Switched on Pop - Post Malone has us Running in Circles

Episode Date: January 28, 2020

Post Malone has confounded your hosts since he emerged on the scene, so this week we sit down to try and get to the bottom of our cycles of attraction and repulsion through deep analysis of his current hit, "Circles." Along the way, we discuss trenchant questions such as: How is the minor IV always the saddest of all chords? Why does Posty tend to sound like a certain ruminant mammal? And, what happens when you plug Tchaikovsky into a Wu Tang name generator? Songs Discussed: Post Malone - Circles, Rockstar, Stay, Congratulations, Candy Paint, Fleetwood Mac - Landslide Tchaikovsky - Symphony No 6, Finale And don't forget to enter the Wu Tang Name Generator Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Attention Spotify. Has given the new Good Girl Jasmine Absolute of Carolina Herrera, a fragrance intense with character gourmet and addictive. Imagine a jasmine emvolventy, taffy caramelized and tonka-tostata. A combination that seduce

from the first instant and he has aweller. Good Girl Jasmine Absolute, hypnotica, irresistible. Discover it now and let's Envolver for its essence. Welcome to Switch on Pop. I'm a musicologist, Nate Sloan. And I'm songwriter, Charlie Harding.

Let's listen to some music. Let's. used to sit and wonder why be if and you don't know by now they're not used to sit and wonder why babe it'll never do somehow when you're rooster crow what's up bob dillon yeah but what bob that's not bob dillon it's not bob dillan though you're right this is a song by bob dillan called don't think twice it's all right yeah beautiful song yeah it's got that nice little descending harmony line What do you think of this performance? That's convincing.

It's good, right? I mean, the guitar line had me sure that this must just be an old bootleg of Bob Dylan. But the vocal is too tinny and actually maybe slightly more in tune than Bob might be. What if I told you we were listening to Austin Richard, aka Post Malone? The show's over. You have a complicated relationship to one post Malone. I have, yeah. Yeah.

We're going to explore that today. You're going to lie down on the couch, and we're going to get to the root of your consternation with this artist. Does this surprise you listening to this? No, I mean, I know that he has this way of sort of blending hip-hop and fulky music, and he play his acoustic guitar, and I think he's from Texas, right? So he's got some Americana musical route. So I'm not surprised.

I mean, this is also, by the way, like anyone who plays guitar, I think if you search like guitar tabs online and like the top 100 guitar tabs of all time, like this song is going to pop up in the top, you know, a couple of songs. Hearing him perform this surprised me. I think I had a very specific image of who Post Malone was and what he sounded like. And I know him to be an artist who is very controversial. He was the subject of a viral review. in the Washington Post.

What was that? Which described him as, quote, a rhinestone cowboy who looks like he crawled out of a primordial swamp of nacho cheese. He has been subject to criticism of unoriginality, of cultural appropriation, and of promoting bad behavior. Are you certain that it's not just the Washington Post being frustrated about him copping their name? Thanks for the generous.

laughter. That was a solid dad joke, Charlie. I feel like the ambivalence around post-Malone is even captured by his name. Post-Malone. Where did that come from? What does it mean? I'd just like immediately go to like post-modernism as if there was a band named Malone, and then this is what happens after Malone. Here's his explanation of his name. When I was a little kid, I was looking for a nice name like Wiz Khalifa. I just thought it kind of rolled out the tongue. So I went to a rap name, General. and typed in Austin Post, and it came up with Post Malone. That's the beginning, middle, and end.

Yeah. And I feel like this anecdote captures some of the ambivalence around Post Malone. It's like, is this guy even trying? Yeah. Is there a message here? Is there a center to this artist? That's how I felt. Let's find out.

But before we do, I do have to issue an important caveat. Because Post Malone is not the only artist to use a rap name generator for their performative cognomen. Any guesses who another well-known rapper who also used a name generator? Run DMC. You know, the internet didn't exist then, basically. Childish Gambino. No way.

