Wonderful! - Wonderful! 262: Not A Bonus February

Episode Date: February 1, 2023

Griffin's favorite deep slacker jazz band! Rachel's favorite gateway to shopping hell!Music: “Money Won’t Pay” by bo en and Augustus – https://open.spotify.com/album/7n6zRzTrGPIHt0kRvmWoyaFoundation for Black Women’s Wellness: http://ffbww.org/ MaxFunDrive ends on March 29, 2024! Support our show now by becoming a member at maximumfun.org/join.

Hi, this is Rachel McElroy. Hello, this is Griffin McElroy. And this is Wonderful. Welcome to the show. Welcome. Come on, take your shoes off. Whoa. Right. Come on in.

We got a lot of, we got tea sandwiches. I'm glad you brought up the shoes off thing. Yeah. This is like an unofficial rule in our house. And a lot of times when people enter, they will ask if they should remove their shoes. And I never know what to say because we do it. Right. ask if they should remove their shoes and i never know what to say because we do it right but not not in like a real intentional way where we're like don't you dare bring a shoe in here we do

many things in this house in the japanese stuff there it is i would say um no yeah i mean like if somebody were to ask you i always kind of stumble a little bit like if if somebody comes to our house and says oh do you want me to take my shoes off yeah what do you say uh yes please wow really yeah i say yes please well you know you don't want to sound like you're just trying to scope those little toesies scope those pigs that's your immediate thought this is so funny that i don't want them to think i'm a you have this constant fear of appearing to be like a deviant. This is like when we talked about hot tubs and you're like, well, if we get a hot tub, we'll be those people.

These are not unreasonable fears for... We were told growing up that these were normal things to be afraid of. That's true. I forget sometimes because you're so loose now, you know? Yeah. I forget about your prudish upbringing. Yeah. Like you've always had a sort of you know? Yeah. I forget about your prudish upbringing. Yeah. Like you've always had a sort of heathiness. I'm a real Dharma.

Damn it. No, I'm not. I'm not willing to cede that ground. I'm going to put it on this podcast. I cede Dharma to you. I can't believe how casually you just did that. Yeah. I feel like that is some.

I saw you blowing bubbles the other day and i was like that's a dharma i can't compete with that i didn't know until we had kids how good i am at blowing bubbles i can't are you saying oh my god because you're exasperated with me because it's a weird thing to flex over or because you know the truth. It's this trait, and I see it in Henry now too, where it's like you will try something, you will be better at it than you expected, and then instantly you're like, maybe I should be a professional bubble blower.

Well, I didn't go that far. I wouldn't say I went that far. But you had the thought a little bit, right? Like I wonder what the biggest bubble is. No, I mean, I've read enough like Guinness book of world Record books. I feel like in my school library, there would be time where we would just go in there and read.

And I'd be like, that sucks. It's so boring. But these Guinness Book of World Records, they have wild facts in them. And so I would read about like the world's biggest pizza or the world's biggest bubble. I couldn't come close to that okay but you are good you are i'm not saying that you're not good you are good pretty good

good breath control yeah from all of my meditating uh hand-eye coordination risk assessment these are all important sort of see now you're leaning towards greg again and i'm regretting my dharma assertion. You think that blowing a nice big bubble—okay, so Dharma would blow a bunch of little bubbles. Greg would get in his head about blowing one huge bubble. The fact that you just detailed an analysis of the strategies to maximum bubble blowing is a very Greg move. It's hard to be this quirky and random all the time. It takes a lot of work actually to be a dharma okay do you have a small wonder for me my my love i mean i don't know that we've talked about it but um there is a place here called jetty's jetty's uh that has a year-round thanksgiving

sandwich the the nobadir yes i don't really actually know what it's called. Nor I, nor I. But it's like turkey and stuffing and cranberry sauce. And I mean, you can get it anytime you want. And so I had it yesterday. Yep. I had the leftovers for lunch. I followed the same trajectory for my lunch choices.

