Wonderful! - Wonderful! 148: Gak Chat

Episode Date: September 3, 2020

Rachel's favorite parenting poem! Griffin's favorite remote-controlled toy! Rachel's favorite torso piercing! Griffin's favorite short-lived game genre!Music: “Money Won’t Pay” by bo en and Augustus – https://open.spotify.com/album/7n6zRzTrGPIHt0kRvmWoyaFor more ways to support Black Lives Matter and find anti-racism resources: https://blacklivesmatters.carrd.co/Donate to the Milwaukee Freedom Fund in support of the protesters in Kenosha: https://supportwomenshealth.salsalabs.org/mkefreedomfund/index.htmlSupport the California Wildfire Relief Fund: https://www.calfund.org/wildfire-relief-fund/Register to vote: https://vote.gov/ MaxFunDrive ends on March 29, 2024! Support our show now by becoming a member at maximumfun.org/join.

Hello, this is Rachel McElroy. Hello, this is Griffin McElroy. And this is wonderful. Life finds a way, doesn't it? That's true. Viva finds a way, doesn't it? That's true. Viva finds a way, doesn't it sometimes? Sometimes you have a week where it's just the stars don't really align. The stars are scattered hither and yon.

But you still find time to do a podcast recording, don't you? You know, you have to. You have to. You can't depend on astrology all the time when scheduling your podcast recordings. And the people are counting on us people need it they don't care if you're it's a pisces moon if it's a pisces moon if aquarius is in retrograde get the get out of here you gotta do your show don't you now there's a loophole because they don't say how long the show has to be so we could knock out a tenor which is what we in the business call a 10

minute long episode but we won't do that to you listen thank you all for waiting on us for this late episode i feel like we've been a little tardy lately and uh you know shit's getting a little wild over here just getting a little out of control but you know it's out of control everywhere we're here we're going to talk about things that we like we're don't worry about us griffin maybe made you worry about us don't worry about us we're fine made you worry about us. Don't worry about us. We're fine. No, no. I mean, I got a headache and I want the people to pray.

Okay. Worry about Griffin's headache. Pray for that. And we're going to talk about stuff we like, things we're into. Do you have any small wonders? I would like to talk about my snack of late, which really takes me back to my youth. And that is a cup of butterscotch pudding with some Cool Whip on top.

You have been eating this nightly. It's my evening treat. It's your evening come down cocktail that you've been imbibing with eating every single night. Yeah, I recommend it. I don't know what it is exactly about it that I am enjoying so much, but it is cool. It is a cool treat.

And it makes me feel like I'm just a comfortable, happy 10-year-old. It makes me feel that way, too, watching you eat it. I feel like I'm back in the school lunchroom being very jealous of a dessert that somebody else is eating. What is your small wonder? Lovecraft Country on HBO. It shows like Wicked right up my alley. It dabbles in a lot of sort of Lovecraftian cosmic horror stuff. It is spooky.

It's very spooky, but it also sort of reckons with the inherent, like oftentimes explicit racism of H.P. Lovecraft and his work. It like really gets into it in the first episode and in in some very explicit ways um but it also tackles it it tackles lovecraftian cosmic horror through the lens of like mid-century segregation and jim crow like laws and like it it does it blends those two concepts into something that is so powerful and so terrifying. And also because it is based on sort of an anthology, short story anthology book, the episodes are just out there, man. Like the first two episodes are like, wow, I know what this show's about.

And then the second episode ends and you're like, oh, wait, I have no fucking idea what this show's about. And then the third episode is something completely different. Yeah, the second episode I was like, wow, well, they resolved that. I don't know what the rest of this show's about. And then the third episode is something completely different. Yeah, the second episode, I was like, wow, well, they resolved that. I don't know what the rest of the show is about. And then the third episode, a whole new adventure. It's got Journey Smollett in it, who was in Friday Night Lights.

