Kelefa Sanneh
Appearances
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
Either you have a secret family or there's some sort of fraud. I love my family. But, like, they're doing this kind of, like, it's a combination of you're hoping that the distributors do some of the moderation work for you, and they're going to do a little bit of, like, this looks fishy checking. But it's not a wild west, but it's like a... Under-regulated West? Semi-Wild West. Semi-Wild West.
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
He has a book called Major Labels that somehow covers the entire evolution of pop music in a fun and breezy way. If I have a question about music that I can't answer, he's the person I always go to. Okay, we got a listener question that I wanted to ask you about. I'm going to lead up to that question first to set a little bit of context.
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
So, okay, just to recap, individuals are not uploading their own tracks. Tracks are uploaded by distributors. Spotify is doing some work to algorithmically prevent tracks from being attached to the wrong artist?
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
Yeah, but there end up being mistakes, inevitably, and when there are mistakes, Spotify has to go in manually and correct them.
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
So Glenn's saying that, yeah, inevitably there end up being mistakes. Smaller artists get labeled as if they were bigger artists, and it doesn't necessarily mean that the smaller artist is trying to do something sneaky. Yeah. However, it's also possible that it could be strategic. PJ, do you know what Taylor Swift's first ever single was? No. It was a country song called Tim McGraw.
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
Yes. And it was about people who fell in love, and she's saying, when you hear Tim McGraw, I hope you think of me.
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
But also. But also. He's very popular. He's very popular. She's a new artist. And so when people search Tim McGraw... Yeah, and not even just in certain searching, in terms of she's associating herself with Tim McGraw. It goes back even before the digital era. In 1964, there was a group called The Carefrees who made it to number 39 on the pop chart with a song called We Love You, Beatles.
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
Yeah, and it's funny, when people do stuff like that, like when you say Taylor Swift's first single was a song called Tim McGraw, the phrase that sort of sings into my mind unbidden is, oh, Taylor Swift's good at the internet? And a lot of people who are cultural workers, cultural artists, who make stuff that goes online, which is many different types of people,
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
one of the things that I find myself noticing, admiring, or critiquing is just how good are they at the internet? But this point about the carefree is, no, it's really just being good about attention.
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
It's understanding that there's something people are already paying attention to, and if you align with this, diss this, get near this, you may be able to refract some of that attention and use it yourself.
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
Yes, exactly right. But I think you're right, PJ, in that the modern era where people are listening to music by, like, typing out the name online has actually led to more of this. There's a Dutch producer, Sam Felt, and he had a big hit in 2019 called Post Malone. Do you think that annoys Post Malone? Well, that's a good question. One answer to that can be found.
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
I think I know the answer to this question, but just in case there's a random lacuna in your musical knowledge. Are you familiar with the band Cake? Yes, I am. How would you describe their music?
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
Last year, there was a singer called Jordan Adetunji who had a huge record called Kalani, which is the name of an R&B singer. Yeah. Apparently, she was not annoyed because she hopped on the remix.
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
Because Jawbreaker had broken up. Yes. People were wondering if there'd be a Jawbreaker reunion.
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
And if you put Jawbreaker reunion on the flyer, maybe people look twice.
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
They're really, I mean, you're really, it's like posting misleading photos of yourself on a dating site. Like you will bring people in, but what happens next seems unenjoyable for you, the person who has catfished them.
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
Well, sure, although as you see from actual dating sites, like, if people feel like the alternative is no one looking at their profile at all, maybe, you know, maybe you try to get the foot in the door and you worry about the mix-up a little later.
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
But back to our story about this Russian hip-hop artist and whether this particular instance is musical catfishing, I mean, it sounds like there's at least a possibility that this was a kind of attentional hijacking.
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
Yes, and this is a venerable tradition in music. When it comes to Pulya Nevetru and the Russians, I think, PJ, you and I talk offline often. Yes. And something that people should know is that when we talk offline, we usually pause our conversation every 30 minutes or so to check our privilege. So I thought it would be a good idea to do a privilege check right now. PJ, where were you born?
