Indiecast - Ten Years Of 'Random Access Memories,' The End Of MTV News, and American Football Buys The American Football House

Episode Date: May 12, 2023

In Indiecast's latest episode, Steven declares that Ian is a surgeon, Dr. Han. (Is this meme old yet? Will anyone know what we're talking about next week?) Actually, their first order of business is talking about In Times New Roman, the just-announced new album by Queens Of The Stone Age due June 16, their first in six years (6:16). They try to sort out their current feelings about this band, and the murky personal life of Josh Homme. (They also struggle, of course, to correctly pronounce "Homme.")Next they talk about the end of two institutions that they sort of thought ended in the aughts, but actually shut down this week: The pop-punk band Sum 41, and the legacy media outlet MTV News. Ian actually goes to bat for Sum 41 by giving them a "yay," while Steven is an indifferent "nay"(12:09). But MTV News was a formative outlet for both '90s kids, especially the gravitas-rich lead anchor Kurt Loder (22:11).From there they piggyback on Steven's recent column about the 10th anniversary of Daft Punk's Random Access Memories and talk about whether the album is a classic, overrated or both. (Steven and Ian both landed on "both") (30:18). What's not overrated is American Football buying the American Football house, which is another thing that happened this week, though the story made Ian sad about that a beloved combination A&W/Long John Silver's that is gone from his college town (46:35).In Recommendation Corner (54:10), Ian hypes the hyperpop/pop-punk hybrid Hot Mulligan, while Steven talks up a reissue from the Cleveland guitarist/composer Mark McGuire.New episodes of Indiecast drop every Friday. Listen to Episode 138 and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. You can submit questions for Steve and Ian at [e-mail], and make sure to follow us on Instagram and Twitter for all the latest news. We also recently launched a visualizer for our favorite Indiecast moments. Check those out here.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Indycast is presented by Uprox's indie mixtape. Hello everyone and welcome to Indycast. On the show, we talk about the biggest indie news of the week, we review albums, and we hash out trends. In this episode, we talk about the 10th anniversary of Random Access Memories and the End of MTV News, among other topics. My name is Stephen Hayden, and I'm joined by my friend and co-host. He is a surgeon, Dr. Hahn. Ian Cohen, Ian, Ian, how are you? I've come to believe that having the good doctor trend during a writer's strike is about as much of a union-busting tactic as having imagined dragons do that picket line concert. You know, there's put, you know, writers did this.

You realize that, right? Are you sure we really need that? Also, let's just make sure that we ease our listeners in who, like, are not completely online poison by explaining this entire joke. Yeah, so there was a meme this week of a video. taken from the ABC drama, The Good Doctor, which is that still on the air? You know, I look at it. It was inconclusive. Maybe I just, like, lost interest in finding out.

But I want to say it is. It is, yeah, it's still going. This show's going to blow the, this is going to blow up. So, it's a show. I've never seen the show. I'm familiar with it. I've heard about it. But it's about an autistic doctor named Dr. Sean.

And that's all I know about it. In addition to this video that's been circulating of a scene from the show where the doctor's having a meltdown. And he's screaming at this other doctor who's apparently his boss. That's Dr. Hahn. Yeah, you'll take him. He's from Lost. Yeah, he was in Lost. Exactly.

I recognize him from Lost. He's screaming at him. He says, I am a surgeon, Dr. Hahn. And he, it's like the most insane. same clip. He's just melting down and screaming, I am a surgeon, Dr. Hahn. And I actually found the original episode,

because I'm like, they must have exaggerated this. There must have been some sort of like digital manipulation to make this look as ridiculous as it does. No, that's exactly how it is in the episode. It is not manipulated. And it really is like a window into networked TV, you know, because like, I only ever learn about shows on network TV when I'm watching sports, you know, because they have nonstop promos for the crappy shows that they have during the week.

Like, you'll be watching football on Fox and you'll learn about, like, all the different iterations of 911 that are on Fox now. But this is like, I think, the most network TV that I've watched in a long time. Like, just watching that. Because every time that clip comes up in my social media feed, I watch it at least once. It's mesmerizing. I'm not sick of it yet.

I feel like I should be, but I'm not. Yeah, we've dipped our toe into these sort of waters before when we talked about Tulsa King or your radio promoter friend. But man, there's nothing more satisfying than doing a little dip on like what's going on with network TV or what's going on with K-Rock-style rock. Not because it like, I don't know, gives us insight into like the mind of the. for lack of a better term, Normie, but it's more because you watch a show like The Good Doctor or listen to AJR or like Five Finger Death Punch

and it just seems way more avant-garde than anything on prestige TV or, you know, in like boundary-pushing electronic music. It's just really hard to conceive, like, you know, to quote Howell Burr's like, a human being wrote this and gave this to a higher-ranking human being and said, yeah, let's go.

with that. I had another thing like that this week where my boss, Phil, shout out to Phil, message me on Slack and he's like, have you heard of this guy Noah Cahan? I feel like that guy always pops up on like Bottle Rock or these other festivals. As a matter of fact that when I drive by the San Diego State venue where I saw like the National in the 1975, I think he's playing there, right? Oh yeah, he's like a big headliner at Austin City Limits this. here. He's like, not on like the top line, but he's on the second line. And he's on, he's like a headliner for all these other festivals. And Phil reached out to me, he's like, who the hell is

Noah Kahan? Do you know who this guy is that I'm like, I've never heard of him? I'm going to assume it's like a Jack Johnson kind of. Right. Yeah. Okay, am I right? Totally. Yeah, it's like a, you know, a Jack Johnson, Jason Maras type thing. And, you know, you go on Spotify and he has songs that have been streamed like, you know, 10, 20 million times. I mean, Really good streaming numbers. There was a... Apparently he released the cover of Jason Isbell's If We Were Vampires this week with Wesley Schultz from Luminers.

