The Watch - Ep. 55: ‘Mr. Robot,’ Schoolboy Q, Desiigner, and 'The Night Of' With Sean Fennessey, Jon Caramanica, and Alison Herman

Episode Date: July 11, 2016

Chris Ryan and Andy Greenwald tackle the leaked season premiere of USA's 'Mr. Robot.' Then, Sean Fennessey joins Chris to discuss Schoolboy Q's new album, 'Blank Face.' Jon Caramanica of The New York Times comes on to make sense of Desiigner's XXL freestyle and disappointing 'New English' release. Finally, The Ringer's Alison Herman hops on to break down HBO's 'The Night Of' and the current shows on her radar. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I need sports to have to clear the room. Stand up and walk now. Hey guys, what's up? Just want to let you know today is a special episode of The Watch. Andy is working on hacking robots, so he's just going to call in for 15 minutes, and then I'm going to be joined by Editor-in-Chief of the Ringer, Sean Fennessee. We're going to talk about Schoolboy Q.

Our buddy, John Caramanica from the New York Times, calls in to talk a little bit about designer, and then Allison Herman from the Ringer is going to join me to talk a little bit about The Night of. Excited for this episode, check it out. Hello and welcome to The Watch. My name is Chris Ryan and I am an editor at the ringer.com and dialing in from the set of hacking robot. It's Andy Greenwald. I can't believe you gave me just a nice, true, supportive intro. I thought you were going to start messing with me. I'm not going to do that, man. I love that you're on the USA Network.

Look, man, you know, I know we came up together in the world of pay cable, but, you know, making the jump to basic cable, that, that, that, Not everyone can fly that high, you know. Not everyone can be Icarus. I can't wait to announce my show after Criminal Minds. Dude, if you went to network, that would be terrific. That would be great. Oh, man. We went deep on Uncle Buck last week, but I feel like that's an opening.

I know. Andy, we are here to talk briefly. You're busy today, but we wanted to do a little bit of Mr. Robot prep as the new season starts on Wednesday. And if people are so inclined, which I really hope they are, they can watch you on Hacking Robot after the episode airs, correct? On USA. Thanks, buddy. Yeah. Yeah, this is this show that we're doing and it's very crazy and it's going to be on live television. The second, the two-episode event premiere ends. So like 11.32 p.m. I'm telling you 1132 for just the real heads who don't want to watch the show, but just want to watch the after show. How much are you worried about having a

Ricky Bobby moment where you don't know what to do with your hands? I generally live my life that way. So that part won't be different. I have a whole other list of anxieties if you'd like to do a special podcast about those. Have you had any interesting anxiety dreams you want to talk about? I could definitely. You know, I'll put them mostly on my live journal, but I'll send people to them. No, it's going to be fun because it's me. It's Sam Smael, the creator of the show.

It's Christian Slater, Rami Malick, Portia Degree, Carly Chakin, potentially special guests, potentially someone wearing an F Society mask. I think it's going to be a lot of fun. Pump up the volumes, Christian Slater? Dude, do you know what this means to me? I remember when Cuffs with a K came out and I was like, I was like, he is our Nicholson. Gleaming the cubes, Christian Slater? To be fair, which I would like to be to Christian Slater.

People don't realize like what a big deal of this kid was when he was a kid. Like when we were kids, when Heather's came out. Oh, yeah. There was like a solid 10 minutes there where it was like, this is the new Nicholson. And I have to say, because I met him last year when we were doing Mr. Robot stuff in the first season, the nicest guy in the world. world now and so excited about being a part of the show. And yeah, I think this is going to be fun. But what we wanted to talk about specifically was a kind of funny surprise that happened last night. I wasn't, I wasn't aware of it. Were you aware that this was coming? No, why would I be aware of it?

You're on the after show. But you live in Hollywood, so maybe you pick up on the currents. I was just like watching my girlfriend, my wife watched girlfriend experience. You were watching your girlfriend. What was your wife watching? She was watching the boyfriend experience. No, I was watching. I was watching. I was watching. I was watching. I was like kind of in and out, but I mean, I watched like seven episodes of Girlfriend Experience last night. So I was not in the zone where I was picking up on on viral stunts. Yeah, so it was kind of exciting because the premiere on Wednesday is two episodes. The first two episodes of season two.

And they are excellent. And I would be saying that regardless of the fact, even if I wasn't standing on a Midtown set of an after show right now. But last night, if you timed your social media engagement, right, you would have seen that they put. first half of the premiere up on various platforms, right? They've dropped it on YouTube, on Twitter, on Snapchat. And that was pretty interesting. So it's the first half or it's the whole episode? Well, the premiere is technically two episodes. So what they put up was the first episode. Wednesday they will air the second episode and also the after show. But the first episode is very good. But I don't think you had a chance to watch it yet. And we'd rather talk about it when

we can talk about all of it later this week. We do a re-up. Yeah. But this was kind of new terrain for TV because we've spent a bunch of time recently talking about the phenomenon of the surprise album drop and all of a sudden TV's like no we want to do that too how do you feel about this I think it sucks I don't think it's working for music I don't I guess it's developed it's building a buzz and you get like these these moments where you own a new cycle or you own a 24 hours or you own maybe even a week if it's I don't think it's working I don't and I don't think that television should do that. It's not that it's cruel necessarily to the people who write about television, which it is. But it is, I don't know, it just doesn't feel right. Am I old? Is that

wrong? Well, I think that you're not wrong because I think that our opinions about this phenomenon are coming from what happens with music. And I think that we are both generally against it, because it does seem like we win the battle, but you lose the war, because you win the conversation cycle for a day, but then you drop off of the conversation cycle for the rest of the week, month, year. But I will say, now, especially now that I don't have to write about these things, because that would have totally screwed me. Let me be clear about that.

Because if I was going to be writing. So that was like 8 p.m. last night? Yes, it was like 8 p.m. on a Sunday. And if this was still Gran Island days, I would probably be writing a column about the return of Mr. Robot. And I would be writing that column. The column would be due Tuesday afternoon. So I would definitely be writing it beginning Tuesday morning.