Yeah. What? And I just have to take a quick digression here because Childish Gambino, there's a lot of rap name generators out there. I feel like that's a good result. But Childish Gambino comes from a particular one from the Wu-Tang name generator. Oh, interesting. Okay. And sure enough, if we go to that site and type in.

in Donald Glover, Gambino's real name. Donald Glover, from this day forward, you will also be known as childish Gambino. Oh, so it always gives the same result. It always gives the same result. Which, of course, raises the question. Charles. Harding.

From this day forward, you will also be known as Amazing Bastard. Wham bamboozle, I'll take it. What's up, Dr. Sloane? Nate Sloan, from this day forward, you will also be known as amateur samurai. Oh, I like this because I'm the Amazing Bastard and you're the Amateur Samurai. Which feels entirely appropriate. I'll take it.

Okay, so for the rest of this, your songwriter, Amazing Bastard. I'm a musicologist, amateur samurai. Let us proceed and get to know Post Malone a little bit better. Let's focus on his current hit song. Yeah. Circles. Amazing Bastard. Have you heard this song?

This might be the song that sort of even turned me around on Post Malone. because sort of contrary to what we do on the show, sort of took his persona at face value without maybe listening deeply enough to his music. And for whatever reason, just from a song perspective, this one, it's a smash. I dig it. I'm with you. Let's use circles to listen a little more deeply to post Malone and see if we can get past the mask. There's a lot in the song that, you know, are I think hallmarks for us as listeners.

One of the big ones, TP, text painting. Yeah. Right from Go on this song, we have a lovely little bit of text painting. Check out what happens to the melody when Post Malone sings the phrase upside down. Upside down. Yeah, yeah, the melody goes down. Right on these things upside down. It starts going up and then it goes down. It literally turns upside down. I mean, this is not a work of genius yet. No. And frankly, neither is this next example that I'll give you. It's maybe a little obvious. We go to. the second verse and we have him singing about echoes and what do we do when that happens? It's going to echo. Let's find out.

You know, I like that one though because I feel like, you know, how did this been done in the 1960s? It would have been like let me hear the echoes. Echoes. Like there would have been another person like a whole group in fact. I think it's important to note you're doing jazz hands right now. Lots of jazz hands.

And it would kind of be cheesy for him to do that kind of thing. And yet this is just like this subtle background, cavernous. Yeah, I like it. Yeah. It's actually pretty. It's obvious and subtle at once. I love it. I'm a sucker for this stuff. I think another thing that you and I gravitate towards is the saddest of all chords. The minor four. The minor four chord. So this song is in the key of C major. And indeed, that's the very first chord we get. In fact, it's a major seventh chord. A little jazzy. That's good for a professor amateur samurai. And then we go to the next chord, which is a B minor 7.

Ooh. Also nice and jazzy. And then an F major 7. Sweet. And so far, everything is kind of proceeding as we would expect until this next moment. The next chord, we move from F major to F minor. And it is, you feel it. Oh, yeah.

You feel it. My shoulders just hunched up. That is a sad chord right there. You can't leave me hanging. Okay, you want me to resolve? Yeah. Yeah, there you go. It is unexpected.

It has this inevitability to it, this inescapability to it. It's something that you thought was going to be major, becoming minor. Every time we hear this, and we hear this in a lot of post-Malone tracks, I think we can even maybe identify it as a signature sound of his. It is going to give you that feeling of melancholy. Which is interesting because I had reference, like, in a lot of post-malone tracks. the echoes bit, if he had copied the 1960s, he had done the sort of vocal harmonies of the 60s. Well, the harmonies here, the actual chords of the songs, actually are a sort of very 1960s kind of sound.

The Beatles, I think, were sort of famous for their excessive use of exactly that. Yeah, there's some rich harmony going on here, courtesy of Post Malone and his co-writers, Louis Bell and Frank Dukes. So that's another thing that I'm immediately hearing. in this song and I'm liking it. It kind of connects into the lyric as well, right? Tell me more. Well, if this is about like running in circles, this chord loop, of course it is a loop

all throughout. But also, as you pointed, it's kind of inevitable. Like, it feels like it's moving somewhere. Each chord has this jazzy quality where it's both happy but a little melancholy. And then as it progresses around, it sort of ends in sadness, returns to happiness. Yeah. Right? It feels like someone's stuck in a loop.

