The New Yorker Radio Hour - The Nerdwriter Conquers the Internet, Plus Kelefa Sanneh on Country Radio

Episode Date: July 19, 2022

Evan Puschak, known on YouTube as the Nerdwriter, posts videos dissecting topics from Shakespeare and Tarkovsky to Superman; from Martin Luther King, Jr., and Bernie Sanders to Donald Trump. The videos are complex; he may spend weeks editing image, sound, and written narration. He spoke with the Radio Hour’s Ngofeen Mputubwele about what drew him to the essay form, and how he’s found success online. “The essay is not a treatise. It’s not a term paper. It’s not something systematically covering everything about a subject,” Puschak says. “It is an inquiry. . . . The cool thing about the video essay is that you are seeing these people’s thoughts articulated with a whole new toolbox.” As much as he loves the video form, Puschak is crossing over into print next month with a book of essays titled “Escape Into Meaning.” Plus, the writer Kelefa Sanneh highlights some notable tracks playing on country radio stations this summer. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Evan Pushak is known professionally as the nerd writer. His videos on YouTube have racked up millions of views, dissecting a wide variety of topics from Shakespeare and Tarkovsky to Martin Luther King. I am happy to John with you today. Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream speech is arguably the most important and most well-known speech of the 20th century. It's 1667 words and 17 minutes long, absolutely riddled with big, difficult terms.

But as the name he goes by suggests, the nerd writer goes very deep on pop culture as well. He'll talk, for example, about the debt that Bruno Mars owes to James Brown. If you want to understand why, at weddings across America and the world this year, thousands, probably millions of people will be lunging their pinky fingers over their heads. You have to go back to 1967. Our producer, Gofan and Putubuele, is an avid consumer of video essays, and he talked with Puschak about this new genre of nonfiction, born on the internet. Here's Gauphin.

on YouTube you are the nerd writer how did you end up here and were you always sort of a very studious learner type um no I wasn't in high school I definitely wasn't I was sort of a kind of class clown and I'm still really goofy but even back then I was obsessed with things that I didn't connect to education I was obsessed with Superman and comic books and things like that. But in college and after college, I became really frustrated with this feeling of not understanding what I believe and think about things. I think at some point in your life, you want to have a sense of who you are. The nerd writer and the book are ways of expressing an understanding. and working out the things that I believe.

So I want to us to look at one of your video essays together. Okay. And actually it's an essay. You write about the same topic, or you write about the same universe in your book, that universe being Lord of the Rings. And the video essay you have is about Gandalf. Gandalf, for those who don't know as a magician,

the better Dumbledore, among other accolades. Careful. Careful with that. You're going to anger a lot of people. I'm willing to die on that hill. The video essay is about Gandalf's eyes. In the Lord of the Rings, Ian McKellen's eyes, in particular, carry a heavy load. Gandalf is the moral center of the story.

He's also the one who understands the significance of events in the broadest sweep. This means that Gandalf has to broadcast a whole lot of story information to the audience. The ring has awoken. It's heard its master's call. Okay. I have so much to say about this. Great. Okay.

So we're talking about the difference between the written essay and the video essay. And I don't think I could have done this in a written essay with anywhere near the same justice. Describe an instance of... Gandalf's eyes and his acting in Lord of the Rings, that's really meaningful to you. Like, what is it that you feel in your body when you watch that part? So the one that comes to mind is when he's sitting with Pippin in the upper levels of Ministers at the end of the Battle of Pellinor Fields in the third movie, where it's all this war.

And I'm just going to translate, Gandalf is with another character. They're in a castle. The movie's almost over. Okay. So he's sitting there with Pippin, a battle's raging outside these doors. And there's this moment of quiet and silence

where Pippin is feeling despair about the chances. And he says, I can't believe it's the end. and Gandalf says, no, it's not going to be the end. Death, if death comes, is only another path, a path we all must take. And he describes what's sort of on the other side of this veil of death. And in describing it, what he does is move his eyes just ever so slightly over and up and into the distance, as if he's looking through the veil of death

to the far green country that he's describing. And as a viewer, what I'm feeling is that I'm seeing this thing he's describing. When I'm just looking at his face, specifically I'm just looking at his eyes, and I'm getting that emotion of... Let me try to describe this. So in the book I described that,

I am not religious. I'm a non-believer. I don't believe there's life after death. But when Gandalf is describing this, these rolling hills in this far green country, this sort of vision of heaven, I sort of feel and believe it that when you're inside a fantasy world, Ian McKellen, his eyes are bringing me to that place. they are immersing me in a story showing me something I can't see on screen and making me believe something that I don't actually really believe in the real world

in the Gandalf video it seems like you're trying to convey the same awe that you feel to us as to us as viewers like in the video essay is that is that right yeah Yeah, that's what I want to communicate the experience I'm having.

