hits but didn't really make much of a wider impact on music, and I'll be dealing with the former more than the latter. But also, I'll be dealing most with people who were influential *and* had lots of hits -- if nothing else because while influence and chart success aren't a one-to-one correlation, they're still somewhat correlated. So it's unlikely you'll see me cover your favourite Scandinavian Black Metal band who only released one album of which every copy was burned in a mysterious fire two days after release, but you can expect most of the huge names in metal to be covered. Though even there, simply because of the number of subgenres I'm going to cover, I'm going to miss some big ones. Related to the question about albums, Svennie asks “This might be a bit of a long winded question so just stick with me here. As the music you cover becomes more elaborate, and the albums become bigger in scale, how do you choose a song which you build the story around while also telling the story of that album? I ask this specifically with the White Album in mind, where you've essentially got four albums in one. To that end, what song would you feel defines the White Album?” [Excerpt: The Beatles, “Revolution #9”] Well, you'll see how I cover the White Album in episode one hundred and seventy-two -- we're actually going to have quite a long stretch with no Beatles songs covered because I'm going to backfill a lot of 1967 and then we're getting to the Beatles again towards the end of 1968, but it'll be another big one when we get there. But in the general case... the majority of albums to come still had singles released off them, and a lot of what I'm going to be looking at in the next year or two is still hit singles, even if the singles are by people known as album bands. Other times, a song wasn't a single, but maybe it was covered by someone else -- if I know I'm going to cover a rock band and I also know that one of the soul artists who would do rock covers as album tracks did a version of one of their songs, and I'm going to cover that soul artist, say, then if I do the song that artist covered I can mention it in the episode on the soul singer and tie the two episodes together a bit. In other cases there's a story behind a particular track that's more interesting than other tracks, or the track is itself a cover version of someone else's record, which lets me cover both artists in a single episode, or it's the title track of the album. A lot of people have asked me this question about how I'd deal with albums as we get to the late sixties and early seventies, but looking at the list of the next fifty episodes, there's actually only two where I had to think seriously about which song I chose from an album -- in one case, I chose the title track, in the other case I just chose the first song on the album (though in that case I may end up choosing another song from the same album if I end up finding a way to make that a more interesting episode). The other forty-eight were all very, very obvious choices. Gary Lucy asks “Do you keep up with contemporary music at all? If so, what have you been enjoying in 2022 so far…and if not, what was the most recent “new” album you really got into?” [Excerpt: Stew and the Negro Problem, "On the Stage of a Blank White Page"] I'm afraid I don't. Since I started doing the podcast, pretty much all of my listening time has been spent on going back to much older music, and even before that, when I was listening to then-new music it was generally stuff that was very much inspired by older music, bands like the Lemon Twigs, who probably count as the last new band I really got into with their album Do Hollywood, which came out in 2016 but which I think I heard in 2018. I'm also now of that age where 2018 seems like basically yesterday, and when I keep thinking "what relatively recent albums have I liked?" I think of things like The Reluctant Graveyard by Jeremy Messersmith, which is from 2010, or Ys by Joanna Newsom, which came out in 2006. Not because I haven't bought records released since then, but because my sense of time is so skewed that summer 1994 and summer 1995 feel like epochs apart, hugely different times in every way, but every time from about 2005 to 2020 is just "er... a couple of years ago? Maybe?" So without going through every record I've bought in the last twenty years and looking at the release date I couldn't tell you what still counts as contemporary and what's old enough to vote. I have recently listened a couple of times to an album by a band called Wet Leg, who are fairly new, but other than that I can't say. But probably the most recent albums to become part of my regular listening rotation are two albums which came out simultaneously in 2018 by Stew and the Negro Problem, Notes of a Native Song, which is a song cycle about James Baldwin and race in America, and The Total Bent, which is actually the soundtrack to a stage musical, and which I think many listeners to the podcast might find interesting, and which is what that last song excerpt was taken from. It's basically a riff on the idea of The Jazz Singer, but set in the Civil Rights era, and about a young politically-radical Black Gospel songwriter who writes songs for his conservative preacher father to sing, but who gets persuaded to become a rock and roll performer by a white British record producer who fetishises Black music. It has a *lot* to say about religion, race, and politics in America -- a couple of the song titles, to give you some idea, are "Jesus Ain't Sitting in the Back of the Bus" and "That's Why He's Jesus and You're Not, Whitey". It's a remarkable album, and it deals with enough of the same subjects I've covered here that I think any listeners will find it interesting. Unfortunately, it was released through the CDBaby store, which closed down a few months later, and unlike most albums released through there it doesn't seem to have made its way onto any of the streaming platforms or digital stores other than Apple Music, which rather limits its availability. I hope it comes out again soon. Alec Dann says “I haven't made it to the Sixties yet so pardon if you have covered this: what was the relationship between Sun and Stax in their heyday? Did musicians work in both studios?” [Excerpt: Booker T. and the MGs, "Green Onions"] I've covered this briefly in a couple of the