Yeah, this is the moment. I think every time in the progression where you're like, ooh, like something good might happen. And then no. No. No. It's going to end badly. Oh, but then we start over. Maybe it will.

Maybe this time. No. It's going to get sad again. I think there's one other thing that I really respond to in this track. And it's something that happens to post Malone's voice in the chorus. I know just the moment you're talking about. Yeah? Yeah. Let's spin it.

Oh. He has... All right, amazing bastard. He has an almost Josh Grobin-style vibrato, which is everything is cold. Circles. Yeah, you nailed it. There is this remarkable vibrato effect.

At the same note, every time the melody of the chorus repeats. It's right here. That note. Dada, da, da, da. Whether he's saying cold or circle, it's like it has this intense vibrato. Vibroto means moving a note really fast between it and the note that closely neighbors it. So you get this almost kind of warbling sound. Running in circles.

Used a lot in opera. It also might kind of give you that burr feeling and when he sings it on cold. Now, this is one of the, I think, distinctive parts of this track is that vibrato. and it's funny. If you look online, people make a lot of jokes about it. There's a post on Reddit where it says, exclusive, the microphone used on Post Malone circles, and you click on it, and it's just a picture of an electric fan.

You know, this is really funny because it makes me think about in David Burns' book, how music works. He talks about how vibrato comes in and out of basically a fad and singing, and that in contemporary pop music, it's very out. So that when, you know, my understanding, It comes from opera, and operatic singers would have this crazy vibrato, which I think would help push more air and get more volume and be more easily heard in a giant opera hall. But people singing into a microphone, doing long, extended notes, even high notes in contemporary pop would just be sort of like a flat note the entire time. Maybe that's partially because of autotune, but I think it's also trying to perform an authentic way of singing and that vibrato might be seen as too...

Performative. Yeah, trying too hard. Artificial, interesting. So you think of like when Rihanna sings a high note, you usually don't get a lot of a bra. No, you don't. But I like it here. Like, it's effective,

especially in a, like, fulky kind of song. It's something that you can hear in other tracks of Post Malones as well. Let's check out a little section of his hit rock star. There's definitely some kind of hoarse on the backing vocals in there. And check out another song from Beerbongs and Bentley's Stay. Tell me that it's all. Okay.

I like that song. Me too. And what did we have? What was that last chord we just heard? It was the minor four chord. He has some things which are... He's got a sound. He's got a vibrato.

He's got that minor four chord. I kind of went down a rabbit hole with this vibrato. Because I could not make up my mind if this was a studio effect or his natural tone. Well, I do know that with tools such as Ontario's auto tune. You can create artificial vibrato. It is possible. Yes. And so how do you tell whether something is natural or artificial?

Well, I don't think you can conclude one way or the other because there's always some form of processing happening on a vocal. But which way does it lean? I'm curious. Let's do our best. Okay. So one point of evidence in this web is the veteran producer Mike Dean, who has a tweet saying that he, has just heard Post Malone's natural vibrato in concert, and it blew his mind. Oh.

Okay. And then we have Post Malone himself in an interview saying this. How the fuck is Post Malone's voice like that? How does he do it? I need answers. A lot of autotune. And I have this little, it's like a little Stevie-Nex kind of goadish thing that I do with my throat. Some people like it.

Some people don't, but, you know, I think it makes it kind of super unique. The Stevie Nicks goat effect. I forgot about that one. Yeah. Okay, so kind of two contradictory answers here. One is autotune, and then the other is some specific vocal technique he has. We got to listen to some Stevie Nix. How about landslide?

