Switched on Pop - ‘Sinners’ summons the demons of American music
Episode Date: May 13, 2025We rarely cover movies here at Switched On Pop. But after seeing Ryan Coogler's new vampire musical Sinners, we knew we had to make an exception. The movie is an ode to Black music. Throughout its o...ver two hour runtime, the film pays tribute to the blues: nodding to the musicians, instruments, and melodies that make it a foundational genre in the American musical canon. There's also Irish folk vampires, original music from Ludwig Göransson, and a whole lot of history – perfect for Charlie and Nate to sink their teeth into. MORE Subscribe to our newsletter to receive your own bingo card! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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Welcome to Switched on Pop.
I'm musicologist Nate Sloan.
And I'm songwriter Charlie Harding.
And today on the pod we are talking about Sinners,
the hit horror film written and directed by Ryan Coogler.
And you know, it's so rare that I think about a movie for weeks after seeing it
and Sinners is one of those rare films.
Yes, it is not often on the pod that we talk movies.
I mean, maybe there's a handful of times.
we talked about Wicked, obviously, a movie musical.
We talked about Barbie.
This is a little different than those, because I feel like those movies produce songs that became pop cultural anthems in their own right.
But Sinners is different.
I don't think there's going to be a hit song that emerges from this film.
And yet, this movie might do more than any other cinema, certainly in the 21st century,
to advance arguments about how we should listen to music, listen to music.
music history, perceive racial identity in music, perceive genre. This is like a musicologist's
fantasy come to life. I mean, it also might be a vampire musical, so we'll get to it. And we should
say spoilers, but I feel like we're going to talk about like the big themes, not sort of specific
plot details and get into the music, but we have to talk spoilers. Exactly. We'll try not to give
away any, you know, huge reveals, but we do want to get into the weeds of the music in this film. So
if you have the opportunity to go see Sinners and then listen to this podcast, I'd recommend it.
Yeah.
Okay, Big Picture Sinners takes place in the 1930s, Mississippi.
We've got twin brothers, Smoke and Stack coming from Chicago down to Mississippi to open a nightclub.
A juke joint.
A juke joint, thank you.
Their name, of course, based on the song Smoke Stack Lightning, made famous by Howlin Wolf.
Oh, Smokestack Light.
And they recruit their cousin, Sammy Preacher Boy.
more to play guitar at their juke joint. He's a great blues guitarist, great singer, and they're
dealing with themes of faith, temptation, and the entire history and celebration of the blues.
We should hear a track, right? Definitely. Let's start with traveling. Our introduction to this
character, Preacher Boy, played by Miles Cate.
That's some classic blues.
we dive into it, we hear the reaction from one of the twin brothers there, played by Michael B. Jordan.
He goes, woo. That was his genuine reaction to hearing this song performed on set for the first time by his co-star, Miles Caden. I love that moment.
That voice is nuts. Now, the sound of this song traveling is really the core of the sound of this movie.
The sound of Mississippi Delta blues guitar, country blues, played on a very specific instrument.
that has its own kind of mythology within the film.
A 1932 Dobro resonator guitar that in the world of the film originally belonged to the real-life bluesman, Charlie Patton.
And this is like the first sound we hear and it'll continue throughout the soundtrack.
It's a familiar sound.
It's an acoustic guitar.
But Charlie, there's something very specific about this particular instrument.
Like, help me understand the tone of this guitar.
Despite the wall of guitars that I have behind me, the Dobro resonator guitar is one that I don't own.
It's a really special instrument that's developed in the 1920s.
It was invented by a Slovakian American named John Doppierra, who is looking to find a way to make guitar louder, right?
Bands are getting bigger.
We're in the jazz era.
If you have to compete with horns, drums, upright bass, how are you going to be heard with your measly acoustic guitar with a little sound?
hole. Because there's no electrical amplification yet. Right. And so the resonator guitar is a way of
making your guitar louder. Basically, it is a guitar made out of a steel body usually, sometimes would.
But in the center is effectively a speaker, a metal resonating speaker. It is a cone shape.
If you took off the top, you'd be like, wow, there's a speaker inside that guitar. And his job is to just
push more sound out of the instrument to be heard. It's all about being heard.
And part of its special sound is it's also one of the first instances of distortion.
When you play the resonator really loud, the speaker cone can start to resonate in ways that are unpleasant but actually really pleasant.