episodes on Stax, but the short version is that Sun was declining just as Stax was picking up. Jim Stewart, who founded Stax, was inspired in part by Sam Phillips, and there was a certain amount of cross-fertilisation, but not that much. Obviously Rufus Thomas recorded for both labels, and there were a few other connections -- Billy Lee Riley, for example, who I did an episode on for his Sun work, also recorded at the Stax studio before going on to be a studio musician in LA, and it was actually at a Billy Lee Riley session that went badly that Booker T and the MGs recorded "Green Onions". Also, Sun had a disc-cutting machine and Stax didn't, so when they wanted to get an acetate cut to play for DJs they'd take it to Sun -- it was actually Scotty Moore, who was working for Sun as a general engineer and producer as well as playing RCA Elvis sessions by 1962, who cut the first acetate copy of "Green Onions". But in general the musicians playing at Stax were largely the next generation of musicians -- people who'd grown up listening to the records Sam Phillips had put out in the very early fifties by Black musicians, and with very little overlap. Roger Stevenson asks "This project is going to take the best part of 7 years to complete. Do you have contingency plans in case of major problems? And please look after yourself - this project is gong to be your legacy." [Excerpt: Bonzo Dog Doodah Band, "Button Up Your Overcoat"] I'm afraid there's not much I can do if major problems come up -- by major problems I'm talking about things that prevent me from making the podcast altogether, like being unable to think or write or talk. By its nature, the podcast is my writing and my research and my voice, and if I can't do those things... well, I can't do them. I *am* trying to build in some slack again -- that's why this month off has happened -- so I can deal with delays and short-term illnesses and other disruptions, but if it becomes impossible to do it becomes impossible to do, and there's nothing more I can do about it. Mark Lipson asks "I'd like to know which episodes you've released have been the most & least popular? And going forward, which episodes do you expect to be the most popular? Just curious to know what music most of your listeners listen to and are interested in." [Excerpt: Sly and the Family Stone, "Somebody's Watching You"] I'm afraid I honestly don't know. Most podcasters have extensive statistical tools available to them, which tell them which episodes are most popular, what demographics are listening to the podcast, where they are in the world, and all that kind of thing. They use that information to sell advertising spots, which is how they make most of their money. You can say "my podcast is mostly listened to by seventy-five year-olds who google for back pain relief -- the perfect demographic for your orthopedic mattresses" or "seven thousand people who downloaded my latest episode also fell for at least one email claiming to be from the wallet inspector last year, so my podcast is listened to by the ideal demographic for cryptocurrency investment". Now, I'm lucky enough to be making enough money from my Patreon supporters' generosity that I don't have to sell advertising, and I hope I never do have to. I said at the very start of the process that I would if it became necessary, but that I hoped to keep it ad-free, and people have frankly been so astonishingly generous I should never have to do ads -- though I do still reserve the right to change my mind if the support drops off. Now, my old podcast host gave me access to that data as standard. But when I had to quickly change providers, I decided that I wasn't going to install any stats packages to keep track of people. I can see a small amount of information about who actually visits the website, because wordpress.com gives you that information – not your identities but just how many people come from which countries, and what sites linked them. But if you're downloading the podcast through a podcast app, or listening through Spotify or Stitcher or wherever, I've deliberately chosen not to access that data. I don't need to know who my audience is, or which episodes they like the most -- and if I did, I have a horrible feeling I'd start trying to tailor the podcast to be more like what the existing listeners like, and by doing so lose the very things that make it unique. Once or twice a month I'll look at the major podcast charts, I check the Patreon every so often to see if there's been a massive change in subscriber numbers, but other than that I decided I'm just not going to spy on my listeners (though pretty much every other link in the chain does, I'm afraid, because these days the entire Internet is based on spying on people). So the only information I have is the auto-generated "most popular episodes" thing that comes up on the front page, which everyone can see, and which shows the episodes people who actually visit the site are listening to most in the last few days, but which doesn't count anything from more than a few days ago, and which doesn't count listens from any other source, and which I put there basically so new listeners can see which ones are popular. At the moment that's showing that the most listened episodes recently are the two most recent full episodes -- "Respect" and "All You Need is Love" -- the most recent of the Pledge Week episodes, episodes one and two, so people are starting at the beginning, and right now there's also the episodes on "Ooby Dooby", "Needles and Pins", "God Only Knows", "She Loves You" and "Hey Joe". But in a couple of days' time those last five will be totally different. And again, that's just the information from people actually visiting the podcast website. I've deliberately chosen not to know what people listening in any other way are doing -- so if you've decided to just stream that bit of the Four Tops episode where I do a bad Bob Dylan impression five thousand times in a row, you can rest assured I have no idea you're doing it and your secret is totally safe. Anyway, that's all I have time for in this episode. In a week or so I'll post a similar-length episode for Patreon backers only, and then a week or two after that the regular podcast will resume, with a story involving folk singers, jazz harmony, angelic visitations and the ghost of James Dean. See you then.