And in that third episode, she puts on like a absolutely staggering, like it's all I've been talking about to our friends. Like you have to watch this show just to watch Journey Smollett like tear the fucking house down in the third episode it's really good uh but it also might not be everybody's cup of tea because it's also horrific and gory and uh yeah wild man but it's good it's good what's your first big thing though my first thing

dust off your beret oh my god are we going back it's the poetry corner that's me dusting the beret it's really big it's like a gallagher prop and i'm also dusting it off against a big snare drum so i'm not gonna do the song. Okay, that's fine. I have this headache. I don't know if you heard the talk of the town. That's fine. The poet I want to talk about this week is Ada Lamone. She is a poet currently practicing living in Lexington, Kentucky. And I have only recently become familiar with her. How have you done so? Are you on the circuit? Are you on the poetry subreddit? Let me be honest with you.

So I have talked about pretty much all of my favorite poets at this point on this show. Interesting. So occasionally I just have to dip in and see who is out there doing good work today that I didn't know about. And this is one of those. Okay. I'm glad. Are you expanding your horizons and therefore expanding mine dramatically and our listeners love it uh she is a poet received her mfa from nyu in 2001 uh and she uh has written what is it

five five collections of poems uh the most recent one called the carrying that came out in 2018 okay um so this is this is hot off the presses yeah she is i mean she's she's out there today she's not that much older than me either she is uh she's a young poet i will say confidently wow um and i just i found her her her voice is very clear she's um part of the reason i found her voice is very clear. Part of the reason I found her is I was looking for more poets like Billy Collins, which I have brought to the show. Just like I am telling you a story that is heartfelt and beautifully written, and it is accessible to all. So I wanted to share the poem that I read recently that I really liked called The Raincoat. All right. And this is from her most recent collection, The Caring.

The Raincoat. When the doctor suggested surgery and a brace for all my youngest years, my parents scrambled to take me to massage therapy, deep tissue work, osteopathy, and soon my crooked spine unspooled a bit. I could breathe again and move more in a body unclouded by pain. My mom would tell me to sing songs to her the whole 45-minute drive to Middle Two Rock Road and 45 minutes back from physical therapy. She'd say even my voice sounded unfettered by my spine afterward. So I sang and sang because I thought she liked it. I never asked her what she

gave up to drive me or how her day was before this chore. Today at her age, I was driving myself home from yet another spine appointment, singing along to some maudlin but solid song on the radio. And I saw a mom take line. I know you do. how a marvel that i never got wet that's really good i mean you know i love a good last line i know you do i also know you're you're uh quite susceptible to parental uh uh poems about uh being parent and having parent uh being as you are one now yeah i don't i don't like i've talked about it on this show like um i am not somebody i think that like built my whole life around having children sure and i always feel a little uncomfortable when people present themselves as like this is the best thing i've ever done you know my life is all about this 100%. This is who I am.

I was born to do this. You know, that that kind of talk has always made me uncomfortable, because I've always had, you know, a lot of ambitions for myself, of course. But I think, you know, the experience of parenting has made me look back at my experience of being a child more too. And I just found that like such a powerful, a powerful way of phrasing that this idea that there is so much that exists within your own parents life when you're a child that you know nothing about. And then as when you become a parent yourself, it's something that you think about a lot more. And then when you become a parent yourself, it's something that you think about a lot more. And the phrasing of that at the end just really struck me. Yeah. And I feel like her approach to writing, if you read more of her poems, is very similar to Billy Collins in that I am just telling you a story and then i i am revealing to you as

it revealed to me like what the significance of this story is um and i read this interview that she gave in columbia journal somebody had asked her of like you know how do you write what is the most important thing about writing what are skills that you need to develop um and she said, your writing wants you to widen your gaze and see the world fully. Your writing wants you to be tender and vulnerable to the world. That's hard to do if self-care isn't involved. She's very much one of those writers that's like, hey, there are times when I don't feel like writing and so I don't write. I don't have a certain process or a scheduled way to do it that I really hold myself to.