I don't know if that's any good. Listeners, how about you chime in? This is like the part where we get like Real Sports Talk Radio. It's like, oh, we're going to take some messages right now. Like, uh... Yeah, any Noah Cahan fans in the house? Like, write us an email. I want to hear...

Where the Cahan heads at? Apparently, his fans are called busyheads. Oh. Because I think he has a record named Busyhead. Okay. So the... Wouldn't maybe the busy headheads then? I don't know.

I need to reach out some of the busy heads. See about like the etymology of it all. Right. Or like Busyhead squares. You know, like the head is squared. I don't know. Before we get to the topics that I announced at the top of the show, we had a lot of topics this week.

I think there's like a running theme this week of things ending that we thought were already finished in the aughts. But they actually finished this week. But we'll get to that in the minute. But like right before we started recording, it was announced that there's a new Queens of the Stone Age album coming out. June 16th, it's called in Times New Roman. Shout out to Times New Roman, by the way. Are you a Times New Roman guy? Are you talking about Times New Viking?

No, I'm talking about Times New Roman. font. Okay. I thought you're talking about Times New Viking, one of my top five favorite band names of all time. Not sure about the music itself, even though they're like Midwestern heroes, but... I like that. Because they were sort of like a noisier GBB, right?

They were part of that short-lived shit-gaze phase. Times New Roman, I'm more of an aerial person. What can I tell you? I like Times New Roman. That's my go-to. Even though you have to, like, change to it in the drop. I like Times New Roman. Apparently, Josh, okay, have we decided, it's Omey, right, Josh Ome?

Sure. I'm, like, really caught flat-footed here. Like, I've always made the joke that, like, from... It's not Josh. Yeah. It's not Homme. Or is it Homey? Josh.

Let's just call him Josh. We're, call him Josh. It's been 20, 30 years of us knowing this guy. He's just Josh now. Okay, so Josh, apparently he's a Times new Roman guy. Like, when he's going on Microsoft Word to type out some. lyrics. He's scrolling down to the Times New Roman and then at some point he thought this would be a great fucking album title. So here we are. What's the status of Josh right now?

Because you know, he's had some, he's had a tumultuous personal life in recent years. Apparently he's going through like the worst divorce of all time to Brody Doll. And I don't even want to get into that because it seems like, there's, There's accusations flying on both sides. I don't know what to believe there. He kicked a photographer in the face. That did happen. That was a long time ago, though, right?

Yeah, well, this is the first Queens of the Stone Age record in six years. So it's been a while. Do you remember the name of the last Queens of the Stone Age record? I know I reviewed it. I want to say it was villains or something like that. Very good. That's it. Villains.

It's been a while. since that record and on that tour cycle I believe is when the kick in the face happened which he said was an accident but it's on video it didn't look accidental anyway what's Josh's status

is he semi-canceled is he like at a gray area or I don't know it's hard to get my head around yeah I always feel like you know ever even after they got rid at Nicolvary like they've been kind like what is the cancellation status of this band it's it's

It's at a point where you have to ask yourself, what's the cancellation status of this ban, you know? All of us got a very long email, like a very long press release, kind of summing up where the custody case is. And it's just like really depressing. You know, it sucks that people have to do that, I suppose. And I honestly can't say. I feel as if like people, I think we're at a point where, even if this album is like really good, like rated R type level, I don't think people are going to like vouch for it in the same way that they might have,

like, were it 2008 or something like that. Like there are bands like, we're not going to go out of our way to cancel this band, but like we're not going to go out of our way to like pump it up. So I essentially see it as like, you know, it's going to come out, it's going to have a bunch of songs on K-Rock. And also that Food Fighters album comes out,

two weeks before, man. So those programs are eaten this summer. Yeah, I mean, I think that for the people that matter to Queens of the Stone Age, they don't care about the personal stuff. Like the K-Rock crowd, they won't care. And, like, fans of the band won't care. And people who don't like this band, they're going to think that Josh is, you know, maybe a shady guy, but they wouldn't have liked this record anyway.

So it's like one of those type of situations. I mean, I still like Queens of the Stone Age. I feel like on their first three records, they were commenting on radio rock. I mean, like, Songs for the Deaf is like literally an album commenting on radio rack. But even like rated R and the self-titled record, there was a subversive quality to those albums that I think over time has been lost where they are essentially like a slightly weirder foo fighters at this point.

And, you know, I can appreciate them on that level. I heard the single. It's about what I expected. If you just imagine a Queens of the Stone Age song in your head, it is probably similar to the song that they released this week, which is called a motion sickness. Not motion sickness, not a Phoebe Bridgers cover. It's an e-motion sickness.

So, you know, I'm sure this record will come out, and I'll really love about three songs, and I'll like about five songs, and I'll forget the other four songs. Like, that's my prediction. I hope I'm wrong. I don't think it's going to be another rated R, but I've been run before and if it was another rated R, I'd be pretty excited about that. Yeah, after we finish recording this episode, I can't wait to go on Twitter and see if this is

going to be like the 20, 23 here comes the cowboy with like all these Phoebe Bridgers and boy genius extended universe fans getting on this guy for having a song title that's somewhat similar to motion sickness. I think it's different enough that they'll be okay. I mean, I would love to see the Venn diagram of Phoebe Bridgers and Queens of the Stone Age fans. That's us, baby. We might be the only two. We have to talk about another big thing in music this week.