In this episode we discuss James Boggs's 1963 The American Revolution: Pages from a Negro Worker's Notebook. We talk about Boggs's materialist conception of rights as “what you make and what you take.” In Boggs we find a novel conception of rights that are grounded in social power. We delve into the dangers automation and structural unemployment present to rights to life and happiness while wondering if a “workless” society would truly be a better one. In the end, we extend a figleaf to egalitarian liberals and offer to heal their psychic distress by showing them that they are already revolutionaries (comrades, join us: the water's fine!). patreon.com/leftofphilosophy | @leftofphil References: James Boggs, The American Revolution: Pages from a Negro Worker's Notebook, with a New Introduction by Grace Lee Bogs and Additional Commentary (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2009). James Boggs, “Toward a New Concept of Citizenship,” in Pages from A Black Radical's Notebook: A James Boggs Reader, ed. Stephen M. Ward, with an Afterword by Grace Lee Boggs (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2011). C.L.R. James, “The Revolutionary Answer to the Negro Problem in the United States,” at https://www.marxists.org/archive/james-clr/works/1948/07/meyer.htm Music: Vintage Memories by Schematist | schematist.bandcamp.com

Today we have Jared Ball, Richard Purcell and Todd Steven Burroughs on the show to talk about the new Eyes On The Prize documentary as well as the original series that aired in the late 1980s. Jared Ball is a Professor of Communication Studies at Morgan State University in Baltimore, MD., and is the curator of the multimedia website imixwhatilike.org. Ball is also the author of The Myth and Propaganda of Black Buying Power (Palgrave 2020). Richard Purcell is a researcher, teaches and writes about film and media, black literature, poetry, music, and other forms of black performance and visual art. His first book Race, Ralph Ellison and American Cold War Intellectual Culture, explored how race, and particularly the debate over "the Negro Problem" in American literature, functioned generatively for US State anticommunist ideology and global hegemony yet also allowed for counter-hegemonic democratic ideas to emerge from black writers during the cultural Cold War. Todd Steven Burroughs is a journalist, historian and popular culture geek. A Ph.D. in Communication from the University of Maryland's Philip Merrill College of Journalism, he is a lifelong student of the history of Black media. He is the author of Warrior Princess: A People's History of Ida B. Wells and Marvel's Black Panther: A Comic Book Biography, From Stan Lee to Ta-Nehisi Coates, both published by Diasporic Africa Press. This is Part 1 of a two-part episode. Part 2 is free to all paid subscribers over at www.patreon.com/posts/57276715. Become a paid subscriber for $5/month over at patreon.com/champagnesharks and get access to the entire archive of subscriber-only episodes, the Discord voice and chat server for patrons, detailed show notes for certain episodes, and our newsletter. Co-produced & edited by Aaron C. Schroeder / Pierced Ears Recording Co, Seattle WA (www.piercedearsrec.com). Opening theme composed by T. Beaulieu. Closing theme composed by Dustfingaz (https://www.youtube.com/user/TheRazhu_)

Esta semana en Islas de Robinson caemos en la década de los 90, un territorio que transitamos con poca frecuencia habitualmente, pero en el que también encontramos un buen montón de discos y canciones fantásticas a las que tenemos enorme cariño. Pop mayúsculo esta semana, guitarras, ingenio, emoción y melodías infalibles. Entre 1996 y 2002, escuchamos: MIKE VIOLA AND THE CANDY BUTCHERS - "FALLING INTO PLACE" ("FALLING INTO PLACE", 1999) / DARIN MURPHY - "DON'T LOOK AT ME" ("SOLITARIUM, 1999) / DOLEFUL LIONS - "GULLIVER DIVER" ("MOTEL SWIM", 1998) / XAVIER ESCUTIA - "SOMETIMES I DREAM" ("SISTER REINCARNATION", 1996) / BECK - "LAZY FLIES" ("MUTATIONS", 1998) / ELGIN PARK - "PATIENCE" ("ELGIN PARK", 2000) / BRENDAN BENSON - "METARIE" ("LAPALCO", 2002) / ERIC MATTHEWS - "THE PLEASANT KIND" ("THE LATENESS OF THE HOUR", 1997) / JASON FALKNER - "MY LUCKY DAY" ("CAN YOU STILL FEEL?", 1999) / NEGRO PROBLEM - "PETER JENNINGS" ("JOYS & CONCERNS", 1999) / XTC - "STANDING IN FOR JOE" ("WASP STAR - APPLE VENUS VOL.2", 2000) / WILCO - "NOTHING'SEVERGONNASTANDINMYWAY(AGAIN)" ("SUMMERTEETH", 1999) / WATTS - "YOU" ("FLASH!", 1998) / Escuchar audio

Did you know that the term Black Excellence was born out of the Civil Rights Movement? Have you ever read W.E.B. Dubois' most famous essay, published in 1903 in a book called the Negro Problem? Ever heard of the Talented Tenth? In this episode I breakdown everything you need to know about Celebrating Black Excellence in the Black Community. Tune in to the Coping Season Podcast with Dr. Tina Webb every Wednesday for your weekly dose of funny, entertaining, thought-provoking content as we explore topics from dating, to pop culture, to current events, to everyday stressors that Black men and women face. We're talking about mental health, personal development, and everything in between! Join Black America's Therapist, with her distinct style, expertise, and humor, as we discuss mental and emotional wellness and life changing insights to help us, Black men and women to begin to heal and cope with the effects of emotional distress. It's Coping Season ya'll and it might even be cuffing season too! Either way, we are going to talk about it all! Check out the latest episodes of Coping Season with Dr. Tina Webb on iHeartRadio- available on Android, IOS, and on iHeartRadio.com. Also available on: Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Podchaser, Listen Notes, Podcast Addict, Deezer and more!You can also listen on my website at: Https://drtinawebb.com.. It's Coping Season Ya'll!For additional updates, conversation and more ways to interact, please connect with me on social media and share your thoughts from the show using the hashtag #copingseasonpodcastInstagram: @drtinawebbTwitter: @DrTinaWebbFacebook: @DrTina WebbFor more information and resources, please visit my website at: https://drtinawebb.comIf you have any questions or you are interested in podcast sponsorship opportunities, email us at podcast@drtinawebb.comSupport the show (https://www.patreon.com/drtinawebb)Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/drtinawebb)

Episode Notes The boys are back. It's a classy return to radio-ing with a good old-fashioned minisode. Dig it. Track list: "Alabama" - Night Moves "The Cedar Room" - Doves "Lonesome Night" - New Order "Caroline, Please Kill Me" - Coma Cinema "Bring the Noise" - Public Enemy "Get Em High" - Kanye West "Black Qualls" - Thundercat" "Western" - Stew and the Negro Problem