It's just about tenacity. It's just about going back and doing it and trying to take care of yourself and recognize that the truly good poems are the ones for her when she really is available to it, which is something that I had a lot of trouble with and continue to have trouble with after i i finished you know my creative writing program of just like how do i do this and now that it's just for me yeah you know well i also really like the the conversation i feel like has really ignited this year of like separating like romanticizing suffering and its place in art uh because i feel like it's like when stay-at-home orders like started to happen back in what like late

late march or so and i remember like there were like a handful of people like trying to start this conversation like think of the art that's going to come out of this year and like the other 99.9 of the population of earth was like shut the fuck up like that is that is not the thing to be thinking about right now like that is that that is not what this is about and i think it's just a lot of people get their start in in creative work in like from a place of like isolation you know when you're like a teenager you're like i'm gonna go write in my journal i'm gonna go write a song like i'm feeling terrible and this is gonna be my outlet as an adult that just doesn't seem to work as well no not quite that was really good that was a very good poem thanks for thanks for bringing it yeah i've been dreading now actually my first

topic both of mine are fairly lightweight this week i'll be honest okay my second one's lightweight okay cool well my first one is uh rc cars i could have there's probably a lot of people out there who when i said rc were wondering if i was going to talk about rc cola yeah i could do rc cola i'm from appalachia like we drank rc cola there in in large amounts was that a thing where you grew up, RC Cola? It was a thing when I would go to my grandparents' house in small town Illinois. Okay. They always would have it in their fridge they had in the garage.

Oh, okay. See, like every vending machine in Huntington, I feel like had like RC Cola and its derivatives in it. I still like an RC Cola. I'll go to restaurants sometimes. It'll be like Coke or Pepsi. I'll be RC Cola. This restaurant that has Coke and pepsi by the way does not exist anyway rc cars rc cars uh i was confused rc is interchangeably used with remote controlled and radio controlled but technically it's like a venn diagram where remote controlled

vehicles or objects can use you you know, infrared or whatever. Like there's all kinds of different like sort of ways of transmitting a signal. But radio controlled cars is like sort of the standard of RC cars, especially when you start getting into the high end of the RC car world. It is like RC cars are the only type of toy that when I see Henry playing with it, I get jealous. I know. What is it? I remember one time I went and saw my cousins playing with an RC car, and I thought, I have to have one of those. I want that.

Yeah. He got one for Christmas from one of his uncles, Justin and Travis. I don't know why I just said one of his uncles. It was Travis. It was Travis. And it was like a tumbling sort of wagon that can just kind of like roll all around and no matter which way it lands, it goes.

And he was like playing with it. And I was like, I want that. I'm 33. I want that. I want to play with that. And I think there's just something so alluring about it, mostly because like uh we didn't have rc cars really growing up because there were three of us meaning we all three need

our own rc car uh and that's too many rc cars to have in one house like it's a definite hazard at that point um and as i like became an adult i feel like remote control car technology got like so much better and so much faster and cooler and like i wasn't able to take part in it so now when i see a good rc car i'm like damn that looks like fun and i guess the logical extension of this is drones like i think that's probably why drones are such a thing is because there's a lot of like adult drone enthusiasts who didn't get their rc car fix as a kid and now the r RC cars can fly and take pictures and shit. Yeah.

And I'm like lukewarm on drones, except for drone racing, which I still think is hot as hell. And I'll watch like videos of drones. I didn't know that was a thing. Oh, my God. It's like these little tiny drones and they go at like 80 miles an hour. Like they just like zip and you have to fly them through like a factory in first person view. It's like wild. But anyway, RC cars, there are separate sort of tiers of accessibility.

There's really two tiers of RC cars when you're talking about a radio controlled automobile. There's toy grade cars, which is, you know, what it says on the tin. And then there are hobbyist grade cars. on the tin uh and then there are hobbyist grade cars uh toy cars are you know things you would get at target or walmart or whatever on on a shelf uh for a kid they they cap out at like five miles an hour on the low end but like a really beefy toy grade uh rc car would go up to like 15 miles an hour which is still pretty fast i feel like yeah yeah like a car rc car going 15 runs into your ankle like that's your day i feel like at that point uh but to give you an idea of this distinction between toy grade and hobby grade uh hobby grade cars usually come in these kits they are

dramatically more expensive than a toy grade car uh and they are also dramatically faster the most sort of like commonly accessible i mean you could find an outlier of like what's the fastest land speed rc car from somebody who like you know strapped a rocket or whatever onto their shit um but there is a kit called the x01 from a company called traxxas that uh apparently is big in the hobbyist RC scene. It costs $1,100 US dollars, American, and it is capable of going up to 100 miles an hour. Oh my God. That's very fast.