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
Haverford, Pennsylvania. Haverford, Pennsylvania. Proud American. I was born in Birmingham, England, but at the age of five, I moved to this country and I became a naturalized citizen when I was, I think, 19, just in case anyone from the government is listening. And so we are both Americans. Yeah. We have some American privilege.
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
And I think it's fair to say that sometimes people in America harbor prejudices about people in Russia. It's true. It's a very acceptable place to harbor prejudices against. And I think part of what's happening with this story is that, like, there's this track uploaded to the internet by a Russian, eyebrows raised. Maybe it's a scam.
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
Spritely indie rock with kind of talky vocals over the top. Do you like them or not like them? I like them a little bit. Sacramento, if I'm not mistaken. Is that where they're from? I think so, yeah. The big hit is Short Skirt, Long Jacket. Is that correct? Yeah. I remember in the early 2000s, I think there was crossover with this Brooklyn band called Chick Chick Chick.
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
You're totally right. Right. It's weird. I hadn't noticed it in myself. But yes, I am more likely to assume, in a situation in which the facts are unclear, that a Russian person may be interfering with American due process. A very specific kind of prejudice. Check your privilege, PJ. Thank you, Kay. We're going to take a short break. When we return, Kay is going to investigate some Russians.
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
Welcome back to the show. So Kalava and the search engine team had spent some time on Russian social media, including this website, VKontakte, which is sort of like the Russian version of Facebook. I'm going to let Kay take it from here.
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
So we had to voyage into the Russian internet, into VKontakte, and Garrett and a researcher found Pulya Nevetru, who turns out to be a Russian guy, and also found a friend of his that he sometimes works with who seems to be known as Cake. I see. Two guys in Russia that love hip-hop.
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
Do they make music together? Yes, they do. Okay, this is starting to point in a different direction. And so, when you say found, like, found social media profiles of?
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
Yeah, in fact, I have Cake's Instagram profile right here. Okay. Here, I just sent it to you. Okay.
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
Cake Tortic. His real name is Sergei. Sergei Savalev. The first picture I see... Okay, so the first picture I see, it's like a Russian dude. He's got like a thin mustache and a beard and what looks like long hair under a hoodie. And he's standing in this like bucolic scene outside of... Are these rams or yaks? I don't know. I was like, is that an alpaca?
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
They're furry animals with big long horns on them. And then the music company is Kendrick Lamar Pride. And the caption is, I can't fake humble just because your ass is insecure. Which is a Kendrick Lamar quote. I assume so. There's just something so funny about, like,
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
I don't know, American rap reaching someone kind of dressed in a slightly like American rap-inflected style in a place that is so foreign. In my head, I might be wrong, but I'm like, it's a Russian yak farm. But the message is transmitting and being received. Like there's something that brings me an adrenaline shot of happiness to my heart from that.
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
Well, yeah, and it's partly what we've been talking about, which is our weird connectivity, where Kendrick Lamar doesn't know that his song is necessarily going to reach this guy, Cake, in Russia, and certainly Cake doesn't know that his song is going to reach us here in New York.
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
Yeah, and it's the dream of everybody that they'll reach a lot of people, but they don't think about what a lot of people means. Right. Like a lot of people means like the guy at the yak farm.
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
And the thing about this kind of connectivity is it's not just that we could see his Instagram page. We can maybe actually talk to him. Hi, Cake. Good to meet you. Hi.
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
Thanks so much for talking with us. I asked Garrett if English was okay, but it sounds like English is great. I think, yeah. I don't speak any Russian, so that's good. So yeah, we got him on a video call. What did the Russian cake have to say for himself? Well, we talked about music, of course. Tell me, when you were growing up, were you listening to a lot of Russian hip-hop?
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
A guy who played in Chick Chick Chick, I think, had played with Cake and then actually later ended up playing with LCD Sound System.
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
Were you listening to American hip-hop? What kind of music was influential to you?
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
All my life, I listened to American music because when I was, I don't know, six years old, maybe seven, my father... said to me that, yo, Russian music is not so good, but you can listen to American music. And he gave me some CDs with Nirvana songs. Nirvana? Yeah, and all my childhood I listened to Kurt Cobain, so I love him very much.