And so you get sort of a growl that comes out of this instrument.
You want to be heard and you want to have this growl.
And that's what we're hearing as the basis for the guitar in sinners.
Other really important thing here is that he's playing the guitar with a slide.
This is taking either a piece of glass or metal, putting it on your finger, and so.
sliding it around the strings that gets this very loose feeling,
lets you hit notes in between the notes,
and it lets you strum whole big, beautiful chords
and these open guitar tunings on the resonator.
So the resonator plus the slide,
that's really the sound of so much Mississippi Delta Blues.
Or in the case of the blues singer, Mississippi Fred McDowell,
he actually used hollowed out steakbone as a slide.
Really?
Now, I'm geeking out on all these historical details,
but there's something,
even more essential about the role of the blues here. Because I think today we might think of
blues music as rarefied sort of antique, something kind of that has this museum quality to it.
But this scene is reminding us that blues was pop music in the 1930s. Blues was entertainment.
Blues was music for dancing for all night juke joint sessions where you're getting sweaty and
getting down and shaking your booty. I mean, how does Michael B. Jordan's?
character react. He says, we're going to make some money as soon as he starts hearing
preacher boy playing and singing. Right. So this is one of our first clues that this movie has a bit of
revisionist history. It's trying to argue for the central role of the blues in African American
culture and by extension in U.S. popular culture. The other thing is when we hear this song,
they are traveling, they're going down a dirt road, leaving the sharecropping farm that
they're on, and they are going to find themselves at a crossroads, if you will. I think that that is
sort of the much larger background thematics that's going on is that so much of the narrative of
Delta Blues comes from the caricature of the crossroads. The crossroads are literally a place.
There was a crossroad in Clarksdale, Mississippi, where first Tommy Johnson, the bluesman,
and then co-opted by Robert Johnson, the bluesman, supposedly sold their soul to the devil,
or maybe more precisely Papa Legba, who is a voodoo, West African character, who's sort of a trickster, a giver of gifts, someone who is an intermediary between the spirit world and the human world.
And the idea that it was the devil has been more of a anglified translation that the person that gave Robert Johnson and Tommy Johnson their skills that they sold to the devil was actually Papa Legba.
And so when we're hearing Travlin and our main character Preacher Boy, he's also at a crossroads,
deciding to leave his father's church to go with his cousins to this juke joint, to not play God's music,
but to play blues music, something that is going to summon spirits from potentially beyond the grave,
like supposedly Great Bluesmen from the 1920s and 30s.
Should we listen to a little bit of Robert Johnson's Crossroad Blues, Charlie?
I went to the crossroads.
That Robert Johnson recording later covered by Eric Clapton and Cream.
This is like an iconic piece of American history here.
And it's cool to hear these sounds revived in this way.
I mean, let's not forget the context.
Like, this is a key moment in the film.
As you said, it represents a crossroads.
The song, Traveling is about embarking on something new.
throwing yourself into the unknown.
And this film has some really dramatic stuff down the line,
mostly involving fangs and garlic and wooden stakes
because it's going to take a turn into the realm of horror.
But right now, it's really more setting the scene of this Southern Mississippi juke joint.
And at this point, we need to talk about the creators behind this film.
Yeah, the director, writer, Ryan Coogler, his longtime collaborator.
The collaborator, the composer Ludvich Gorensen, they made this movie with music at the core from the very beginning.
Like, it wasn't something that was added on later in production.
Like, this story was conceived from the beginning as a musical tale.
Yeah.
Gorinson has an executive producer credit.
He was on set for the making of the film.
They've been collaborating since they were students at USC.
Shameless plug for you.
Fight on.
Shout out.
And there was a course that Coogler had taken.
where one of his directing teachers was like, never, ever put temp music into your film.
It's going to change the nature of the film. If you use someone else's music,
you need to think about music and sound going into the beginning. And so they have made
very successful collaborations from Fruitvale Station to Black Panther, Creed. And in many ways,
I feel like this is their magnum opus working together. This is a film about music with music
integrated from the very start. The blues occupies a foundational element in the
story. And I think for Ryan Coogler especially, this was a discovery of sorts. He said on the
In Proximity Podcast, the best example for me is like, if you like over the counter like corn syrup,
listening to the blues music is like going to a maple tree and like, yeah, like sticking it in
like drinking it straight from the tree. It's like mind blind. If you like over the counter
corn syrup, listening to blues music is like going to a maple tree.
and just drinking straight from the tree.