Yes. That's quite fast. One of those runs into your ankle, it's goodbye ankle. Yeah, no, that is faster than I am allowed to drive as a person in the world yeah in my big car with gasoline in it and stuff well apparently some cars are powered by gas uh not in the same not in the same sort of combustion engine way that our cars are powered by gas but uh electric cars cap out at like a certain amount of of torque uh And so like a nitro powered car

can get pretty freaking fast as things go. That scares me that I would, I don't know that I would be comfortable driving a thing that fast, but like this hobbyist scene is so huge. And it has been for a while. The first RC cars were invented in 1966. The first one was a miniature gas poweredpowered ferrari and while like the

you know technology of the engine and everything has changed in the same way that car technology has advanced throughout the years uh the way that you like the receiver setup is essentially the same like the you use a radio transmitter controller with the throttle and steering mechanism on it and then there's a receiver in the car and that's it uh they're this big scene has been around for basically as long as it's they've the cars have been around uh rc car action magazine is still in circulation after 35 years in print like there's still a lot of people who are very very into rc cars i just think it's kind of magical to control something remotely we have a we have a little uh like r2 unit that we got from the star wars park uh at uh at disney world last time we went that henry put together uh and I love playing with that thing partially because like I think

it's kind of cool to make something move around remotely but also because when i'm feeling like a lazy dad i can kind of just like make the robot move around for me uh and and that's cool and it's fun to chase the child around with the little robot and make intimidating sounds with it not to scare him but to play with him uh yeah rc cars are cool they are cool they are cool aren't they always they're always so cool you know what else is cool? Advertisements. Can I steal you away? Yes. Okay.

We have Jumbotron. Oh, good. Oh, come here, little Jumbotron. Oh, don't be scared. I have some feed for you. I'll hold it in my hand, little Jumbotron. Don't be scared. I'll brush your soft plumage. Do you want to read the first one? make my life so full. I'm so happy that we're actually legally wives. You roast the best coffee,

make that good popcorn, and always do the laundry. You're the best writer and I can't wait to read your book someday. Until then, I look forward to D&D, stargazing, and always being silly. Love, Linny. Gotta know this good popcorn recipe. Gotta know it.

I don't know that I've ever eaten homemade popcorn that wasn't like out of a bag or something where I was like, whoa, what did you do to this popcorn? Where the answer wasn't just like, I put it in the put it in the microwave. We have dabbled in the purchase of gourmet popcorn, but have never, never made it ourselves. It was a wedding favor. It was the wedding favor at our wedding. Well, of course, we got married in Austin, Texas. So we legally had to involve mason jars in some way. But we filled those mason jars up with good ass what was it cornucopia is that the name of the company it was dill we gave out dill pickle and what was the other flavor i'm not

gonna remember i will remember it was something it was something smoky it was like a smoky cheddar i want to say this thing it was like smoked cheddar and dill pickle popcorn it was so fucking good and also like we had like 30 jars of it left over and so we ate that popcorn for months tiny jars and our little tiny one jar at a time it was very wasteful i don't remember what we ended up doing with the empty mason jars i mean we saved some and then we recycled others it's not really a story i guess not uh here is another one this one is for celeste and it's from zakai who says to my sweetest blep and the most badass lady scientist by now we've spent more than half our marriage stuck at home so there's no one else i'd rather be with i love you so much

and so do the cats even when you lovingly call them horrible names that i don't want to pay griffin and rachel to repeat all our love zakai squeakums and doi got it don't want to pay Griffin and Rachel to repeat. All our love, Zakai, Squeakums, and Doi. Got it. Now I want to know about these names. Do you think it's something like, and I don't want to be rude or say bad words or anything, but do you think it says something like little stinker? Or jerk. Little jerk?

Hey, you dink. Get back here. Griffin, I hate when you use that kind of language. I'm so sorry. Yeah, now we're going to get the explicit tag on iTunes. Hey, J. Keith. Hey, Helen. Hey, you've got another true-false quiz for me?

