The NPR Politics Podcast - The Best Political Music Of 2018

Episode Date: December 23, 2018

In a year full of news, one line in the Aug. 23 episode of the NPR Politics Podcast spurred the most comments from our listeners. "You can't find good political music." Our listeners were right. There is good political music, so this year we're breaking down what makes a good political song & what were the best ones of 2018. This episode: Congressional correspondent Scott Detrow, White House reporter Ayesha Rascoe, political reporter Miles Parks, political reporter Danielle Kurtzleben, and NPR Music editor Stephen Thompson. Email the show at [e-mail]. Find and support your local public radio station at npr.org/stations.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. Today, we are doing something a little bit different, and we are going to address the one thing that all of you, our listeners, could not let go of this year, and we will explain. I'm Scott Detrow, I cover Congress. I'm Ayesha Roscoe, I cover the White House. I'm Miles Parks, I'm a political reporter. We've got a very special guest here today, Stephen Thompson from NPR Music.

How's it going? It is great. I am so excited and honored to be here. I love this podcast. I got to say, this is kind of trippy because you are a regular on Pop Culture Happy Hour, and we basically stole your format. You stole it and then perfected it. But now you're here, so it's like the full blend of the two podcasts. Coming home.

A full circle moment. So Stephen, we are here because of one very important thing. Of all the things we said in all the podcasts this year, which is a lot, there was one thing that our listeners couldn't let go. We got the most angry response on Twitter, in email, on the street, everywhere. And it is

something that Tim Mack said on August 23rd. Let's take a listen to that and go from there. Well, here's what I kind of wanted to go on a mini rant on. It was like, you can't find good political music. Does anyone agree with Tim? No offense to Tim, but is there good political music or do people just try too hard and it leads to bad music? No, absolutely.

There are great political songs. And there are songs, political songs that kind of last throughout the decades, right? Like, what's going on? I will. I will say that I'm a big believer in the songs that don't hit it so hard on the head. Like if the song is a straight ahead political song, I'm probably listening one time. So I know what people are talking about when they're angry tweeting about it. But then other than that, I'm not going back and listening to it while I'm like working out or something like that. I feel like a little tinge of politics is kind of where my happy medium is. Steven, ingredients for a good political song.

Well, Scott, first of all, I appreciate the preamble of saying, does anyone agree with Tim after you set up that people have been like whipping eggs at you on the street for months? I want to say I don't think it's surprising that of all the people who could garner this kind of response, it is like a very Tim Mack thing to just say something that controversial and then just let it hang and just wait for the response. And poor Tim isn't here to defend himself. He's responded to this, I think. We should probably let him know we're doing this podcast before it publishes.

But Stephen, I assume you disagree. I do disagree. I mean, first of all, as Aisha said, you have absolutely unimpeachable classic songs that are themselves protest songs. To say there is no good protest music is silly. At the same time, if I can defend slightly what Tim said, I do think it has gotten harder to make a good protest song. We are now in a world, first of all, where a lot more people are making music than used to make music. You don't necessarily have this kind of monoculture happening. Everything

is so stratified. And so when you have a musician who's trying to explicitly comment on a major piece of news or whatever, as you said, Miles, it's so on the nose that it can be hard to really latch into it. So my favorite political music is either somewhat vague in its intentions, where it works as a jam, but also as a commentary, or it takes something really, really big and makes it smaller and more personal. If you have a bigger issue that you're talking about, like I was just thinking about like Jay-Z, 99 Problems. If you having girl problems, I feel bad for you, son. I got 99 problems, but a bitch ain't one. He's talking about getting pulled over by the police.

That's like a, well, not universal. But what I mean is it is an overarching issue, especially for people of color, especially for black people. And it is an experience that just resonates. So him being able to talk about that and to give you the kind of visual of it and even some of the lines like, you know, I'm not going to let you illegally search my car. You think about that like, yeah, I'm not going to let you look at my trunk.

Like, I'm going to just say no. Like, he's giving you legal advice. And I think that's what makes that a great song is it's not a song. The specificity is what makes that a great song. It's not a song. The specificity is what makes it a great song. I didn't realize really what that song was about until I listened to it a couple different times. Getting back to it not being a universal problem.

No, no, no. I understand what it was about, but I was thinking it's a story of his story, right? And I'm so into that scene, and I can see when he said, what does he say? Yeah, you're doing 55 in a 54. All of these things. But, you know, but the way that he puts it, I mean, when you look at the hook,

I got 99 problems, but ain't one. You don't realize that it's going to be this very important. If you having girl problems, I forgot me, son. I got 99 problems, but ain't one. Hit me. One thing that I wanted to throw in when we talk about specificity, there were several songs that jump out at me.