It's raw, it's unprocessed,
it's the roots of so much of American popular music.
Right, he describes blues as the source,
like the wellspring of so much African-American creativity
and musical expression.
And that idea is extrapolated in one of the most powerful scenes in the film.
Something I've been wanting to tell you for a long time.
It might hurt you.
Hope you don't lose your mind.
Well, I was just a boy, about eight years old.
You threw me a Bible on that Mississippi rope.
See, I love your papa. You did all you can do.
And they say the truth hurts, so I lied to you.
Yes, I lied to you.
to you. This is, I Lie to You, the centerpiece of the soundtrack, in some ways, a centerpiece of the film.
It was written by Gorenson and Raphael Sadiq, founder of Tony Tony, DeAngelo collaborator,
Beyonce collaborator, kind of living legend. Yeah, icon. It starts with that same
Dobro resonator guitar, that same blues feel. This is Preacher Boys' Moment to Shine in the
juke joint. You can hear everyone stomping their feet in approval. Yep. And after this intro,
something kind of astonishing, something almost magical happens. And it's a moment that was likely
inspired by Coogler's reading of the author Amiri Baraka, one of the great commentators on
American music. I told you, Charlie, this is this movie is a musicologist's dream, right?
It's got texts and subtexts and citations. Not since a complete unknown based on the
author Elijah Wald's book, Dylan Goes Electric, have we had?
such a musical logical explosion.
Yeah.
And Amiri Baraka argues that we need to hear the history of African-American music on a continuum.
A continuum from West Africa to the American South to northern urban cities.
All of these different styles that we think of as kind of distinct from hip-hop to R&B to
soul to blues to Senegalian musical practice.
Like these are actually all part of one unbroken lineage.
They are just different aspects, different reform.
reflections of the same communal experience.
Baraka calls this concept rhythm travel.
And when you hear music in that way, it makes you not only appreciate it sonically,
but it makes you appreciate it culturally.
So this song just being very unusual.
It invokes spirits of the present, past, and future.
We are traveling through time as if conjured by the rhythm of the blues.
And Preacher Boy invites it.
The next thing that he sings is somebody take a.
me in your arms tonight.
You could think, ah, yes, I would like to end up in the arms of a lover.
But you could also read it as almost like a seance.
Somebody come and join me in this room.
Yeah.
Somebody take me.
So he has called in the spirits of his ancestors.
You know, at the beginning of the film, and his father's like, don't play the devil's music.
This is the warning.
This is like, watch out.
You might conjure up the past.
but it turns out conjuring with the past is also something very beautiful.
The first thing that we hear is going all the way back to the known roots of the blues.
We're hearing West African griot music is the first thing that he conjures.
The griot are a West African cast of poet, singer, musician, storytellers that carry narratives of their lineage through song.
And we hear the instrument, the Quora.
which was one of the main stringed instruments that is, in many ways, the forefather to the banjo.
And if you want to hear the sound of the cora, we could listen to Sound Yolo Susoko, the king of the cora.
I think there's also an ingoni in there as well, which is a West African predecessor to the banjo.
And yeah, it's like you hear that thick sound of the Dobro resonator guitar being replaced with the kind of thinner, more delicate sound of the cora and the ingone, and you realize, oh, something is happening.
Right, right, right.
And then things get really weird.
A character that is sort of a hybrid Hendricks-Prince-Prinse-Collins-like figure emerges, and we move forward in time from the 1930s to the 1960s with yet another distinct sound, a loud electric guitar.
Hendrix also summoned spirits in his music.
In a song like Voodoo Child, you get the same otherworldly mystical electric guitar.
Then continuing on our rhythm travel through the song,
I lied to you, Preacher Boy takes us yet forward into the future to the era of hip hop.
Yeah.
We get a TR808 drum machine.
We get turntabalism in the style of, like, Grandmaster Flash.
Yeah.
You say one for the trouble, two for the time.
Come on, girls, let's rock that.
And I lied to you.
We got B-boys and B-girls.
dancing, the sounds of the hip-hop drum machine blend with the West African Jembe, and then we take
a further trip forward in time towards the era of 90s G-Funk.
Couglar, of course, is from Oakland, California, and these are the sounds of his youth.
When we hear that high, whiny mogs synthesizer, it immediately puts us into the world of,
I don't know, nothing but a G-thang.
