Switched on Pop - When Good Music Happens To Bad People

Episode Date: June 30, 2016

We have more information about pop stars lives than ever before, but this transparency is not always uplifting for music lovers. Just as we may enjoy following the intimate lives of celebrities on Ins...tagram, we simultaneously uncover how stars abuse their power to marginalize others, commit heinous crimes and inspire mass atrocity. Sometimes skeletons in the closet turn our to be literal skeletons. As listeners, this undoubtedly colors the way we hear our old favorite songs. Join us as we explore how to listen to good music that happens to bad people. FEATURING Jerry Lee Lewis - Great Balls Of Fire The Righteous Brothers - You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling Garry Glitter - Hey R. Kelly - Ignition (Remix) Wagner - Ride Of The Valkyries The Ronettes - Be My Baby  Queen - You’re My Best Friend Drake - Keep The Family Close Wagner - Tristan Und Isolade: Prelude Wagner - Tristan Und Isolade: Liebestod  Wagner - Lohengrin: Bridal Chorus Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Starting point is 00:00:00 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. the eater app at eaterapp.com. It's free for iOS users. Good evening, Charlie. Good evening. I thought we could
Starting point is 00:00:37 begin today's episode by ruining five songs for you. Oh, why would you do that? Because I'm a cruel and terrible person. All right, what do you got? I'll play you five songs, and then after we do this episode together, you probably will not be able to listen to them in the same way again. Oh, okay. Oh, hey, pretty girl, I'm feeling you. The way you do the things you do reminds me of my elect is cool. That's why I'm all the fin you creole. Okay, these are all great songs. The last one's a little scary, but what's wrong with them?
Starting point is 00:01:35 Well, what ties these together is that these are all aesthetically great works that have been penned, by artists who have committed horrible acts, among them, sexual assault, anti-Semitism, and even murder. Oh, God. Yeah. So today, Charlie, we ask, what should we do when good music happens to bad people? All right. I'll get on this train with you for just this once. And for those listeners who want something a little lighthearted, at the end of the episode,
Starting point is 00:02:05 we're going to give away something really nice for you dedicated listeners. So stick around. Way to bring some levity to the proceedings, Charlie. I'm there for you. Welcome to Switch on Pop. I'm musicologist Nate Sloan. And I'm a songwriter Charlie Harding. Charlie, I feel like questions about morals in pop music are more pressing today than they've been in previous decades.
Starting point is 00:02:35 Because in 2016, we have more information about popular artists than anyone ever did before, thanks to the febrile nature of the internet. Yeah, I mean, I don't follow, like, lots of celebrities on Instagram all the time. Just a couple. Just a few, yeah. And in this world where it's harder than ever for artists to hide information, some of it very innocuous, you know, like you can't hide that you wore the wrong lipstick to a fashion premiere or... I would never. ...tweeted something inappropriate.
Starting point is 00:03:06 Yeah, I don't do that. But then it's also harder to hide from artists more serious moral failings. The kind of thing that you might have been able to sweep under the rug in an age. before iPhones and Facebook and social media. Yeah, and for the better, I mean, I feel like finally as listeners, we get to make a choice about how we get to listen to music when the person behind it might have some serious moral failing. Totally, but that's a difficult thing to navigate, right?
Starting point is 00:03:36 Like, are we complicit in these artists' moral failings by continuing to listen to them? I don't want to be, but I kind of feel like I am. I totally agree, but it's not an easy question, as I think is actually really beautifully addressed by a recent episode of the sitcom The Carmichael Show, where the protagonists debate with each other whether it's right for them to go watch Bill Cosby do stand up or not. This is going to be troubling. Maxine, just face it, talent is more important than morals.
Starting point is 00:04:09 What, more important, according to who? According to you, the same women who, despite many accusations, continues to listen to Michael Jackson. Well, if she's listening to Michael Jackson, I can go see Bill Cosby. Give me a break. Everybody listens to Michael Jackson. And that's my point. Everyone should listen to Michael Jackson. Even his victims should listen to his music. I mean, they probably need it more than we do.