Yep. Our trivia podcast, Go Fact Yourself, used to be in front of a live audience. True. Turns out that's not so safe anymore. Correct. Next. Unfortunately, this means we can no longer record the show. True. Turns out that's not so safe anymore. Correct. Next, unfortunately, this means we can no longer record the show. False. The show still comes out every first and third Friday of

the month. Correct. Finally, we still have great celebrity guests answering trivia about things they love on every episode of Go Fact Yourself. Definitely true. And for bonus points, name some of them. Recently, we've had Ophiraisenberg plus tons of surprise experts like yardley smith and suzanne summers perfect score you can hear go fact yourself every first and third friday of the month with all the great guests and trivia that we've always had and if you don't listen well then you can go fact yourself that's the name of our podcast correct hey what's your second thing that's i hear i hear it's very lightweight and silly well i gave you a little hint at this last night um because it came up we were playing a game and the question was what is something that rachel thinks that younger people uh don't

appreciate oh my gosh you're going there i'm talking about the rise and fall of the belly button ring what okay i sometimes it's important to lay out the context of how we appreciate the things we talk about on the show because sometimes it's like when i talk about like gack i'm not i'm 33 years old i'm not slinging gack now but i appreciated gack back in the day uh-huh are you saying that when you see a belly button ring out on the street now you're like oh choice or are you saying it is wonderful that the belly button ring was a phenomenon for a bit i think it was wonderful for me that it was a phenomenon it was it was interesting like to be a teen yeah right in the time period when that was huge and to feel like it was a thing that everybody had an opinion on of whether or not they were going to get one.

And the teens that were able to get one with their parents' consent at a young age. Yes. And then the people like me who waited until I turned 18 and then immediately went and got it because it was my it was my sign post literally every everybody I went to high school like every girl I went to high school with got belly button rings I feel like like I'm trying to think back most of the most of the girls I dated like had belly button rings yeah uh I seriously everybody everybody I'm thinking about it now and it's like the da vinci code like all these pieces are falling into place in my mind like holy shit

everyone had one of these and now no one's gone well we shouldn't say no one there's probably listeners of our show who still got their belly button rings but like yeah it was wildly ubiquitous the teens are doing it i don't think they're racing out to do it the way that we all did okay um i actually it was funny when i wrote for the school newspaper i wrote a whole piece on like censorship and part of what i wrote about was this girl on the cheerleading team who got a belly button ring and got kicked off because they weren't allowed yes i know i like interviewed her and then my journalism teacher was so excited about my my piece of journalism he made me submit it to this competition. And it was not selected.

Ah, beans. I imagine there were people facing larger issues than somebody getting kicked off a team for a belly button ring. thing is when I was doing the research on it, just to kind of see the evolution of it. So it was, it was actually something that was present in the 1970s. There, it was a store that kind of became the premier piercing business called The Gauntlet that started in somebody's house in West Hollywood. And it was part of this 1970s gay leather movement. And it was started by Jim Ward. And it's considered the first business of its type in the United States. And so it became this body modification scene that was largely associated with the gay leather movement in California. That's wild. I had no idea. And then so then they opened up shops in

New York and Seattle. And apparently there's even one in Paris that kind of started the whole business. They opened a mail order business for piercing jewelry. And they coined terms like barbell and circular barbell and captive bead ring. Like all of that came from that store. Was this specifically a belly button piercing shop? It was just a piercing? Because I guess prior to that, I guess folks were just doing it at home. Like if you were getting your ears pierced,

you would do it? People would like go to doctor's office to get their ears pierced. What the hell? I guess it's a safer environment to do it than at home but that's why that's a wild idea to me yeah uh i guess it used to cost 15 cents to go to the doctor so you could just like show up and for like a buck 50 like get a bunch of shit done yeah yeah i um it was interesting to read that research because I'd never really thought about like the origins of piercing.

I mean, obviously there is a rich history that goes well before. Of course. But kind of as we know it today, this idea that you would walk into a store and pick out your jewelry and get it done there in the store. I'm dying over here right now

because I can't remember the name of the shop that was like at every mall that like- Ohire's claire's okay thank you holy shit and they just did ear piercing right uh and it and it was done by people that were not necessarily trained in the art of piercing so where did you go to get your belly button pierced uh it's a place in st louis uh i don't remember what it was called. I think it was in the Central West End. But I went with my friend who had already had hers pierced. And I was very nervous.