I forget the name of the sandwich I get, but it's like a chicken parmesan sandwich. It's good as hell. Keep it up, Jed i just i love i i feel a little purist about thanksgiving food and that i wouldn't necessarily just make stuffing like in april but i like that i can have a little thanksgiving sandwich anytime i want yep um i'm gonna say uh i've been struggling with some pretty bad insomnia lately mostly brought on by stress and also the fact that our baby wakes up a lot now and so what's the point yeah um but i have been sort of knocking out some stuff off the backlog of some movies i've wanted to watch mostly horror films which is probably not helping matters much, but I finally saw Nope.

Yeah. And I thought it fucking ruled. I thought it was really good and super scary. Extremely, deeply unsettling and scary in ways that I wasn't even expecting, you know, Jordan Peele to go to, which is saying something after Get Out and Miss. I feel like that says a lot,

because to me, Us was incredibly scary. See, I never thought Us was that scary. And the fact that you didn't but think that this one is makes me think it must be crazy. This one's about alien abduction, which I think when done right, and this film does it right, is an inherently terrifying concept.

And this movie does a really great job of establishing its alien as a genuinely threatening presence. And then after it establishes that, just constantly throws the heroes of the film into scrape after scrape after scrape after scrape with it uh it's badass it's got like some genuinely rad moments in it uh it's great it's great i can't stop thinking about it it it is uh is great i don't know what else to say about it because i'm like a year and a half late to this uh to this discussion but i don't know why i mean i know why i put it off is because like it's tough to get stoked about watching horror movies when you only have like an hour to watch TV at night. But I'm glad I dipped in because I thought it absolutely ruled.

I go first this week. Okay. I'm talking about a music thing. I'm excited to talk about a music thing because it's like a music thing I've loved for a long time. And so it's like one of those, why haven't I talked about it yet? I know. It's the band Soul Coughing. Yeah.

And by extension, frontman Mike Doty, who has gone on to have an illustrious and incredible solo career as a musician. 90s kids will remember this one. as a musician. 90s kids, Will Mimbedis won. Soul coughing was an experimental alt rock question mark band.

The genre is like completely. Yeah, that feels right. Yeah. I'll talk about sort of what kind of music that the band made, but they don't adhere

to a genre very cleanly. And yeah, it was fronted by Mike Doty, who has some pretty complicated feelings about soul coughing that i'll get into a little bit later the trajectory of soul coughing was like almost like archetypical new york experimental music uh group in the 90s story uh he was a doorman and like a amateur music critic who met up with a drummer and a bassist and a dude with a sampler machine at the knitting factory which was like this uh experimental rock nightclub in the same sort of like cbgb's circuit, the same Manhattan neighborhood in the 90s.

And so these four people came together and formed this just Frankenstein-like group that dabbled in rock and blues guitar and hip hop and jazz samples to make something that is just wild. If you've never heard a song of theirs, that's not true. You have heard at least one song of theirs.

It's probably Circles, which was on their third and final studio album, El Oso, which came out in 1998. It's been in a bunch of movies and TV shows and video games and commercials and everything. I think unequivocally, it's like maybe their best song, but it also is not like the rest of their stuff.

But I wanted to play it because it's probably the same one you remember because it's got a super catchy hook and the chorus is just like eight words over and over and over again. So here's a little bit of Circles. I'll still fuck with circles When the wind set down in funnel form and pulled you in. I'll still fuck with Circles, even though I don't think it's necessarily representative of the rest of their work. You grew up, you listened to Soul Coughing in their active era.

No, I don't think so. There was this period of time in college where I really found a community of people that really loved music. And I hadn't really had that prior yeah and so there were all these bands that I had a real passing knowledge of from the 90s um like Stone Temple Pilots sure um for example and Soul Coffee was another one that just kind of showed up all of a sudden and I was was like, wow, I'm really late on this one. But this is exactly what I like. It does not surprise me that you liked it. It is so sort of like poetry influenced. I honestly, when I when I look back, Mike Doty has gone on to have his own solo career, and he's made more music and music that is like more meaningful to me, because it was like, I was going through college when he was releasing music and it was just it hit all the all of my pleasure centers all at the same time but the nostalgia factor i guess for for me with soul coughing is like completely off the charts um there was a thing it can't

exist it can't possibly exist anymore uh but it was called Columbia House, and it was Columbia Records' sort of distribution and sales platform that if memory serves, you would get a flyer in a magazine that you would just sort of check the boxes of what albums you wanted. And then you would mail that in, and you would get a bunch of cassettes or CDs in the mail. Justin did this constantly because they were dirt cheap for whatever reason. Yeah, I couldn't figure out. I wondered, like, did you have to pay for a membership? I don't know. Because they always would advertise, like, nine CDs for $9. And I'm like, how are they doing this?