A song by Dessa called Fire Drills, a song by Courtney Barnett called Nameless Faceless, that are about being a woman trying to make your way in the world and not being able to walk at night and feel safe, not being able to go online and feel safe. These are very powerful, like hard-edged, viscerally exciting songs that are still about this moment, but they're about every moment in the history of women in America and the world. I want to walk through the park in the dark, men are scared, the women will walk the dance. I want to walk through the park in the dark, women are scared, the men will kill them. And so they manage to be political songs. They're not necessarily pieces of political advocacy so much as this is my experience.

Either hook into this shared experience or view this experience as an outsider and understand what I'm going through and what women are going through. So as the veteran of talking about pop culture here in Studio 44 that you are, you just provided us the perfect segue to get to the next thing that we wanted to talk about. And that is, it's the end of the year. Everybody's doing year-end lists. Steven, what for you was the best political song of 2018? Oh, man. This is tough.

I mean, I've named a bunch that I really love. There are a few other things that I wanted to mention. I think pretty much the entire Janelle Monae record, Dirty Computer, manages to tap into something that I've been thinking a lot about protest music in 2018. That a lot of what I guess qualifies as protest music is really statements of identity. By existing in the world in this very bold way, that is in and of itself a political statement. You had that Beyonce and Jay-Z record, Everything Is Love. You watch that video where they're performing in the Louvre. That is very much about, like, we are taking up this place

that is not ordinarily considered welcoming to us, and we are in it. And so Janelle Monáe's record kind of falls into that same thing. It is this statement of blackness, of queerness, of womanhood that also sounds like Prince. Well, and we talked a lot about this in the politics podcast, that Beyonce album. And, you know, I kind of said, oh, this was like a fun, happy album.

And someone did write to me and was like, no, this is very deep meanings. And I agree because everything that Beyonce does and even Jay-Z at this point is very intentional. And I think putting themselves in the Louvre and doing all of those things is to say a lot of culture has been taken from black people. And this is our way of saying we are taking ownership of something that has traditionally been more European. I can't believe we made it.

This is what we made. This is what we thank for. This is what we thank for. I can't believe we made it. This is different. I ain't never seen a crowd going, hey, hey, give me my check. I do think in that song specifically too,

even when you get away from the lyrics, I think just the sound of Beyonce's voice in that record, there is a sense of breaking out that you listen to old Beyonce records, it is not that same sense of tension. There's a line in a song on that record called Boss, where Beyonce sings, My great-great-grandchildren already rich, that's a lot of brown children on your Forbes list. And on one hand, like, that's a great brag.

But on another, it's like, look, look where we are. Look where we've been. Look where we're going. All right. So, Stephen, you admit it. You are a man of long lineups. And that's great. Could have gone longer. Tunde Alainaran made a great record this year. I know. Go ahead. You mentioned a lot of great music, but was there one in the end that really rises to the top that you feel like this is definitively, maybe definitively too strong, but if you had to pick one, what is it? Yeah, it could never be definitive, but I think Childish Gambino, the song This Is America, which kind of dropped out of nowhere a little bit. He was on Saturday

Night Live and performing, and then all of a sudden he debuts this song, This Is America. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, go the way. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, go the way. And for me, I feel like one of the downsides of pop culture shifting to the internet is that there are few real-time surprises anymore. And this was the exception for that. I saw this buzz about this video, but I didn't quite know why. So I pretty quickly was watching the video in real time,

and I had that same shocking moment that so many else had when this video just takes a turn. Well, it's a great example. You're talking about the internet makes it hard for surprises to happen, but Childish Gambino used the internet to really hammer home the surprise. He appeared on Saturday Night Live, performed the song, wow, and then immediately released the video. And he's dancing, he's shirtless, he's just kind of writhing through these different scenes, and he actually pulls out a gun and shoots someone.

That person is unceremoniously dragged away like that person meant nothing and the gun is like cushioned and like carried away in this very delicate fashion and you're left not only in the song but in the video, to really parse out some very strong meanings. One of my favorite responses to this, and I totally forget who said it on Twitter, but they said, Donald Glover is doing what Kanye thinks he's doing in terms of a political message. So let's actually just take a step back for the six people who haven't watched this video who are listening. What was the overarching political message of this song in this video? To me, the political message seemed to be about how violence is a part of America and how certain people in America can be disposable.