This episode is dedicated to the memory and power of the victims of white domestic terrorism in Atlanta, the survivors and their families as well as the victims and survivors of all forms of sinophobic, anti-immigrant, anti-sex work and anti-Asian xenophobia/ US imperialist violence against Asian bodies happening all around the globe. If you would like to join us in a moment of silence, fast forward to the 1:54:28. This episode is also dedicated to Stacey Park Milbern, one of the creators of the disability justice movement. We also dedicate this episode to the Seattle Massage Parlor Outreach Project (MPOP). The transcript at 1:55:00 is from a livestream of a community vigil held in the victims' honor and in solidarity with Black and Indigenous sovereignty. Cash App: $mpopsea, Venmo: MPOP_SEA Recommended Reading: -Resisting State Violence by Dr. Joy James (Ericka reads an excerpt from that book in this episode) -Black Marxism by Cedric J. Robinson -Some Reasons For Chinese Exclusion: Meat v Rice, American Manhood Against Asiatic Coolieism (Author Unknown) -Essay on Japanese American Beauty Pageants and Minstrel Shows during political imprisonment by the FDR administration during WWII by Malia McAndrews: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/536560/summary -Search for articles on the history behind yellow peril movement, Richard Aoki, FBI Informant who joined Black Panther Party in the 60s -Note on Marxism: Engels' father owned a factory and Marx was white and didn’t understand that capitalism is always racialized like Cedric Robinson and Dr. Ruth Wilson Gilmore talk about - check the book out if you want, there are some goods in Marx’s Capital Illustrated by David Smith -Lisa Simpson and Samaria Rice Official Statement: https://www.wearyourvoicemag.com/official-statement-from-samaria-rice-mother-of-tamir-rice-lisa-simpson-mother-of-richard-risher-and-the-collective/ How to Support Samaria and Lisa: Cashapp-$SamariaRice Cashapp: $lisalee693 Support Southeast Asia Resource Action Center (SEARAC) Seattle Massage Parlor Outreach Project (MPOP) List of Black Owned Bookstores: https://nonamebooks.com/Bookstores Zora's Daughters Podcast: https://zorasdaughters.com/ Music by Benjamin Earl Turner-Apathy Happy Editors Note: Both Jimmy Fallon and Jimmy Kimmel wore Blackface

This is The Spoon, where Lisa Orkin is our guest, and we make 2001 look like something that was knocked up in a kid's backyard.  Music By  The Temptations  The Negro Problem  Utopia  Spoon Feeding  Emmy Cho Puzzles And Survival  Teri Kanefield Pantsuit Politics  The Toast Of London The Men Of The Spoon Robbie RistChris Jackson Thom Bowers The Spoon on Twitter  The Spoon Facebook Group The Spoon Facebook Page Email: the_spoon_radio@yahoo.com

The Negro Problem is a collection of seven essays by prominent Black American writers, such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Paul Laurence Dunbar, edited by Booker T. Washington, and published in 1903. It covers law, education, disenfranchisement, and Black Americans' place in American society. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/pbliving/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/pbliving/support

Frederick Douglass speech in Aug, 1866. The Negro Problem. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/dr-rt./support

The Christian Citizen is edited by Curtis Ramsey-Lucas and is a publication of the American Baptist Home Mission Societies. The show, website and newsletter are produced by Joshua Kagi. Stories are copy edited by Hannah Estifanos. Our Art Director is Danny Ellison. The Christian Citizen editorial board is: Dr. Jeffrey Haggray, Laura Alden, Susan Gottshall, Dr. Jeffrey Johnson, the Rev. Sarah Strosahl-Kagi, the Rev. Salvador Orellana, the Rev. Dr. Marilyn Turner-Triplett and Rev. Cassandra Carkuff Williams, and our advisors are Cherilyn Crowe, the Rev. Kimberlee Payton Jones, the Rev. Steven D. Martin, the Rev. Marvin A. McMickle and the Rev. Harold Dean. To learn more about The Christian Citizen, visit our website, ChristianCitizen.us.

PLEASE SUPPORT US ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/cometowhereimfrom Stream of Download the podcast on: iTunes, Google, Spotify, TuneIn, Stitcher, Simplecast and Pocket Casts, please rate us and subscribe.

Stew is a singer, musician, composer, playwright, and a powerhouse in the world of music and theater. For years he fronted the band Stew and the Negro Problem. He then went on to create and star in a play called Passing Strange which started off-Broadway and then went on to have a successful run on Broadway, where it garnered multiple Tonys and other awards, and was eventually turned into a feature film by Spike Lee. In all of Stew's work, he shines a bright light on what it means to be an African-American guy with a killer sense of humor and an acute sense of history and culture, in a world that wants to reduce everyone to stereotypes. Stew performed a live acoustic rendition of his song "Baldwin Country" and we spoke about "asshole-adjacent people," the role of comedy in music, the American vs European idea of freedom, what Reagan would say about today's mess, his ongoing collaboration with partner Heidi Rodewald, the audacity of craziness, and so much more.  Episode sponsor: Splendidcorp.com. Opening music: "Marchandise" written by Fugazi, performed by Pierre de Gaillande with James Fletcher, drums. Songs: "Baldwin Country" performed live by Stew, guitar and vocals. ""Merci Beaucoup M. Godard" from the Passing Strange Broadway soundtrack. "Man in a Dress" by Stew, "Black Men Ski," "Klown Wit Da Nuclear Code" and "Why do Black People Still Believe in God" by Stew and the Negro Problem. End credit music: "Hé" by Pixies, performed by Pierre de Gaillande, from the forthcoming album "franglais" by Bad Reputation. www.facebook.com/stewtnp

It begins with a breathtaking version of “Bleed” and goes from there. In order to get in the mood for the release of more Garden Sessions, the Sunshine Boys finally release the long awaited Sesh and interview with Stew & The Negro Problem, pretty much Adam’s favorite band in existence. We talk some shit, they play some magic, and on top of that you get a little of the end of their Bowery Electric set and THEN...we rock a little Kasey Anderson for good measure. It don’t get any better than this. Get sum.