Starting point is 00:04:32 They've been through a lot. I'm just saying you need to separate people's personal life from their work. I mean, anybody's capable of doing something violent or disgusting, but the list of people with genuine talent is limited. So, talent trumps morals. Does this matter go back to listen to Chris Brown? I love the way Carmichael puts the equation in this clip, right? Is talent greater than morals?
Starting point is 00:04:59 I think that is the question that I want to ask in this show. It's such a hard question. I do not feel like I have an answer to that. I know, and it's burning me up, right? I can't decide whether I'm doing something objectionable by listening to music made by, in some cases, really dispel. But don't worry, I have a plan. You're always ready.
Starting point is 00:05:22 Who can help us sort through this ethical dilemma? A philosopher. Oh, perfect. I'm Willie Costello. I'm a post-doctoral solo in philosophy at Stanford University. So last year, Willie taught a class on this very subject at Stanford University. So I thought, of course, maybe he can give us some answers into our burning questions about morals and music. Well, let me start up by saying that we philosophers, we don't really traffic in answers to questions so much.
Starting point is 00:05:55 We're more about questions and making distinction. So we'll see if anything, the philosophical community has to say can sort of clear up this question a bit. Damn it, we can't get any answers. What can we do? So I guess we have to ask some questions. Philosophy. All right. So what kind of philosophical question should we ask?
Starting point is 00:06:15 Okay. Okay, so I guess, I mean, one for me is, can bad people still make good music? Well, I guess then there's the issue of, like, are we bad people if we listen to their music? Okay, and then I guess the flip side was, can good people make bad music? I would never make bad music, Nate. And then can music be good or bad at all, or is it just people that can be good or bad, and music just is? Okay, you've gone too far. Let's take it back a notch.
Starting point is 00:06:42 Okay, slow down. Okay. Let's just go back to this central question about. what we can do about good music made by bad people. So Willie did, I have to say, give me a good framework about how we can think about these questions. Okay, so these are kind of our two extreme positions, right? So we have aestheticism on the one hand saying
Starting point is 00:07:04 moral value has nothing to do with aesthetic value. You have moralism on the other side that says moral value has everything to do with aesthetic value. obviously these are the two extreme positions and the truth is rarely found in either of two extremes. And so what's more interesting is these sort of positions in between the two which allow that artworks have both moral and aesthetic value
Starting point is 00:07:30 and then the question is how do those two values relate. And I think like when we think about the ways in which we go about morally evaluating a piece of music and the ways we go about aesthetically evaluating it, It seems to me that these are two fairly different processes. So when we're more than evaluating a piece of music, we're going to look at things like, well, what is the lyrical content? What's the sort of message of the song?
Starting point is 00:07:56 What is the sort of moral character of its creator? Things like that. But when we aesthetically evaluate a piece of music, we're looking for things like, well, what is it sort of sonic nature? Is it appealing or pleasing to the ear? What are its sort of formal elements? Is there a kind of formal unity? to the work as a whole. And that seems to be sort of just separate
Starting point is 00:08:18 and completely different than the sort of moral evaluations that we make of a work of art. Okay, so I feel like we're setting up this moralism versus aestheticism dualistic way of looking at the problem. Yeah, it actually kind of corresponds to what they're debating
Starting point is 00:08:34 in the Carmichael show, right? Yeah. You could say talent is asceticism and morals is moralism. So how should we go about assessing these values in pop music? Maybe one productive route would be to take a pop song by one of these morally objectionable artists and try and read it both through the lens of asceticism and the lens of moralism. Okay, well, I have to volunteer a candidate. I have to admit, I felt really complicated about R. Kelly's remix to Ignition for a very long time.
