Switched on Pop - Modern Classics: Mark Ronson on Ginuwine's "Pony"

Episode Date: August 3, 2021

Mark Ronson has a CV too long to list here. Suffice to say he’s a musician who’s worked with everyone from Amy Winehouse to Lady Gaga to Dua Lipa, has one of the highest selling singles of all time with Bruno Mars in “Uptown Funk,” and has been making just really good music since the turn of the millennium. He’s also the presenter of one of our all time favorite TED talks on the history of sampling, and he’s been continuing that journey of musical curiosity with the Apple TV show “Watch The Sound,” which explores the untold stories behind music creation and the lengths producers and creators are willing to go to find the perfect sound, and the FADER Uncovered Podcast, where he interviews artists ranging from David Byrne to HAIM. Today, Mark is the guest for another episode of Modern Classics, in which he brings Ginuwine’s classic 90s jam “Pony,” produced by Timbaland and Static Major, as an example of the ways that innovation and radical experimentation undergird even the biggest of pop smashes.  Songs Discussed Ginuwine - Pony Rakim - Juice (Know the Ledge) Mobb Deep - Shook Ones Part II Notorious B.I.G. - Juicy Aaliyah - Are You That Somebody? 10cc - I’m Not in Love Shangri-Las - Remember (Walkin’ in the Sand) Amy Winehouse and Mark Ronson - Valerie Paul McCartney - Get Enough Usher - Climax Beatles - Maxwell’s Silver Hammer Stevie Wonder - You Are the Sunshine of My Life Cher - Believe Gang Starr - Work Nikka Costa - Like a Feather Stevie Wonder - Superstition Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you're tired of endless scrolling to figure out where to eat, same. I'm Stephanie Wu, editor-in-chief of Eater. We've just launched the new-ish and way better Eater app. It has all the restaurants we love, gives you personalized picks wherever you are, and serves up smarter search results just for you. You can find my list of the best places for martinis and fries in New York City. And save your favorite spots, share lists, follow editors, and book right in the app. Download the eater app at eaterapp.com.

It's free for iOS users. Hey, just before we get started, Switched On Pop is going to be doing a mini-series on summer festivals, and we're looking for listener stories of moments of ecstatic musical joy at a festival. If you have a short one or two-minute story, send it to us in a voice note to submissions at switchedonpop.com, and you might hear your voice in the show. Welcome to Switchon Pop. I'm musicologist Nate Sloan. And I'm songwriter Charlie Harding. Mark Ronson has a CV too long to list here.

Suffice to say, he's a musician who's worked with everyone from Amy Winehouse, Lady Gaga to do a Lipa. He has one of the highest selling singles of all time with Brunham Mars and Uptown Funk, and basically has just been making really good music since about the turn of the millennium. He's also the presenter of one of our all-time favorite TED talks on the history of sampling, and he's been continuing that journey of musical curiosity with the Apple TV show, watch the sound which explores the untold stories behind music creation and the lengths producers and creators are willing to go to find the perfect sound. Today, Mark is the guest on another episode of Modern Classics. Mark, welcome to the show. Hello. Like all of our guests for the

modern classics series, Mark has brought a song that he believes deserves to dwell in the modern pop pantheon. Mark, what have you brought for us? I picked, um, Genuine Pony. It's crazy to think that a song to me that's like a modern classic is actually nearly 30 years old, but I guess in the canon of when we think of classics,

for me, my brain still goes to Beatles, Stones, TV Wonder, like that. So it feels like a modern classic, Genuine Pony, produced by Timbalin. Let's get a little of this in our ears. Mark, what do you think makes this track endure as you said after 30 years, it still slaps.

It still explodes out of the speakers. When you first asked me to pick a modern classic, the first place my brain went was like, what was a record that there was like a full paradigm shift? Like when that record came out, nothing was the same. And I remember it really from a purely DJ standpoint because I just started DJing probably,

I've been DJing for a couple years in hip hop clubs in New York. And there was a very set tempo that your entire hip hop set was kind of, arched around. There was some more old-school hip-hop that tended to be faster, like Big Daddy Kane and Rock Kim. Then hip-hop in the 90s got kind of slower and moody. And then you had Puffy and Biggie a little more shiny. It was all a dream. I used to read Word Up Magazine, salt and pepper and heavy D up in the limousine. It was all in this like 90 beats per minute to like 110 and that's where you're set resigned. And this song just came out that just suddenly had to, like, you didn't even know how to play it in the middle of the night.