Dr. Dre, Snoop Dog.
Definitely.
I also hear a little bit of like electrofunk planet rock in there.
Oh, yeah.
It's a moment in the theater where you're watching this scene,
this 1930s juke joint all of a sudden populated by these figures from the distant
West African past and the American musical future.
It's kind of this Afro-Futurist vision of that rhythm travel hypothesis by Amiri Baraka.
And you're thinking, who spiked my popcorn?
What is in my drink?
You're like, this shouldn't work, and yet I am transfixed.
Yeah.
What do you make of this scene?
Like, what is it trying to argue in the film?
I think it serves as corroboration of this central notion that blues is a wellspring of
creativity, that it also is indebted to these deeper West African musical practices,
that it still undergirds the expression of, like, all the sounds we're listening to on the radio on Spotify today.
And then there's a less.
celebratory part of this too, which is there is a threat lurking here. As this scene continues,
the literal physical walls of the juke joint fall away. And we see all these people from all these
different eras dancing together surrounded by flames. There is danger, the struggle to preserve
this tradition, to preserve this livelihood against the threat of white supremacy, which is
always at the margins, the threat of violence, the threat of appropriation, the threat of
economic undercutting. And that threat receives a physical embodiment in this movie. It's the
ageless Irish bloodsucker remick. He arrives in this film with his own musical
accompaniment. He's a musician too. That's what's so brilliant about this movie. Even the
vampires sing and dance. I told you, it's a vampire musical first ever, I swear. Well, there is the
vampire musical that Jason Siegel does at the end of forgetting Sarah Marshall. So there might be some
precedence. True, true, true. So he, along with two of his converts, you know, there's probably a term for
this in the vampire mythology that I don't know. Yeah, I don't know. Yeah. They auditioned to be led into
the juke joint essentially, because vampires need to be invited in by performing a little ditty. And it's kind of
funny and kind of menacing. It's called Pick Poor Robin Clean.
I pick poor I've been clean
Pick poor I've been clean
Pick his head
I pick his feet
I would have picked his body
But it wouldn't fit to eat
Oh I pick poor I've been clean
Pick poor I've been clean
And I'll be satisfied
You see these literal vampires
And I think your first reaction is like
Oh okay
This is a metaphor
For vampiric white culture
taking these authentic, vibrant black sounds and sort of denuding them, whitewashing them, profiting off
of them.
This is in so many ways the story of American music.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
They're even playing the banjo, an instrument with roots from West Africa.
The sound is so different from that deep resonant delta blues we heard earlier.
It's kind of like light and hokey and a little corny.
And at this point, it seems pretty clear that the film is kind of.
going to set up this dichotomy between the square vampiric kind of out-of-touch vampires and the
syncopated, growling, deep tradition of the blues. But Charlie, it's not quite as simple as that.
And I think that's what makes this movie truly great. It turns out there's a lot more going on
with the music of these vampires. Let's dig into that after the break.
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Charlie, we just heard these vampires
perform a menacing,
very white-sounding rendition
of pick poor, Robin Clean.
They're literally going to pick you clean.
They're going to eat you all the way
down to the bones.
It's a menacing on multisering
on multiple levels, musically, lyrically, et cetera, et cetera.
My assumption watching the scene initially was like, okay, this is a minstrel song.
This is a song composed by white entertainers in the 1800s to mock and demean black people
and black musicians.
But if we actually study this fascinating little number, pick poor Robin Clean, it's much
more complicated than that.
Let's start by going to the original recording of the song, 1931, Gishi Wiley and L.V. Thomas.
These are two black women, kind of anomalous in the larger blues tradition.
And they are singing what we have to imagine is actually an African-American folk song.
The meaning of this song is obscured.
It's kind of been lost to the ages.
You can find so many different interpretations of it.
Some historians wrongly believed that it is a minstrel song.
like I said, that's clearly not the case.
Others, like the jazz writer Ralph Ellison,
think of it as an expression of trying to like laugh through suffering.
Historian Elijah Wald thinks it's about sex.
He says it's like plucking feathers,
is taking a lover's clothes off.
The multiple interpretations of this song
are probably exactly the reason why Coogler and Gorinson
selected it for this scene.
Right.
They even put it as the final song of the soundtrack.
So this is very clearly intentional.
What is it doing in the mouth of the vampire?