Starting point is 00:09:26 So this song is undeniably fun and at major celebrations. But so often we are ignoring the fact that R. Kelly has been accused of some very heinous crimes. Marrying a minor, sexual conduct with minors, child pornography, all of which he's been acquitted for, but the evidence is incredibly damning. All of which I feel like really needs to be considered when we celebrate. this song. Yeah, Charlie, I totally agree because after I read this long village voice report that came out a few years ago about R. Kelly's sorted sexual past, it became really hard to experience his music in the same sort of easygoing way that I had before. I mean, when this reporter describes how R. Kelly married the R&B singer, Alia, when she was just 14 or 15 years old, and then having Alia's mother
Starting point is 00:10:28 cry on his shoulder and say that her daughter's life was ruined by R. Kelly, I mean, that kind of makes it hard to, like, get funky on the dance floor, right? Yeah, so I guess, just from our own emotional reaction, we've kind of already made our moral assessment, but I guess that's our moral assessment of R. Kelly, the composer, I guess we should also look at the song itself and question its moral qualities and its aesthetic qualities. Right. I mean, Willie Costello encourages us to do both, to consider the morals of its creator and to consider the morals of the work itself.
Starting point is 00:11:01 Do you mind if we do aestheticism first? Yeah, let's do it. Okay. So I guess what I'm hearing is a really fun song. It's a beat. It's a bunch of major chords. And I guess for an R&B song, it feels really happy. It's really harmonically rich, these piano chords going all over the place.
Starting point is 00:11:23 My ear is super engaged. And then I think on another level, the song is just singable. It's danceable. Oh, my God. That part when he goes up into his falsetto range after the show, it's the after party. I mean, that is like apotheosis. That's beautiful stuff. I know.
Starting point is 00:11:44 And then, you know, the amount of times that I've screamed toot-toot on a dance floor, I'm kind of, no, I'm like actually truly embarrassed about. I know. Somehow he even makes the phrase toot, toot seem sexy and cool. So from an aesthetic perspective, I would have to give this song a great rating for a dance hit, right? Yeah, I think it has a lot of aesthetic value. I mean, it really, as you were kind of attesting, it really brings people together on the dance floor. Yeah, even within the language of pop music, it does things which are different and it does it in a really successful way.
Starting point is 00:12:15 Yeah. So, so our aesthetic value judgment of this song is like two thumbs up. Definitely. Now, though, we have to turn to our moralistic judgment of this track. God, it's so hard to separate that. And then you say like two thumbs up. I like, I want to give two half thumbs up. But I'm just like, we got to try on this philosophical approach.
Starting point is 00:12:32 Okay, moralistic. So we've already analyzed the moral failings of R. Kelly himself. I mean, yeah, goes beyond failings, right? Yeah. I mean, we should mention that he's been acquitted of all crimes, but these allegations still seem to be very serious. Lots to worry about. So, well, but let's look at just the moralistic perspective of the song.
Starting point is 00:12:54 What are you hearing? It's like murder she rode. Once I get you out of them close, privacy's on the door, but still they can hear screaming moll. Girl, I'm feeling what you're feeling. No more hoping and wishing. I'm about to take my key in.
Starting point is 00:13:07 Stick it in the ignition. So give me that. Well, I definitely hear some what you might call low-level, misogyny. Yeah, I feel like the narrative point of view is kind of definitely from a male perspective and sexualizes women in a nasty way. It's, yeah, it seems to be a narrative of sexual conquest in which the, uh, the female protagonists here have like almost zero agency. I don't, I don't think it's, uh, necessarily exceptional in that in any way. I think you could probably find another million pop songs that do the same thing, but that doesn't excuse it, right? No, no,
Starting point is 00:13:41 definitely not. And it's, and it's in there. Okay, so then I guess summarizing the moralistic point of view if we looked at just the song itself there's definitely things to to point a finger at but it doesn't stand out in an exceptional way on the pop charts unfortunately and on the side of aestheticism we find this to be a aesthetically very strong piece after going through this analytic approach i still don't feel better when it comes on on the dance floor because i always feel like i guess i'm going to go dance to this because it's a really fun song but i don't want to support it Yeah, Charlie, I totally hear what you're saying. And I'm wondering if another way to sort of unravel this naughty philosophical quagmire that we're in is to consider an artist who, unlike R. Kelly, isn't currently making music, isn't currently out there on the charts.