It's Gary and Frank together in the Booth for a cavalcade of theatergoer notes on shows we've recently seen around Chicago. First off, Frank tells us about his adventures in speech competition judging that's kept him away from home the past month. By all accounts, the dazzling array of young talented actors and orators is promising news for the future of theater and performance in the Chicago area. Just this afternoon, our boys went to Northlight Theatre to see the world premiere play Landladies by Sharyn Rothstein, directed by Jess McLeod. As luck would have it, this sparkling three-hander features actress Leah Karpel, who Frank has known since she was a baby some 25-odd years ago. Leah was gracious enough to spend a few minutes with us after the show talking about her role and the privilege of appearing in a world premiere, and we bring you some of that remote interview in this episode. Running through April 20. Next, we traveled to the Den Theatre to see a truly inspiring and brilliantly produced musical show called The Total Bent. Written by the acclaimed singer, songwriter, founder and leader of the punk-rock combo The Negro Problem, Stew, and his writing partner Heidi Rodewald, The Total Bent traces the lives of an established Gospel and R&B singer (magnificently played by Robert Cornelius) and his upstart young son (a dazzling debut by Gilbert Domally) as they navigate show business and the total bent of their lives together and apart. Though closed now, this show was one of the finest productions Chicago has seen in many years, so keep your eyes peeled for a revival. Director Lili-Anne Brown does amazing work keeping the story and the tension moving. Teaser Alert: Robert Cornelius and Lili-Anne Brown will be our guests next time on Episode 96! Have you heard of the very smart fish that scientists think can recognize itself in a mirror? Until now, the only species to have passed the mirror test were great apes, bottlenose dolphins, killer whales, Eurasian magpies and a single Asian elephant. Add to that list the cleaner wrasse, a 4-inch fish that lives in coral reefs. Read the full story here. Along those lines, Gary wishes that some annoying theatergoers were more self-aware! A Caryl Churchill play called A Number is receiving a striking production at Writers Theatre this spring. Running through June 9 in the Gillian Theatre, this 65-minute show is about parenting, cloning and going back to try to fix mistakes in your life. Gary was a bit lost in the narrative at times, but the two performances by William Brown and Nate Burger are compelling. Directed by Robin Witt, it's a roller coaster ride through a strikingly familiar future. As always with Writers, the production values and quality are top-notch. You can't go wrong with an evening out at Writers Theatre. Former President Jimmy Carter has become the longest-living president in US history. This past week, Mr. Carter, the nation's 39th president, reached the age of 94 years and 172 days. He has enjoyed the longest post-presidency in American history. His tireless resolve and heart have helped to improve life for millions of the world's poorest people. God bless Mr. Carter and his continued work for those in need. I'll Be Seeing You (aka Kiss of Death) Stanley Donan - The director and choreographer of classic musicals such as Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, Singin' in the Rain, Royal Wedding, The Pajama Game and Damn Yankees. Mr. Donan was frequently overshadowed by his collaborator Gene Kelly, but they made a grand team. By 1960, the Metro musical was no more and Donan became an accomplished director of comedy, romance and spoof thrillers, such as Charade and Two for the Road. Mr. Donan was married five times and is survived by his long-time partner, the writer, director and actor Elaine May. Stanley Donan was 94. Read the full Guardian obit by David Thomson here.  

Watch & share this superb college class presentation from one of the youngest (if not the youngest!) Sheiks in the nation, Sheik Mikha'EL out of Mecca (Chicago). The Sheik explains in masterfully The Negro Problem & The Solution to it Through Nationality. Support the young Sheik's work here: http://paypal.me/BroSheikMikhael It takes Finance to Uplift a Nation! Subscribe to Sheik Mikha'EL on YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClwW... Disclaimer: This video represents the views of the presenters and/or our guests based off of our personal research and life experiences, and in no way is this content endorsed by or a representation of the official policies of the Moorish Science Temple of America. Subscribe & Check Out Our Website http://www.MoorsInAmerica.com Donations/Support: https://patreon.com/moorsinamerica https://paypal.me/lloydmd Here is the official website of the Moorish Science Temple of America: http://www.mstofa.net Join & Contribute to our FB Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/moors... Follow Us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/moorsinamer... Like Us on FB: https://www.facebook.com/MoorsInAmerica/ Follow Us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MoorsInAmerica/ Tell Everyone about the channel & Subscribe! https://www.youtube.com/c/MoorsInAmer... #thenegroproblem #nationality #moorishamerican #moorsinamerica #moorishscience #moorishamericans #moors #moorish #moorishhistory

The final run of Essays in the long-running series which explores the impact of the First World War on individual artists through the prism of a single great work of art. 1.Imaobong Umoren tells the story behind W.E.B. Dubois' seminal editorial, Returning Soldiers, which laid the early foundations of the Black Lives Matter campaign. Born in 1868 in Massachusetts, Du Bois was raised by a single mother who descended from African, English and Dutch ancestors. Growing up in the racially mixed town of Great Barrington, Du Bois attended public school alongside both white and black pupils and, at an early age, was singled out for his intellect. He was to grow up to become one of the leading scholars and activists of the twentieth century on what was then termed the ‘Negro Problem'. Published in The Crisis, the magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Returning Soldiers', was based on the experiences that Du Bois had during his three-month visit to France from December 1918 to March 1919. Imaobong tells the story behind its writing and uncovers its continuing importance in today's Black Lives Matter campaign. Dr Imaobong D Umoren is Assistant Professor of International History of Gender at London School of Economics and Political Science.

Addressing how blacks prefer to be in the public sector than in the private sector of life

Over the past 3 summers Counting Crows have lost 1 gig each summer to bizarre circumstances: the giant broken fan blade that beheaded Bristow, the sinkhole that ate San Francisco, and finally the mudflood that fucked Kentucky yesterday. (sigh) I hate missing gigs. Nevertheless, I’m home now and we are back with Part Deux of our journey through the musical life and times of Stew and The Negro Problem. Someday there’ll be a Part Three but for now...Welcome Black!