And this is the beginning of our theme of things that we thought ended in the aughts, but actually ended this week. And the first thing is Sum 41, the pop punk band from Canada. I'm going to read this from the New York Times. The band Sum 41 announced on Monday that it was breaking up after 27 years. Wow. Yeah. I didn't know they were together that long. Unleashing a well of nostalgia for the early 2000s when pop punk seemed ubiquitous on MTV's Total Request Live and in memorable scenes and blockbuster movies.

The Canadian group funded by the spiky-haired singer Derek Wibbley. That's his name. I love that name. That's his name. Derek D-E-R-C-K. fantastic spelling was part of a pop punk wave that included Blink 182,

Simple Plan, Good Charlotte, and Averill Levine. Isn't Blink in a different class? Oh, absolutely. Yes, they're older. They're like mid-90s. Yeah, they're older and a lot bigger. And we'll get into like why that's important. But I could see it.

Yeah. I mean, they were they were pop, but it's kind of like grouping the Beatles into like early 70s power pop bands. It's like saying, the Beatles and the raspberries. You know what I mean? Like they were, I feel like they invented that scene.

They should be separate. But anyway, their hits included Fat Lip and Into Deep, which fans loved to belt out in their car or jump up and down at shows. Did New York Times fact check that, by the way? Did New York Times fact check that they actually did love to belt it out in the car? Yeah, and also, like, how many, like, you're also assuming that fans of this band had driver's licenses.

at that time, which is like, yeah, I mean, this stuff trended super young, but, you know, maybe on the way to soccer practice, you belt it out, mom's car, I don't know. Right, right, or, you know, when they're hanging out in someone's basement watching, uh, punked, and then during commercials they put on 741. The band's music was also featured in popular movies from the early 2000s, among them Spider-Man, dude, where's my car, and bring it on. Are these the blockbuster movies that they're talking about? Because Spider-Man, yes, but dude, where's my car? New York Times, man. Like, come on.

Who got on the pop-punk beat here? Yeah, we're stretching the definition of blockbuster for Dude, where's my car? Although I did see that in the theaters. I think I saw an opening weekend. Because before you have kids, that's what I did before I had kids, apparently. I would just go see anything in the movie theater.

You know, this week I was waiting for the think piece that, like, contextualized. some 41 as like an actually great band you know I was waiting and I don't know if that happened maybe it did and I just didn't see it but is there a case for them because I just think of them as like a goofy pop punk band from the early 2000s like the only song of theirs I know is Fat Lip and I remember that video there's a lot of synchronized jumping in that video which was fun like that I mean I remember liking the video and I thought song was okay I'm a fan of synchronized jumping I

I want more bands to bring that back, you know, jump at the same time, kick in the air and all that kind of stuff. But I don't know. Am I missing anything with this band? If we're doing like the impromptu, yay or nay, I'm going to go with yay because they, you know, I don't. Wow. I don't, I don't, of course I don't like like this band, but they had some good moments. Like they're a band, like sort of like Aerosmith where I do have to hand it to them. My favorite song of theirs is still waiting, which is from does this look infected?

That's the follow-up to all killer no filler. Wow. Wow. You're going to the second record? I imagine it's the second. You're going to the... Wow. The darker more considerate sophomore album.

The Pinkerton? This is their Pinkerton? Yeah. And so, yeah, the video for still waiting is sort of like, I guess, like, Nirvana's in bloom, except it's entirely about the strokes last night video. It's actually pretty funny. Also, we got to bring up the fact that have you, do you recall or have you learned about when they like escaped like a civil war in the Congo on a helicopter? They were filming a documentary there.

It's sort of like like pop star and tropic thunder. This happened. It is absolutely mind-blowing. Wait, wait, wait, so Derek Wibley. Mr. Wibley, if we're using New York Times voice. he was concerned about the Congo so he made a documentary about it

and then they got like stranded there I think I want to say it was like they were doing like some sort of you know the band was doing like a documentary or a benefit of some sort and you know like at the time the Democratic Republic of Congo things were really

you know disputed there and you know like a like war breaks out and they have to like quite literally get in a helicopter to get the fuck out of there or they might die. It's, you can, yeah, it's insane. Wow.

So, is there any footage of this? Like, this should be a documentary. Yeah, it's, it's so unbelievable. But also, another thing in their favor, I saw them at the Beale Street Festival in Memphis. I'm pretty sure they played right between Jimmy Eat World and Snoop Dog. So, and also Derek Wibley, he dated Paris Hilton before marrying Avril Levine. So that feels like definitive. But is he still married to?

No. Avril leveled up to Chad Crager. I was going to say, yeah, yeah, she married the guy from Nickelback. Which is like, do Canadian pop stars have to marry each other? Is that like a law of Canada? It's like the radio thing where they have to play like a certain amount of like Canadian dance. I don't know. Yeah, it's like, yeah, you've got to keep the pop stars in house here to support the, you know,

the national economy or something. So I'm not going to front here. I thought this band was garbage at the time. I have no affinity really for this era, like pop punk at all. It's not even something like New Metal where I can go back retrospectively and see like, oh, corn's a really good band.

And Slipknot is a really good band. And there's like other good bands in that scene in like the terrible bands. at least are entertaining and kind of fun to talk about. This scene I really have no affinity for. I don't know if you feel differently because it does feel like a little emo adjacent here. I will say that I'm a little surprised that they're breaking up now because the fan base is in that sort of just like heaven demographic at this point where they're mid-30s probably. You know, it's a nostalgia market now.

So it seems like these bands, the Good Charlotte's Simple Plan, All-American Rejects, can you put them in here? Yeah, I think. Absolutely. What about Motion City Soundtrack? Oh, here we fucking go. Okay, so you put them above these bands that I just mentioned. Well, I'm just surprised that, you know, as a Minnesotan, you're not showing some civic pride for some Minneapolis legends. Like, I could see how Motion City soundtrack could be grouped into this band.