You just had to stop all the other songs that you were playing because there was nothing to mix this into. It was 60 beats per minute. It was like nothing else. And it was so good that it warranted that. You know, if you stopped the song that you were playing in a hip-hop club, like a certain time, the music stopped. Like, you were in danger of having a bottle thrown at you in the DJ booth or something, you know? like this was not this was not something that you would you would do unless you really knew that what you were about to play was going to be such an event that everybody there would just be this rush

of the room so not only was it sonically so inventive and like nothing that came before it anyway but from a DJ perspective it was like oh shit and then you know slowly after that timblum was so influential and then you had the dirty south movement and all the atlantis the hip-hop and stuff from Texas that was coming out that was around that tempo and slowly you could build an entire set in this tempo but at that moment it was just an island it was this record that was so good you couldn't mix it with anything and it was fucking and it just sounded like it came from out of space too so a lot of people know this as a slow sexy jam the tempo is compelling in that way but what else in the sonics of this song make it a modern classic for you well

it sounds incredible. I mean, there's a lot of mythology around Hal Timberland, how he came up with that sound, because it was around the same time as A Leo One in a Million, which is a song that I probably, I like even more. It moves me more, but it maybe wasn't like a dance for a classic the same way that Pony was, but the same thing, slow tempo. And it just, I remember, like, we would all be like, how did he do that? Oh, apparently he was like playing with his drum machine and by accident he turned the tempo knob down from 120 to 60 and invented this new sound. I mean

there was great like we were just all going like we wanted to know how this came about and there were all these ridiculous rumors. I still don't know exactly what it was but it sounded like nobody had ever gone that tempo before. Sonically it was insane. Timberlin you know you see him in the studio when he's building

beats he's always doing this kind of like half beat boxy thing with his mouth. A lot of the rhythms and the interesting things come from that and that's you can hear his breaths in it. It's actually funny listening to it because I only ever listened to it at like 200 decibels in a nightclub to hear

quietly in headphones right now. Like there's a lot of weird shit going on in the background there too. Like Timberland, we forget because he just had so many hits like how eccentric his brain actually was. Like he's a, he's kind of a weirdo disguised as like a kind of handsome

like built dude. Like he's like a lot of great you know, really creative producer. just, Pharrell's a weirdo. Like, you don't make music like that without being odd. And Timberland's the same thing. And the way he samples his own voice, and just plays it on a keyboard for the different pitches.

And that was kind of a classic hip-hop thing for, like, you know, the 80s. Since the advent of sampling, people would take, like, a funny voice, like a bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo. You know. But, like, just everything in this song is just like, it just had never been happened before and it had the sonic presence of like

it's sparse enough that like that's why Dr. Dre productions cut through so hard because there's so much room for that kick and that snare and those frequencies to just hit. So I think for so many reasons it's just a classic and then I haven't even spoken about the vocal

really which is I'm a beat guy so vocal is always a little bit secondary to me vocal and melody but it's like as far as a sexy slow jam goes, like, pony, ride it. It's just like, it's so instant. It's kind of like naughty enough that like, you know, it feels dirty in the club, but then it's PG enough that like you could get it on daytime radio and kids think it's fun to sing. As a producer, we can get really into the sonics of a sound and for so many listeners, the vocal is first. But what I think is

interesting about this track is that the production is also vocal base. You know, Timbalin, is famous for beatboxing his ideas into a mic and then programming those ideas. And you get all these weird little ear candy moments, these sort of like strange lasers and things that don't pop up in a normal beat because it's coming from Timberlin's mouth. And then obviously, as you're saying, the synth itself,

