Wonderful! - Wonderful! 235: Ghostbuskers

Episode Date: June 29, 2022

Griffin's favorite vocal instrument doohickey! Rachel's favorite polyethylene grass substitute!Music: “Money Won’t Pay” by bo en and Augustus – https://open.spotify.com/album/7n6zRzTrGPIHt0kRvmWoyaFairness West Virginia: https://fairnesswv.org/ MaxFunDrive ends on March 29, 2024! Support our show now by becoming a member at maximumfun.org/join.

Hi, this is Rachel McElroy. Oh, hello, this is Griffin McElroy. And this is Wonderful. The show about stuff we like that is good and that we are into and that's the new direction we've talked about sort of okay stuff that we're ambivalent about in the past but um this week i think we should talk about things that we like and things that are good and things that we are into i'm into you can i say that right now at the top wow we went me i me and henry went on this latest tour to uh boston and mash and tuckett and it

was the we realized like right before the trip that it is the first time you and i have been apart in this pandemic what like i cannot remember i can't either it was so brutal and then you did it again this last weekend i did i went on a trip to houston with some friends took in some art took in some some sushi the space took in the space center hung out with my good friends uh gus grissom and john oh shit i can't remember the other guy's name the sandwich space boys yeah on their apollo 3 mission having having a fun time and a delicious lunch up there in the cosmos um and it made the distance did make this damn heart grow fonder oh thanks honey do you want to say do you maybe want to say something you don't have to no no no

seriously for real like don't even don't worry about it it's i know how you feel about me and um it's um it's it's like okay it's like whatever you know like it's so chill around here i did i did yeah sure sorry Sorry. Is something going on? Oh, I'm trying to prepare my thing. You should have done that before. Oh, your small wonder. Yeah. Oh, okay.

Are you Googling things I like? Things Rachel likes. No, I couldn't remember what it was called because it has a very long title. Okay, what is it? The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window. How is it? I really enjoyed it. So this is the Kristen Bell kind of spoof on...

Love a spoof. On like the true crime, murder mystery kind of stuff, the phenomenon. And I was worried it would be a little too like scary movie like haha and this trope which means so fucking funny to bust up so hard um and i watched the trailer and i was like i don't know it's still kind of risky i really enjoyed it no good yeah because it kind of like it does stand up as like kind of a good murder mystery. Okay.

I mean, the outcome is pretty silly, but I found myself compelled each episode. I mean, it is very funny. Yeah. But I would recommend it if you're kind of on the fence about it. I have two. I want to give a special mention to Stranger Things.

Yeah. Because half of the fourth season's out, I guess. The next half comes out on July 1st. And we were so cool on it. When season four dropped, we were like, eh, not really. I don't really know if that's something I really care about. And it was so mystifying as to why I felt that. Because I loved the first season, kind of liked the second season.

And I didn't remember how I felt about the third season, but I really liked it too. I will say like we have been hesitant because we have such a short amount of time at night. Yeah. And that time at night is so unpredictable to watch anything that's going to be kind of dark and unsettling. Yeah. Which it is. This season goes pretty deep in the pain. It is, but Stranger Things,

like the cast and the tone can be so delightful. Just a glut of characters. And I think that coolness was because it has been three years since the last season came out, which is a ridiculous amount of time to go between seasons of television or anything. But I'm really liking it. The most recent episode we watched had some flashbacks to the between seasons of television or anything uh but i'm really liking it the most recent episode

we watch had some like flashbacks to the early seasons and it is just remarkable how babies little babies these children have grown i know uh i also want to shout out foam roller when i was in houston visiting uh our friends clint and natalie natalie was like you got to try this you got to try this foam i was like what is that beautiful little cylinder? She's like, put your back on that and roll. And I was like, wow. That was the noise that my body made involuntarily. I invested so much in like back massage products. And I thought for sure we had a foam roller, just assuming.