I feel like they came, their peak was a little bit later, like 2005. Commit this to memory, that's the album they put out in 2005. It's fucking awesome. It came out on an epitaph, and it sounds a little more like new pornographer-style power pop. It holds up really, really well. But, yeah, with the rest of these bands, like, I don't like them. You know, I didn't like them when they first came out. And I didn't like how, you know, for a very, very long time, like, they became somehow, like, the working definition of emo.

Like, if you were to see, like, emo was back on, like, the news or whatever, they would probably talk about all American rejects. But I actually appreciate how trivial they are because, like, no one's going to come up and, like, make a point that, you know, they were, like, important or they really changed the game. You know, you have mentioned they are in their, you know, just like Heaven Festival phase, which, you know, that's when we were young. That's the deal. And they play those shows. And I think All American Rejects Motion City soundtrack and Simple Plan are touring together this fall. And you know what?

That's like a way for like the get up kids to make a quick buck. You know, they'll hop on that door. And, you know, they got to eat too. Yeah, get a babysitter. Put your chain wallet back on. Go see the pop punk nostalgia show. I mean, that's all good. You know, I'll just say like there are bands.

that I love when I was 14 that are trash, but I still love. So I don't begrudge anyone still loving something that they love when they're 14. I just have to be honest. I'm not going to be like the revisionist music critic here and say, you know, I was listening to All Killer, No Filler. And I feel like it was a commentary on youth in the 9-11 era and how they escaped into the world of skate parks

in order to deal with the new millennium tension that existed after, the Twin Towers came down. You know, I, you know, someone is going to write that piece. I'm not going to pretend like I would believe in that at all. Dude, you're like already halfway there. Like, just, you can get 200 bucks out of somebody. Just fucking AI the rest of that shit. You got yourself 200 bucks.

I just improvised that up top of my head. You know, come on. This is what, when you've been in the game this long, you can just turn that stuff out without even thinking about it. The second news item, this week that pertains to an institution that I thought ended in the aughts, but actually ended this week, is MTV News. And this is from the Hollywood Reporter, 36 years after MTV News was created to expand the stable

programming that defined the cable channel MTV, it is no more. MTV News was shuttered this week as part of larger layoffs at parent company Paramount Global. What launched as a single show in 1987, the Weekend Rock, led by correspondent Kurt Lodon, eventually became a bona fide news outlet for Gen X and older millennials who found that traditional TV programming on the broadcast networks and CNN wasn't cutting it. And I'll say I'm one of those people. I'm one of those Gen Xers slash older millennials who watched MTV News as a teenager and it was

very formative for me, especially as someone who went into music journalism. Kurt Loder was the first music journalist I think I ever saw or even knew like, okay, that's what a music critic or journalist looks like. It was like him and like Sisko and Ebert. It was like, okay, these are film critics on TV. This is a music journalist on TV. And honestly, you know, before the internet, and if you lived in a small town, you didn't really know that people did this for a living. So for me, Kurt Loder was like the model of like what a judge. journalist who writes about music

was supposed to be. And in a way, it still is. Like, I was looking at old MTV news clips this week. And, I mean, he was, like, kind of older anyway at that time. But, I mean, he seems like such a grown-up in a way that, like, nobody seems like a grown-up now, you know, who does this for a living. Like, he had a gravitas that nobody has now. Yeah.

Now. And, I mean, the thing that people always talk about. is him announcing the death of Kurt Cobain, which, look, I don't want to overstate it. For younger people, you probably roll your eyes at this, but it is true that, I think, for a certain kind of person, that is like the Kennedy assassination moment, you know, like Walter Cronkite going on TV and announcing that JFK has been murdered. You know, if you were a teenager in 1994 and you watched MTV, that's like a touch-tone moment that people remember.

It's like burned in your brain. And moments like that don't happen anymore. I mean, now we associate it with like seeing something on your phone. Like you see something on Twitter that tells you that something terrible has happened. But it's not someone on TV telling it to you in this sort of calm voice that's like reassuring in a weird kind of way. I don't know. Do you relate to any of this? Like was MTV News like a big deal to you?

Oh, absolutely. I mean, when you talk about it. how, you know, Kurt Loader has this gravitas, which is kind of hard to imagine these days. This guy is two years younger than Joe Biden. Kurt Loader is 78 years old. So he was like 50 years old back this day. But like, that's crazy. Yeah, it's wild.

He was, like, reviewing Pink Floyd albums at Rolling Stone back in the day. Yeah, like, Kurt. And also, like, why, like, whenever they portray, like, music writers and movies and TV, I was like, why can't we, like, use Kurt Loder as the model rather than, like, I don't know, the Lester Bangs, like, Philip Seymour Hoffman type. But, yeah, I know. He's, like, the sharp-dressed guy who is serious. But he has, like, a dry sense of humor at the same time. Like, you just feel like, oh, this guy, he knows all the angles.

Yeah. He's really, you know. Sort of wish he was my dad, you know. Yeah, just like watching him, like, interview, like, Axel Rose in the back of a limousine in 1992. I'm like, this is what we missed. This is the journalism scene that we missed. You know, like, I'm sorry, it's hard not to be wistful watching some of this stuff. Or like, Kurt Loder interviewing Madonna after the MTV Video Music Awards and then Courtney Love is like throwing stuff at them and then he invites her to come on and he's

interviewing Madonna and Courtney Love at the same time. I mean, come on. You can't, there's nothing that we're doing now that even approaches that. It's like oh yeah, I have a phoner with someone who just put an album on a band camp, you know? Like, God bless that person. And they're turning off video for this phone, for this Zoom interview.

And God bless that artist. You know, I want to write about that artist too, but you know, the glamour, the larger than lifeness of that era of music journalism. It's just, you look at it and you're like, this is like, we're not even close to that anymore.