as well as also kind of its own vocal line. Yeah, there's something very instant about when you use a vocal but in the production of a song that's just really instant because it's like, I know that. It's a little bit of a different concept, but in Uptown Funk, it's a group vocal from the start. I mean, Bruno's in the lead, but all that this is, that ice go,

like it's like eight people. There's something about gangs of human voices. It's like the listener just subconsciously hears and goes, oh, that's a lot of fun, because that's a lot of people saying that. The same way that Timberling uses his like br-up, it's almost like, I know that sound. Like I probably made that sound once before, but like now it's in a song that like the baby crying and are you that somebody. It's the same thing. It's like that is a song that's somewhere from my life. That's a sound and it's familiar. Wow. I haven't quite thought about it that way, but that it is sort of tapping into something ancient and communal every time you're like grinding on the dance floor to pony by Genuine.

Yeah, I think of it like also like the background vocals and I'm not in love by 10CC.C. Just the. the way that those ahs are forming the paths. It could be a synth, but the fact that it's the ahs and it's a human voice is like, I think it's just like a bit more of a warm like blanket around the soul. It just gives us this feeling. Hearing you describe, you know, you and your friends trying to understand what Timbland was doing in this song, I think that people are still trying to do so because I went online to try and figure out the magic behind this opening baseline and if you go on like reddit and places people no one really seems to know people

have theories and hypotheses but no one really seems to know and i found an interview with timblin and he describes there was kind of a certain level of accident with this too like he was scrolling through a rack mount and then found this particular effect and it just suddenly clicked and it made me wonder if you've had similar moments like just something accidental happens you find the right you scroll to the right sound, you play the note, and all of a sudden you're like, oh, that's it. Can you relate to that feeling? It's kind of the entire theme of our TV show,

watch the sound as well. It's like these accidents like, you know, Roger Lynn made the Lynn drum to sound as much like a real drummer and a real snare drum as he could, and that's why his machine was so coveted because it was like fancy. And then Prince turns the fucking snare drum by accident one day. It goes like from to like

and then suddenly that's the fucking coolest sound ever and then you get drummers tuning their drum to sound like a lind jump now. It's like all those and actually I was working on it now because of technology

as well in programs like Ableton you can they're very creative and you can make accidents even sort of more easily and you can just throw a loop in there and turn the pitch all the way till it's so high

it's indistinguishable and then you just get a weird sound that suddenly makes your song cooler. I think that everything is, you know, there's a great deal of songwriting and music creation that of course comes from the main tenets that we think of, like the song and the melody and the thing, but like all the other shit is definitely accidents.

I mean, even like plunking your hand down on a piano keyboard and like get a weird voicing or a cluster chord that you wouldn't think to play, it's like that can sometimes just set you off and running as chord one of a new song. Like I think it's so much of it is those happy accidents. Maria, you have a podcast now and you need to start acting like it. What's the first step as a podcaster?

Well, you have to ask lots of questions. I'm Maria Sharpova and I'm hosting a new podcast called Pretty Tough. Every week I'm sitting down with trailblazing women at the top of their game to discuss ambition, work ethic, and the ups and downs that come on the path to achieving greatness. I have a few pretty tough questions for you. Ready? Ready. Do not sugarcoat something for me. No, no.

We'll dive into their stories and get valuable insights from top executives, actors, entrepreneurs, and other individuals who have inspired me so much in my own journey. Pretty tough is your front row seat to the women who have demonstrated the power in being unapologetic in their pursuits. I hope you'll join us. New episodes drop Wednesdays on YouTube or in your favorite podcast app. I think a lot of people know of Mark Bronson as the, Mark Grants, On a Marquis, you're the behind-the-scenes producer who might be on stage playing

guitar, but you also have this very engaged public life with your exploration of music. As Nate said at the top, you had this great TED talk on sampling that totally captured the world, and you now have this TV series, this podcast. I guess I'm curious what's driving you to ask these questions in your career and take your private production curiosities into public conversations. I think that maybe if I was like some kind of musical prodigy or like from the beginning, I was amazing at one instrument.