Yeah, I remember going through the checklist once because justin had some like extra picks and it was like 99 cents per person which is like the cost of and distribution of music doesn't mean anything like any anymore not compared to like how it was but this was like a a thing that justin used. And I know it exposed him to a lot of music. And then of course, by trickle down economics, would then go on to inform sort of the music that I thought was cool. And that is like all soul coughing. Like it didn't sound like anything else I'd ever heard.

I don't know that really anybody's been able to emulate it quite the way that they they did it it's lots of spoken word lots of just sort of stream of consciousness lyrics a bunch of jazz a lot of drum and bass samples in their later music which is like funky as fuck uh it it's just when i look back at the music that i thought was cool in the 90s there's not a lot that still stands up to scrutiny, that I would still look back on and not be like, well, okay, maybe that wasn't so cool. Soul Coughing fucking stands the test of time. It is still fresh as hell. I'm going to play another one of their songs off of L.O. So called Fully Retractable, which sort of more encapsulates the band's super specific genre, which Mike Doty described as deep slacker jazz. But it's my right to waste your time With these things

It stands to reason These things won't kill me Your feelings The spattering of poison Don't tell me So Soul Coughing released three albums together before they broke up in 2000. Over a decade later, Mike Doty wrote a memoir called The Book of Drugs that described pretty hellish conditions in the band.

There was just like constant strife over creative direction and credit and all of this different stuff. I think one of their members had a baby and then that was just like they were like okay well this is the reason this is the off ramp that we needed to not do this band anymore he was also struggling with drug addiction uh which unsurprisingly based on the title of the book it it deals mostly in uh he also wrote a book of poetry i don't know if ever if you knew about that and then like uh it was when i was in college he released a book of poetry. I don't know if you knew about that. And then like, it was when I was in college, he released a book of poetry called Slanky that I like read in college.

And the same way I thought his music was like the coolest shit in middle school, Slanky was like the coolest shit for me in college. Yeah, I think that it's really unique music that I can still go back to and listen to and not only enjoy, but just kind of like, you know, appreciate the fact that that was some pretty cool shit that Igrandizing maybe a bit. But it's kind of undeniable how cool the music is that Soul Coffee made and that Mike Doty continues to make. And if you've never listened to any of their stuff, I'm kind of jealous of you because there's a pretty big body of work there to dip into.

Go listen to pretty much all of L.O. So it fucking shreds from start to finish that's soul coffee can i steal you away yes they can be anywhere at your office in your In your car. And they are wrong. My mom says that the Grey House didn't exist, but she's wrong. He just doesn't wrong. Someone in your life is wrong about something. Something small. Something weird. Something vitally important. Only one person has the courage to tell them just how wrong they are. You know what you did was wrong, but your daughter

is a liar who eats garbage. They call me Judge John Hodgman. Listen to me on the Judge John Hodgman podcast. If someone in your life is doing you wrong, don't just take it, take it to court. Submit your case at MaximumFun.org slash JJHO. MaximumFun.org slash JJHO. Hi, I'm Alex Schmidt. And I'm Katie Golden. And we make Secretly Incredibly Fascinating, a podcast about why seemingly ordinary stuff is actually the title of the podcast.

Using tons of research, we take a joyful look at history and science and stories. And jokes. About the ordinary stuff in your life because that's what makes those things amazing. Also jokes. So get excited about paperclips. Get thrilled about pigeons. Get all psyched up and running around the room about the imperial system of weights and measurements. For real, there's whole episodes about that stuff. Hear them anytime and hear new episodes mondays at maximumfun.org okay yes so kind of speaking of that time period oh boy uh i wanted to talk about my wonderful thing this week which is hot topic oh my god i maybe this inspired you as well. I just saw some post somewhere that was just screenshots of the Hot Topic website when it first launched.