Yeah, it's the old, like, I'm getting the feeling that I came in at the end. The best is over, you know, like Tony's a Prado type shit. But, yeah, I, you know, I definitely listen to both Stone Temple Pilots Lounge Fly and Megadth P. sells who's buying this week. If you are of our age, you know exactly why those songs are significant to us. But, yeah, I just kind of want to go, I know it exists. I want to go on, like, eBay or wherever. like just order this big stockpile of entire days of MTV programming from like

1993 and just watch them again and just try to figure out like what flew over my head back in the day because I mean sometimes I would be into MTV news other times I'm like yeah whatever like can we just get through this shit so I can see an ugly kid Joe video um I just like wonder like what sort of not even just like the shit like um you know Kirkco Bain diem but like I don't know, hey, there's this hip new band called Pavement or whatever. Like, I feel like that would have been the portal to, I don't know, indie rock or whatever as a whole if I like knew what to look for. So, I mean, yeah, shout to, I actually looked on the MTV News Twitter before we filmed this. It has like 4.5 million followers. And mostly it's just talking about like mental health month, which is exactly

what I would expect MTV News to be doing in 2023. But, you know, like, you know, like, Yeah, shout to them. Like, people lost their jobs and shit. Like, I don't want to be too cool about it. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, and look, the people who work there, they were ill-served by, you know, just like the revolving cast of, like, management that has been there forever. I should shout up Patrick Hoskin.

I think he's been there for, like, a long time. I've seen him on social media. Shout out to him. They're doing good work, but they're just. ill-served by these corporate buffoons who ran that place into the ground and like destroyed a brand that

was like really strong for a long time and you know all of the like silly things about MTV you could set those aside and you look at something like MTV News like that was like a real journalistic institution like

they did a lot of good work and again like in their prime you know Kurt Loder of like Tabitha and Allison Stewart, people like that. Kennedy. Well, she was a V. I don't think she was on MTV News. But, you know, they were like serious journalists

who also had like a sense of humor. And, you know, if you came up, you know, in a certain era, like those were, they were like aspirational figures. Like, that's who you thought, okay, that is who is a music journalist. Like, that is how I should act or the kind of standards I should have. So, yeah, a lot of good people work there. and they just got, again, like many people screwed over by clueless jerks who treated it like a handy wipe, you know, just used it for their own purposes

and then tossed it into the garbage. So pretty sad. Yeah. So the next thing I wanted to bring up was, well, it's related to something I wrote this week. I wrote a column about the 10th anniversary of Random Access Memories, the Daft Punk record, which turns 10 this month. And the, I guess, central thing in my piece is about whether this album is overrated or not. Because I feel like that has become the narrative when people talk about this album,

which, by the way, very successful record, obviously, went to number one in, like, more than 20 countries, won multiple Grammys, including album of the year and song of the year for Get Lucky. You go on streaming platforms now, I believe that half the record has been streamed more than 100 million times. Some of those songs have been streamed like several hundred million times. So clearly there are a lot of people that still love that record. But I feel like when people talk about it, certainly music critics, it's always couched in this language that suggests that the praise that it got in was undeserved. And I think like a concrete example of that is that pitchfork rescored piece that came out a couple years ago where random access memories was among the albums that got downgraded.

It was, I think it went from like an 8.8 to a 6.8. And they also upgraded Discovery, the second Daft Punk record from a 6.4 to a 10. but it's interesting I mean I I guess before we get into the reasons of like why this album is considered overrated I'm just wondering what's your take on this album 10 years later like have you listened to this record

at all like in recent years you know in preparation for this show I'm kind of knowing this is coming around I'm like yeah I'm gonna yeah I'm gonna give this and I'm ready to give it another chance which would be like the first time I've listened to it like in full since literally 2020 or 2013 and then it dawned

I mean it's like oh there is a major difference between then and now which is I have like a full time job when am I got to find the time to listen to a 75 minute album that I'm not even sure I like but I'm like down to talk about it just like talking about the thing rather than the thing itself and it's so funny like you were saying the view amongst music critics is that it's overrated

It's like, oh, whose fault's that? You know what I mean? It's like, that's just like real make-work shit. But yeah, I think it, you know, with this, you compared it to a, this is kind of another end of an era sort of discussion. You compared it to some Steely Dan albums or some Steely Dan solo albums. And like, I'll have to take your word for that. But it just kind of dawned on me that this album was more similar to like, I don't think that punk would, you know, shy away from. comparison to, you know, movies.

It reminds me more of like once a time, once upon a time in Hollywood or the Irishman. If you remember those conversations about, you know, because they all come from like visionaries and there's like this underlying sense that the kind of vision they have is being outmoded. And they're all like once upon a time in Hollywood is a pretty, I'm like groaning as I say. It's like kind of a raucist movie just in terms of like it's budgeting. and it's like attention to detail. And so the question is like whether,

and you kind of brought this up in your discussion of random access memories, like whether it's like The Thing, which is a big summer blockbuster or it's like an elegy for the thing as like things get more outmoded or whether it's like a critique of the culture. And chances are it's like all three.

You know what I mean? Because I hear this album and it's like, I don't hear it as like, oh, this is the way everything should be. You know what I mean? Yeah, I mean, what's interesting about random access memories is, you know, the year that it came out. And we've talked about 2013 before on the show. That's such a fascinating year of like the 21st century for music.

It might be the most interesting year in a lot of respects. You know, and I wrote about that in my piece about how it really was a time like where a lot of things were in transition. The music industry was still in this mentality of trying to sell digital downloads to people. People thought, like, oh, we got to get people to buy MP3s, but, like, they were not doing that. You know, album sales were plummeting. They hit all-time lows in 2013. Spotify was around, but it still hadn't reached critical mass yet.