That really was my thing. Or I could sing. I guess what I mean is because I've never had that even growing up. I always just knew that I loved music and I wanted to kind of just like swallow up whole everything about it around me. So in my high school band, I was the shittiest musician, so I was like, okay, well, I'm never going to be slash. I'm not going to be some, so I better, like, study all these other things than I got into

producing, but then I also worked, like, writing for heavy metal fanzines and interned at Rolling Stone in the summers. I just knew that I wanted to consume everything around this thing that I loved because there was no one thing that I was good at enough that said, like, here's your path into music. So by the time I became a producer, these sort of miscellaneous things that I had picked up, DJing, sort of knowing a lot about music and the history of music and all these things, those end up as helpful things in the tool belt of a producer in general. So I think that I've never stopped wanting to learn more about that stuff. And I don't see myself really as more of a creator of music than I do as a fan of it either.

So the podcast and talking to people about it, like talking to David Byrne, like I'm not trying to put David Byrne and me on the same level and be like, hey, man, do you also feel like when you go to the studio this happens? It's like, dude, when you fucking made stop making sense, you know, like I'm very happy and want to know those kind of things. So I think that's, that's it. And then I also like a challenge. Like I think that, you know, Kim Rosenfeld from Apple came to me and said, I want to make a show that's a little bit like your TED Talk in the spirit of it, like educational but fun and things that I didn't think I cared about. cared to know about, I ended up learning about.

So that was it. So I like that challenge. I mean, it's not that dissimilar to when Amy Winehouse, I'm actually back in the studio that I met her. This is literally the room that we first met, and we first had a conversation about music. And she just said, like, I want to make something that sounds like the 60s girl groups

that they play down at my local. And I was like, cool, what's that? And she played me, the Shangri-Laws. I, of course, knew it. like very outsider. Like I think I probably only knew it from like a Scorsese film where they're like beating some guy out and throwing him into a trunk to like one of those songs.

But I listened to it and I was like, okay, I've never made anything like this before, but I like it. And I really like you. And I like the idea of this challenge. So I think it's a, I think it's kind of all those things mixed together. And maybe it's just because I didn't fucking finish school

that I feel like I need to constantly still be learning something. Some unfinished business there. Yeah. I want to talk more about the TV show. It's called Watch the Sound, and it explores the technology and personalities behind your favorite sounds. And when you say you approach music as a fan, you can really see that in the show. You're someone who's genuinely excited to learn more, and the viewer gets to inhabit that role as well. One episode that may relate sort of to Pony and Genuine and Timbaland is this episode.

episode on autotune and vocal processing. I think it really resonated with us because we wrote a book called Switched on Pop. And in the epilogue, we wrote about Paul McCartney's 2019 song, Get Enough. I've been looking for love, but it gets me nowhere. And we were really surprised because he uses synthesizers and autotune and drum programming. And then we're like, wait a minute, this is Sir Paul embracing all of this. And in one episode of Watch the Sound, you talk to Sir Paul. And he didn't really seem to have a lot of hesitation about embracing new techniques.

No, because everybody forgets because we're so warm and fuzzy when we think of the Beatles because it's been instilled in us for so long and it's so familiar. But like, I listen to like Revolve every now and then. I'm like, damn, that fucking drums sound like tough and nasty. And there's a shaker that's like so aggressive in the right speaker. So not only was there stuff like kind of a little more badass than we maybe remember it, but they were always on the cutting edge of technology. That's why at that moment, they were always pushing the engineers in Abbey Road. And Sean Lennon talks about it a little bit later in that same episode about his dad. And, you know, some of the times, too, they would always have to, like, John loved to double

track his vocal. And then sometimes he'd get a little lazy and was like, can't you just invent something that, like, makes it sound like I double tracked it already? And literally, that's why they came out with like the first prototype digital analog delay pedal or whatever that was. So yeah, Paul was always on the cutting edge of everything. I mean, I remember when I worked with him on his new album. And I think at that point, I've had varying points in my career where I not get lazy, but I think after, yeah, fuck it, I got lazy. after version and back to black

and I'd work so hard to establish myself after 12 years of sort of banging my head against while I was like oh cool everyone likes it when I'm the retro guy I guess I'll just like fucking latch on to that and I kind of watch people around me and Diplo and people that I was friendly with like really no new technology and I was just falling back to what I had and I remember going in with Sir Paul