Wow. Yeah, there it is. Well, that is an excess of a braggio. Okay. Every vowel, basically. Maybe there is some intentionality here from a surprising source. Also a song, which has an acoustic progression not dissimilar from Don't Think Twice, it's All right, bringing us back to being a song. Yeah, and a very circular progression.

Okay. And then we have the acapella audio of Stay. Oh, this is some good... This is from a genius decoded video with the songs producer Watt. Inspector Sloan. Tell me that it's all. Okay. I've been waiting on this all day.

Come in the moment. Tell me how that's night when. That's not conclusive because that's not the raw audio. I can hear auto tune on that as well. All right. All right. Still inconclusive. My final piece of evidence.

Post Malone referred to himself as kind of having the Stevie-Nix goadish thing. Let's go to a YouTube video that mashes up post-Malone. Malone's rock star with a goat? Yes. I had called it a horse. I wasn't far off. I just had the wrong farm animal. So what can we say here? We don't really know. I guess the answer is it's probably some combination. It makes me think of the episode we

recorded with Simon Reynolds, who wrote an article about Autotune for Pitchfork. And he made this observation when we were talking about. He said some artists have a voice that works well with Autotune. That's right. Yeah. I think Post Malone is one of those. But there's one other thing going on here. And it's not just his voice, it's the notes that we're hearing at this specific moment in the chorus. Because earlier we went through the chord progression here, we go from C major to a B minor chord. This melodic moment in the chorus always happens over that

B minor chord. So in other words, we've got a B in the root, but the note that he's always stressing with that vibrato is a C. Oh, okay. that's very dissonant. So here's our base note, here's our root note of the chord, and here's the melody. It may also be a G chord in inversion or maybe an E minor chord in inversion,

but either way, that B is the root note. And regardless of the exact sonority, it's always going to create that super crunchy dissonance. So if I just play those, too, at the same time, it's very dissonant. So perhaps we need the vibrato to shake us out of that disconance. dissonance? I don't know. Or I would say it heightens that dissonance. And it's this really

pungent moment in the song, a really powerful moment in the song. I also like that there are so many ways that you could potentially hear the thing. It feels like our own analysis is running in circles. Let's take a break. And when we come back, we've been praising Post Malone. But should we be burying him? Let's find out. with the form of pay with a better conversion of the world.

Has you know the best one. The incredible system of payment of Shopify facilita the

website on your website, in the social and in the world. That is music for

your ears. No, you'll do you make more your business. It's a

period of a period of a month in Shopify. at Shopify records.

Immigration may be Donald Trump's signature issue. President Trump is now targeting predominantly Democratic cities for ice raids and deportations. Dozens of protesters clashing with immigration and customs enforcement agents in Minneapolis Tuesday. We will begin the process of returning millions and millions of criminal aliens back to the places from which they came.

But what we want to do in this space is talk about America and politics beyond the current president. So what do most Americans think about deportation and border security, period? I think that Americans are definitely against the kind of violent displays that we've seen in the street from ICE. When it comes to the question of deportation, the answer is more complicated. My sense is that people want order at the border. They don't like the idea of having no idea who's coming into the United States at any given time. The view on immigration from the bottom up instead of the top down. That's this week on America Actually.

Every Saturday in your audio and video feeds. Amazing Bastard, we're back. Good to be with you, amateur samurai. Thank you. We have been discussing some of the things we love about circles by Post Malone, but let's not forget some of the very valid criticisms of this artist. And we can start with one of the more bizarre ones, that he, like many contemporary musicians,

is someone who is gaming the current model of the streaming economy. Okay, yeah. I think it's a boring criticism. But please, go ahead. It's fascinating, though, to see what. what they did because when his song Congratulations was released and you went to YouTube to find the official video yeah this is what you would find. I've never realized that that is one of the deepest 808 bass lines that I've ever heard it almost is unregisterable. It's so low. Yeah, yeah it's at the three

threshold of audibility. That is the chorus of congratulations. When you're listening to a song like that, you expect after the chorus, what would happen? You would go back to the verse? In this song, they just play the chorus again. And again, in this video, I should say. Oh, really? It is a video of just the chorus of the song on repeat for three and a half minutes.