There was only about 24 million people that were using it that year, and only 6 million were paying subscribers. That was shocking here. Like, because I remember, like, I wasn't using Spotify for real until like 2017. When you put that number in there, I'm like, no, that's, I was, yeah, that's right. I was like getting shit off what dot CD. Yeah, or like Pandora was a bigger deal in 2013. Hard to imagine. Spotify was.

But, you know, it was still a thing where albums were leaking. Like, as you said, you know, piracy was still, you know, thriving at that time. So it was an uncertain economic period. And then in terms of like the critical conversation, like that was really the peak of like the anti-rockist discourse and in critical conversations. Like that was when, you know, people would. Yeah, the 2020 experience. And like, you know, Taylor Swift put out red the year before. And there, there were a couple reviews that were condescending to Taylor Swift.

And like, I remember there was. one music critic who I will not name, but essentially challenged this writer to a duel in the streets over Taylor Swift, because it was like, how dare you, sir? And, like, slapped him across the face with, like, a white glove, you know? I demand satisfaction. Yeah, exactly. And Daft Punk enters that moment, and I think part of the hype with random access memories

was that there was this kind of generation of writers that was, like, like, okay, we want to give deaf punk their due here. Not that they weren't critically acclaimed before, but like, you know, Discovery, for instance, getting a 6.4 from Pitchfork, you know, like, no one would give that score to that album now. It's like an acknowledged class. We just have to put... I also just want to point out, though, in their defense, like, Rolling Stone wasn't

particularly, like, they gave it, like, three stars or something. Right. I mean, for the most part, people were into it, but I think we have to be abundantly clear that it was just, I mean, it's indicative of perhaps the view of it, but pitchwork was hardly alone on that front. No, yeah, it wasn't the kind of album that critics would get behind at that time. It had a lot of bops in it, and I hate saying that word, but it's that kind of, it's like a pop record, essentially.

And then, so Def Punk enters this moment, and they deliver this record, which, you know, is basically like a raucous electronic record. Like, you know, it's like serious music. and we're using real musicians, and we're making a statement about sort of, that's sort of like looking back to the 20th century. Like they wanted to make a record in the style of like thriller, or like the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack,

like one of those sort of like monocultural classics that just has like excellent studio players on it and like really good songwriters and not just people making music on computers. which was becoming, or what really was the new norm by that time. And I think it just kind of confused the reaction to that record. Because they didn't give people what they were expecting. And like Get Lucky was the first single,

but it's not really representative of that album. Like that album, for the most part, I think, is like a pretty melancholic record. And there's a lot of slow kind of songs that are like, it feels like it's mourning something. You know, it's not just like a bunch of fun, up-party, you know, upbeat dance songs. I mean, there's some of that on that record,

but there's really not. And I think that was the thing that, you know, when people listen to it, now expecting it to be maybe more like discovery, I think that's where that record gets marooned a little bit. Yeah. Well, the only other, There are two songs that I can remember

off top, not having listened to this album in a very, very long time. The first is doing it right. That's the one with Panda Bear, which could be pretty prophetic. You know, Panda Bear had quite a few electronic, you know, kind of electronic pop songs last year where he was a guest vocalist

that were really awesome, step by step by Alex being another. And also Giorgio by Maroder. Yeah, they put, I think that's like the third song. And that just, I guess that's like, like really a gauntlet being thrown. And in a way, I... Definitely the most polarizing song on the record.

No question. And I think people kind of view that as like the thesis statement of, you know, random access memories where it's like kind of an end of history sort of thing rather than like forward thinking. And I think that's kind of true of like all of the daft punk records. Because when it's into homework, they have a song called, you know, they have a song that was like a tribute to like all the Chicago and Detroit DJs that came before them and you know discovery as well like a lot of sampling going on there and so um yeah i would

say that like there's always kind of that component to them and it was just thrown into a um yeah it was just kind of thrown into a very very strange pivot point for uh you know music criticism where it just absorbed all of the anxieties um yeah it just all the anxiety um yeah it just all the anxiety and all like the where is this going to go and yeah I would imagine and also like kind of similar to our discussion about the good doctor it's like there are people here who think that that you know Farrell actually fronts this band you know just from having heard get lucky yeah I mean and just like from seeing the reaction in my column I think there is there are a lot of people who don't even know that this has been called overrated by

you know, music writers over the years who appreciate it purely as a representative of that time. You know, because it is a record that I think no matter how you, however you feel about it, it, like, defines the time it came out.

And it really is, I think, one of the big records of like the last 20 years. Like if you were going to make a list of like 10 to 15 records, you'd have to mention this one because it really was an event. I mean,

And again, that's related to how it was marketed. It was marketed very, very well. And there was a lot of anticipation for it. It came out at the right time, even though it was kind of a weird time for them. But, yeah, it's a big record. It's a big deal. And there is a 10th anniversary edition, I guess, that came out today. That adds even more time to the record.

Now it's like a two-hour record, because I think there's like a half hour of outtakes. and stuff. So I haven't heard that yet. I might dip into that this weekend. But I like this record. I don't know. It seems like you're sort of ambivalent about it. But I'm a fan of this record.

I enjoyed going back and revisiting it. Yeah, maybe I'll give it another list then. But I think that you asked, like, whether this is classic or overrated, I think it can be both in the same way. I think that like, again, you know, I don't know what sort of fan basis might activate, but like Taman Paul's currents is both a classic. classic and also kind of overrated. I think most classics kind of have to be overrated just a bit.