And like the merch that they had, the Beavis and Butthead and Slipknot and MCR merch and shit that they had there. And it took me on a journey. I think, I don't,'t honestly i don't remember how i came to this topic but uh have we not discussed hot topic we have so we've talked about the mole okay i was going to say i know i've shared some deep dark hot topic based secrets on this show before uh and i think like it was easy to recognize that it was special because it was so different from any other store in the mall yes but i didn't really think about the kind of the access it gave like suburban kids or like small town kids all over the country like the fact that you could you know you didn't have to live in like a hip college town

or like a New York or Los Angeles. Sure. You could go to the mall and access these like band t-shirts. An incredibly canny, I would say business decision to go after that market that was being crucially underserved.

And it's funny too. In the Huntington, west virginians of the country it was funny too to think about how intimidating that store was to me oh for fucking sure and and like obviously it was designed i think to be that way a little bit i mean every store in the mall was designed to be that way from your hollisters to your american eagles to your you know yeah but this this felt more like you had to have cred, you know, because the employees, and I guess this was true with, like, Hollister, too. Yeah, for sure.

But the employees represented something that was very intimidating. The music was very, very loud. Sure. As I mentioned, the storefront was, like, you know, super imposing. And very bad sometimes, and that's okay, too. Yeah, I mean, that's just true of young people like in a retail environment yeah you know you have employees more often than not that aren't being paid well i have to be careful after talking about soul coughing in the first half of the show

approaching this hot topic half of the show and not sounding like the world's biggest hipster douchebag piece of shit asshole ever i don't think that's possible it's not i loved hot topic with my whole heart i always wanted to hang there but i knew that i was like not nearly on the right level yeah i used that i shopped there wrong i would leave the store and be like that wasn't i bought a ring why that wasn't right i panicked and bought a ring um yeah they for me it was like they had hair dye in the like crazy manic panic colors which was hard to find like at a you know grocery store which is a while with your with your hair colors i mean i tried i never

bleached my hair right so when i would do like purple or red it would be very subdued because my hair was brown you know um but i definitely tried and it was and like body jewelry too you know it was just like stuff that you you really didn't know where to get it as a young person right you know particularly if you like couldn't drive yet. Yeah. Not that I had any kind of body piercing before I could drive. But, you know, I'm just saying like it was a way to like access things, you know, that you like were into. Right.

And couldn't get it, you know, Target. Right. I didn't realize a lot about kind of the story behind Hot Topic. It was really charming to read about. It was a couple that started it out of their Southern California garage in 1989. And they opened their first location in Montclair, California at a mall. The couple was Orv and Leanne Madden. Orv was a former executive at the Children's Place.

Huh. And if you look at it, if you can find a picture of this couple online. Does he just have like his ears gauged? No, it's like the most wholesome couple you've ever seen. Like, it looks like, I mean, like, if they introduce themselves, like if you were at, let's say, like a neighborhood ice rink. Yeah. And, you know, both your kids were on the same hockey team and you leaned over and you're

like, hey, so what do you do? And they're like, oh, I started Hot Topic. You'd be like, no way. No, you fucking didn't. Yeah, but they were super- Do you kids like Invader Zim? um so i read this i read a couple articles um but one that i read was with cindy levitt who was the very first employee hired by hot topic and is now the senior vice president of merchandising and marketing i love that and she said i love that for cindy i know initially when they started

it was it was going to be like a hip young men's accessory chain so like wait hold on wait uh an accessory they just had the one chain that they were selling to men's as accessories to wear at the at the scott concert that's sweet no i'm talking i'm talking about like sunglasses belts you know like uh and then they they kind of just kept adding as they kind of followed where the interest was. And so then they went on to like jewelry, the spiked wristbands and collars that you may remember. And then they started traveling around the country. And back in 1989, you couldn't find like music t-shirts at any kind of like mall you know like there was you would go to a concert or you would go to like a really cool

area of like downtown big city usa um but you couldn't find that at the mall and so they immediately started like trying to find those t-shirts all over the country to bring to their store um i remember god i remember going to a tower records in new york city before i think we had a hot topic at huntington and just being like wait a minute wait a minute wait a minute you can buy shirts with the band's names on it yeah i mean this thing was before the internet right like you had to physically go somewhere to purchase this thing uh and you didn't really know where to go yeah um and hot topic kind of cornered the market on that um so then they expanded to pop culture which is like what