I was just going to say that I was like, I thought you were going to be like, I would be polishing off my second draft. It's like GTFO, dog. But also I would have been writing probably like a recap or something of night up. So I would have had another piece to be doing today because it's totally blown everything up. So, but you know, do not weep for the TV critics. They do not weep for you. But I think that was that Shakespeare or John Dunn? But the reason I'm going to play the devil's advocate here.

And I say this, this is the first time this has happened to my. knowledge and to be clear though I'm hosting the after show I had no knowledge of that happening last night ahead of time TV is a little bit more uniquely suited to actually I think gain from this kind of stunt because there's always a second episode you know what I mean yeah like it's not like things are gonna vanish it's just sort of you know hyping the people who are already hyped and I think the key thing about this leak was that it was only for a limited time on these platforms and the truth is the people who are peeping like who is Mr. Robot account and learned about it

are the people who are most excited to watch it early and to be honest I don't think those are the people of Nielsen boxes or who are you know I don't think those are necessarily the people that count so I don't think they cannibalize it on ratings by doing it. Okay that being said I can just I can safely tell you that that that episode that the episode doesn't disappear just because they've taken the tweet down or anything like that. What are you suggesting, Elliot Alderson? I don't understand. And I do think that as we've been talking about a lot when we've talked about this idea of the belt

for the best TV show of the moment, part of what contributes to that is the ability to talk about it at the same time. And I actually do think now in retrospect for as I'm sure as unpleasant as it would have been or as it was to write about Game of Thrones the night of its airing, the fact that there wasn't a lot of like boy wait to you see episode six of this game of throne season or episode two or episode nine uh that that that helped and that there was a degree to which everybody was around the campfire at the same time with this season now game of thrones is maybe unique in television right now with the exception of walking dead in terms of you really got to see what's going to happen when it happens because otherwise you're going to hear about it whether you like it or not i think that's a good point i think the other thing is that you don't get many turns at the plate in, I don't always say this business, but I mean in the television landscape. And what I mean is coming off a season like season one of Mr. Rob, but you don't necessarily, you're not guaranteed to have a, you know, five times, six times, seven times, even two or three more times to have a large portion of the country so hyped and psych to find out what happens

next. And to sort of give some people a chance to know what happens next and then sort of dribble it out over three days instead of knowing that everyone who cares, everyone who caught the show when it was on last summer, everyone who binged on Amazon, everyone who was just super psyched to find out where they are, not having them all united and together on Wednesday night, that seems like a missed opportunity potentially. And I'm not just saying that because I want them to be watching at 1132 p.m. on the USA Network. Yeah. No, I hear you. So, I mean, just in terms of, oh, go ahead. Oh, go ahead. You're the guest. You're the guest. You're calling in from a cold hallway somewhere.

I'm in this empty dressing room, I guess, and in the bathroom there's like a hair sink, like where you can put your head in it so someone can like massage your follicles, but I don't think anyone is, I don't think any follicles have been massaged in there like a good half decade. The hair sink was definitely like on the vision board for seven. It was like, David Fincher was like, let me just bounce something off you guys, hair sink. And Morgan Freeman was like, no.

If he had, what if there had been like a slack chat? for like principals involved in seven. And it's just like the slack pings at like two in the morning. And Finch was like, hair sync, dot, dot, dot, question mark. And nobody responds. It's like Brad Pitt has left the room. And it's like Morgan Freeman sends the like chin scratching emoji. Kevin Space just hits panda emoji 15 times.

And he's never stopped. And it turns out later he was just sitting on his phone, but everyone thought he was a visionary. I was going to say that, you know, the Horace and Pete, the Louis CK show was kind of a surprise drop. And in that sense, and, you know, it's just very, very hard to surprise drop anything because of advertising and scheduling and because that was separate from advertising, it was able to do it. But I think that suited him because everyone was like, what is this? And then what he was, the surprise drop wasn't just dropping one thing and one thing alone. It was like I was saying before.

He was basically saying, okay, now this is going to be a thing. for a number of weeks and he never quite made it clear how many weeks. So it built and built and built in a more traditional way. But in retrospect, don't you think that Horace and P could have probably reached more people if it had a run up? And if people felt like, oh my gosh, like Louis C.K. is branching out into more or less like American theater. And he got to check this out. Alan Alda's greatest ever performance. You got to everybody has to watch this. I'm not saying it didn't necessarily need to be on a traditional platform. But sometimes people need to be. to just be made aware of these things.

I see what you mean. I don't think you're wrong, but I also think this maybe is a cynical take on it. But I think that the show probably profited more from the story about how and why he did it than anything else because he got so much press from the fact that he did it as a surprise, as an email subscription, as something that potentially put him into like Kanye levels of debt, which, as it turns out, wasn't really true. But those stories kept the show in the news as much as, like, Lori Metcalf's stunning one take finale in episode three. You know what I mean? So in a way, I, you know, Louis K

definitely presents himself as like, I don't know, I'm just kind of making it up as I go along, but he knows how the kind of press coverage he's going to get, and he's very smart about using it. Yeah, and I suppose that this ultimately is, it's not, it serves Mr. Robot as a show because this is a show about the way that information is vulnerable and what, the power of information. And in a lot of ways, even though it's kind of obvious, releasing it in this fashion, if only temporarily, is pretty smart. Can I suggest why? So when you see Sam Esmail, Sam, nice job, Sam.

I will. Sam Esmell listens to the watch, so he'll hear it before I tell him. But one thing that I would also add about it is that I think I know, again, I don't actually know, but I'm beginning to suspect why they did it last night and why they did it at like 8, 5, 9 p.m. I think it's because someone at the USA Network heard what we were saying about the TV belt and that we were saying it. could go to the night of and so they dropped this show right before the night of premiered

i mean which was a little that's a little question i'm going to talk to al uh to we're going to be talking a little bit more about the night of later in the episode this episode but i don't think that i think that night of deserves it before before i go because i got to get back to um put it you know hair sink i got to go back to hoodie fittings in the hair sink yeah but one thing and please talk to alison about this but it's been interesting to watch reactions to the night of as people watched it. And by the way, that was available before it actually premiered two, although that wasn't really like a surprise. Is it, does it, what, what, you know, I'm not going to lead the witness. What reaction does it engender in you when people's response to the show are, oh, what a dummy.