I'm sort of obsessed with matching content with form. And so from the beginning of the nerd writer, I've been trying to figure out what is YouTube good at specifically? What are its strengths and weakness? What sets it apart from TV or books or podcasts or whatever? Yeah, so what is YouTube good at? So I think YouTube is attracted to breaking things down. It's like, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, the

medium is the message. He was talking about movies, how movies in the theater, it's a very passive experience because you are sitting there in the dark and these giant images are washing over. And it's high deaf. And you're just kind of. and you're just kind of passively engaging with it. Then compared to that TV, you're sitting in your home, the lights are on, the windows are open, things are happening, you have the remote in your hand.

It is a more active, engaged environment. McLuhan said that TV was really good at showing processes, which is why you get something like instant replay in sports. were just as interested in seeing the process of the play as the result of it. So when you slow time to examine the catch from multiple angles, it's a way of participating in that image. And TV is a participatory medium. I think YouTube takes that even further and it's even more obsessed with processes. And that's a function of the ways we interact with it.

So you're sitting at the computer holding your phone, you're scrubbing through the video, you're double tapping to rewind or or changing the speed or whatever. Showing the process of something is really satisfying. The things I'm trying to describe or understand with my videos are the ways that those pieces of art or those pieces of information or ideas made me feel. Like I felt some kind of awe or some kind of. or some kind of arresting emotion about this. There is a famous Virginia Wolf quote.

She was an extraordinary essay, of course. And she said that an essay should lay us under a spell with its first word and we should only wake refreshed with its last. And so that idea of putting you under a spell is part of my aim as someone who's making videos. One of the things that, as I've been reflecting a bit on video essays, I think one of the things that draws me to them is that it feels like I think that if you grow up on the internet, so millennials and younger, you are receiving videos all the time. You're receiving videos, like, constantly, like funny videos, all kinds of videos. And I think that there's something about the video essay and the video essayists that I follow,

where it feels like, ah, I get sort of meditative reflection. Because I live on the internet. That's the place where I can get like a meditative thought. Yeah. And I actually think what you're describing is, what do people come to the essay for, period. Like the written essay. Go there, do it. Tell me.

The essay is not a treatise. It's not a term paper. It's not something systematically covering everything about a subject. It is an inquiry. It is thought articulated in one case in prose, in this case in audio visual medium, you don't come to the essay to necessarily become an expert on something. You come to it because you want to see thought articulated. The cool thing about the video essay is that you are seeing these people's thoughts articulated.

with a whole new toolbox. And the ones who use the specific toolbox of the medium that they're working in are the ones that I am most interested in. Evan Pushak, who's known on YouTube as the nerd writer, his new book is called Escape Into Meaning, and he spoke with the radio as Gophane and Putabuele. This week in a special digital issue,

the New Yorker is exploring the changing contours of family. And there's a conversation with Laura Wasser, a divorced lawyer to the stars. Plus, a comic strip by Leanna Fink illustrates some of the parenting advice that she never took. That's all in our special issue this week at new yorker.com slash family issue. And there's more to come on the New Yorker Radio Hour, so stick around. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Staff writer, Kel Fasana, is one of my favorite people in general. but one of my favorite people to talk about music,

and he's a man of broad taste, from hip-hop to country and well beyond. Recently, he wrote about the rising country star, Haley Witters. So, Kay, you've got a few songs for us to listen to today. What's the theme? The theme of this is country music. You know, one of my goals for the magazine is to get paid to do stuff I would do for free.

And one of the things I do for free is listen to country radio. I wrote this piece about Haley Witters, who's an emerging country singer who this summer is trying to get her first single onto country radio. It's a song called Everything She Ain't. And, you know, so she's got her people at her record label plugging it. And it's a lot of suspense for her. She's been building. She's critically acclaimed.