Wait. Why would they do such a thing? I know, it's perplexing. Okay, well, first of all, you asked, why would they do such a thing? Yes. Which suggests that this might not be post-malone. Maybe it is. Who knows who's sort of behind the marketing thoughts of how to promote a track.

But, yeah, at this point, everyone is trying to figure out how to get noticed, whether that is being able to place your song effectively on a playlist on Spotify or having some crazy, wild moment where you release a 10-part mini-document about your life since your last release. Hello, Justin Bieber. Kind of desperate. Here, I think he's trying to make sure that the hook gets stuck in your ear. It's probably that simple.

That's what I would think. That's a great guess. There are other commentators who read it this way. You're going to hear Post Malone's new song, and you find you were just listening to the chorus over and over again. Oh, you have to go find the real thing? Then you have to go to Spotify, you'd go to Spotify, title, what have you. And effectively, in that way, Post Malone has just gotten two streams for the price of one, kind of.

They've gotten a YouTube stream and potentially a Spotify stream, which is slightly more lucrative than a YouTube stream. So it's kind of baiting listeners potentially to say, oh, you want the full thing? Go listen to it somewhere else. We'll get two streams and one of them will be worth more. Yeah, I agree. I don't think it's like the word. It's not a dark art.

Well, but I think everybody in pop music is somehow participating in this dark art of trying to capture attention. Yeah. And that I think has a lot to do with the structure of the economy, right? I think it's such a common criticism within our world, our economy. in which we blame the individual for the thing which might be structural. Yeah. I find it more fascinating than anything else.

It is interesting. Okay, let's go to another criticism. This is maybe, I don't know if this is a wide one. This is one that I have devised after watching a lot of videos of Post Malone. Dude smokes a lot on stage in interviews. Bad role model. I'm actually going to say, like, live your life. But when you're on stage, like, I've never felt this way, but it made me very uncomfortable

to see him performing this song circles with a cigarette in his mouth. I don't like it. Okay. And I think maybe the most important one is accusations of cultural appropriation. Yeah, that's why I was not turned into his music. Yeah, yeah. This is someone who appropriates the language style and sound of black music for his own profitability without really giving back to the communities that have created that music.

Yeah, I mean, the place that he lost me was where at some point he had a sort of disastrous a set of interviews in which he sort of said he's making hip hop. He said he wasn't making hip hop. He said hip hop doesn't say anything important. If you want to message in your music, don't go to hip hop. And yet, right, and that was very rankling because he's sitting there like making millions off hip hop. Yeah.

It fits into a mold of the white performer who gets to sort of put on different identities and then discard them when they're of no use to them anymore. Yeah. And we might even think about that in relationship. to the music that we're listening to now. Yeah. Circles is really an Americana root song. There's really no sign of hip hop left in this track, whereas there was, you know, in

congratulations, that was a trap song. Yeah. Finally, we have the criticism that Post Malone's music is really stupid. It's really simple. It's really repetitive. It's really uncreative. I mean, this could be said of so much different guys of music. Yeah.

Let's go deep into that criticism. Let's focus on the repetition. We actually talked about this a little bit in our interview with Mike Posner, way back when, how the chorus of the song Rockstar also extends into the verse, and basically you are being hit over the head with this melody over and over and over again. Yeah, don't bore us. Get to the chorus. And I think another song on Beer, Bongs, and Bentley's takes that idea to the nth degree. It's Candy Paint.

Let's listen to the chorus. Candy paint with the white on top. D'O'O' up drop. If you busy plotting on what I got, kicking your door is what you thought. $100,000 on the tabletop. Have priced my whip, same price my watch. Got no jumper, but I bawl a lot.

Bitch on your stony, I do it I want. Candy paint with the white on top. Another chorus. So every time we hear the chorus, it's a double chorus. It's a double chorus. Which means you get that line. da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da like double the amount of times. And he repeats that within each chorus many, many times.