He made so many dumb choices, so I couldn't watch it. You know, I mean, I don't, I don't think Twitter is a great place for people to. Do you just stop there? I would say that that was a vocal, a vocal minority of the response. that I saw to the show, lots of which were like, holy shit, you guys did not undersell this. Yeah, I mean, a lot of people are like, this guy is really screwing up, but there's a lot of beats this story, man. But I agree.

And it's also like, there are a lot of keyboard warriors who are like, I would have been much savvier about wiping my prints from the knife that was just used to butcher a woman. Yeah, that's definitely, definitely, definitely someone you won't want to mute. Yeah, exactly. Or if you're just like out in the city where you've lived in your whole life and someone notices you standing at a gas station, my first thought is definitely like, well, I better brown bag that guy because I don't want him to know what I was doing tonight. It's the thing that Rizamette does so well is that he seems so totally petrified and confused

while also seeming like someone who is in other circumstances a competent and relatively together kid. But a kid. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Um, all right, man. We'll go back to the hair sink. Say hi to David Fincher for me. We are, I mean, everybody that I know, with a few exceptions, are so excited for you. Do you want to name those people right now? Tate's like, fuck Andy. Tate basically said... Tate's like Ben Simmons can't shoot

and Andy can't host. This is what I'm important. Like Tate already said fuck Andy when he started talking ill of the god Ben Simmons. Yeah. So, you know what? Dossi Tate at the Ben Simmons statue unveiling in 20 years.

And Tate will still not be as old as we are. I can't wait. You and I'll be there like we just survive like Dunkirk. We'll be like, you. You. didn't believe, teach? Why would be that old?

We'll only be 60, but still. First of all, how dare you? Second of all, people will come up to us and be like, why are you cos-playing John Mullaney and Nick Curles, oh, hello, Joe? That's what people will say to us when they see us in public in 20 years. Why are you in Staples Center

when Ben Simmons leaves to go to the Clippers in five years? You know, I knew calling into my own podcast is a terrible idea. Okay. Have fun at the hair sink. We'll talk to you in a couple. couple days. We'll be back Thursday for a re-up where we talk about the actual episodes.

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Big things. Very happy to be here, Chris. Damn, this is a good record. I keep thinking like, this is it. Now I'm like, I've got the collection of albums

that I will be listening to for the rest of the year. And then this is, this is great. This is just an awesome album. What do you like about it? I'm curious. You know what it is?

I was talking with Michael Peters about this a little bit. I'm actually not an M&M fan, but this kind of, reminds me a little of Eminem in places in terms of the darkness and some of the textures of the production and I really, really, really like that this feels like it's used to be that, you know, mixtapes were used as like sketchbooks and the albums where you're painting and this actually feels like that. I feel like schoolboys been building up towards this complete of a statement, and in a lot of ways, it, you know, I know that we're going to talk a little bit about YG,

but this feels like the wide range of Southern California rap on display from like, Cypress Hill to Predator America's Most Wanted Era Ice Cube has some some references in there. I don't know. And also just the collection of guests, but actually weirdly the exception of Kanye, I think I'm really correct. You know, it's like wild that they put out the Kendrick remix of that song. And it's just like now that Kanye verse is just not good. It feels meaningless.

Yeah, yeah. It's interesting. So we should give a little context. Schoolboy is a member of TDE. He is sort of the robinson. to Kendrick Lamar's Batman, I guess you could say. No disrespect to J Rock or Absul. And this is his fourth record, his second major label record.

It's mostly produced by Digifonics, which is, you know, the in-house TDE producers, which is Tabe's Soundwave will be. And it's an interesting, beautiful, dark drug cloud of a record. Yeah, it's really, really blunt ashes in an ashtray. and like kind of gross windows, you know, that have been smoked on too much and can't tell if it's 5 p.m. or 5 a.m. Yeah. Yeah. Cypress Hill is a really interesting reference point that you made because I think that that druginess is very resonant.

But on the other hand, schoolboy Q seems very sad and angry. And I always felt like Cypress Hill, there was kind of like a joyousness to their blunted out. Fuck the cops point of view. Yeah. This is a much more been sipping on lean. falling asleep in my couch watching belly for the hundredth time kind of look, you know? And some of it is mournful and some of it is reflective and some of it is just like, fuck everybody.

Yeah, it feels like when people talk about throwbacks, often it means like, oh, it's a throwback sonically or, you know, like Joey Badass does this stuff or whatever. But with this record, it's more of a throwback to a feeling of almost a pre-airnet, how you would entertain yourself, which was usually getting high and watching whatever was on television. You know, it feels very like, I'm watching skate videos for four and a half hours and I didn't notice time went that far, you know? Yeah, he feels in a way to me like the logical conclusion of Odd Future.

Like, they don't have anything to do with each other necessarily, even though Tyler, the creator does produce a song on this album. But where Odd Future and the artists in that collective were very brady and very angry and very just sort of like, you know, spraying in every direction, schoolboy is much more measured and direct. and, you know, angry but contained. And you can kind of see that in his public persona too. Like you mentioned the fact that he doesn't have this sort of like mixtape approach to the world.

He creates albums. He has four records. He doesn't put up. He doesn't just flood the block with music. He took almost two and a half years to put this album out after his last one, which was a number one record in the country. You'd think he'd try to capitalize on the Kendrick moment or something, but he really took his time. Yeah. He took a whole extra year to do this.