In which the boyz return from their 2-week Adam’s-On-The-Road-And We-Miscounted-How-Many-Episodes-We-Had hiatus with a bang-up series on maybe my favorite songwriter and my favorite band. Dig Stew and The Negro Problem!

Image: Jacob Lawrence, Migration Series, panel 45, 1941. Marx wrote in the Poverty of Philosophy, in Chapter II Part 1 The Method, Fourth Observation that: “Direct slavery is just as much the pivot of bourgeois industry as machinery, credits, etc. Without slavery you have no cotton; without cotton you have no modern industry..." Moving this argument beyond Marx, Africana scholars/activists, thinkers, cultural workers such as, but not limited to, C. L. R. James; W. E. B. Du Bois, Cedric Robinson, Eric Williams, Amiri Baraka deepens the overture by Marx. According to J. Phillip Thompson in his article titled, Capitalism, Democracy, and Du Bois's Two Proletariats, it is suggested that W. E. B. Du Bois arguments in Marxism and the Negro Problem and Black Reconstruction supports the notion that capitalism created two proletariats. Writing in Marxism and the Negro Problem, Du Bois argues that: [the] black proletariat is not part of the white proletariat. . . while Negro labor in America suffers because of the fundamental inequities of the whole capitalist system, the lowest and most fatal degree of its suffering comes not from the capitalists but from fellow white laborers..." Moreover, capitalism (beginning with slavery) offered the white worker, a second/distinct proletariat role; more specifically a policing role in relation to the first proletariat. Du Bois writes in Black Reconstruction that: “The system of slavery demanded a special police force and such a force was made possible and unusually effective by the presence of the poor whites…” Adding more perspective, Eric Williams writing in Slavery and Capitalism, argued that capitalism was an economic modality that replaced the practice of chattel slavery once European elites accumulated the vast surplus capital to firmly fuel the industrial revolution. Adding more perspective, Eric Williams writing in Slavery and Capitalism, argued that capitalism was an economic modality that replaced the practice of chattel slavery once European elites accumulated the vast surplus capital to firmly fuel the industrial revolution. Contemplating the conditions within which African descendant folk where living during the 1960s, Sydney Wilhelm in, Who Needs the Negro? argues that the conditions which produced the rebellions were caught in the complex relationship of internal colonial conditions that were directly related to the nature of work, the historic role and dependency of black labor, and the shift in the needs of a more technologically advanced global economy. In the tradition of those mentioned above, today we ask: Is it important (or time) be critical of labor?...What is the use of labor in this moment, as we live in a world of algorithms and move toward an artificial intelligent future? What does "Labor" mean in a settler colonial society...? It is within this context that Africa World Now Project's own, Mwiza Munthali caught up with Bill Fletcher. Bill Fletcher, Jr., co-founder of the Center for Labor Renewal, is a syndicated columnist and long-time labor activist. He has served as President of TransAfrica Forum and was formerly the Education Director and later Assistant to the President of the AFL-CIO. He is the author and co-author of a number of books which include: The Indispensable Ally: Black Workers and the Formation of the Congress of Industrial Relations, 1934-1941; They are Bankrupting US!; Solidarity Divided: The Crisis in Organized Labor and a New Path toward Social Justice; Claim No Easy Victories: The legacy of Amilcar Cabral. Our show was produced today in solidarity with the native, indigenous, African, and Afro-descended communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana; and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all people.

The music of Stew, creator of the musical "Passing Strange" and his former band The Negro Problem. 00:00 Intro/MacArthur Park 03:30 Segment One-- Post-Minstrel Syndrome 08:15 Submarine Down 12:10 2-inch Dick Mobile 15:35 Witch 22:15 Segment Two-- Passing Strange 23:33 Keys/It's Alright 31:25 Segment Three-- Joys & Concerns 34:50 Gary Come Home/End Of The Hour

This week on 'State of Wonder,' we talk Twitter and Copland with George Takei, hear about the must-see shows at the Time-Based Art Festival, celebrate James Baldwin with Stew and the Negro Problem. Also firefighter Sean Davis talks about working the lines in southern Oregon.