But no, we didn't. I am five inches taller. My eyesight has improved. It's just amazing. Yeah. It's just so good can i do a third one can i do a third small wonder let's go for it uh in my drive to houston it's what like a three hour drive uh there and three hours back i uh started listening to the latest season of dimension 20 called a starstruck odyssey i was telling you about it a little bit that's uh brennan lee mulligan and and and company the thing they do for dropout at college humor it's an actual play thing and it is probably my favorite actual play thing i've ever really tuned

into it is delightful from the jump it is fan fucking tastic brennan has such a sensibility that i feel like is so similar to you and your brothers yeah that it's just like it's very like soothing like you trust him entirely yeah and you're just delighted and the cast is just like like out of control it's mostly folks i think from um uh fantasy high uh and man it's just so good it's so good i cannot recommend it enough go listen to it even if you only kind of like actual play stuff it is it is such a treat from yeah i bet okay i go first this week okay i want to talk about a computer, software, an instrument, a little doohickey called the vocoder. Oh. Yeah.

You know, it is amazing how many things you like. I say that because- I could leverage that at you. We have gone pretty much blow for blow here on Wonderful. Well, it's just every time you bring something up, I'm like, surely we've covered that because that's something you like so much. I do like a vocoder. And I realize like, oh, no, he just likes a lot of things. I do.

I've been diving back through my Spotify playlists from past years, and I just stumbled back onto and became deeply obsessed with Bon bony bears 2016 album 22 a million uh and it is uh i i i'm feeling a little bit i'm excited and nervous about the the move and stressed but also like a little bit melancholy like a little bit like bitter bitter sweetness i should hope so and i find that this album is really meeting me where I'm at right now. I don't know how deep into it you got. I loved all of his albums that came up before that for Emma Forever Ago was like,

I had that on for months when that album first came out. But 22 A Million is a really wild conceptual sort of futuristic thing that is like laced with these very like Bon Iver style, pretty acoustic melodies and falsetto singing. And then also just these booming robot choirs from the like very complicated vocoder. Do I know this? 22 a Million? I don't know so this this came out around the time that uh i think it was his next album after he won the grammy and uh started to collaborate with a bunch of people he did a song on beautiful dark twisted fantasy with kanye

and i think maybe even a couple other things with kanye um. But this sound kind of became his trademark sound and just kind of flourished from this album on. And so he had dabbled with this sound, this vocated sound in the past, but in 22 A Million, it just goes beast mode. And I want to play a song off of that album called 715 Creeks with like sigma signs instead of E's. Okay.

Because it's a very weird album. And I'll play a little bit of it now. Low moon down the yellow road. I remember something. The evening wasn't easy, no, that evening in my eyes. it sounds like if bonnie vera had a robot brother or like 15 robot brother there's there's a lot happening there sort of harmonically uh it's like some of the best vocoder in the business. It's actually a special proprietary like effect chain, like hardware and software effect chain called the Messina, which is named for the sound engineer who designed it for Bon Iver. Chris Messina.

Yes, exactly. From Loggins and Messina. I don't know. Probably not. Probably not. bloggins and and messina and i don't know probably not probably not it's just like a bunch of effects that he triggers with a keyboard while he sings which then runs it just through all of these different patches and returns these like super rich like wet layers of vocoder harmonies uh and it's just it sounds so amazing i He got some shit when that album came out

because it was, you know, he uses it so much that it becomes maybe a little gimmicky at times. But I am such a sucker for it. I think it sounds so cool. Especially like in a car with the bass kind of up, hearing the like really deep parts of the harmony like rattling your your buttocks uh it's it's really really incredible played around with this before

right a little bit so mostly i did um oh god what's a good vocaloid uh which is a different thing that's like where you use computer software to like synthesize singing from nothing there is no there's no dry signal there's no input from you singing into the microphone like it is all created from i've never really messed around with the with a vocoder although it is pretty easy to kind of get plugged in this is a variant on a type of vocoder called a prismizer, like prism miser. And it is just like it lets you sing while you play a keyboard. And then the notes you play on the keyboard, it creates your voice along with it, like in in real time, which is basically just like what a vocoder does. But, you know, more more complicated, more voices sort of coming back at you at once i would be remiss if i didn't mention the song that took the oc and then snl and then the world