And it hurt very badly. I bet. Yeah. And, you know, here's the thing. I came home, had not told my parents. But I had the bottle of the antiseptic soap or

whatever in my medicine cabinet. And so my mom came to me and was like, what did you get, Pierce? Wow. How rebellious, huh? Yeah. So I cannot think about belly button piercing without thinking about Justin's horrifying story of when he- Where he forced somebody.

Well, he didn't force somebody but like as a special birthday surprise he uh blindfolded his girlfriend and drove her to the local uh somewhat reputable pawn shop in town to get her belly button pierced pawn shop i'm pretty sure it was a pawn shop that also did piercing i mean it was like a secondhand music they mostly sold like secondhand like music instruments and stuff. Wow. Yeah, bud. So the phenomenon that we are talking about where a bunch of women would go get their belly button pierced, a lot of articles I read traced it back very specifically to the Aerosmith video where Alicia Silverstone gets her belly button pierced.

That was bracing for me. The idea of the country watching an Aerosmith video. Do you know the video I'm talking about? Yes. The 1993 video for Cryin'. Is Liv Tyler also in that one? Oh, man. There's one that Liv Tyler is in.

I don't think so, no. Okay. I think that's a different one i think that's crazy okay i think crying is the one where alicia silverstone is is a rebellious teen who to show her rebellious spirit goes to get her belly button pierced apparently they used a stand-in in the video oh a prop a prop button um but after that that was when like britney spears janet jackson yeah uh christina whose name i can't remember her last name i can't remember are you kidding really sorry and shakira yeah well you you commonly call her x tina still to this day and that was what i wanted to say uh britney 2001 I'm a Slave for You performance

at the VMAs. Very prominent. Yeah. And some of it, I think, was the fashion at the time. There was a lot of like low-waisted jean. So there was a lot more. And high-bottomed shirt,

I think is what they called them. It's a lot of opportunity to show off the belly button. But I read a lot of articles that talked about how, you know, this movement that started in the kind of the gay leather movement suddenly became this thing that teen girls were doing. Yeah.

And it became a very gendered piercing, which is really strange because there aren't a lot of gendered piercings out there. Yeah. Well, I mean, it's not inherently gendered. It's just like what the fad was. It was just what the fad was. Yeah. Yeah. It's just like what the fad was. It was just what the fad was, yeah.

And I think in the same, all the articles I read, so I read an article on Vice and one on Racked, and they talked about how this idea of the belly button ring around the same time of like the lower back tattoo are now kind of regarded dismissively as like a fad of young girls, you know, that for whatever reason reason is not as prominent today. And so it's just kind of an interesting movement. I mean, there are lots of trends that come and go,

but to have one where you are modifying your body, become so prominent and then become less prominent is kind of fascinating to me. Yeah, I mean, that's what you do when you roll the dice. That's true. Getting a hole. I don't have a hole. Now the teens, they just dab.

Now they just dab. It's less permanent. Less invasive. Unless you are filmed doing it for your television show. And then people think it's like your whole life is dabbing. Do you want to know my second thing? Yes. I'm very excited know my second thing? Yes. I'm very excited about my second thing.

It was one of those things that I was sure I talked about before. It is peripheral-based rhythm games, which is to say a guitar hero or a rock band. I know, right? How have you not talked about this? It's wild. It's like, much like the belly button ring, it was a fad. ring it was a fad uh it was a fairly uh long and successful fad but it is for sure gone uh by the wayside at this point it has long since gone by the wayside um and i loved it so much it was like my very very favorite type of game when these were when these games were around uh it was it

was super huge so brief history uh i mean rhythm games were a thing for a while like you know on console or uh the first sort of like big arcade smash hit that i can think of was ddr dance dance revolution you ever play you ever dabble in ddr have you ever played it no see i played it at an arcade while i was like on some family trip and i was like i gotta have this so i bought a ddr dance pad for my house uh and would play it and would have like friends over to play it it was like a big deal for me like being able to say like yeah you could come over my house and play dance dance revolution if you want to go i know you're too scared to do it at the mall and let other people see you so why don't you come on over uh in japan there was this very successful uh arcade game called beat mania which was essentially uh kind of like how guitar hero looks where you have notes