we know of now like their big like nightmare before Christmas, Care Bears kind of genre. But their first big pop culture shirt was Homie the Clown from In Living Color. It was their first non-music license that they purchased. I guess it worked. History was made. It was huge for them. And then they started buying Twin Pe peaks shirts uh and people went crazy for it and then they started going after shirts where merchandise wasn't available yet like spongebob okay it was like the first year of the show nickelodeon hadn't put out any merch yet and

so hot topic scheduled a meeting with a company and became the like exclusive deal for spongebob t-shirts i'm curious what their licensing deals with like different anime distributors is like because i feel like every time i walk past a hot topic now it's like demon slayer and yuri on ice and like big yeah breakout anime shows that i mean certainly wasn't anything I was watching when Hot Topic first opened. Yeah, no, that's what's kind of incredible is that for a store that tries to be so specifically, like, of the moment and relevant to, like, young people's interests, like, they've really kept up. Sure. In a way that is surprising. Sure.

In a way that is surprising. The Care Bears thing that I was talking about is what I remember from that time period. Because I would walk into Hot Topics super intimidated by all the like spikes and boots. And then I would see, you know, like strawberry shortcake. And I'd be like, wait. Yeah. There was a weird part of the like early emo zeitgeist, I guess, that was very like 80s and like NES. I remember they had like a bunch of they had like a they had like a zelda wallet and i was like whoa that's fucking cool yeah like for whatever reason those two kind of cultural touchstones blended in the petri dish of of

the hot topic well that interview that i read with the senior vice president was talking about rave culture like how that became really popular, this kind of like nostalgic, like big pants, you know, like child's t-shirt, like low sticks, like all of that. They just like really. I never thought of rave culture as being. Really doubled down on it. An extension of one's childhood. Everyone's childhood. Yeah.

So they have really kind of kept up in a way that has been surprising. Like a lot of, as you know, shopping malls and stores in malls are struggling. And they definitely had a dip, but they still have over like 676 stores in malls around the country. The one thing I wanted to show you that I didn't realize so the hot topic i remember looked like this shit yeah like had the the big metal gates the like gargoyles the like crazy font um you know they like really set it apart which i know there are younger people who listen to this show you have to imagine going to a mall where there's like an Auntie Anne's and a Suncoast Records. Like a Sears. A Sears.

And then there's a fucking gateway to hell. It was the most badass stuff ever. Let me show you how Hot Topic looks now. Oh. It's going to make you kind of sad. No, I get it. Yeah, I mean, that's the thing right like so now it's it it kind of just looks like a like a modern urban store like it's not still dark like

a designed darker vibe than yeah uh the the pack sun next door but it's not designed to be um you know as intimidating maybe as it once was uh this this i guess all happened in like 2007 yeah they intentionally like pursued what they called this lighter and brighter model of just like making it more uh accessible to people because obviously they're carrying a lot of stuff that young people want and they want to be like hey you can come in here it's okay well and it's also good for the people who were teens when Hot Topic first came out and then are not teens because of the cruel trajectory of time's arrow. And then they're like, people are not going – adults are not going to come in this fucking store, y'all. Yeah, that's fair.

So they had to change something. Yeah. They've done – they've continued to do a lot of stuff. The most recent thing I found is they've launched, and this is really, I think, wise. They've launched a resale program with a partnership through ThredUp. So you can resell your like hot topic apparel for credit that's interesting which i think is interesting because there's always like this push for like you know finding like vintage stuff yeah and obviously at a certain point god that's hysterical

the idea that old hot topic merch is now vintage is makes me want to go sit down in a dark and cold room uh this just happened october 2022 they announced this so this is this is brand new um i'll see if i can find my my uh my goggles your goggles my fucking cowboy bebop uh windbreaker yeah i don't know if i ever i mean i definitely bought stuff in hot Topic, but I was in there maybe a hundred times more than I ever bought anything. Yeah. Because I would just kind of be like, well, no, okay, I gotta go. I didn't buy much there.