The dialectical configuration of black inclusion/Chinese exclusion is at the center of Edlie Wong‘s book Racial Reconstruction: Black Inclusion, Chinese Exclusion, and the Fictions of Citizenship (New York University Press, 2015). At the end of the 19th century, the southern United States was experimenting with a transition from a dependency on uncompensated, coerced labor in the form of black chattel slavery, to a system of (nominally) voluntary, wage labor i.e. Chinese contract labor (coolieism), modeled most prominently in nearby colonial Cuba. Wong poses the important question of whether coolieism constituted a form of slavery or was indeed, a transition to free labor. In so doing, Racial Reconstruction explores the implications of mutually constitutive African American and Chinese American racialized identity formations, the Chinese Question, and the Negro Problem being coterminous: Chinese exclusion–the exception that proved the rule–helped America define itself as a free nation in the wake of racial slavery. Wong’s use of unusual documentary sources such as the underexamined archive of Anglo-American Cuban travelogues and invasion fiction by both African and European Americans, limns the changing racial landscape of Reconstruction-era immigration policies and conceptions of citizenship that shaped Asian-American cultural politics and impacted African American life. NB: Professor Wong’s next project, mentioned toward the end of the interview, concerns apprenticeship and not indenture as indicated. Mireille Djenno is the Librarian for African, African American and Diaspora Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The dialectical configuration of black inclusion/Chinese exclusion is at the center of Edlie Wong‘s book Racial Reconstruction: Black Inclusion, Chinese Exclusion, and the Fictions of Citizenship (New York University Press, 2015). At the end of the 19th century, the southern United States was experimenting with a transition from a dependency on uncompensated, coerced labor in the form of black chattel slavery, to a system of (nominally) voluntary, wage labor i.e. Chinese contract labor (coolieism), modeled most prominently in nearby colonial Cuba. Wong poses the important question of whether coolieism constituted a form of slavery or was indeed, a transition to free labor. In so doing, Racial Reconstruction explores the implications of mutually constitutive African American and Chinese American racialized identity formations, the Chinese Question, and the Negro Problem being coterminous: Chinese exclusion–the exception that proved the rule–helped America define itself as a free nation in the wake of racial slavery. Wong’s use of unusual documentary sources such as the underexamined archive of Anglo-American Cuban travelogues and invasion fiction by both African and European Americans, limns the changing racial landscape of Reconstruction-era immigration policies and conceptions of citizenship that shaped Asian-American cultural politics and impacted African American life. NB: Professor Wong’s next project, mentioned toward the end of the interview, concerns apprenticeship and not indenture as indicated. Mireille Djenno is the Librarian for African, African American and Diaspora Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The dialectical configuration of black inclusion/Chinese exclusion is at the center of Edlie Wong‘s book Racial Reconstruction: Black Inclusion, Chinese Exclusion, and the Fictions of Citizenship (New York University Press, 2015). At the end of the 19th century, the southern United States was experimenting with a transition from a dependency on uncompensated, coerced labor in the form of black chattel slavery, to a system of (nominally) voluntary, wage labor i.e. Chinese contract labor (coolieism), modeled most prominently in nearby colonial Cuba. Wong poses the important question of whether coolieism constituted a form of slavery or was indeed, a transition to free labor. In so doing, Racial Reconstruction explores the implications of mutually constitutive African American and Chinese American racialized identity formations, the Chinese Question, and the Negro Problem being coterminous: Chinese exclusion–the exception that proved the rule–helped America define itself as a free nation in the wake of racial slavery. Wong’s use of unusual documentary sources such as the underexamined archive of Anglo-American Cuban travelogues and invasion fiction by both African and European Americans, limns the changing racial landscape of Reconstruction-era immigration policies and conceptions of citizenship that shaped Asian-American cultural politics and impacted African American life. NB: Professor Wong’s next project, mentioned toward the end of the interview, concerns apprenticeship and not indenture as indicated. Mireille Djenno is the Librarian for African, African American and Diaspora Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The dialectical configuration of black inclusion/Chinese exclusion is at the center of Edlie Wong‘s book Racial Reconstruction: Black Inclusion, Chinese Exclusion, and the Fictions of Citizenship (New York University Press, 2015). At the end of the 19th century, the southern United States was experimenting with a transition from a dependency on uncompensated, coerced labor in the form of black chattel slavery, to a system of (nominally) voluntary, wage labor i.e. Chinese contract labor (coolieism), modeled most prominently in nearby colonial Cuba. Wong poses the important question of whether coolieism constituted a form of slavery or was indeed, a transition to free labor. In so doing, Racial Reconstruction explores the implications of mutually constitutive African American and Chinese American racialized identity formations, the Chinese Question, and the Negro Problem being coterminous: Chinese exclusion–the exception that proved the rule–helped America define itself as a free nation in the wake of racial slavery. Wong’s use of unusual documentary sources such as the underexamined archive of Anglo-American Cuban travelogues and invasion fiction by both African and European Americans, limns the changing racial landscape of Reconstruction-era immigration policies and conceptions of citizenship that shaped Asian-American cultural politics and impacted African American life. NB: Professor Wong’s next project, mentioned toward the end of the interview, concerns apprenticeship and not indenture as indicated. Mireille Djenno is the Librarian for African, African American and Diaspora Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The dialectical configuration of black inclusion/Chinese exclusion is at the center of Edlie Wong‘s book Racial Reconstruction: Black Inclusion, Chinese Exclusion, and the Fictions of Citizenship (New York University Press, 2015). At the end of the 19th century, the southern United States was experimenting with a transition from a dependency on uncompensated, coerced labor in the form of black chattel slavery, to a system of (nominally) voluntary, wage labor i.e. Chinese contract labor (coolieism), modeled most prominently in nearby colonial Cuba. Wong poses the important question of whether coolieism constituted a form of slavery or was indeed, a transition to free labor. In so doing, Racial Reconstruction explores the implications of mutually constitutive African American and Chinese American racialized identity formations, the Chinese Question, and the Negro Problem being coterminous: Chinese exclusion–the exception that proved the rule–helped America define itself as a free nation in the wake of racial slavery. Wong's use of unusual documentary sources such as the underexamined archive of Anglo-American Cuban travelogues and invasion fiction by both African and European Americans, limns the changing racial landscape of Reconstruction-era immigration policies and conceptions of citizenship that shaped Asian-American cultural politics and impacted African American life. NB: Professor Wong's next project, mentioned toward the end of the interview, concerns apprenticeship and not indenture as indicated. Mireille Djenno is the Librarian for African, African American and Diaspora Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

Oct. 23, 2014. In a special appearance, Stew discusses his career as a playwright, songwriter, poet and lyricist. Adrien-Alice Hansel talks with him about the song lyric as poem and as a dramatic text, and takes a look at some interesting recent projects -- his song cycle "Brooklyn Omnibus" and a new show written for the 2014 Oregon Shakespeare Festival, "Family Album." Speaker Biography: Stew's rock musical "Passing Strange" took top Tony, Obie and Drama Desk awards, and inspired the Spike Lee documentary premiered at Sundance. Working with his band "The Negro Problem" and longtime collaborator Heidi Rodewald, Stew has created a powerful and provocative body of work -- songs and shows that chronicle a semiautobiographical musical journey and reveal "a razor-sharp literary eye and a wicked sense of humor" (Chicago Sun-Times). Speaker Biography: Adrien-Alice Hansel is literary director of Studio Theatre. For transcript, captions, and more information, visit http://www.loc.gov/today/cyberlc/feature_wdesc.php?rec=6604