He is a very self-contained artist. He's an adult insofar as somebody who makes a, record like this can be an adult. And he almost works entirely. I feel like school boy cue is best appreciated on school boy cue records. Whereas like for as much as I love the Vince Staples album, there's nothing I love more in this world than Vince Staples guest spots because I feel like Vince comes in on ride out here. He's really great when he what he guess on Earl songs. But on right out, you're just like, oh my God, Vince is the best rapper alive for like 45 seconds in a row. Vince is really like a perfect contemporary for him. You know, in the way that odd future feels very young,

is those two guys match. They have a similar point of view. They have a similar tone. It's all rap nihilism, right? Which is not a very common thing. Very, very cynical. But it's like, do you understand what I mean by it? To appreciate school boy, you have to go to schoolboy to get it.

It's very true. I can't even off the top of my head think of any relevant guest spots he's had aside from TDE records. It doesn't really seem. I'm sure that there are some and people will tell me what they are. But it's not a part of his pursuit. He is self-contained. In relationship to the wide.

record and I think we should mention that Justin Charity's got a piece coming this week on the ringer that's about these two albums kind of looking at them together. I love the YG record and we talked about it on the watch a couple of weeks ago. And the more I think about it though, and I'm not sure I really was able to articulate this the last time I talked about it. And this is going to sound corny, but it does feel sometimes like when I'm listening to the YG record, like it's a Roy Lichtenstein version of West Coast rap. Like it's almost like too self-aware how the beats are like just a little bit too mechanized. Does that make any sense?

Like the way it's almost just like West Coast rap. This is the best West Coast rap record ever made. This is the DAZ homage. This is the DJ Clu homage. This is the Cube song. This is my political song. It is very, it's paint by numbers, and I don't mean that as an insult.

Yeah. And it is very joyful and excited. It's very, it really recalls Tupac. Maybe we can talk about your feelings about Tupac. And for that reason, I think it makes for all, fun listen. I wouldn't describe blank face as a fun listen. No. This is kind of the, it's a real alpha and

omega proposition where if you want to go up at the barbecue, you listen to Stillbrazy. If you want to go down on the Sunday night before you've got to go to work, maybe light a match, you listen to this. Yeah, I was listening to Blakeface on the way to work today. Put me an interesting mood. Good job on a Monday morning. Yeah. Yeah, it's fun.

I don't know really what Schoolboy Q's arc is, though. He's a really interesting character. He reminds me of like the kinds of artists that put out like 30 albums across 30 years and they just they put a new one out and they put a new one yeah it's like Neil young or something he doesn't he doesn't seem to be in pursuit of some like mass commercial enterprise even though he has had a number one album in the country even though he has had a top 10 single pre devoted fan base he'll follow him on like the jagsy goes on yeah yeah what do you think about

the future of tde given what kendrick has become to the culture and the rest of the people in that world well do it's interesting because like when you say tde i don't necessarily think of a specific collection of artists as much as like a very like artistically courageous and exploratory group of L.A. Quote-unquote rappers. Yeah. That are kind of messing around on the margins of that stuff. And so I don't necessarily think of it as like a crew in the way that you and I grew up thinking of that that's Rockefeller. That's dipset.

These guys all, you know, kind of eat from the river of Cam or eat from the river of Jay, but then go off and do their own thing. but it's always basically related. Do you have a favorite? I mean, I really like J. Rock. Do you have a favorite TD person? Is it schoolboy? It's probably schoolboy, although, you know, I mentioned this last night. The Black Hippie remix of that part, which we mentioned earlier, features just yet another in like a series of 100 consecutive Kendrick verses that are really just emotionally, intellectually, you know, stylistically.

Yeah. Formally incredible. Just amazing. Like look at that. Look at the verse from. from the blacky remix of that part. Yeah, people can find that on genius.com. There's like a piece where it's like look at the rhyme scheme of this verse.

It's, it's staggering. And it's also just there's a lot of meaning. There's a lot of interiority going on in that verse. So Kendrick is sort of, it's impossible to defy him as the leading light of that group. There's nothing that will make you confront your real relationship to your favorite rapper than having your favorite rapper rap next to Kendrick. And I say that as somebody who thinks nostalgia on the Pusher record is probably one of like the five best rap songs the last few years.

And just Kendrick, Kendrick's just on a different planet. Kendrick is operating in a completely different frequency. And even push of who I think is in a lot of ways, like one of my favorite rappers ever. It's just incredible to watch him go to work on somebody else's song. I think the thing that I like about Kendrick is... Especially Taylor Swift. Oh, God. It hurts.

The thing I like about Kendrick is not Taylor Swift. Is the specificity and the clarity that he interacts with. School Boy, Q, is kind of the opposite proposition. It's really good vibe out. You don't actually don't have to worry too. much about what the details of his pain. You can really just enjoy the music around it. It's an interesting thing too where he has managed to not sacrifice the quality and the consistency of his work, but he still has Metro Woman on this album. He's got Swiss beats on this album. He

has Alchemist on this album. He has a, Miguel's on it, right? Miguel has a chorus on it. I was just reading about it this morning that the label needed to compel him to add Miguel to this record, even though... I don't get that. Like, in 2016, here's what I was thinking about that when I was And there was another song on this record that I was thinking about this in relation to. I think it was whatever you want. And I was like, maybe he wanted to do this song. Maybe he didn't. I hadn't read that interview yet.

But in 2016, it made sense in 2006 or 1996 when it was like, oh, this is the radio song. Because there wasn't a Wikipedia where people were like, I'll just go find out everything I can about this person. And then I'll go on YouTube and do a search for his name and find out about his music. It was literally radio. It was your conduit to these people. And to any artists, it could be like the wallflowers or smashing pumpkins. That's why those people made songs that were sort of the softest, most accessible version of what it is they thought they were doing. I don't know why you need to do that anymore.

I guess it does appeal, quote unquote, to a large audience. But I always felt like, isn't that kind of a rope atop where somebody's like, oh, I heard this song that you made with Jennifer Lopez. I thought it would be pretty cool to check you out. Oh, shit, you're fat Joe. This is really, really brolic New York street rap. That's a really good question. I have two thoughts about this. On the one hand, I completely agree with you.