by storm which is imaging heaps hide and seek yes it has been so thoroughly memefied and i understand that it had special significance to me because i watched the oc before the whole dear sister thing uh happened on on snl and so like when that when that sketch dropped i was like what is how are my worlds crossing in this way and then everybody's like did you see that do you hear that you remember that song from the snL sketch? I was like, no, it's the song when Marissa Cooper shoots Trey. Anyway, I'll play a little. Spoiler, spoiler, spoiler. That show's 100 years old.

I'm going to play a little bit right now. Spin me round again And rub my eyes This could be happening When busy streets are messed with People would stop to hold their heads heavy. Hide and seek. You know that song, don't you?

Yeah. I went through like a big phase. You love Imogene. Well, I mean, enough that I like downloaded discreet songs. When I, when I was in Chicago, 2006, 2007,

I rode my bike a lot and I'd always get out my, my iPod mini, nano, whatever, and just jam on my bike. And so, yeah, that was in the playlist.

She was a, she was at the vanguard. She was a pioneer in this like prismizer sort of style of of electronic music uh fun fact that song dropped as a single from uh an album she released in 2005 the same exact day that the episode of the oc that it was featured in aired wow the oc was always at the cutting edge and also launched a million ships of like uh not not that imogene he you know arguably needed the boost at that point but then holy shit i remember hearing that i want to say two or three different movie soundtracks that same song was on yeah all of them uh and even though it's like a you know know, a gag at this point, I still love that song.

It still gives me like goosebumps every time I hear it. For sure. So that is the Prismizer, which is sort of an evolved version of a vocoder. And a vocoder, you know, strictly defined is a machine that takes vocal input and returns it in a digital format. So like it wasn't a music thing when it was first invented. It was invented in 1938 from a Bell Labs engineer named Homer Dudley. And it was, I mean, it was literally used for what it says on the tin like recording voice and returning it in a non uh analog format and it was actually like a huge step forward for telecommunications uh like a lot of different sort of um like codecs and stuff like that sprung forth from this this invention that was not inherently used for music. What was the value of it?

I mean, it was a machine that recorded your voice and could turn it into a digital thing. So for like character work or like... Or for just recorded voice. I mean, it was instead of recording to tape or any kind of analog format, it could return. Oh, okay. You know, I don't have enough technical know-how.

Yeah. But it stands apart. It's the difference between using, you know, an audio cassette to record your voice and a, like, digital voice recorder to record your voice. Yeah, I was trying to figure out, like, what the intended purpose was initially. Yeah. And this is 1938. That's wild to me. That seems way ahead of its time.

And so many inventions came out of that. The 60s were for the 60s were a really cool, foundational, fun time for electronic music because it was so theoretical and it was so like cutting edge of technology that it was being like it wasn't happening in someone's basement it was like happening in laboratories and it was happening at universities in like departments specifically founded around the synthesis of sound and music i think that's really cool because like obviously it has graduated from that to become this like infinitely accessible thing that even a decade later, like people were doing all kinds of wild shit with.

In 1968, the first like real time solid state vocoder for music was invented by none other than Robertbert moog who is arguably like the most important figure in all of electronic music uh and that's why so many so many synthesizers carry the moog name uh and he was the first one to to get the vocoder off the ground alongside so many other sort of things with the with you know synthesized electronic sound um yeah i i it obviously like it is a thing that you can do a whole lot with and it is a broad category right like auto-tune i guess you could yeah qualify under this and certainly we had uh uh you know