And he uses it in the first verse as well. Is this like a ballad to his Lamborghini? This is... You're speechless because it's totally an utterly in-adneed-dain. I'm processing this. A love song between a man in his car. Yeah. Yeah, I'm buying. Love it or hate it, this is a very effective technique for drilling a song into your head.

Yes. Over the course of candy paint, I did the math. You are exposed to that melody. da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da 68 times you are just so that is like think of each of those as a nail going into your brain tick tick tick

by the end of this your brain is just hammered with that melody he's not alone in this like Lizzo's truth hurts is the same Drake's God's plan does much the same yes no I think this is absolutely a strategy of modern music yeah and I think you could say okay post Malone like put a little more

creativity into some of these melodies. That might sound a little harsh, but I have a specific example in mind. His song On the Road from his new album, Hollywood's Bleeding. I got so many hits, can't remember them all. While I'm taking the shit,

look at the plaques on the wall. He's got so many hits. I can't remember them all while I'm taking a shit. Look at the plaques on the wall. That suggests someone who is not really putting a lot of thought into their art.

How would you describe my face? Oh, sorry, I just imagine that. Your face, I would say, was crestfallen, consternated, vexed. But yeah, please. Here's the thing. Like, he's intentionally irreverent, right? Like, isn't that part of what is attractive, probably especially to young people? It's just like, I'm just trying to mess with you.

Yeah, no, I totally agree. And yet, I wonder if there isn't some genuine truth here that Post-Malone actually doesn't remember all of his hits. And I say that because in the same song, there are two melodies that we have heard in other post-malone songs. No. So here's On the Road again. Check out this melody line. That's the same as rock star. I've been fucking hos and popping pillies, man, I feel just like a rock star. And a little later in the song, we have this melody. ECHOs. Yeah. I'm glad, like me, you heard a very clear kind of melodic reference. Is it intentional or did he genuinely forget that he wrote those songs?

I don't know. Well, it also sort of falls into our earlier analysis or maybe contrast with our early analysis of praising him for having some signature sounds, maybe recycling these very simple melodies anyway. Yeah. That's a way to say, hey, this is me. I agree. And I think when he says, this is me, I give you these simple, repeatable melodies.

it matches something we've been talking about. There's a tension in his music. There's the kind of celebration of wealth and excess. And then there's also the sadness and melancholy of kind of the meaningless of all of that. I think that sentiment is most beautifully expressed in one of his songs, Rich and Sad. Post Malone has it all.

And what does it? mean. I think the repetition in so much of his music captures that. I mean, again, he's someone who's going in circles. Where does all this lead? We don't know. Those melodic fragments that repeat again and again kind of have that sense of fatalism, have that sense of not being sure where you're going. You know, it makes my stomach almost uneasy. It does for me too. And I think in this way, Post Malone is tapping into something that is a tried and true part of Western musical history. and that's because it's time for classical masters. Take me to Piotr Chikovsky's sixth symphony.

Charlie, I'm putting Chikovsky into the name generator right now, the Wutang name generator. Piotr Chikovsky, from this day forward, you will also be known as misunderstood conqueror. Whoa, that's kind of heavy. That's a good one. Someone who was a queer man in a very heteronormative Russian world, Very misunderstood.

And yet the conqueror of Russian music. Yeah. Powerful. Wu Tang name generator. Doesn't fail. Deep truths. Okay. His sixth symphony is a masterpiece.

It ends with one of the most heartbreaking passages in the canon of classical music. And it all hinges on this very simple melodic phrase that goes like this. The sending minor line. I think that could be something you'd hear in a post-Malone song. 100%. I'm not bitches on my car. They know that I'm a star. Wait, sorry.

They know that I'm a star. Sorry. So this is a very simple melodic line. As you say, it's all drawn from the B minor scale. It's actually just descending down the scale. And the next thing it does is also super simple. So basically it's just descending down the B minor scale. And yet this is what it becomes.