I remember being at Coachella in 2014, and I was standing about a thousand yards away from a girl talk set happening on the main stage. And he was, you know, beat matching, you know, the bangles to Jay-Z or something, some terrible girl talk thing. And then Man of the Year by Schoolboy came on and he flipped that against like a radio head song. And I was like, you know, man of the year is a real schoolboy banger. It's a poppy song and it was a quasi-hit. But it was still a very hard record. And I was like, okay, well, this is all school boy needs to do. But when I was reading about what he had to say about adding Miguel to this song on this album,

it's largely because of the successive studio from Oxymoron, which is probably the biggest hit off Oxymoron. And he has, there's an R&B hook on that song. And it's, you can't get away from it. And so it does, the radio thing that sort of like climbing the Spotify charts thing still does matter to some people. I just think Miguel is maybe not as pure pop as Jennifer Lopez. I think you see less of that crass commercial, like, why is Mandy Moore on this song with designer than you do now where you see like. Candy and Panda are very close.

You wouldn't have to change that many words. That's something that Girl Talk can maybe get into. I know. That's true. I want to ask you two questions to wrap this up before we get to John. One is do you consider Untitled and Master a 2016 album? I am old and so I think of it as an EP. Okay.

And EPs are amazing. And there's two, two songs on that record, number two and number seven that probably are in my top 100 songs of the year. Yeah. Kendrick Lamar is entitled and mastered. But it's still basically like an odds and sods kind of thing. It's not really a true album. You can feel it being part of a recording time that was 18, 24 months ago. So no, but I don't think it really matters.

And so where are you at now in July with the landscape? what are the top three and what order from the rap from rap this can i share can i share the take i've been sharpening for you like this is an exclusive right this is an exclusive i feel like we should get the high 97 voice i've really come around on views by the artist drake i think views is really good tate are you nodding tate i know tate agrees with me because tate and i are from the same generation even if they're different generations we see the world this ways you with me nine it's a it's a pretty sought indicted to the album but it's still soft and cut away.

Hype, Weston Road Flows. Western Road Flows is good. There's 10 songs on that album that are really good, which is more than, that's more than our on Blank Face, which I love. And if it was a 12-song album, people would be like, what a great record. Yeah, which is such a,

that's probably a conversation you and I have had about rap records for 10 years, but it still means something. There's a lot of songs on there that I like to listen to. So I feel very good about views. Obviously, Cullering Book and Pablo own a lot of the mind share,

I think, for album of the year, for rap album of the year, for whatever category you want to create. But, you know, Blankface kind of worming its way in there. I like the YG record. It's still brazy up there. It's good. It's good and I won't return to it 18 months from now

the way that I do with Pablo every other week. Yeah, and I feel like, I mean, it's only been a few days, but I feel like I am developing that relationship with Blankface because I'm like, I'm going to have like a month or two we're ride out. I've already listened to Groovy Tony like 27 times today. So, I mean, thank you for putting Jada kiss back in my life. School Boy, Q.

He's such a great man. Thanks, Chris. Let's call John Carmichica. All right, I'm here with Sean Fennacy, editor-in-chief. Hello. Chief Keefe of the Ringer, and we are joined by our good buddy, the New York Times pop music critic, John Caramonica. What, John?

Not necessarily in that order. That we're good buddies? I'm just saying, like, let's just tell the people, be truthful to the people. Pop music critic, true savant, Pokemon Go, Lord and Master. That's true. And then you'll catch me in the streets.

Are you fucking playing Pokemon Go? I'm going to be playing it right now. Thanks for joining us, John. How does it feel that you spent like $100 on that E40 Warriors T-shirt and now it's garbage bandwagon jumping? First of all, when the hip-hop museum opened in 2044, that is going to be vital. Vital in the merch category. Just catching on the second floor next to my Rick.

Ross, Teflon, Don, bobblehead. You know what I'm saying? Congratulations on all your artifacts. The other thing that they're going to... First of all, I'm staring at a Buster Rhymes break your neck,

neck brace right now. I mean, come on. Why wouldn't I own that? So you're basically saying that if it weren't for your hoarding, we would have a hip-hop museum and rap would be treated with the respect it deserved.

What I'm saying is come see me. If you want to know the true history, come see me. There's only one reason this culture is great. Private tours available. Yeah, it's John. Okay, private. That's really creepy.

John, you know what else should be in a museum is this X, X, X,L magazine freestyle that designer did for their freshman issue. Was it a bit of freshman issue? I understand. And I know we agreed. I know we agreed in advance that that's what we were going to talk about it. We will talk about it. But I felt like it was a little fuss that when you said, John, what do you want to talk about?

And I said, Chad from the Bachelorette. Snapcat. You just got the wrong podcast. called Juliet. Okay, I'm just saying, I'm just saying you want to talk about quick enthusiasm

I mean that's the most flame thing going that's not on a Pokemon Go screen right now. You also, you wrote about this designer freestyle and I thought it was really... Fine, fine, oh my God,

your relentless ability to steer the subject Young Mortally Safe on after the Thrones. I feel like I'm on after the phones. I wanted to ask you about this because I can't think of

a, uh, precedent. I can't think of another time where the best thing someone is made is something that's so disposable like this. Can you? Disposable is a rough word. Well, I don't mean disposable. I mean, it's a 45 second promo clip for a magazine cover. So I mean, I... Well, sure, but, but do you keep I mean, first of all, I feel like the precedent for this really is the BET Hip Hop Award cipher. Yeah. The very, very famous one. The one with Juell, the one with Fab, like that, in terms of sort of like

like content that is created essentially for promotion, but that ends up being maybe like genre shifting or at least in my mind. Like that's sort of what I'm looking at it from the framework or you know, or you know, Cam, Cameron and a Rhapsody. Yeah. I mean, Sean and I were talking before we were recording and I was like, is this like if Jay only ever did the S. Doc Carter Reebok mixed tape? Yes. Right. But that's fine because look, what is designer's signature problem? Right. His signature problem is also a second-ture accomplishment, which he is literally all he's doing every day is trying to find five places that will let him play panda

and get a check for it. So that's sort of his basic struggle right now. What do you mean five places? You mean like McDonald's? You know, like a club show, you know, a radio show. Like, you know, he's milking it. He's running from spot to spot to spot. I don't know if you guys were real heavy on Snapchat this weekend, but if you looked at designer Snapchat, he was out in the Hamptons playing some party with a bunch of crazy white people for some online site with some retail site with Chanel Emon and Haley Baldwin and yada yada and white people are losing their minds to Vanda.