She's a great singer and songwriter. But in country music, you haven't quite made it until the radio stations are playing your song. What's her story? She's from Iowa, from a tiny town in Iowa called Shoeville, and moved to Nashville, convinced she was going to. going to be the next country star. And, you know, 10 years later, she was starting to wonder if it was ever going to happen. Ironically, one of her breakthrough songs was about that. She's saying, I'm 12 years into a 10-year town. And the idea is that, you know, she had already maybe missed her

chance, but she made a great album, made another great album. And, you know, now people are paying attention. At least, you know, people like me are paying attention. So let's hear everything she ain't. Now, you're picking, she ain't the cup of tea, yeah, boy I can be simple, she treats you like you're pro, like you need fix, and you ain't getting nothing back. If you're good with her, you kiss and say, LaVie, but I can show you what you're missing, yeah, boy, I can be. Now, speaking as a guy, meaning you, his first piece for this magazine was a

profile of Jay-Z way back when. How does this fit into your musical universe? Well, you know, my musical universe has expanded over the years. I grew up as a punk rocker. And, you know, I think it was really in the 2000s when I was working at the New York Times as a music critic that I started to listen to a lot of country music and found that I loved especially what sometimes people called New Country or Commercial Country or Nashville Country. Big Hat. Well, sometimes Big Hat, though, at the it was morphing into a ballcap kind of genre, right? These things change. And I love the idea that Nashville was this town full of brilliant musicians all competing

to write the perfect song. And the top ones get on the radio and get lodged in your brain. I like the idea that writing a song could be a little bit like solving a crossword puzzle. And how does this song solve the crossword puzzle? Well, you know, everything she ain't. Part of what you're trying to do is you're trying to do something that reflects the culture of country music. part of the fun of it, and that's part of the sense of belonging, right? So when she says

she can be the shotgun in your Tacoma, she's kind of making a winking allusion to the small town Iowa where she grew up, but also letting you know that she finds the whole thing kind of fun and funny as well. And where does Haley Witters sit in Nashville? So Haley Witters is a good example of someone who spent a bunch of years in town trying to figure out who she is, trying to figure out, oh, do I get all glammed up to be a country star in Nashville? And what she found, what seems to have worked for her is to double down on her roots. You know, she's from this small town in Iowa, and she plays it up in a really kitsy way now. She sometimes wears bloomers that say corn star on the back.

And so, you know, she wears prairie dresses, and she's really all about in a fun way trying to embrace this idea of being, you know, a woman from a small Midwestern town. She's also part of a movement. You know, it's been much remarked upon in the last few years that on country radio you hear a lot more men than women. Right. And there's people working to change this. Nicole Galleon is a successful songwriter in Nashville

who started a label, Songs and Daughters, which is the label that signed Haley Witter. So she was part of this effort. One of the people working to change this is Marin Morris, who's a great singer and songwriter in Nashville, and she's had great country success while also having some success outside of country music. She had a huge pop hit a few years ago called The Middle.

And she has a new album, Marin Morris has a new album called Humble Quest, which is a really good record, it's a really smart record, and her current single, which is on country radio, is called Circles around this town. That is a really bottom-heavy sound.

In other words, more based than guitar. or lap steel or whatever. Yeah, it's got a beat. And then when the chorus hits, you hear that country music sound that maybe is something that you're more expecting to hear. One of the things I like about,

I love songs that do two things at once, and one of the things I love about circles is that if you're not paying attention, it's just a great driving song, right? I'm driving circles around this town. If you are paying attention, it's a meta song. It's a song about what it's like

to try and write a great song and what it's like to try and succeed in country music. And so in that way, it both fits in and sticks out on country radio. Obviously, ultimately, the arbiter of what a great song is in the popular commercial sense is the audience. But who are the arbiters in Nashville? Who decides? How does that work? Oh, it's so complicated.

You know, it's a little bit of an art, a little bit of a science, a little bit of a scam. Some combination of those. Well, you know, there's a whole arm. These record companies have whole departments that are devoted, as has been true for, you know, half a century, to getting songs onto the radio, sometimes in straightforward way, flattery,

sometimes probably some other ways as well. And then the radio stations... Some other ways meaning payola. Well... Does that still exist? I don't know about straightforward payola, but certainly if you listen to the radio, they might have something called a flyaway,

where there's a contest where you can win the chance to get flown to a concert by this artist and put up in a hotel and you get to see them $500 bucks spending money. And that contest will be... sponsored by the record company behind the artist. So yes, there's marketing campaigns, and certainly in that way, some money is changing hands, and the record company is spending some real money.

At the same time, there is this science, or maybe pseudoscience, that the labels still do where they do research. They survey people, they play them snippets of songs and say, do you like this, do you like that? And they're really, you know, as they've been doing for decades, they're trying to figure out, if we play this song, are people going to change the dial, or are people going to keep listening. And the fact that country radio still exists is this industry devoted to giving people what they demonstrably want, which is sometimes different from what they say they want. How do you mean? Well, sometimes people would say, I would like to hear more of this on the radio. I would like to hear more of that. And then you do the research and you find out, well, apparently

not. Apparently this is what you like. Apparently this is what keeps you listening. So it's interesting to me to see that all these stations are trying to give people what they want. And the artists are trying to give people what they want maybe with a twist or maybe in a slightly different way. One of my favorite examples of this phenomenon right now is a song by Tim McGraw, who's been, you know, he's been around forever.