and thinking like okay I'll do my thing where I was just like classic, great recorded band arrangements, a couple little hip elements. And he came in with a CD he had been listening to. And the first song he played me that he loved was Climax by Usher. And I was like, oh, my God. Produced by Diplo and Ariel Reichstad

and with Nico Muley, like, arrangement on it. And I was just like, oh, man, yeah. Well, I was just pretty honest. I was like, this is great. What do you like about this? Because I'm not very good at this. Like that's what we're looking for here. He's like, I just like the space and stuff.

And at varying degrees of my career from working closely with Diplow or a blood pop or Kevin Parker from Tame and Paula. Like, I have really gone back to like, okay, I don't want to just lean on someone else to do the cool tricks and the programming like on the stuff. I want to learn how to do it myself. So anyway, Sir Paul always seems to be like he's always pushing. you and he wants to push his own stuff and it's kind of amazing and then the thing that he says it's really beautiful

which is the thing that inspired us to go and ask Sean to do some digital manipulation, some vocoder stuff with one of his dad's classic records was because Paul says in the episode he goes, you know I think if John were around today he'd be messing with

auto tune not because he needed it to fix his voice but because he would have loved to play with it and that was John was the one who loved to double track his voice. I mean, Sean tells it, and John double-tracked his voice because he didn't like the sound of his own voice. Like, he actually didn't like the way it sounded alone, so that's why he started doing the double track. But we take the a cappella of Hold On, and Sean was a little like, I don't know if we should do this. Like, this is kind of sacrilege. And I was just like, don't worry, you could just blame it on me. And there's a scene in the episode where he, like, he looks into the camera when I'm not looking.

and it was just like, Mark told me to do this. I didn't even see it until I saw the edit. But we do this really interesting stuff and do some sort of more Bonny Vair-style harmonies and things through digital processing with his dad's vocal. That's really need to think about the ways in which the studio experimentation narrative of the Beatles, which is well-known, gets played out in this series.

You also have this great moment with Sir Paul and the synthesizer. And I remember, I think the first record I ever got was Abbey Road. And I hadn't recognized at the time how much that was going on there was obscure and new. Paul plays the Moog synthesizer on Maxwell Silver Hammer. It's very bizarre and ethereal. There's this great moment in the show about him sort of toiling with the synthesizer so much that the rest of the band is getting upset. And yet today, of course, the synthesizer is the contemporary sound. You have this great exploration into it.

I mean, it's even the thing that grabs us with Genuine's pony, right? It's the sampling and re-synthesizing of the voice. You know, I'm curious. You state in the show that synthesizers were extremely important from the beginning of your music making. Was there something you learned in this exploration of synthesizers that you hadn't understood before? I hadn't really. It's just, you know, the same thing with Stevie Wonder and all the groundbreaking stuff he was doing in the 70s with Tonto, that machine that they built for him. And it's like, it's funny because those songs are so.

so in our psyche and they have, I wouldn't say the edges have been dulled off of them. Like they sound like hokey or something, but like you just forget that they were just using the most cutting edge shit and it was revolutionary at that time because it has become like standards in a way. Like even something like you are the sunshine of my life that you probably heard at like a thousand weddings and hotel lobbies. Like that was made with groundbreaking fucking technology at the time that was not able to be made. And not only that, even the keyboards, I mean, the clavinet, the sound of superstition, that can't really be, it's more of a keyboard than a synthesizer, but like the guy who invented that

machine, the electrical clavonet, like, hated Stevie Wonder was outraged because he was like, this is meant to be playing Bach and Beethoven and who's this guy playing this fucking thing? It's like, well, this guy made your shit cool. So I think that I learned a lot about maybe how I hadn't thought about how synthesizers were kind of, not taboo, but when they first came out, you know, you had these orchestras up in arms. I was like, we're going to lose our jobs. And the musicians union wanted to ban certain ones of them. And then Emmy Parker, who's a friend of mine who I grew up with who, you know, ran artist relations with Moog and then teenage instruments who make the OP1. and she has such a wonderful part in that episode

because she really reminds us that since we're the kind of tools of people from the margins, like if you think about it in the realms of pop music and stuff, people of color, trans people. Wendy Carlos was like a trans woman who worked so closely with Bob Moog that that keyboard wouldn't have come about the way it was and wouldn't have been so artist-friendly without her work.