Starting point is 00:14:31 Right. Someone who we don't have to think about necessarily perpetrating like terrible acts while we're grinding to their music. Oh, God. Yeah. I think that that's a wise decision. So who would you want to talk about? Well, I thought we could talk about someone whose style I know is very influential, right? And I think someone who you admire a lot.
Starting point is 00:14:49 So I'm just not going to make it that easy for you. All right, all right, let's go. I think we should talk about mega producer Phil Spector. Oh, wow. Okay. Yeah, this one's complicated. Phil Spector has been named one of the most influential music producers in history. In fact, he basically invented the idea of the modern producer.
Starting point is 00:15:07 He is credited with so many different innovations in recorded music. He's one of the pioneers of the girl group, which still persists today, of course. And he's most famous for this particular sound that is so associated with Phil Spector that any time you hear it, no matter who he's recording, any artist, you can tell that he was on the track. And that style became known as one, two, three, the wall of sound. Are we having too much fun right now? Yeah, no, we're having too much fun. I'll explain the technique and then it's going to get worse from here. So the wall of sound is basically exactly what it sounds like. It is a ton of sound happening on a single track.
Starting point is 00:15:48 And it was important because back in the day when it was much more challenging to record lots of instruments because you only had a couple of tracks that you could record to, Phil Spector came up with all of these techniques to make it sound like you were in a cavern full of tons of different instruments such that you could hardly even tell what you were listening to that it was so big. A really good example would be a song like Be My Baby, a song that Phil Spector recorded with Renettes. So we're just awash in sound, guitar, strings. Another good example would be you've lost that loving feeling. It's just a fun 1960s track, but it is so full of sound wall to wall.
Starting point is 00:16:39 It makes me just feel like trying. Yeah, and this technique gets picked up by tons of groups working in the 60s, but also I think really continues to be influential in the present. Oh, absolutely. his technique has traversed history, right? From the sounds of Queen to even the modern day, I feel like I'm hearing it all over the opening track to Drake's new album, Vues.
Starting point is 00:17:25 And of course you went and chose a side that was in mind. It's got that symphonic, big sound, lots happening, echoing all around. Phil Spector's sound is in there. So you just gave us a beautiful summary of Spector's. musical career. I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop here, Charlie. Well, in addition to being a very well-regarded producer, he is also a convicted murderer and serving out probably the rest of his life in prison. Yeah. And if you want to not sleep for a week, just Google Phil Spector mugshot. That is
Starting point is 00:18:10 nightmare fuel. He's a very terrifying, strange, violent person. And that makes me feel really strange about his musical legacy. I guess for the avid fans, it would be nice if we could just listen to the music and not feel complicated about it. Is it possible to listen that way, do you think? It would be nice, and I'm not sure if you're intentionally making a Beach Boys reference there. That's a bad one, I'm sorry. But our philosopher for hire, Willie Costello, I think, would tell us that sometimes listening itself can be a less than benign act. No, we need to take kind of a wider view of our listening practices or something like that for, I think, these moral questions to really get any traction.
Starting point is 00:18:53 You know, one's habits of listening or really of consuming any art are not completely morally neutral. These are at least in a small way sort of morally loaded. We are in actual monetary ways supporting these artists. in other sort of kind of social or cultural ways. We're approving them and raising their sociocultural value. And these are things that, you know,
Starting point is 00:19:17 benefit those people. And we do want to ask ourselves, you know, well, do I want to contribute or in what ways do I want to contribute to the benefit of certain people or of artists? So I think we need to be just cognizant of the ways in which are,
Starting point is 00:19:32 say, musical actions. The things we do with a piece of music, kind of go above and beyond just what we make of its aesthetic value. Okay, so now I feel like we're finally getting to the issue of why I feel differently about listening to artists at the present from artists from the past. Because when we listen to artists from the past, we're not as morally implicated. We're not like actually financially, monetarily supporting Phil Spector anymore. I mean, I'm assuming not since he's in prison.