auto-tuning music is still a very common standard practice in the music industry but in the you know auto-tuning music is still a very common standard practice in the music industry but in the you know in the the early 20 teens it was very prominent and it was very like uh not something they were trying to disguise it was a feature and not a bug and you know like t-pain made a lot of money off of that off of that specifically but the vocoder has been used for music for forever like fucking Mr. Blue Sky by ELO uses a vocoder like there's so many different

artists who have done so many different incredible things with it and it has only like continued to evolve and like this 2016 album from Bon Iver with the Messina that's nothing i've ever heard before uh before that album came out so it's still kind of evolving and people are still finding cool things to do with it and i think that is rad so and i don't and you know

what i don't care who disagrees with me okay i see you over there you're looking at me like i like the real deal give me give me a beautiful opera performance. You know, just acoustic, unplugged. Unplug it, you know? Yeah. Cut the wires. Cut yourself free. Uh-huh.

Experience the true sound. Put a hat on the ground, you know? Put a hat right on the ground. Make your money that way. And make money on it. Oh, I thought you meant just like in protest. No, I'm just saying like take it to the street. Bust it.

You know? Bust it and bust it. That was my motto. That is. That's still. You said that to me yesterday. Can I steal your way? Yes.

We have a couple of jamble jars here, and I would love to read the first one if I may be granted permission to do so, please. Yes. This one is for Adrian. It is from Aaron, who says, Happy birthday, Adrian. I hope things are going better at the city, and I hope you know how glad me and Freddie are to have you in our lives, helping us with our weird brains while we try to help you with yours. We should go to Hearst Castle again soon, now that these unprecedented times are hopefully mostly over. That is quite an adventure. Do you know about Hearst Castle? No.

Dracula lived there. Oh. Dracula lived there. Okay. Scary. Scary man. Do you know about his work? The cape?

I mean, he's got a lot more going on than just a lot of people wear capes. The teeth. The two, specifically the two teeth that he uses for biting and the eating of the flesh. Good. You're so good at that. Yeah. Very scary castle. Good luck.

Bring a whip and a cross and holy water. Do you want to do this next one? Yes. Okay, good. This is for Laura. It is from Stevie. Laura, my sweet baby sister. What can I say besides thank you for introducing us to the McElroy Extended Universe and for

just generally being the coolest sibling I could ask for. I'm incredibly proud to be your sister, and I can't wait until our next long overdue trip to PGH. I'd say you're going to be amazing, but let's face it, you already are. That's so sweet. And of course you know what PGH stands for. Oh, um, pepper.

Pepper. Garbanzo. Garbanzo what's that what's the last part of it again what's the h stand for i know it's pepper garbanzo hen hen hen they're going to pepper garbo Hen. That's my favorite sort of poultry and pepper and bean restaurant. It's like White Hen in Chicago, you know? Yes. But. More peppers and beans. Yeah.

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its natural habitat on maximumfun.org listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts you ready yes my topic artificial turf artificial turf yes whenever i go to any kind of play place and i see they have artificial turf on the ground i'm like i can just chill uh-huh i can i can relax yeah now yeah when so when you took henry on tour uh my whole objective was to take gus places that were outdoors yes uh so as to keep him from the germs yes um and also that i could just kind of let him go that he wouldn't get dirty because he doesn't he doesn't really wear the shoes no you know uh and so i specifically sought out like turf playgrounds and there are a lot. A lot, a lot, a lot.

Yeah. People like me are looking for that. Oh, I thought that was the end of that sentence. People like me. People. Unrelated. I don't know if you know this. Unrelated.

People like me. Yeah. And I was curious about about this stuff. I thought it was like made for the sports. Like day one. Let's make it for the sports. What, like mini golf? No, like the football. The football and the baseball.

I mean, are those not real grass fields most of the time? There's some turf out there. I guess so. Yeah. But actually it was developed specifically for urban areas for the kids. Okay. So, I mean, it does go back to war, of course. Everything does.