Morley Bartnoff(Cosmo Topper) born in 1959, is a Los Angeles, California-born keyboardist, guitarist, songwriter, and composer who has been performing and recording for the past 30 years. Formerly with the Los Angeles rock band Burning Sensations, Morley now leads alternative rock band Cosmo Topper,[1] and whenever possible serves as the “secret weapon” on keyboards for Dramarama, an enduring power pop band best known for its hits "Anything, Anything (I'll Give You)" and "Last Cigarette". For the last few years Morley has been playing keys for the reunited group Dramarama and will be featured on the New Dramarama recording, playing Baby Grand Piano and a Hammond B 3, with a Leslie to be released in 2011. His talents have also appeared on their previous 2005 CD, 'Everybody Dies'. In addition, Morley's songs have been appearing in motion pictures. His original track "For... The Time Being," from the Cosmo Topper CD Pure Fast Vibration, is heard during the end credits of Mayor of the Sunset Strip, a rock documentary examining the life and career of legendary KROQ-FM DJ Rodney "On the 'ROQ" Bingenheimer, produced by Dramarama's Chris Carter. A few additional bands Bartnoff's talents have been a part of are Pasteurized Ashtray, Waterfall, Who's The Father?, Joe Thomas, The Sluff Bros., Cantaloupe Without a Ladder, Franny and Zowie, Playing Cards, Bugs Tomorrow, Andy and the Rattlesnakes, Burning Sensations, The Rugz With Ike Willis, Nick Varoom's Tomb, Mesuganah Soul Review, Talkback, Push-Start Jungle, Daisychain, The Negro Problem,The Stew Ensemble, and of course his own band Cosmo Topper, whose song “For The Time Being” closes the Rock Documentary “Mayor of the Sunset Strip”

In this special double-sized, civics-minded episode: Robbie Rist returns from the road covered in musical glory, southern infatuation, and sweet, sweet BBQ sauce. There ensues a recap of both his touring adventures and how the show fared in his absence, then talk turns from past to future as the upcoming election is dissected on micro, macro, and meta levels. The definition of the word "legacy" is stretched to taffy-like proportions in this week's SAL, featuring the antics of one Carlos Irwin Estevez (ne Charlie Sheen.) In the second hour, artist/writer/bon vivant, Joe Oesterle, drops by for lively tales of the unlikely and bizarre in our fair city, as detailed in his book Weird Hollywood. Also on display are the comedic ruminations of NDR Overlord, Johnny Dam, in addition to music by The Mockers, The Neighborhood Bullys, and The Negro Problem. Get out and vote!

This episode Adam Marsland joins me in the studio to talk about his current tour, new record, and performs a few acoustic songs for your listening pleasure. BIO:Recently described in SPIN magazine as "a high-energy cross between Brian Wilson, Paul Stanley, and Elton John,” Adam Marsland's pop adventurism, brash vulnerability and stubborn idealism have not earned him the record sales of his L.A. contemporaries Weezer (with whom he once shared rehearsal space) or the cult following of Wondermints or The Negro Problem (both of whom he has performed with), but he has had one of the more prolific and intriguing music careers of the last 10 years. A talented singer, arranger, performer, multi-instrumentalist and "one of the most gifted songwriters to come out of the west coast in a long time" (Time Out-NY), Marsland has pulled off rock, punk, baroque pop, soul and alt-country through the course of seven albums and 22 tours. When his label collapsed on the week of the release of his band's third CD, he went totally underground, touring alone for 2 1/2 years straight and selling thousands of albums out of the back of a 1994 Toyota Tercel. More recently, thanks to the advent of myspace, a jaw-dropping band that includes a bonafide pop legend, and a tour-de-force live album of similarly overlooked but worthy Beach Boys songs, Marsland's smartass-punk-meets-music-geek songs and persona have attracted a new audience. Most recently, he played guitar and keyboards side by side in studio and onstage with Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Famers Hal Blaine and Don Randi and legendary guitarist Jerry Cole in recording sessions recreating '60s hits they originally played on for the soundtrack of the upcoming Shawn Bryant-produced documentary Makaha. His music began to be used more frequently in TV and film, including for the Fall 2007 season MTV Road Rules, Lisa Williams: Life Among The Dead, Scott Baio Is 46 And Pregnant as well as the Sci-Fi channel original film The Headless Horseman. An instrumental version of his song "Burning Me Out" was used as the end theme for I Know My Kid's A Star on VH-1. In 2008 Adam completed his return to full-time music-making with a 20 track album called "Daylight Kissing Night - Adam Marsland's Greatest Hits," released on March 18, 2008. With a artist-breaking $5.99 list price and several new recordings included, the album was his first marketed exclusively to the retail chain since his Big Deal days, and was the subject of an intense word-of-mouth campaign among Adam's fan base. The CD immediately sold out across the U.S. and reached 17 on Amazon's rock chart, followed by a traditional media campaign and a 40-date national tour in the summer. Writing and rehearsals are also underway for a new studio album, his first in four years. The opening song was:"Tales of My Pop Rock Love Life" - by Your 33 Black AngelsAs promised - THE FLYNN REPORTI'm bored, let's just do a bunch of simple sites. Cuss words included.1) For those that like the shrooms. click2) Is the internet f-ing awesome? click3) In case you're mad at someone. click4) Is it Christmas? click5) I've sent this one before but probably my favorite. click