Starting point is 00:19:59 I don't think that he's getting benefit. But with someone like R. Kelly, when we download his music, we are financially support. And if any of the accusations against him are true, then we're potentially supporting somebody who is able to commit those crimes again. Yeah, I hear what you're saying. Though Willie's commentary also makes me think that we have to talk about the legacy of these artists in a different way if we're going to be able to maintain some moral high ground here. Yeah. You know, maybe on our show we should be referring to Phil Specter from now on as Phil Spector, producer, and murderer. Yeah, I think that's only fair.
Starting point is 00:20:36 I mean, truly, like, you don't want that side of their history to disappear in the greatness of their work. I think we have to listen from a very level perspective. All right, Nate, I want to try on a really hard question. Okay, let's do it. Let's just go, let's go all the way here. So far, we've been trying to assess the moralistic or aestheticism. Sure, Charlie, just keep going. You're doing great.
Starting point is 00:21:09 But I feel like we're just kind of like analyzing pieces back and forth. I want to get into something much more terrifying. Do you think it's possible that music itself can inspire Great Evil? You know, I actually have the perfect test case if we want to ask this. And I have to be the total chump who says that we're going to have to stick around to the second half of the show to find out if this is so. Nice, cliffhanger, Chuck. And stick around because we have a really fun giveaway at the very end. in a business with Shopify
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Starting point is 00:22:04 for one per 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,
Starting point is 00:22:39 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 border 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.
Starting point is 00:23:06 every Saturday in your audio and video feeds. Welcome back to Switch on Pop Charlie. Before we left, you posed this very dramatic question. Right. So in the first half, we looked at sort of an artist's moral culpability in relationship to their work. Right. Talent versus morals. Yeah, exactly. And now I want to look at, is it possible that the work itself can inspire horrendous immoral acts?
Starting point is 00:23:33 Whoa. Yeah. That's pretty deep. And I think it's difficult to assess the moral impact of music from the present. There's just not a long afterlife there. So maybe you can indulge me. Anytime. And we can look to our classical past to make a closer determination.
Starting point is 00:23:53 So who do we want to talk about today? I feel like there's no one else who fits the bill for your question better than Ricard Wagner. Yes, the famous German operatic composer of the Romantic era. Yes, I mean, this guy is endlessly fascinating, endlessly maddening, endlessly provocative. I would say he is probably the single biggest obsession of music scholars after Beethoven, because he just has such a complex legacy. Okay, so where are you taking me? Okay, so first we can do a quick, aesthetic moral binary here.
Starting point is 00:24:36 aesthetically, Wagner is one of the most influential composers of the romantic period. He, in a lot of people's minds, is responsible for ushering music actually out of romanticism into the modern period. That's how powerful his work is. Sort of the beginning of the destruction of traditional harmony. Yeah, exactly. The tonal system that composers had been relying on since Mozart kind of starts to crumble. in Wagner's hand. There's one famous chord he uses in his opera.
Starting point is 00:25:12 Oh, sorry, he wouldn't like me to call them operas. He preferred to call them music dramas. There's a little insight into his pugnacious personality right there. There's one chord in his music drama, Tristan und Isolda, that scholars are still debating what it is. Oh, that is a strange sound. Yeah, yeah. What's it called?
Starting point is 00:25:39 It's called the Tristan Chord. There's like a multi-pain. Wikipedia article about Discord. I was looking it up just a few days ago. Yeah, it's fascinating. Music wonks head there immediately for some brain scratching stuff. But yeah, he's really pushing the bounds of
Starting point is 00:25:54 traditional harmony. He's stretching the scale of music. You know, a single Wagner opera can last five hours. And if you're going to one of his cycles, like the ring cycle, that's going to be five operas over the course of five days. That is
Starting point is 00:26:10 a big commitment, man. That's you're really submitting yourself to a lot of Wagner there. Is there like a classic Wagner example we should play? I think that same piece, Tristan and Isolda, is just like perfect Wagner. In this, you can hear the chromatic harmonies. You can hear these sighing, high romantic melodies. You can hear this technique that he called endless melody, where the melody never resolves but just goes on and on and on,
Starting point is 00:26:39 creating this feeling of delayed gratification and almost a sense of suspended animation. I mean, this is like Wagner in a nutshell right here. Oh, okay. So aesthetically, sounds like you're giving it like an A triple plus. Yeah. But I asked you a hard question, which was about can a song inspire moral or immoral action? Right. And here's where the waters get troubled.