Like there are very few that, you know, to be to be a classic, it has to have some sort of like popular impact way outside the critical sphere. And so there's always going to be that discrepancy between, you know, how popular get lucky is and the actual content. So, yeah, classic, a little overrated. Maybe I'll listen to, you know, what's the, if. I get through the entirety of Georgia Obama Road or this time around.

Yeah, you know, I tend to agree with what you just said about it being both. I mean, I made this point in my column that I think in the social media era, everything is overrated. Because when you call something overrated, it's not really about the thing itself. It's about how people are talking about it.

And you're reacting to discourse that you essentially find annoying. And in the social media era, anything that gets talked about inspires discourse that's annoying. I mean, you know, like if you only want to focus on how people talk about something, you won't like anything because there's a lot of annoying people out there who say annoying things all day long. So at some point you have to try to block that out so you don't get too brain poisoned by that

because it's very easy otherwise to just be like a raging misanthropic grouch about everything in the world. And I'm saying this to myself, by the way. I'm not even saying it to the listeners here. This is an affirmation I have to do for myself because I constantly feel like my judgment is in danger of being blurred by just all the noise that you hear day in and day out in our modern society. We live in a society Yeah It's like at work It's like all my co-workers

Like listen to Taylor Swift And very little else I'm like oh fuck I get back on Twitter Just to get a break for this And like it's more or less the same thing Except like somehow like bigger words are being used Uh

Quick tangent here Since you brought up Taylor Swift I was Watching music videos with my daughter Yesterday and she wanted to hear some Taylor Swift so I put on Shake It Off When was the last time you saw the video for Shake It Off? That is an extremely problematic video.

Can you picture it in your head? I cannot. I mean, I feel like I've seen the thumbnail on YouTube, but like not the actual thing. There's a lot in that video where Taylor Swift is basically making fun of like rap videos. She's kind of dressed up. as a rapper and she has like the backing dancers who are twerking and stuff and I'm like Everyone's got that kind of video though

Is it too late for her to be canceled for this? Because this is like I don't know It's it's crazy video anyway. I'm not trying to stir up anything here. I don't care either way I'm just saying I was watching this with my daughter and I'm like I don't think I'm gonna show her the video for shaking off again This is like that uh this is like those like tweets you see it's like yeah my six-year-old daughter said Ruth Konda forever. Like, this is pure cap. No, I'm playing. Yeah, I'm pretty sure I knew that.

I'm not saying my daughter said Ruth Konda. This is not like Ruth Konda forever. She just watched it. She didn't say anything. This was like all in my head. Thinking like, oh, like this is some problematic imagery in this video. I don't know if I want to support this. We have to talk because you are, of course,

the king of emo music criticism. So we have to bring up the big news in emo this week, which was American Football, buying the American Football House. And I'll just read this from Vulture. The members of Illinois, emo-grades American Football, never actually lived in the house that graced the cover of their first self-titled album in 1999,

but now they own the unlikely musical landmark, polyvinyl, the indie label from Champaign, Illinois, that released American Football, the record, revealed that the label and band purchased the house alongside the photographer who shot the cover, another photographer, in a Chicago Art Gallery group. So it's a consortium

came together to buy this house. In a news release, Polyvinyl said the house in nearby Urbana was put up for sale in fall of 2022, and they worried it could have been demolished. So the buyers made a pact to protect it. And here's a quote. A few days ago,

we held true to this promise and formally signed the closing papers preserving both the space and its unique legacy within the community that shaped its existence, the label said. So is this going to be like an emo museum now? Like, do you know what's going on with this? Yeah, well, first off, we got to congratulate, you know, American football for being the first, like, indie emo band that could, like, buy a house.

Even though they, even though they had to get some help from the higher-ups. I mean, I keep on getting emails that the Punk Rock Museum opened up in Las Vegas. and kind of given the when we were young festival, I imagine if there were to be an emo festival, it would probably open there as well. Like, that's where everything's going, like the Raiders, the Oakland A's, punk rock. But, yeah, I mean, if it becomes an emo museum,

like, I think that would be super cool. Over the past couple years, like, people make, like, kind of indie rock landlord jokes. Like, there was that whole thing where the guy from Waves was apparently price gouging in Silver Lake. And I really did see like one or two people get kind of mad about polyvinyl and American football like buying this house. Not because like, oh, they shouldn't own the house that's on the cover. It's like, oh, look at these people like buying real estate, you know, how DIY.

But look, if you think of this beyond being like, you know, the American football house and just being a house that exists on a college campus. campus at the University of Illinois. Like, listener, I don't know if you've been back to where you went to college, you know, like within the past five years. Like, give yourself like five years before you go back to your college campus. And like everything that you will have loved on that campus is turning into something else. Like I went back to University of Virginia for the first time in like 13 years last summer. And, you know, our combination A&W long John Silver is like a boring ass.

Thai place. There's like an urban outfitters on Broad Street now. And like anyone who is like, who could possibly gin up being mad about this, this house was absolute, first off, this house is an absolute piece of shit. Even by the standard of like Big Ten college campus

five to ten people living in at houses. It was going to get torn down. It's going to be a Chipotle or like one of those interchangeable apartment complexes where like senior get price gouged because like all of a sudden they oh hey we got a pool or we have a clubhouse where you can play Xbox um like no matter how you slice it this is a good thing in order to maintain i don't know

some semblance of uh local color so do you are you regretful that you didn't get like your college friends together to buy the combination a and w long john silver i mean had we had known uh had we had known. Like, we definitely would have done this. But, I mean, yeah, just the, the only thing, like, Facebook is kind of useful for now these days is to hear from, like, my friends who still live near, like, Athens, Georgia to talk about, like, what restaurant we love that closed. And then, you know, if it's something like Weaver D's, you know, immortalized and automatic for the people, you know, like the go fund me to keep it afloat. Yeah, college campuses, like, college towns in general, are like just as bad if not worse in terms of like gentrification.