coming at you like on a on a track and you have to but all it was was buttons that you press like these colorful buttons that you press in time with the music uh it spawned this entire label of music games called Bimani. And in 1999, Bimani released two games in Japanese arcades, which were Guitar Freaks and Drum Mania, which were essentially guitar hero, like you use a guitar controller to play notes, and the drumming part of rock band, like there was a rubber drum kit that you would play drum notes on as they came at you on a track. of rock band. Like there was a rubber drum kit that you would play drum notes on as they came at you on a track. Uh, so in 2005, uh, an American developer called Harmonix, uh, who also made, man, holy shit. Harmonix has provided me with a literally thousands of hours of good times. They made Dance Central, uh, and, and that weird Fantasia connect game that I like absolutely

adore. Uh, but their first game was guitar hero which was like super inspired by guitar freaks only it used a licensed western rock music instead of just sort of like japanese pop uh and at that point like the rhythm game genre was like kaput like there was dance dance revolution in arcades but like it wasn't this huge crossover hit that people were buying dance mats and playing at their house but when guitar hero came out it like absolutely exploded like it single-handedly like injected all of this life into the genre uh the first game earned over a billion dollars like and partially that's because the game cost something like 90 bucks because you had to get

like the guitar controller or something with it uh and then uh a few years later they released rock band which was essentially guitar hero but with drums and bass and singing in it and that also earned well over a billion dollars uh these games were huge and i don't think i really i was in the industry at this point i was working at joystick when these games came out uh i don't think i recognized just how successful they were uh they this was like when the we came out which i don't know how much you knew about the the the we but the we like brought in all these new people playing video games um i'm curious like from your perspective from like the outside because you weren't like big into games or anything like that but like this era 2007 2008 when the wii was like really taking off and all of these like uh casual games on iphone and rhythm games were coming out like bringing a

bunch of people in did you were you like seeing that happen from the outside did you notice an uptick in like your friends talking about and playing games and stuff? Yes. It was always like, I know somebody who knows somebody that has one of these. And I would, you know, if I happened to be at their house, I would play it once and I would think, oh, this is cool. But I didn't have any like direct link to it. Yeah. And I do remember being kind of surprised,

particularly with the Wii, that it seemed like it was older people that were excited about bowling in their own house. And I was like, this is unusual for games, especially like brand new technology. I think Wii Sports is the number one. Well, it came with the Wii, but it was like the number one video game owned by people in the history of mankind. But rhythm games were like bringing a ton of people in. So it was this like exciting era of expanding gaming demographics in a major way. And a bunch of developers wanted to get on board with that. So overnight, in 2008, which was the zenith of this genre, rhythm games made up 18% of all video games being made, which is a lot, which is so much. The equipment was so substantial, too.

That's what kind of blew me away when I first saw it. I was like, oh, this isn't just like a handheld controller. Rock Band came with a guitar, a drum set, and a microphone and just assumed that you had another guitar that you could play bass on. And I want to say it was around 200 bucks. So it's like the price of a of a video game console kind of uh but like good lord i had the best time in college playing these games sort of like the way that i was an evangelist i feel like for dbr uh guitar hero came out my freshman year of college

like my first semester of college and i am not a person who is very good at like meeting new people and like striking up a conversation or forging any kind of like relationship or making plans with new friends or whatever but guitar hero was kind of like everybody was talking about it and i had it and so i could be and i had a bunch of people just like that i'd talk about the game with and be like you want to come over and play it and i made a lot of friends in my freshman year college because of that uh even more so when Rock Band came out, because Rock Band wasn't just like, hey, come check out this guitar that you can play with music. It was like, hey, I'm having a party now with like all of these different songs.