The vocoder was actually invented in World War II as a way. So during the when they were recruiting for the Korean War, the U.S. Army noticed that individuals from rural areas were more physically fit than their urban counterparts and so they uh in the 1950s they were looking to develop outdoor play space uh that is okay this just got pretty sinister pretty fast right like how do we how do we get more people physically fit so we can put them in war that's okay yeah the shine i will be honest babe the shine has come off the astroturf apple so it's interesting that you call it that uh initially it was called chemgrass chemgrass which also adds to this kind of dystopia for sure It skyrockets the dystopian sort of rating of this idea.

First installed large scale at a school in Rhode Island in 1964. Come children, play on the Kimgrass. The Kimgrass. Become soldiers on the Kimgrass. The reason you called it AstroTurf, though, is in 1965, the Houston Astrodome was built and conditions were such that they could not keep grass alive. Because it's in Texas. Well, and the, and the overhang, right?

Like, isn't the Astrodome like, you know, like closable? Yeah, sure. I mean, I don't know if it was in 1960, whatever, but. But yeah, so, so they just couldn't keep anything alive and so they were looking for some kind of turf interesting uh and so 1966 they began playing on chemgrass uh so it sucks this is a good segment and i love this stuff but it's it's it's conceptually it sucks well only because i started calling it chemgrass right you didn't feel so strongly about it no i loved it until you told me that the military invented it to make stronger children i mean what are you gonna do what are

you gonna do it is soft when you fall down on you don't get hurt you don't a lot of good inventions have come out of the need to put people in battle here we are here we are the military has you gotta break a few eggs to get a safer child playground driven a lot of inventions uh and here we are here we go uh okay so so astroturfurf, as you and I would know it. The first iteration, pretty hard and not particularly forgiving. There's a lot of burns and blisters from the friction of the turf. Just the sports, the balls would bounce a lot harder and roll faster on the surface. That's fun though. That makes the sport more fun, doesn't it?

Not the rug burn as much, but the speed, the speed of the ball. Love that. Um, I will say I read something, uh, where an individual that played sports on it talked about like, you could, uh, guarantee that you would get good traction on every play like grass is kind of unpredictable depending on the weather but at least you know you knew you knew what you were dealing with with turf that is that is hockey has illuminated how important that is because you will watch hockey games where you're like everyone's doing a pretty shitty job today and it's like oh that ice looks bad.

That puck is bouncing everywhere. That puck is bouncing all over the dang place. I'll also say, and I have noticed this, I don't know if this is still true in like the big leagues, but when I take Gus to a turf playground, you really have to find the shade. Because in the olden days, at least in sports and what I still notice on playgrounds, it gets very hot. Yeah. It does not have the same cooling effect as grass. And so you really have to be careful.

I once took Gus to a playground in the afternoon and it was just like, I had to corral him to like a very small shady space because there was nowhere he could put his hand without. I do like that about grass. When was the last time you just like laid down in some grass i don't know it's been about six years for me i don't know i mean it's been a little more recent than that for me when we go to a lot of the uh the neighborhood pools they have like a grassy yeah but i always put a blanket down on that because our neighborhood pools also have a lot of neighborhood ants. That's true. I'm just talking about me and nature. Evolution of turf. 1970s.

There was a new version introduced as shag turf because it was the 70s, I guess, and everything was shag. Is that called Kimgrass Deluxe? No. Okay. No, I think at this point everybody is kind of calling it AstroTurf. Okay. Although, I mean, I imagine still, you know, it's like Kleenex. DARPA still calls it chemgrass in their deep fucking shadow compound.

So the new material is polypropylene, which is less abrasive and looks like a little nicer. Just call it that. Come kids, let's play on the polyproflupulin. Polyproflupulin. The tufts were spread more widely apart to look more like grass. Love a wide tuft. So this second round was better for like field hockey, but wasn't as great for soccer because it was just,

the ball was just different. Yeah. You know, like you train on grass and then you get out there and it's just all goofy. Yeah. And then 1990s is when we changed polypropylene to polyethylene. Oh, upgrade. I know, right? Upgrade.