But then, you know, white people were not losing her. I can't even unpack that statement. I don't know if you guys were on Snapchat. No. Was he playing it? Or is he, like, just, like, showing up with a disc man and plugging in the ox and being, like, if you white people heard bandit. What do you want to know if, like, Susan Tedeski was back to him? Like, what do you want to know, man?

He went out and he did the thing. Like, he did the thing. Come on, you know what the thing I'm talking about. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Don't maybe qualify the thing. But anyway, you know what the white people were not going crazy for? The Timmy Turner. Timmy, Timmy, Timmy Turner.

He did an a cappella Timmy, Timmy Turner, and it literally looked like he was delivering something at a funeral. No one cared. The entire crowd just stopped dead. I felt very bad for him because Timmy, Timmy, Timmy, Timmy Turner, in my mind is going to be the signature designer song when we all look back on Designer 10 years. But is it going to be the version that we saw in this YouTube clip,

or is it going to be the version we heard in a clip of designer and Mike Dean getting John blazed out and listening to the musical version? Have you seen that yet, Sean? I think, I think. Here's the thing. I think in the way that, like, real Drakeheads are like the... You know what I'm saying? Yeah. Not the Beanie Man version.

I think in that same way, this double XL freestyle is the real version, and our album is not going to be... And that's for a couple reasons. One, it shows designer, I mean, assuming designer wrote it, which I'm assuming he did, that he did not display on panda. It shows that he has, like, a narrative approach. Also, and I wrote about this when I wrote about... when I wrote about the free stop, there's a difference in his delivery between the double Xl freestyle and the whatever he's doing with Mike Dean. In the double Xl freestyle, he takes on the burden of the narrative, but he also takes on the burden of the sort of melodies and the counter melodies.

He all, all that melancholy that is sort of taken on by whatever beat Mike Dean gave him, designer appropriated as a result. But then when he did it over the 19 beat, he kind of let go adhere more tightly to the beat structure and therefore let go of some of those sort of those blue notes and those grace notes in between beats that really gave the XXL. Yeah, it's funny, John, what you identified is exactly what we talked about in our office when that freestyle first came out. We were like, wow, this is profound, the melody, the depth, the incantation. There's something funereal and terrifying about this. And then we immediately jumped to, oh my God, designer is way deep. and better than we ever could have imagined. And then I felt like the air kind of came out of the balloon

when we heard that Mike Dean version. There is this weird disconnect between designer now getting the chance to work with the most elite creative people in hip hop and somehow it being worse for him? Like, is it possible if he were a man alone recording these weird acapella songs, would he be somehow more interesting to us? Because I guess I'm not convinced that this weird

acapella song even would have come to the surface had we not kind of gone through like the Kanye boot camp to this point. Right. He wouldn't be a freshman who got a freestyle in the first place had he not, had Kanye not taken his work and made it into. And he also might not have taken the risk of doing something like that, even if he wasn't a freshman, even if he was just still a kid posting to SoundCloud, what kid posting the SoundCloud is basically doing like, great, you know, like no one's really doing that.

So what are the odds that him, as a kid who was 17 or 18, buying beats off of, off of the internet from random producers he's never met, what are the odds that he's going to be like, you know what's really going to be popping? Is if I do this and I sort of like take my voice and turn it into a gospel sermon. It just seems unlikely. You know, there's an interesting designer's interviews, but he said something in one of the early ones that I read. It seemed, you know, like just a thing that a guy says, which is, you know, I met with Kanye

and everything on good music. Like everybody here is an artist. Like, we're not rappers. We're artists. And maybe that's meaningless to me and you and like a bunch of people who sort of follow the genre for years and years and years. Because it's a type of thing a lot of people say. But if you're a kid coming from where he comes from who really has like Kanye and creative processes like his, maybe he really did take it to heart. Maybe he really did open his mind.

And maybe he really did learn something from being. That said, maybe not. That was my follow up was, have you heard New English? Because I don't think that's the case. Yeah. How much of that do you think is just leftover old stuff that he's been working on for a while and how much of it is I came out of the Mike Dean Kanye Lab and this is what I got. I think it's a fair question.

I want to say maybe I feel like it's mostly new, to be honest. I don't get the sense that I'm not going to say I got Talmudic with New English, you know. Like I didn't exactly like listen to it 12 times and try to parse out all the fine points. But it felt like stuff, it felt like a guy who was burning off a lot of energy, you know? And that's fine, but it didn't feel focused, but it felt like they were like, we got to get 12 songs. Like, we just got to keep going. And so because of that, my sense is it's mostly new. I felt like the Timmy Turner Freestyle pushed him firmly beyond the future comparison into a new conversation.

And then when I heard the mixtape and I heard shooters and I heard make it out, I was like, these are just bad future songs. And it's amazing how he just gave that up immediately. I guess the question is not so much than how much of New English was before or after. Maybe the question is more like, where did the Timmy Turner, for like, who's actually behind the Timmy Turner freestyle? Because maybe there's some in and there that we're not aware. Maybe that's actually the outlier. Like, you know, Timmy Turner freestyle is, if I had to do my top 10 of 2016, like, that's top five maybe right now. And it's also, but it's a question about whether or not, like, that could be, that's,

just feels like one of those we're going to find out in three years that like he had the beat but like it didn't work like when he was freestyling or something like that like I know their site like their a cappella's like there'll be some like rather sus backstory me yeah something yeah you know big Sean wrote it

that's too bad I hope that's not the truth no honestly I hope that's not the truth when I heard that I was just like oh I want this kid to win and if you like follow him and you like see him of enthusiasm yeah I mean that's why like the Mike Dean clip is like he's just so in the moment right there.