I think I got, I bought goggles once. I bought a ring once. It was expensive. I mean, it was, it was mall expensive, which like, I didn't have any fucking money. So like any amount of money was mall expensive for me. Yeah. But I always, it always was like a proving ground. It felt like, it felt taboo for me to be in there partially because of my own, you know, Southern Baptist upbringing and feeling like, oh man, what if someone from church sees me in here?

But also from the like, I don't know. I have no idea what I'm doing. I'm going to touch something and someone will be like, why are you touching that shirt that way? That's not a touching shirt. Well, there was this big thing. And in the interviews that I read, they talk a lot about how the culture has changed where you're like kind of allowed to like different things now.

Whereas when we were younger, I feel like there was this big fear of being a poser. You know, you had to like, you had to like lean into an interest. And if you leaned into that interest, you had to like follow everything that went along with it. And so it was very challenging, I think, to be like the person like me who really just kind of liked REM and Fiona Apple to be in Hot Topic and feel like it can be for me too yeah like i don't really know metallica um but i can be in a place where there are metallica shirts how strange and sad i know we we eulogized the mall on our episode where we talked about the mall but it's so wild how that was a personal cultural moment when Hot Topic opened. And all of a sudden this place where you go to buy jeans and, you know, video games at the Babbage's has like some counterculture shit in it.

And you get exposed to that for the first time. Obviously, like, you know know you can buy whatever online but to be able to have that kind of like like communal shared experience with all my friends of like figuring out like how we how do we approach this store and i think i mean i think and this is what i was reading when i was researching it is like in a lot of like small towns, that is still very much true. Yeah, for sure. Like they don't have access to like places to gather where their interests are like welcomed and common, except for Hot Topic, which I think is great. God bless Hot Topic.

God bless you, Hot Topic. Thank you to Bowen and Augustus for these for our theme song, Money Won't Pay. You can find a link to that in the episode description. And thank you to the Maximum Fun Network for having us on the network. Speaking of, the Max Fun Drive is going to be coming up here in a while. And we've been thinking about our bonus episode, our BOCO for Wonderful this year. If you don't know, we're a pledge-supported show. year if you don't know we're a pledge uh supported show and uh with the max fun drive is our our chance to uh put out some extra stuff and ask y'all for help supporting the show anyway we've

been talking about what we want to do this year and we've discussed doing a return to rachel plays a rachel plays a video game yeah first time um yeah. We aren't really 100% sure on what the video game should be. Two years ago, it was Animal Crossing New Leaf, I think. Yeah, which did in some ways kind of- Or no, the one before that. Oh, yeah. No, it was New Leaf. It was the 3DS one.

Was it? Yeah, yeah. New Horizons was the- Yeah. And that really, I mean, it did. I played that game a lot. I played the hell out of that game. Yeah.

So if you have any suggestions hop in the facebook group what game maybe someone could get a poll there maybe rachel keeping in mind here let's set some parameters i would prefer it to be on a handheld device because then i can do it in different places of our house i would say a switch game would be ideal yeah we have a couple of those uh yeah and also like the barrier to entry has to be pretty low because i'm not gonna have a lot of time to dedicate to that's true i think something in the stardew valley family would be good i think um i don't know a zel a zel you've never played any of those zelda yeah but those are huge games those are pretty big games sure yeah i mean I mean, so is Animal Crossing, technically, if you think about it.

Anyway, just food for thought. We have merch over at McElroyMerch.com. Always updating the stuff in there. We got a bunch of videos up on our YouTube channel at the McElroy Family on YouTube. Go subscribe and watch stuff. And have a great month. February is going to be your month. Wow.

February is going to be your month. It's February, huh? Which is cruel because it's the shortest one. Is this a special one where we get bonus? No, it's an odd number year. There's no way it's a leap year. Yeah, I don't believe that it is. Okay.

I don't get bonus February. Damn it. I love a bonus February. It feels like stolen time, you know? Seized from mother Nate, from the father time.

I like bonus February as like a band name, maybe. Yes. Yeah. Dry January, bonus February. No,

not November. Oh, I thought we were going to do all the months, but we're just. I'm jumping around. Okay. Groovy June. That's, I don't want to do anymore. Okay. Working on it, money on it. MaximumFun.org Comedy and culture.

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