The fact that Herbie Hancock, they didn't want to play Herbie Hancock, MTV, you know? He was a black artist who did kind of like jazzy music that was suddenly hip-hop influence, and then suddenly you're making these sounds that are just so amazing because no one's ever heard them before, but they have, they become so wildly popular that they have no choice but to play it. So it's this amazing thing. I never thought about synthesizers being outside or art before, but they do become these tools for that. You know, I think another technology you explore that's also, I like the way you put it, like kind of like an instrument for outsiders might be sampling.

And in the episode on sampling, you sit down with one of your idols, the DJ and producer DJ Premiere, who's produced for everyone from Gangstar to DiAngelo to Nasca, Christina Aguilera. Premier might not be as well known, I think maybe it's like other superstar producers like Timbaland. So I wonder, like, what do you hear about his approach to sampling that is so iconic? He is, his is a paradigm shift as well. Like he, and you can chart the way his production is sort of evolves over the first few gangstar records. Like the first few is like, you know, Gangstar was known for their jazzy sounds, sampling Charles Mingus bass lines and putting it over great breaks. It was very classy, but it was what other people were doing.

well. It was just a very good version of it. And then there's this moment on the third Gangstar album where Premier just reinvents his sound. And what he does is he invented the Boom Bap sound, which is something that we still call it today. He chopped up samples into little micro stabs and horns and replayed them himself because the technology, the MPC 3000, had these 16 pads and was kind of like well designed to do that. And he just invented an entirely different sound and it was so tough. Instead of taking drum loops, say like the do-mm-hmm-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch.

He would just sample just the kick and snare and make this like, boom-ch, like this heavy swing. And these samples and hits, and everything was syncopated together. And it was kind of like rock and roll energy. I mean, you know, at that time, gangstar started going out on the road with rage against the machine

because it just had this, like, hard energy. And just, like, it was just incredible. It was so inventive. It was so clever. and that's why I wanted to become a hip-hop producer. I mean, I'm staring at my drum machine. I mean, I'll just hold it up because... I bought this machine, the MPC 3,000,

because this is what DJ Premier used, my hero. And, like, actually, this one is even actually... I got signed when we went to do the show. But... It's beautiful. Hot Rod, Orange, and Blue. Yeah, that was... got that when I was producing my first record

Nika Costa in L.A. and I was like I'm not going to get fucking soft out here in L.A. and forget where I'm from. So I painted my MPC, New York Nix colors. I still have it. But I do, like yeah, I wanted to do that thing that DJ Premier did and

even up to my first record, the Nika Costa like a feather, the way that the beat goes in that, the the derna, da-da-da-da-na. The idea of chopping different samples from a jazz riff and playing replaying them yourself across the pads of the MPC was completely influenced by him and there's a moment in the show where I remind him he doesn't remember but he came in the booth one time when I was

DJing the album release party for DiAngelo Voodoo and I'm playing this song and it hasn't come out yet and he comes in the booth and I'm so I've never met him I'm starstruck I'm thinking like why is he in his like yo he goes what's this record and in my head I was thinking he's going to be like like, who the hell is ripping off my entire sound? Like, I didn't do this. Like, what is this? And I go, uh, it's, it's, Nika Costa, um, sir, like, I produced it. And he's like, he's just kind of stands it for like a minute.

And for the next two minutes, the whole remainder of the song, he's just bobbing his head like this, like so hard, like so into it. And it was, it's still one of the top five musical moments that's ever happened in my life and something with a hero. And I remind him in the episode. and he's like, oh yeah, he's like, I sure the funk did. I sure the funk did. He's like, oh, that was dope.