When he takes the gun and he shoots the choir, that obviously seems to be a message about what happened in Charleston and how there are so many shootings can happen. They run together. And in America, you had all of these people killed in church, and we've just moved on. Till the next church shooting. Then we move on four days later.

And to the school shooting. And it all blurs together. It is a song and a video about desensitization, but it expects you to be able to desensitize yourself in order to consume it. So it is this very powerful statement that is not meant to be easy to watch. And it ends with him running seemingly for his life in total fear. Like that, that image of him just running for his life is kind of like this idea that you can't slip up and that if you do, the consequences are dire. Absolutely. And I think getting back a little bit to what Scott said in the beginning, part of what makes this to me the political song of the year is that it was experienced collectively in ways that so many of, I mean, I can list, I have listed a whole bunch of really, really great songs that invoke politics, but they weren't experienced by like everyone in your office at the same time over the same weekend on the same social media where all of a sudden like

everybody's everybody's experiencing the same thing and discussing it we don't get very many opportunities to do that as the culture becomes more and more and more diffuse all right so childish gambino this is america all right so steven at the end of each of our thursday shows we talk about what we can't let go uh so taking the politics out of it, what's the music you can't let go of this year? For me, a couple of the best albums of the year were made by women who were pushing the boundaries of what people consider country music. I think the Kacey Musgraves album Golden Hour is pretty widely accepted as one of the albums of the year. I don't want to leave. So crazy magic. It's hard to believe.

I don't want to leave. It's not just a country record. It's kind of a soft pop record with even little elements of disco to it almost. Oh, it's got some grooves. But also a lot of it is just very candlelit and soft and sweet. That record is just one of those at night in your house with the lights turned down, you know, kind of

albums of reflection and beauty and I'm so glad that it's been so widely embraced. What a world. Don't want to leave. All kinds of magic all around us. It's hard to believe. Thank God it's not. Well, Stephen, thanks so much for coming to hang out with us. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Stephen, as you can tell, has a lot more thoughts on music in general, which you can read at NPR Music's website. And he's also on the Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast, which, if you ever need a break from politics, is a great podcast to listen to. And I'm still really hoping to be on it the next time there's a big superhero movie. Oh, noted. Noted, Scott Dutrow.

Stephen, thanks a lot. Thank you. All right, we're going to take a quick break, and we're going to come back and talk about our favorite songs of the year without the politics. We'll be right back. Support for NPR and the following message come from Walmart. Walmart is using virtual reality to train managers and associates on everything from customer service to adopting new in-store tech. Here's Senior Director of Digital Operations, Brock McKeel. With VR, I'm able to do a lot of that training in four and five minute segments. And now I can bring that technology to them and it's accessible and it's fun and it's engaging. We focus on three things for VR. It's bringing to life the things that we don't want to create in front of a customer. Those moments in time that we don't want to happen, but we know they do. And so we want

our associates to be prepared. We also focus on those moments that are hard to recreate or we can't. You think of Black Friday. I can't recreate Black Friday for you, but we need you to feel confident and understand why we have the certain standards and protocols in place that we do. And then there's those moments that we just need you to remember. And because it's VR and it's fun and it's cool, you walk away understanding what those are. To learn more about how Walmart leverages virtual reality, visit walmarttoday.com slash training. Years ago, Jennifer Lopez's career almost took a big shift. Then the actress Penelope Cruz stepped in. I was like, I was thinking about, maybe I'll keep doing movies, but I don't know if I'm going to keep singing. She was like,

you have to keep singing. I'm Sam Sanders. My chat with J-Lo on the secret to her continued success this week on It's Been a Minute from NPR. And we are back and Steven is gone. But now Danielle Kurtzleben is here. Hey, Danielle. Hey there. And I know you listen to a lot of music because you always have your headphones in, but I can never see your headphones. So I'm always like, hey Danielle. And then there's a 10 second pause and then I realize, oh, she has headphones in again. This happens every day and I've never picked up on it. Oh, well.

Which all goes to say, I feel like you have a lot to contribute here. I like to think so. Okay. So what we're going to do here is kind of throw politics off the side of the ship and just talk about our favorite songs from the year, what we listen to, whether we were traveling to stories or sitting at our desk or just driving around. Songs of the year. So, Danielle, you're listening to music all day. I know this. Or you just don't want to talk to me, which is cool.