I mean, Zwaudevie doesn't even begin to describe what this kid's life. Maybe you should call his album Zwa de Veev and maybe then you'd appreciate him. Yes, that's right. Lord knows, everybody should just name albums in ways that make me happy. John, thanks for calling in from the Hip Hop Museum. I wish you and the Golden State Warriors the best of luck next season. I'm just going to smooch you before I come gather your edges, dog.

Bye, John. Bye. And now we are joined by, or I am joined by, Allison Herman from The Ringer. What's up, Allison? Not too much. And this is your first time on the watch. We're really excited to have you. I'm speaking for Andy here.

Andy's just like somewhere with Rami Malik probably, so he doesn't care. But still. I appreciate it. Allison, I wanted to have you on because I really loved the thing you wrote about the night of, and you and I are both super into this show. We have to be careful because, you know, I know that everything that happens, and this show is such pure plot that like it goes into the understanding of the case that the season is taking on. But the idea that you kind of put forward in your piece that was up last week was this idea that it's like a return to Golden Age television, right?

That it's that it kind of has the essence of the best shows that we used to like that we sort of not grew up watching, but kind of cemented the world that we kind of live in now with television. Can you talk a little bit about your piece? Yeah, definitely. So I think we're sort of in this period of skepticism towards a lot of the tropes that a lot of the big golden age shows kind of introduced to television. Do you think that there's like a particular thing behind that skepticism? I think there's sort of a chain of things. Like you have very high profile codifications of that trope that didn't necessarily succeed.

So vinyl would be the most obvious example. Looking towards HBO more generally, people have sort of noted that. since Game of Thrones launch, they haven't really had that big tent pole drama. Yeah, yeah. Tradition of the Wire of the Sopranos. And then there's kind of this interesting trickle-down effect that if you look at a show like AMC's halt and catch fire, which was sort of criticized for being kind of a rote replication of that trope in the first season.

Difficult man, company stuff, just like madmen with computers, basically. Exactly. It was the criticism. Yeah. Exactly. And in its second season, it strayed pretty far away from that and also demonstrated a lot of awareness of the flaws of the difficult man character in the show. Right.

And people really responded to that, critically at least. And so I think The Night of is a really interesting entry into that conversation because it has a lot of the things that we so loved about the most obvious example would be the wire because Richard Price worked on that show. But it has the sort of ambiguous morality, genre focus and crime. A lot of things that, you know, we haven't necessarily seen it. We remember for Breaking Bad. I remember some Sopranos.

We remember from, yeah, from the wire, exactly. I was curious as to whether or not, Andy and I talked about this a little bit last week, whether or not, I mean, obviously they shot this pilot 2012 with Gandalfini. And there's actually a pretty interesting Q&A with Riz Ahmed and in Vulture where he's just like, yeah, like, it was Gandalfini and then it was obviously not. And then it was going to be De Niro for a second.

And I was like about to get on a plane to go shoot this with De Niro. And then that got canceled. And then it was like all of a sudden it's like to Turro. get on a plane. But I was wondering, despite the fact that it's been such a long-gestating project, whether or not you feel like it also comes into a moment where, because of making a murder, because of serial, because of our fascination with the minutiae of the criminal justice system and with unfairly accused or possibly unfairly accused criminals in certain cases, that it's kind of catching

a zeitgeist moment, which is also something that those HBO shows used to be, that the golden and HTV seem to grab? Definitely. I mean, yeah, it's just that I think we're sort of in a cultural moment where we are fixating on the flaws of the criminal justice system. For obvious reasons, yeah. Very apparent in the news, but it's kind of trickled down into not just the fact that serial making murder exists, but that they had such a chokehold on the popular imagination for a few

weeks. And I think it's sort of interesting that it does combine a lot of things that, you know, the wire was nothing, if not skeptical, of our criminal. justice system with things that have trickled into the zeitgeist. Also the fact that, you know, he talks about obviously Rizofman's character is Pakistani American and they talk about the effects of post-9-11 prejudice on his community. They hint at it in the premiere episode. I don't think it's going to be a shocker that it comes into play a little later. But the fact that these are things that have both been in the conversation literally since 2001 and things that are just a little bit more

current now than they have been in the past few years is definitely it's a fortuitous collision for the show. I was watching partially on your recommendation. I was watching a bunch of girlfriend experience episodes this week end and that was fun. And I couldn't help but feel like watching that, having seen two seasons of the Nick and looking at Robert Ellswood's work with Steve Zalian, Robert Ellswood, the cinematographer, who's worked a bunch with Paul Thomas Anderson and shot the first few episodes of the night of. It was just like how far we've come from Goldswe's. in age television in terms of like the visual vocabulary of these shows. It, do you think the night of does anything visually that is, what makes it just so distinctive?

I mean, obviously there's composition questions, but the way that it's actually kind of a boring show in terms of just like, oh, and then he goes to a procedural hearing, and then he goes to this and then his parents try to bring him some food or something like that. That's not like, oh my God, we found out Don Draper is this person. Yeah, but they do such a great job of particularly in the premiere, just like suffusing it with dread. Like the idea of a college student going to a party isn't inherently a terrifying prospect, but the show teaches you very early on. I thought another visual thing that was really interesting was it uses surveillance footage.

And so you are literally seeing people, you're seeing Razafin's character as he is seen, and you see how incriminating it looks when you get the Midtown Tunnel surveillance footage or you get the interrogation footage. And it's very good at sort of teaching you to see this through the eyes of both someone who's specific. And that's another post-9-11 thing. Oh, absolutely. Everything we do is basically on tape, whether it's because we're filming each other or because we're being filmed.