Glow up. I don't know what that means uh longer longer fibers oh sure um how are the tufts though still pretty wide i mean this is like when we we purchase an artificial tree and you're like how many how many points though you can't you can't pretend that now that doesn't matter to you. No, it's true. Of course it matters to you. And also less stress on players' joints with the good traction. So as I mentioned, like early turf, like not great for the injuries. Yeah.

But now we've got some good stuff out there. Now we've got great turf out there, yeah. It is very expensive. So when we were looking to kind of rehab our green space out back, which we cannot keep green, I was like, what about turf? And the gentleman I was talking to was like, it's like four times as expensive. I mean, which makes sense, right? Like you don't replace it.

Yeah. Like it looks good. Low maintenance, which makes sense, right? You don't replace it. It looks good. Low maintenance, obviously. But pricey. I don't love it at the home. I like for all of our many, many ecological troubles at this house that we live in for a few more weeks. I do enjoy the naturalness of it the even even though parts of it have been we have been run roughshod over by mother nature yeah uh it is i don't know it's neat yeah and i

will say so another problem with turf that i found is it really kind of destroys the biome underneath obviously it's just like putting a big plastic tarp down on some dirt. But it's nice for a play space. That is true. I really like it a lot. I think it looks good. I like you a lot. I think you look good.

You're just going hard today. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. And thank you for listening and thank you to bowen and augustus for these for our theme song money won't pay you can find a link to it in our episode description and thank you to maximum fun oh maximum fun there's all kinds of good shows on maximum fun yes i you know i was dipping into jordan jesse go dipping into jordan jesse go yeah dip your toes into the cool refreshing waters yeah of jordan and jesse they get some great

guests as they go um we are going to be doing some more shows later in this year of ours san diego portland uh and salt lake city that tour is almost actually sold out hey thanks a lot west coast really do appreciate that i have never been to portland or salt lake city or san diego so i'm very excited about this tour you're gonna have a hell of a time yeah it's gonna be it's gonna be a i adore all three of those cities very pretty out there it's so pretty yeah um and yeah you can find links to that at macroy.family. We also got shows coming up in D.C., Detroit, Cincinnati, and maybe a couple other places. I'm not 100% sure, but keep it locked there.

We have stuff at macroymerch.com, too. Always adding more stuff there every month. And if you enjoy any of our shows, I bet you'll find something that you'll enjoy. Or if you have a special someone in your life who likes our stuff. Yeah, you know those people with the summer birthdays, you know? It's hard. It's hard, right? Like everyone's traveling or like you're not in school and you like never get to celebrate your birthday and give them something.

To talk about. The McElroy family. Yeah. To talk about. The McElroy family. Yeah. To brighten their day. We should make a new shirt that says Busket and Busted on it. And it's just, there can just be a hat. It seems a little Ghostbusters, I'm going to be honest.

I mean, sure. What about Ghostbusters? And it's like a. Oh, that's something. Spectral jam band. I like that a lot. In the streets of New Orleans. Yeah. That's it.

Thank you for listening. Thanks for being here. Thanks for listening to us. Thanks to you. Thanks to me. Thanks to the, thanks to. Thanks for continuing to give us an opportunity to do this show. Yes.

It is very difficult to feel positive and grateful for a lot of things right now. But it gives me strength. But this show helps me focus on what I like and I am grateful for an opportunity to do that. Me too. I have been thinking of nothing else but foam rolling on my back since the beginning of the show.

May we be excused from the table? Are you asking me? I'm asking the listeners. Hold on, so may we be excused from the table. Are you asking me? I'm asking the listeners. I'm asking the listeners. Hold on, listen. Thank you. Bye. Money wall, hey! Working all day. Money wall, hey! Working all day.

Money wall, hey! Working all day. Money wall, hey! Working all day. Money wall, hey! MaximumFun.org Comedy and culture. Artist owned. Audience supported.