Which is cool. Headphones do give me plausible deniability where if someone is like, hey, Danielle, I'm like, no, I don't want to talk to you. I just kind of shrug it off. I think that's the NPR way, really. Like 80% of this building is just kind of like nodding along. But I've never done that to you, Scott. Okay. We can just stick with that premise for my feelings.

But at any rate. Of all the songs you're listening to. Well, to set this up, you guys may know this. Our listeners probably do not. But tucked away in the bowels of the first floor of NPR, there is a grand piano. It's awesome because it is over in this corner. You can't even see that anybody is playing it from the outside. And so when I am sick of writing, or I don't know if this happens to you guys, you're working on a story, it's not going well, you actually just hate it, you feel like you're

not doing a good job on it. Yeah, maybe, I don't know. I've heard this happens. This is when I go eat food it. You feel like you're not doing a good job on it. Maybe. I don't know. I've heard this happen. This is when I go eat food, but it sounds like you're more productive. I go play piano. And this year, you know, in the middle of a midterm year, there was a lot of stuff going on. I had a lot of capital M moments where I was just like, all right, screw this. Let's go pound on something.

My song is Un So Spiro by Franz Liszt. You don't have to know it. It's go pound on something. My song is Un So Spiro by Franz Liszt. You don't have to know it. It's no big deal. But it also matches this year. It's big. It's melodramatic. But it's also calming at the same time. It's kind of perfect. I like how you're all inranced. This is great.

And you can play this? Yeah. I'm not as good as this person. I just have no musical ability, so I'm always so impressed when people can. I've been playing since I was a kid. I was very small. Wow. But this is one of the pieces I go down and plunk out when I am really frustrated.

I will say this is like the calmest I have felt in literal weeks is listening to this song right now. Well, now you know why I'm so anxiety-free around this. So anxiety-free. I feel so sophisticated just listening to this. I thought I would bring class today, guys. You brought class. This is the most old-school public radio that the podcast has ever been.

My second choice was War Pigs by Sabbath, but I figured let's go with this. This is calming. This elevates. It elevates, I think. Miles, I'm going to ask you to show your song next. You're listening to classical music on the NPR Politics Podcast. Oh, my gosh.

Mine is going to be a little different. Okay. So let's have a buffer. Let's everyone take a deep breath. Okay. Pivot. Pivot. Okay.

And so I want to put you in my mindset when I discovered this artist. This is going to be an artist named Burna Boy, who is a Nigerian Afrofusion singer-songwriter. I found this artist earlier this summer coming back from two softball victories for the NPR softball team. Wait, wait, wait, wait. Wait, wait. Was this just an excuse? No, no, no, no, no. Are you talking about

the regular season champion? You have to listen to me. We heard about piano. You have to hear about softball. That's the deal. Get to hear about softball. Okay. So, a couple victories

in the rearview mirror. We're driving windows down from the suburbs of Maryland back into D.C. Going to Sweet 75 MPH. Okay. And drinking Gatorades. Possibly going to Sweet 75 MPH. Okay. And drinking Gatorades.

Possibly. Potentially. And this is just celebration music. It just sounds like glory to me. I wish I could describe what Miles is doing right now. This is, yeah, this is true. Yes! Okay. I can get behind this. Okay. Wait till the chorus comes in. It's gonna get even better.

This entire album, which is called Outside, basically just sounds like this at different tempos for 45 straight minutes. And it is my happy place. It is for parties. It is for working out. It is for hanging out. It is for doing all of the happy things in your life. It just puts a smile on my face. And so what type of dancing do you, I've seen a little bit in the chair.

It's not good. It's not good. Are you kind of winding it up? Okay. So for the listeners out there, I think to Europe this summer and got the nickname on this trip of corn stalk. For the listeners to understand my body type, that's basically what is happening here. We've got shoulders. We've got a little bit of, we've got some

hip. We've got some shimmy. You guys were shimmying too. I don't know why it's all about my shimmy. I cannot dance. I cannot dance. So I'm not, I can do a lot of chair dancing, but I cannot dance. So I just wanted to know whether you also bring in the moves. This makes you want to

move. I've been known to bring in the moves. If that, that's all, I'll leave it at that. Okay. All right. Thank you for sharing The moves. This makes you want to move. I've been known to bring in the moves. I'll leave it at that. Okay. All right. Thank you for sharing not only that, but also your dance moves with us, Miles. So, Aisha, Danielle's happy place is playing piano. Miles' happy place is playing weekend softball on the NPR softball team.