He's been making country music for more than 30 years. He's been around so long that Taylor Swift's first single, more than about almost 15 years ago, was called Tim McGraw and was a song about listening to Tim McGraw. So he's as established as it gets.

He's huge. And he has a song on radio right now called 7500 OBO. What does that mean? It's about the least euphonious title you could imagine. I was going to say, can you guess what this song is about?

I cannot in a million years. 7,500 OBO is what you'd put in the want ad if you're selling a truck. 7,500 or best offer, OBO. Got it. And it's a song about a guy who's got a truck. It still works pretty well,

but he wants to sell it because it reminds him of the woman he used to hang out with in that truck. It's got leather seats, sunroof, sitting on 33s that run smooth, it'll get your bum. A'd a beep, but not for me. Because every time I turn that key, I see her. Shotgun riding down a two-lane row, just driving around with no place to go. I singing along to where the green grass grows, hands out the window floating on the creek.

She's fixing her lips in the drop-bell mirror that pretty pretty. Little thing made it hard to steer out Never gonna get her out of there There's too many memories Now there's a for sale sign In the wind Now my favorite thing about this song Is that it is one of two songs

Currently on country radio With the exact same plot Right now on country radio You can listen to 7500 OBO by Tim McGraw Or you can listen to New Truck By Dylan Scott Which has the same plot It's about having to sell a truck.

because it reminds him of the woman he used to be with. The radio works that don't show dirt worth every dime I spend. I was going to drive it till the wheels fell off. Yeah, that was before she slammed the door, said it's over. They ain't got lost. I'd love to know what's going on behind the scenes in Nashville when these songwriters realize that they have this song, they think it's pretty good,

and then they come to find out they are one of two people. on the charts with the same theme. This is kind of more orthodox country. You got the pedal steel. Well, it's a good example of how orthodox can mean different things, right? Like the Tim McGraw song has, I believe, a drum machine, which is not traditionally how you would do the rhythm in a country track. Well, no, I mean, it's still a fairly new version of country music, but the fact that a song

with a drum machine might sound orthodox tells you something about how the definition of country changes over the years and how a great singer like Tim McGraw could not only make a drum machine sound orthodox, he can turn a phrase like 7,500 OBO into a memorable chorus. Thank God you explain this to me right away. Now, final pick, what do we have here? So a bunch of years back, I profiled George Strait for the magazine, who's a country institution, has more number one hits than just about anyone. And, you know, he was doing this show in Vegas at the arena there.

And before he went on stage, he'd play a medley of contemporary country songs. And at first I thought, oh, that's interesting. He's playing a bunch of new country songs before he gets on stage. And then I realized what he was doing. He was playing a medley of songs that mentioned him. Fantastic. There are so many songs that mentioned George Strait that he could do a mixtape of nothing but George Strait songs in that sense.

That's great. And this is a new addition to that canon. It's by Scotty McCreary, who's kind of a lower profile country hitmaker. He won American Idol about a decade ago, and he's had a bunch of hits since then. And this is maybe my favorite or one of them. It's called Damn Straight. Nobody in his right mind.

would have left her and that was her favorite song she sang along every time it came on and we danced was to Marina del Rey

and I fell right there and then I didn't want that song to end was the color I still see And part of the fun of this is that if you know George Straight he's name checking a lot of his song titles And you know he's singing nobody in his right mind would have left her.

That was her favorite song. And so part of the fun is finding these old George Strait song titles. And then his idea is that he can no longer listen to George Strait because he misses his woman. And David, you're the editor of the New Yorker. You know something about literary tropes and techniques. So I think you probably have an idea of where this is going. He can't listen to George Strait anymore because he misses his woman.

Does he wish he could get her back? I think he might. Damn straight. Okay, thanks so much. It's great to see you as over. Thanks. This was fun. The New Yorker's Kelifah Sane,

with songs by Scotty McCreary, Marin Morris, Haley Witters, and Tim McGraw. You can read Kelifa at New Yorker.com, writing about Hayley Witters, along with Morgan Whalen, and many more.

That's the New Yorker Radio Hour for today. Thanks for joining us. See you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Arts, with additional music by Alexis Quadrato. This episode was produced by Emily Boutin, Ave Carrillo, Brita Green,

Calilea, David Krasnow, Louis Mitchell, and Gauphin and Putabuele, with help from David Gable, Harrison Keithline, Alex Barish, Victor Gwan, and Meng Faye Chen. We had additional help this week from Michael May and James Napoli. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Tramina Endowment Fund.