We had a radio show that I played the game that me and my buddies played the game for, for like one of our last episodes that we did for our college radio show. And I got in a little bit of trouble because I was doing sabotage by the beastie boys and i was singing and i said fucking i forgot to mute that particular word which they don't like that word on the radio um so this was like a huge thing for me like i played it constantly i played it by myself i got pretty good at drumming on rock band drums uh but overnight like it blew up uh the bad way like a bomb blows up and then isn't there anymore 2008 was the zenith right and uh games sold over uh one and a half billion bucks in 2008 where these rhythm games did uh and then in 2009 that number was halved it was down to like

750 000 for the entire like genre uh and then there were these huge games harmonix made this game called beatles rock band which i don't know if i've ever shown you is remarkable because it's like all beatles music and that's cool but they also stylistically recreate the trajectory of the beatles whole career so you like watch them go from you know hard day's night all the way through like sergeant pepper and like some of the trippier songs like you go on these weird dream sequence trips but like you follow them all the way to the rooftop concert and uh there's these like really gorgeous cut scenes like bridging every it is a incredible game best game they ever made uh and it sold like half of its

expected unit so like at that point like people kind of had all the stuff that they wanted from this genre and they weren't really that interested in it anymore. Also, you know, after 2008, there was a bit of a recession. So people weren't as willing to pay $200 for a drum controller anymore. So by the time like 2013 rolled around, like the whole genre that again was making up for a fifth of all video games released was more or less kaput. And that's kind of that. I really harbor a deep affection for these games, partially because they were really fun and they were a refreshing change of pace from like other games that were being released at the time. Like I was kind of done with first person shooters and stuff like that.

But they also like allowed me to meet new people and have parties and make friends. But also the first Guitar Hero game and really that whole series enlightened me to a lot of classic rock that like I didn't know shit about because i thought the music my dad likes sucks shit yeah uh like i i remember playing a song with my friends like when one of the guitar hero games came out and i was like this slaps who is this and they're like oh this is a steely dan and i was like what no way uh yeah it was a it was an eye-opening experience but like there's a lot of classic rock music that i only know about because of guitar here because i just did not care about it or listen to it before that's fascinating yeah it's great games i still i mean maybe it'll come back probably not maybe we still have it in the garage we still do have my rock band set in the

garage i would be blown away if that still works. Do you want to know what our friends at home are talking about? Yes. Okay, I only pulled one submission from our friends at home because it's a very powerful one. It's sent in by Marina who says, This wonderful website lets you mash up popular songs from 2007, and I cannot stop laughing. I didn't know this at first, so when I accidentally mashed 99 problems with Hey There Delilah, my third eye was opened and I truly ascended. I hope you get as much joy out of

this as I have. Thank you to whoever bestowed this gift unto the universe. I'm going to see if I can get it working on my phone. Oh, it does work on my phone. What is this website? It is called themagicipod.com. All one word, themagicipod.com. Let me see if I can put 99 Problems on Hey There, Delilah. So it just takes the music of one and puts the lyrics of the other over it? It does more than that. It actually blends the two together. Let me see if there's another. Let's see what we can put country grammar on oh sugar we're going down swinging by fallout boy

that's delightful wow Wow. So good. That's themagiceyepod.com. Thank you, Marina. I'm going to spend my whole day doing this now. Thank you to Bowen and Augustus for the use of our theme song, When He Won't Pay. You can find a link to that in the episode description.

And thank you to Maximum Fun for having us on the network. Yeah. Thank you, Maximum Fun. If you are interested in finding some new great podcasts, I would encourage you to maximum fun for having us on the network yeah thank you maximum fun if you are interested in finding some new great podcasts i would encourage you to go to maximum fun.org and check out all of the great shows on that website and or on that web click on the web address and or the network when you're surfing the world wide web uh yeah also hey register to vote go to vote.gov and uh support black lives matter we'll have links to that and how you can give to help out folks like for instance with the milwaukee freedom fund

who is supporting protesters in kenosha and uh you know all over because there's lots of folks who could use some help right now um well we've come to the end of another show, time to mop, time to get out the broom and mop to clean up the mess we made doing the show. What kind of show do we do? Well, people don't know this. They only hear our voices. They don't see all the wacky zany prop comedy that we do. At the beginning of every show, I put a flag in a pile of Gak and Griffin has to find it before we finish recording. A lot of Gak talk this out.

Yeah. What's the harm? A lot of GAC talk this out. Yeah. What's the harm? A lot of GAC chat. Money won't pay. Work it off. Money won't pay. Work it off. Money won't pay. Work it off. Work it off. MaximumFun.org Comedy and culture.

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