And it was just such a crazy thing. And that happens a lot when you're ripping off, or you think you're ripping off something you love or you're so in debt to your heroes. But actually, like, you do something weird along the way that changes it into your own thing and they can hear it and not even hear themselves in it, you know? I feel like something I recognize about,

there seems to be a trend in all of this work where, you feel really driven to explore musical paradigm shifts, you know, from genuines, tempo changes and manipulated synth vocals to subterranean reverbs, talking with some of the best music producers in the world. In this investigation, are there paradigm shifts that you hear are happening now in popular music? I think there's two things that just undeniably, like in most modern popular songs, which is like the warping of high hats and the crazy rhythms or the

and the kind of like, you know, the way that the Ableton sound war upon them and then the vocal chop, like the fact of which came a lot from Diplo and Snake and people like that of turning the vocal chop into like the secondary hook or sometimes the main

hook. Those are the only, everything else to me feels a bit just like progression and an sonic evolving of all the things that have happened before. There's not a shitload of stuff in even trap music that 3-6 Mafia weren't doing 25 years ago. It just sounds like it's

on fucking steroids right now. I hear a connection between those warped drums and the vocal chops and a lot of the technologies you explore unwatch the sound, auto-tuned sampling synthesis. These were met

with hostility and dismissal when they first arrived on the scene. And then we're eventually hailed and embraced. And there's a moment that really struck me when you're talking about listening to, I think it was shares believe for the first time when it came out in like 98. And you were like, I thought this was pretty corny when it came out. And listening now, it's like I hear it so differently.

Like I'm wondering, is there a way you try and listen with open ears? Like, how can we listen in a way that is accepting, I guess? Yeah, I think that I'd rather hear something that is, like, fully progressive and production-wise doing something that sounds like from the future and that I actually don't like. Like, I'd rather listen to something like that, like, melodically and harmonically is not pleasing to me, but there's something weird going on in it than just somebody, like, writing a... quote unquote hit song over the same four chords and it's just like obvious and derivative so I'm always like listening and you know I spent so much of my life as a DJ that I always have to kind of just skim the top 20 to be like oh is there some new shit that I like or that I could maybe work into my set so I'm just not that like chogglodyte old guy that doesn't like listen to any

new shit so so I do think that I am listening with open ears a lot of the time out of a curiosity thing I mean it's weird now that when I'm home like I don't have any way to listen to music other than a record player so that's obviously like a very like

specific thing of what I'm listening to it there but yeah for my for my work and my own professional curiosity I do like to keep an open ear and listen to stuff Mark this has been so much fun you know I think

What I love about your approach to make music and listening to music is how you can just keep peeling back layers. We start with a song Pony by Genuine, and it just takes us in all these different directions through history, through technology, through personalities. It's just so fun to kind of spend a minute in your musical brain. Thank you so much for joining us today. Thanks so much for having me. I'm excited to check it out. Switched on Pop is produced by Nate Sloan, Charlie Harding, and Megan Lubin. We're edited by Jolie Myers and engineered by Brandon McFarland.

Iris Gottlieb does our amazing illustrations, and Abby Barr dials it up on the social media. Our executive producers are Nashat Kurwa and Hana Rosen and were members of Vulture and the Vox Media Podcast Network. You can listen to more episodes of Switched on Pop anywhere you listen to a podcast. podcast. I'm talking to Apple. I'm talking Spotify. I'm talking overcast. I'm talking Google Box. I'm talking slick slack. I'm talking other things that I'm making up as I'm going along. And if that's too confusing for you, there's always our website, www.switchedonpop.com. Also, thanks to JBL for hooking us up with the gear we need to make our show on the road as we visit friends and family this summer. We love talking to you on social media, so please reach out

At Switched on Pop, the Twitter, the Instagram, we're there, and we want to know what you're listening to. Check us out next week when we are launching a new mini-series on summer festivals. And until then, thanks for listening. Attention Spotify. Has arrived on the new Good Girl Jasmine Absolute of Carolina Herrera. A fragrance intense with character Gourman and addictive. Imagine a jasmine emvolventy, caramelized, and tonka-tosted. A combination that seduce from the first instant and doesn't leave a wea.

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