What is your song, and do you have a happy place that goes with it? Well, I don't know if it's really a happy place, but I was on maternity leave at the beginning of this year. I got to, you know, have all these babies, but I had a baby last year. And so I would be, like, driving to nursery school, and I would be in the van, just drop my son off, and I would just be cranking this. I'd rather go blind, blind, blind than to stay with her.

The music I listen to is not current, but this came out in 2017 and it combines some of my loves. So Ratchet Reality TV and like classic R&B. So it is from Tamar Braxton. Okay. The sister of Toni Braxton. Braxton Family Values. There was

Tamar and Vince. These are shows on WE tv and she had an album called The Bluebird of Happiness that came out late 2017 but I really discovered it 2018 and she has this song called Blind and I would be singing kind of at the top of my lungs. I love songs about love that is just crazy. When you love somebody so much that if they leave, you'd rather just go blind. You crazy, but I like that. Wait, so can you tie this back into the Ratchet reality TV? Because Tamar is on reality TV.

She got her start. There was Braxton Family Values with Toni Braxton and her sisters. And Tamar wanted to be a singer like Toni Braxton. I see. But she'd been in the background. And so that reality TV show helped launch her career. Okay. And now she's doing it. And is she still on TV?

And now she's doing it. She's still, well, kind of, sort of. She had some issues with it. Like, her and her husband had a thing. But now they're going through a divorce. So it's like a whole thing. Okay. Well, she's going to have a lot more to sing about.'s gonna have a lot more to sing about she'll have a lot more to sing about it's just a

lot it's a lot going on with tamar but i wish her the best detro yes let's hear yours what is your 2018 song so i think actually this is building on several of the trends that asia put out um i had one of those moments where spotify gives you uh the top songs that you listen to all year where i clicked on it and I was like, yeah, my life's a lot different than it was at the beginning of the year based on this list. And so we had a son earlier this year

and when I put him to sleep at night, which has been a process, but you know, I found over the time that I began curating a go to sleep music playlist that sounded suspiciously like a middle school dance for people my age. There is a lot of 90s slows jams, a lot of Casey and JoJo, a lot of Boyz II Men, a lot of Mariah Carey. And I found, I was like, wow, the swaying back and forth kind of mirrors the awkward dancing of when you actually did try to dance with someone else,

which was a rare occurrence in the Scott Tetreault middle school dance experience. This is some epic parallelism right now, yeah. So of all these 90s slow songs, though, what has risen to the top as his favorite to fall asleep to, scientifically tested, but also my favorite to listen to, is a lot of slow early 90s Michael Jackson. Particularly, number one song of the year for me would be Man in the Mirror. Oh, yes. I'm going to make a change for once in my life. It's going to feel real good.

I'm going to make a difference. I'm going to make it right. But that's not that slow. Gonna make a difference. Gonna make it right. But that's not that slow. That gets a little fast. Your song has taste. But that's a great song. It's a great song. And it's a great song because I actually have this early memory of,

and this makes me sound really old now, but my dad got me like the 45s when this came out. So I listened to a 45 record of this song in my basement over and over when I was little and I just liked it. So it's just very nice to, this song in my basement over and over when I was little. And I just liked it. So it's just very nice to, at the end of the day, even when he's not falling asleep, to just like hang out in a dark room with my son and listen to some Michael Jackson. And it's all about personal responsibility.

You've got to start with the man in the mirror. Look at yourself. Make a change. That's right. Cause and effect. I'm starting with the man in the mirror. I'm asking him just lost his mind. And there was this nice moment of we had just flown on a plane and we were in the cab coming home and he just lost his mind.

He was good on the plane, but he lost his mind in the cab. And I was like, let's try this. So I just started playing this and caused association. He was snoring in the car for like 20 seconds. And I was like, oh my God, it worked. All right, so now you know a lot more about all of us Than you did before This was fun though

And we're thinking about doing this So why don't you send us an email Of your favorite songs of the year At nprpolitics at npr.org Or you can tweet us at nprpolitics And we'll try to put together a Spotify playlist Or something of all of the favorite Songs of the favorite songs

of the year from our listeners. That is all for today, though. As much as talking about music can make you forget about it, news still does happen all the time. And when there is news, we will be back in your feeds covering the latest things happening. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover Congress. I'm Danielle Kurtzleben, political reporter. I'm Ayesha Roscoe. I cover the White House. I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting. Thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast. Make that change.