Well, far from our original idea of it setting up this dichotomy of like white, vampiric culture and authentic black expression,
Coogler is doing something even more complicated.
On the WTF podcast with Mark Marin,
Cougler said that in his reading and listening in preparation for making this film,
what he learned is that everything we think about as genre is fiction.
In my research, I discovered that, you know, and people would talk about this all the time.
It's not like my discovery.
You know what I'm saying?
People would speak to this often.
Yeah.
But you could make the argument that genre is an invention of racism.
You know what I'm saying?
You can make like the categorization of different types of music.
Yeah.
It's essentially like a form of segregation.
When we listen to blues, when we listen to country music and we think, oh, this is black people music and this is white people music, that's not.
a historical reality. All of these styles coexisted, we're being exchanged, we're being
collaborated on together in the American South. Only later when the music industry comes into the
scene, does it create these divisions and these target audiences and say, okay, this is music for you,
this is music for them, these lines do not cross. That was not the actual lived experience
of these musicians and audiences in the American South in the early 20th century. Okay, so this
corroborate something I saw Couglar talk about where it turns out he is like a Irish folk music fan.
I'm obsessed with Irish folk music. My kids are obsessed with it. Look, my first name is Irish. I think it's
not known how much, how much, how much crossover there is between, like, you know, African-American
culture and Irish culture and how much that stuff's loved in our community. Critically, our antagonist,
Remick, the vampire, is born in the 12th century, the era in which,
England was invading Ireland. He's a character whose worldview is developed before the
age of imperialism, before the Atlantic slave trade, before these divisions of racial identity
as they're represented in musical genres even existed. And so he's coming with a different
kind of musical promise. It isn't this simple binary of vampirism. Instead, he's sort of
offering this potential gift of everlasting life, right?
Vampires live forever, except for in the daytime.
And I think you can hear Coogler and Gorensen's appreciation of Irish music in the songs that they choose.
Because Pickball, Rob and Clean feels like a straw man.
In comparison to the incredibly beautiful ballad, Will You Go, Lassie Go?
It's such a beautiful duet between Lola Kirky and Jack O'Connell.
and they are singing about going into this pastoral mountain where the time is blossoming and going to collect these herbs.
It feels kind of like a call to the heavens, a call to afterlife.
We'll all go together.
And what an interesting choice of song, because I think it has a lot of parallels to what we heard in Pick Poor Robin Clean,
a song which has sort of lost its provenance.
Will You Go, Lassie Go, also called Purple Heather, also called Wild Mountain Time, is one of those songs that
feels like it's an infinitely long traditional song, and its roots are not entirely clear. It's
thought to have descended from the Scottish song by Robert Ultrabald Smith, which is adapted into
Wild Mountain Time in the 1950s by Francis McPeak, and then makes its way onto the BBC airwaves
in 1957, is brought into the American folk revival scene in the 50s and 60s, and is a song
which has been covered by John Baez, Bob Dylan, countless other folk stars. And so,
in a certain way, this song is anachronistic. The film takes place in the 1930s. This version of the song didn't exist until 30 years after that. And yet the melody and its history are not exactly known and lost to time. And so the song does have this sort of timeless like quality, both in its narrative, but also in its musical presentation. And it shows us that perhaps the vampires aren't the real enemy. They are offering the gift of everlasting life in this harmonious space.
suggesting that the real enemy is lurking further than the background and it is the real manifestation
of white supremacy that KKK are hiding in the background of this film and are the true antagonist
to our main characters. This moment when the vampires sing, will you go lassie, it stops you
in your tracks and you think, oh, there's more happening here than I realized. Right. Because it humanizes
them so deeply. And you realize that these characters are not two dimensional.
Charlie, you described this idea of everlasting life as a gift.
And the vampire Remick really sees it as being something appealing to his victims, these African-American juke joint patrons.
Like, I'm offering you a place beyond discrimination, beyond racism, where our musics can come together, where we can recognize the common ground of these musical traditions.
And we can end this musical segregation.
And that idea is brought to life later in the film
when the lead vampire remic
leads all of these African-American vampires
that he's converted in a rousing rendition
of the Irish slip jig,
the Rocky Road to Dublin.
Love this.
Well, in the merry month of May from me home,
I started, left the girls of tomb,
where nearly broken-hearted, saluted father dear,
kissed me, darling mother, drank a pint of beer,
And tears this mother than off to reap the corn leave where I was born.