Yeah. And the fact that it is so desaturated. It's literally shot in Chains of Gray, which, you know, it wears really well with the thematics. But it's just this New York that it impresses upon you not just like the fact that being in New York and I can be a sort of scary thing, but also just the drudgery of when he shows up at the precinct. You see that this is full of paper pushers and people who aren't exactly, you know, at

the top of their game. They're just kind of there at four in the morning filling out paperwork and they just want to clock out. And it's this, you know, grinding system that the student is suddenly interjected in. And that's it. That's the thing that the wire capture really well about police work was this idea that everybody works for somebody, that everybody, you're all, everybody's part of the same bureaucracy and that everybody has these margins that nobody, you know, that seems sort of arbitrary. The thing that's been really great so far in reading some of the responses is just, I'm just, Richard Price is one of my favorite writers. And, and, you know, And, you know, Andy and I've talked a lot about the idea of this tension that's developing or maybe even just it's good that television is somewhat becoming more of a director's medium, the more of these sort of marquee filmmakers get involved in like, I'm going to shoot a six-episode thing.

But it's incredible to watch and people will see this unfold like a really great Richard Price crime novel. And it does, it has all the hallmarks of it, whether it's that like almost on a chemical level understanding of New York City. and its frustrations and its possibilities. And that's so much like Lush Life, where it's like you can have the most amazing night of your life that ends with the most tragic thing that ever happened, you know. And just also just that feeling of like the lights and the sounds and the people and everybody you see on Subways having a different interface with what you're doing.

You just transplanted from New York. I mean, is it making you nostalgic at all? Yeah. I mean, one thing I really loved about Lush Life was that I kind of capture this incredibly unlikely collision of these two. usually separate classes of New Yorkers. And this is very similar. It's, you know, she lives in an unbelievable upper west side brownstone, which the New Yorker

and me is trained to be like, how does she live there? Yeah, right. But then you also get the Paca Sadi cab drivers, son. You get the beat cops and you just get this like singular event that just happens to toss together a bunch of people who both interact every day in the form of the subway car and otherwise never substantive interactions. Yeah. And it's just like the idea.

that something is at once two blocks away and three worlds away. Oh, definitely. The depiction of Queens, the depiction of how dilapidated the police stations are and just how analog it all is with writing everything out in Penn. I mean, it's taking place in 2014. It's still, they could be on some sort of software by then. Okay, Knight of is great. I wanted to just get quickly from you, like, what else are you watching right now?

Well, I just wrote a thing that went up on the website today. Over July 4th weekend, I went on an incredibly impulsive Hulu binge of these two shows, cucumber and banana. They're British imports. It's one of those things that's both not timely at all because it originally aired a year ago, but because not that many people actually watched it when it first aired, it's just hanging out in these streaming services, just waiting for people to kind of stumble on. So people are always asking me what's on Hulu or Netflix that I can just kind of tune into,

And I highly, highly, highly recommend these two for sure. What else? Stranger Things is coming out on Netflix this Friday. Yeah. Yeah. I was, you know, because I was talking about, this is like Brian Curtis wrote something for us in the newsletter when we were first starting out about, I think it might have been about Midnight Special. Yeah. And it was about like the sort of amblification of everything and how we just, it seems like movie history starts with ET.

You know? And that's our collective imagination stretch back to whatever Spielberg film was the sort of formative experience for us. But it does seem also like over the last with Midnight Special with this and a couple of other films like the guest and some other stuff that Carpenter, John Carpenter has become like as big of an influence. I haven't gotten a chance to see any of Stranger Things. Were you a fan of it? Have you checked out the purpose episode? Yeah. I've seen the first two or three episodes.

And if you are a fan of 80 style, either Spielberg Blackbusters or Carpenter films, you will absolutely. love it. It is an incredibly studied and well-executed homage to those things. And the filmmaking is great since we were talking about television as increasingly a director. But you're a little bit younger. So when you're watching that, are you like, this is cool? Like, this is good Spielberg karaoke? Or are you, do you see it and you're like, this is great? Like, I really like it for what it is. Or do you care about all the boxes it checks with like, whether it's lens flare or John Williams style swelling music or kids in their wonder at space or whatever? Like that what's your sort of relationship to that stuff?

I mean, I definitely grew up watching Spielberg stuff on VHS. It didn't just disappear from the consciousness. I know, yes. But yeah, I think also this is a show that very much wants you to understand that it is a homage and it's working in this tradition and it kind of goes out of its way, I think. Like you see 80s kids playing Dungeons and Dragons and it's all these things that clearly are not, I feel like there are certain 80s shows like Halt and Catch Fire that don't necessarily they're not about the nostalgia element as much.

Like, Hall and Catch Fire is very forward-looking. It's about the Don of the Tech Revolution. This is very much focusing on the 80s as something that is not like the way suburban childhood is today. Like, you see them discovering ham radio and being so wowed by the idea of them, being able to talk to each other. And so I think the nostalgia is kind of infectious. Like you really pick up the brothers who co-created the series, you know,

are working in this tradition and really enjoy it. And it's obviously wonderful to see Winona Ryder. I was going to ask what's the state of the Winonaissance? Strong. Okay. She's so incredible and show me a hero. I just seems like I'm hoping that she keeps the streak alive. Yeah.

I think her character, you know, she plays a woman whose son goes missing. So I think in the early episodes, it is justifiably very focused on her like panicked response to that. She's kind of like the Melinda Dillon Close Encounter's character. Exactly. So I get the sense that she's going to have, you know, more to do and that character is going to deepen as the, as the series goes on. but definitely. You know, it's a cast mostly of child actors, and she's definitely the biggest name on there, and I think she totally carries it. And it'll be great if she's the draw that gets people to watch it. Okay, awesome. We'll have to check that out. Allison Herman. Thank you so much

for joining us. You can read Allison's stuff on The Ringer. We'll have her on again sometime soon. Thanks for listening, guys.