Starting point is 00:27:24 because despite all his musical gifts, Wagner himself was a pretty heinous person who was one of the most virulent anti-Semites of the 19th century and spilled a lot of ink on these voluminous tracks about what was wrong with the Jews. Then there's the added complication that in addition to espousing this anti-Semitic belief, Wagner's music was later appropriated by the Nazi party because of its strong themes of nationalism and became in a lot of ways the soundtrack of the Third Reich. Oh man. Wait, so he didn't hand songs for the Nazis, did he?
Starting point is 00:28:11 No, no, no, good question. He was long dead before Hitler came to power, but Hitler said he had no forerunner except Wagner. And he wrote about him in Mime Kampf. seeing him as a visionary German leader. Oh, boy. Oh, man. Yeah. And not only that, Wagner's son-in-law was the race theorist, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who was responsible for sort of codifying a lot of the racial theory that the Nazi party later used to perpetrate the Shoah.
Starting point is 00:28:42 Okay, so Wagner himself was morally corrupt, and his works inspired the greatest human tragedy of all time. Yeah, this is a very troubling, difficult legacy to deal with. Yeah. And this legacy remains, like, very hotly contested, which is something you can see in Larry David's Kerbure enthusiasm, where Larry David, the show's Jewish protagonist, gets berated on the street for whistling Wagner by another Jew. Now, this is something you need to think about, right? What were you whistling?
Starting point is 00:29:23 What were you whistling? Hello, darling? No, it's Wagner. Oh, was it? You, sir, we're a hundred. He was one of the great anti-Semites of the world. You know what you are? What am I?
Starting point is 00:29:33 You're a self-loathing Jew. Am I? Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes. I do hate myself. But it has nothing to do with being Jewish, okay? Larry David, morality and immorality is at the center of the entire show. Yeah, right. But then Wagner's difficult legacy,
Starting point is 00:29:52 also has, I think, a more sort of serious discourse in a state like Israel, where there's been more or less an unofficial ban on performing his music since about 1938. Wow. And there have been some very dramatic incidents surrounding this, like in 1981, when the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra tried to play a piece from Tristan and Azolda that we listened to before. But a Holocaust survivor jumped on the stage, opened his shirt, and showed scars from a concentration camp. Oh my God. You can imagine that performance was abandoned. Wow. So Vodger's music has inspired incredible sense of national identity and in historical identity.
Starting point is 00:30:36 It's so emotionally resonant for people. Right. Which brings us back to this question that you posed earlier. Is Wagner's music responsible for these great acts of evil? Responsible is a heavy word, but there seems to be definitely an inspiration there. That's right. And another way to think about this is to think about the changing meaning of Wagner's music. Like, for instance, we can pick out pieces that the Nazis loved, like his music drama, de Meisterzinger von Nuremberg. But then we can also look at pieces like his famous wedding march from Lohengrin. Oh my gosh. Yeah. It's so wild to put them next to each other because on the scale of moral inspiration, how many millions of people have to be? How many millions of people have
Starting point is 00:31:26 have been married to that song and been in an overwhelming state of joy. I know with Wagner's music in inspiring bliss and promise and optimism. So he's on both sides of the same coin, inspiring the greatest evils as well as marital love. Yeah. Oh, it's so messy. And you can even hear how our interpretation of a single piece can change over time. Like, say, take one of his most famous pieces, Ride of the Valkyries. Yeah, this piece has been used in very different context.