And then he's going to take that line and it's going to go even further down, descend to the root of the scale. Okay, now we've reached the bottom of the scale. Let's do it again. Let's go back to that simple melodic motive. We'll play it one more time. This time even lower, basier, low strings, cellos, basses. It's like we're sinking down. Oh, we were in the depths of the ocean.

And there's no escape. We're going to go down with that impossibly low territory. like post and congratulations where nothing is audible any longer. Yes, we're going to go to the asymptote

of hearing and then finally we'll resolve with the end of that phrase this is one of the saddest things I've ever heard in my life.

This is the minoriest minor that ever minored. Charlie, this minor majored in minor. This is not how you end a symphony. You end a symphony with like horns

and marching and triumph. This is like not... Utter despair. Not a bang, but a whimper. And I think the repetition here, hearing that same melodic motive over and over again, is the tragedy and the beauty of having no escape. Because this just like post is circularly descending, going down, never ending.

It's this mix of bravado and despair. And I think it is one of the key qualities of contemporary music. It's something we talked about, in fact, a lot in our last. episode covering Mac Miller, Future in Drake, Billy Eilish, this duality, the highs and the lows, the hopes and the fears. I think that's in Post-Malon 2, and I think it comes through the magic of repetition. Well, I had said that it makes my stomach uneasy. You know, the most pointed criticism that is very well earned is his sort of flippant borrowing of black culture. And I think that in his circular issues, whether it's his melodies, his song about running in circles, that the lyrical motive of running in circles and then not finding anything happy, it feels like he's trying on these other identities and cultures.

And then also he personally doesn't feel like he's gratified by it, like makes it even feel more, like, disrespectful. And I don't know. It just doesn't sit with me well. I simultaneously can hear with someone else's ears how maybe sort of decontextualized to the larger cultural criticism, the music itself may speak to some young person running in circles. Both are there for me, right? Like I feel like my relationship to him as a persona and artist will continue to be necessarily complicated. And I think I can still listen to parts of the music and isolate the moments that I find meaningful. and have to kind of like how these songs are running in circle and there's no resolution.

I don't think I can quite find an easy resolution with post music. That's my honest appraisal. I appreciate your honesty. Now, before we wrap, I feel like you had one other thought about something we got into inside A of this episode. That's right. The natural vibrato or auto-tuned vibrato, the perennial debate. Yes. About Post Malone.

Well, I think that there might be a scientific way of solving this issue. Do tell. As I do contain some production skills myself in some of these same tools that he uses, I thought, well, we could have an A, B experiment in which you could sing the line. And one of them could have the fake vibrato, and the other you could try yourself. And let the listeners decide which is better. Should we do that right now? Yes, we should. All right.

Okay. So first I'll do it without any vibrato. Okay. Run away, but we're running in circles. And I'll try my best Stevie Nix, Billy Goat vibrato. Run away, but we're running in circles. So you can let us know how you feel. Which do you prefer the completely artificial one?

or natural Nate or some hybrid of the two. Let us know. Nate, I want to thank you for both challenging my assumptions, bending my ear. You know, I think sometimes the most interesting stuff that we find leaves us a little bit in that liminal space. Yeah. And it personally might at first feel dissatisfying. I find it to be continually challenging, and I appreciate that. Charlie, you're an amazing bastard.

Switched-on-pop is produced by me, Nate Sloan, and he, Charlie Harding. Brandon McFarland is our amazing engineer and editor. Megan Lubin and Bridget Armstrong are producers and our executive. producers are Liz Nelson and Nashat Kurwa. We're a production of the Fox Media Podcast Network, and you can find more of our episodes anywhere you get your podcasts, especially on our website, switchedonpop.com, where you will see beautiful illustrations of our show made by the fabulous Iris Gottlieb. The brilliant Abby Barr is our community manager, so reach out to us on Instagram, Twitter. We love talking with y'all there at Switched On Pop.

Thank you, sir. Until next week, thanks for listening.