Yeah, I know like the grocery store that I worked at in college in O'Clair was torn down. And now I think it's like a, you know, like one of those like mini mall things like with a wing stop in it and all that kind of stuff. I know like that like I lived in a shitty house my junior year with with a bunch of pals. And they totally renovated the house. and there used to be like a shed next door that we would throw, oh, no, it was a garage that we would throw beer bottles at late at night. And that got torn down. They probably even picked up the beer bottle, broken glass,

which is a real tragedy. My closest equivalent with this is the big pink house, which is the house that the band lived in in the late 60s, like when they did the basement tapes with Bob Dylan. And when I was in upstate New York, I think five years ago, I made a point to find this house and have my picture taken in front of it. So if you're an American football fan and you're going to do some emo tourism and go to this house, like I can't clown on you because I did the same thing. I think the big pink house is like an Airbnb now. Like someone posted an ad that you can like actually rent it and like live in like for a weekend.

That sounds right. Would you be pretty amazing? I wonder what they're going to do with this house. The American Football House? It'd be funny if they, like, did rent it out to people and, like, charge super high rent. That's no one would want, like, it's, like, notorious for being a piece of shit. Just, or, you know, have, like, have basement shows there, but, like, you have to buy tickets through ticket master. You know, like, one of those kind of things.

Just to really irritate the DIY purists out there who are mad that they bought a high. house. Is that a real thing? People got mad that they bought a house. Like what? It's a, I want to say that like, it's either a real dry sense of humor or a joke that didn't land because I think that this, you can sort of kind of fit it into some other things that people are mad about. Like, I don't know, like any rock musicians making enough money to buy like a $200,000 house. I mean, I've, I've, I, looked, I've looked at this house on Redfin. It's, yeah, it was like 240 or something like that.

But I don't, like, if there are people who are mad, it, like, died down hopefully when they realized, like, oh, wait, like, I'm totally in the wrong here. Yeah, that's a touch grass situation, I have to say. As your doctor, I prescribe that you touch grass for a half hour. Yeah. If you were posting about that.

Or just listen to NeverMet. I mean, fuck, man. You've now reached part of our episode. that we call Recommendation Corner where Ian and I talk about something that we're into this week. Ian, why don't you go first? So it's been a while since I've like thrown up something here where there's like maybe a zero to three percent chance that Steve might actually like it. But I have a profile running today at uprocks of a band from Michigan called Hot Mulligan. And boy, if we're talking about, you know, 2003 era type pop punk, this kind of sort of does that.

These guys, they just finished touring with the Wonder Years. They've been in the past toured with bands like Newfound Glory. And of the kind of emo-adjacent, pop-punk adjacent bands of modern times, like these are absolutely one of the most popular bunch. They put out an album in 2020 called You'll Be Fine that came out like a week before the pandemic started. And now they've got a new album called Why Would I Watch? and I describe the album in the piece as like if a hyper pop band made Pups the Dream is Over completely out of samples from the Warped Tour 2003 comp.

They have really shitposty titles and like really dark song subjects. Their first single was about the guy saying, yeah, like I hate my mom. I sort of wish she would die. She gets worse every time I see her. And the song is called Sh Golf is on. It's an acquired taste for sure. but if you have any affinity for

you know, the Wonder Years or any of the bands currently on Waxe bodega a really great label, this album's for you. So high variance stuff here. Yeah, there might be a 1% chance I'd get into that. There's a 0% chance

I think that you'll like what I'm going to recommend this week. It's a record called Pocketful of Rain. It's by a Cleveland guitarist and composer named Mark McGuire, not the Oakland A's St. Louis Cardinals great. His last name is spelled MC-G-U-I-R-E.

He was in a band called Emeralds that existed in the... I like that band. Okay, so maybe you will like this record. He was in a band called Emeralds in the Outs, which was sort of like an electronic, like ambient band. And then he went off on his own, and he actually ended up putting out

fairly high-profile records on Dead Oceans in the 2010s. But this album comes from before that. It was released originally in 2009 as a double cassette and CDR. And it's been re-released this month by Riley Walker, friend of the podcast. He has an indie label called Husky Pants Records. And he puts out a lot of his own records on that label, but he's also been putting out albums by other artists and including this reissue. And it's a really mesmerizing record.

I would describe it as like guitar music that sounds like electronic music. There's a lot of long songs with loops and repetition that are really about creating a hypnotic vibe that takes you to somewhere else in your head. There's also like shorter songs as well that kind of go in and out and do the same kind of thing, but over the course of like a minute or two. I think the album is probably best looked at as like one long experience that you want to listen to from beginning to end. And look, a lot of us don't have time for that kind of album. I get it. This is a record that you have to give yourself over to and let it kind of overtake you and wash over you like ocean waves

and be swept away by it. But, you know, if you have a moment this weekend, like 45 minutes an hour or so, to meditate on something kind of beautiful and spiritual, this is a record I think you want to check out. It's available on Bandcamp right now, so just basically Google Mark McGuire, band camp or go on the band camp app and look up mark mcguire you'll find this record and i think you'll

enjoy it if you are looking to be swept away this week yeah this is a call for some band to split you know split the adam and sound a little bit like hot mulligan and a little bit like emeralds like uh here we go we're thrown down the gauntlet please do it and maybe throw some sum 41 in there for all the sum 41 heads out there who are sad thank you all for listening to this episode of Indycast. We'll be back with more news and reviews and hashing out trends next week. And if you're looking for more music recommendations, sign up for the Indie Mix Tate newsletter. You can go to uprocks.com backslash indie. And I recommend five albums per week and we'll send it directly to your email box.