Starting point is 00:32:12 So it might be used to sort of support the racist nationalism of D.W. Griffith's 1917 film Birth of a Nation. Okay. And how has it changed? Yeah, but then it can also be used in a much darker and more ironic way in a film. like Apocalypse now. And I'm out of my lot, we'll put on the music. Scares the hell out of the song. Right? Now it's not the song of triumph,
Starting point is 00:33:02 but almost the song of like dystopian combat. Right, right. Well, I just feel like I'm feeling so complicated still. I'm not coming away with any answers or guidance on how to listen better. This just, the bigger question made it worse. Well, as Willie Costello said, you know, maybe we can't turn to philosophy to help us. It's just going to make us ask more questions.
Starting point is 00:33:29 Yeah. Though I do think he's helped us to refine the questions we want to ask, which has been really helpful. And he does hint at some more concrete actions we can take if we want to align our music with our morals. There's so much music that one can listen to without getting into these moral quandries. And, you know, even if you only listen to that sort of music, there would still be more music out there that you would still not have time for. We have an abundance of riches here. There's not a scarcity of morally benign music. This is really helpful for me because instead of getting stuck in this constant debate of can I feel good listening to this music, I feel like we can just go to other music, which shares the same aesthetic qualities. You look at R. Kelly or Phil Spector,
Starting point is 00:34:17 and there are lots of other artists that have similar musical qualities that we can enjoy and not have to feel so gross about. Where we can have positive aesthetic judgments and positive moral judgments. Yeah. It is a shockingly easy solution to this issue we're having. Simply change the channel. Yeah, there's just so much music we can listen to. And if we stumble upon those artists that we feel ish about,
Starting point is 00:34:45 we have the opportunity now to qualify and speak honestly about that music to say who the person is and how the music sounds and hold them together as one. So Charlie, all episode you've been teasing this giveaway. Tell us what we can win. This is so exciting. This is unprecedented for us to do this. I'm so into it. Yes, after an episode of such we get to have a fun moment and give something away. The fine folks over at Cumberland Coast deliver beautiful framed wave form artwork. So this is a sound wave printed, hand-numbered, and limited showcasing iconic songs with clean, simplistic, beautiful design. They're really gorgeous. I actually had a custom one made of the waveform of the song that I wrote for my wife for our wedding. And I'm going to be giving it to her on our third anniversary, which is a few days after this episode is released, but it hasn't been recorded yet.
Starting point is 00:35:46 Don't tell anybody. Damn, that is romantic. Thanks, Nate. So you can enter to win a free 11 by 17 framed custom sound wave print. You get to pick your favorite song. You get to hang it on your wall. The randomly selected winner will be announced on July 15, 2016. Only one entry per participant.
Starting point is 00:36:05 And the contest URL, you want to remember this is cumberlandcoast.com slash switched on. That's just switched on. No pop. So cumberlandcoast.com slash switched on. This is pretty cool, I have to say. This makes me feel really important. Anytime I can do that for you. All right, some quick credits.
Starting point is 00:36:23 This episode was produced by me, Nate Sloan. And me, Charlie Harding. Designed by Luke Harris. And I really want to say thank you to Yukiko from Yukiko Draws. She is a wonderful illustrator who made this beautiful commission of me and Nate. Investigating a record. It's on my Twitter profile at Charlie Harding. You can check out Yukiko's work atukikos.com.
Starting point is 00:36:44 Enormous thanks to Willie Costello, the only philosopher I can imagine having the patience to answer my assinine questions about the relative moral worth of insane clown posse and Gary Glitter. Willie, you're the best. Thank you. You can always go and listen to more episodes of Switched on Pop on the Panofly Network on our website, switched on pop.com. Join us again in two weeks as we explore the biggest song right now on the charts. It was written across three continents, Drake's One Dance. And until then, thanks for listening. Euforia of Calvin Klein,
Starting point is 00:37:22 the new collection Elixir. Three new elixires perfum intense. Solar, Magnetic, Boll. Pulsan the banner, do the quiz, and discover your fragrance, euphoria.

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