Cut a stout, black thorn to banish grossing cobblings brand new pair of brooks,
rattling over the box and frightened all the dogs on the rocky road.
A doubling one, two, three, four, five.
Put the hair and turn her down the road.
Uh, Nate, what is happening?
How do I count this thing?
They're saying one, two, three, four, five.
But I can't figure out what time signature I'm in.
It's funky.
It's, I called it a slip jig.
And that's because that describes a nudge.
98 meter dance tune in Irish music tradition.
So one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight.
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight.
I can't do it anymore.
No, no, no, no.
You have to think of it in groups of three.
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, one.
No, no, no.
One, two, three. One, two, three. One, two, three.
Take those beats and divide each of them into groups of three.
one to three one to three one two three one two three one two three four five six seven eight nine one two three four five six seven eight that's where we get the nine eight
but yeah but i'm not surprised it's hard to count for you because it's kind of complicated in this way
it's a very specific kind of jig pattern a kind of specific dancing pattern it's also telling this
story and there's so many moments here that i think are intended to actually call back to the juke joint
song. I lied to you. The fiddle that enters is pulsing in this kind of rough and resonant,
growly way, with little even blues affectation, kind of similar to the resonator guitar we heard
earlier. All the gathered vampires are clapping and stomping just like they were in the juke
joint earlier. This is not a scene making fun of this music or mocking it or denigrating it.
It is showing it as, I think, a corollary to the black experience.
Like you were talking about the Irish experience is one of oppression and resistance.
Like that expresses itself in the music in such similar ways.
These are not enemies in a conventional sense.
These are more like allies who have been pushed apart by the ruling classes.
Right.
And the difference between their music and their cultural traditions is real,
but it's also kind of exaggerated in this way that makes it easier to divide people in order to conquer them.
Okay, so we've heard that Kugler and Gorensen are trying to give us a wider view of music,
perhaps a desegregated view of music and the way that genre can force people into different groups.
But ultimately, this movie is an ode to the blues.
And I feel like we get that towards the end of the film when we go to the present and we get to see a living legend, Buddy Guy.
Buddy Guy performs the song Travelin that we heard at the very beginning,
taking us from the past into the present,
showing that the blues is still alive and well today.
Ending this film with the real-life blues musician Buddy Guy at 88 years old
is a perfect summation of so many of these themes.
He's someone who has lived this story depicted in the film.
He grew up in a sharecropping community,
picking cotton as a young boy. He traveled to the north to make it as an electric blues musician
in the Chicago blues scene. And from then on has become a kind of living icon of this music.
And when he plays the song at the end, you hear all that history. You feel it in his fingers,
and his vocal tone. It reminds us that these kind of shadowy phantoms, mythic, almost magical
figures like Robert Johnson are real people and they have real embodiments today as well.
This is blues as wellspring as source, but also as living tradition. And it makes me kind of
emotional, honestly, that we have this film that makes such a passionate case for the importance
and the relevance of this music, but never in a way that feels academic or instructional. It's like,
this is a vampire movie. This is a vampire movie. This is a.
a horror movie. It's edge of your seat entertainment. If it was anything else, it would be so easy
to roll your eyes at this. But because it's all wrapped up in this incredibly powerful and
gripping story, you come away with it, not thinking about, oh, I learned an important lesson
about the blues. You were like, oh my God, that was crazy when that guy bit that guy.
And in the end, I think that's why sinners might have an impact, might even create something
of a blues revival, Charlie.
Maybe even an Irish music revival.
So are you saying that it would be okay for me to buy one more guitar?
Is it time that I get a resonator?
I think I see a little space on the wall where we can hang that 1932 dough,
wrote Charles.
Switched on Pop is produced by Rihanna Cruz, engineered by Brandon McFarlane,
edited by Art Chung, illustrations by Iris Gottlieb.
Our theme music is by Zach Tenario and Jossi Adams of Arc Iris.
We're a member of the Vox Media Podcast Network
and a production of Vulture,
which is part of New York Magazine.
You can subscribe at nymag.com slash pod.
Listen to more episodes of Switched on Pop anywhere you get podcasts
and find us on social media at Switched on Pop.
Head to our website, switchonpop.com,
put in your email address to get a weekly newsletter from us.
We'll be back next week with a brand new episode,
breaking down the surprises and oddities of the Billboard Hot 100.
It's our series, Chartbreakers.
And until then, thanks for listening.