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
I love ACDC also, but when I grow up, like I'm 15 years old or something like that, I start listening to... Kendrick, Travis, Kanye. So, yeah, I listen to a lot of American hip-hop. Okay.
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
I wondered probably what you're wondering, right? Which is, like, the name Cake. Does that come from the 2006 Lloyd Banks featuring 50 Cent track, Cake?
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
There's a saying before GPS was widespread where they used to study the brains of London cabbies. And there was like a part of their brain that either lit up more or maybe had grown more. I'm sure that's wrong. But it was just sort of a scientific marvel how the human mind could expand to
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
It comes more from him being a kid who liked cakes. It's a really strange story. In my childhood a lot of people called me like just brownie. I don't know why, but it's a fact. One day I just eat in a restaurant in a small Russian town named Gilets.
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
uh the cafe named london so um in the menu i see like cake brownie oh it sounds cool but it's too long i will take just cake and so that's how i become cake
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
So that is how Sergei got his nickname. And the members of the American band Cake might be kind of heartbroken to discover that the Russian rapper Cake had never heard of them.
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
I feel like if I were them, it would like slightly wound me. Like not even once, not even one time. But you know what? Having talked to teenagers about music, rock music does not exist to them. It's like trying to get them into disco. It's like totally, they're not interested in anything that has a guitar.
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
So, Sergei told us that he got a laptop from his parents for his 18th birthday, and he started messing around on the computer making hip-hop tracks and decides to collaborate with this kid he met at school, who's also 18, and his name is Ivan, or as he's known on the internet, Pulya Navetru. Ah. Can I show you a Pulya Navetru video on TikTok? Please.
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
How would you describe what you're seeing? A very, very young-looking teenager. I don't know if he's going to listen, but he looks like he's 15. He's got a black t-shirt and kind of Mark Zuckerberg gold chain. Clean cut. And then this, I think they go to his collaborator. Is that Cake? I think that's Cake. I recognize him from the Yannick Farm.
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
But they're just like rapping in a street somewhere in Russia.
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
But at this point in the story, PJ, it's easier for you to recognize Russian cake than American cake. Isn't that true? If I showed you a picture of a guy and tried to guess which one was the lead singer of American cake, you would have no idea, right? I would have no idea. But when it comes to Russian cake, you are one of America's leading experts. Is this what it feels like to be you?
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
Only on very good days, PJ. Anyway, Polly and Yvette and Cake upload their track. They give it to their distributor. The distributor puts it on Spotify. Yeah. And they see some people are listening to it, which is good. Very good. And they're excited, but then they realize... there's a problem. Right. It's linked to this band they've never heard of.
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
to contain knowledge, and when you talk about music in this way, I feel like I'm talking to a London cabbie in 1997.
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
And so were they like at first they're excited because it's doing numbers and then they're disappointed because it's slightly a glitch?
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
Yeah, I don't think it was like exploding with the numbers, but it was more like, yes, they liked the idea that it was getting some exposure, but there was like, you know, we actually are trying to maybe have a career. We got to fix this issue. Okay. And they reach out to the distributor. Distributor's kind of like, not our problem. Right. You guys need to take it up with Spotify.
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
And there's a problem at that point. Why? Because, I don't know if you recall this, in 2022, there was some international news involving Russia. Yes. So in the aftermath of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Spotify closed its Russian office. And then, shortly afterwards, Russia passes a law that makes it illegal to disparage the Russian military. Okay.
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
Isn't it possible that brains don't actually expand and that it's zero-sum?
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
And in the aftermath of that, Spotify blocks its service in Russia altogether.
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
Wait, so when Russia made it illegal to disparage the Russian military, Spotify was like, we're standing up for free expression. no Russian can listen to music? Well, I think maybe part of the idea was there might be legal liability.
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
Oh, it's not a... If you're streaming content into a country that has that kind of a censorship law.
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
I see. Their fear is, like, the same porous system that allows Cake the rapper to end up as Cake the rocker could mean that some Russian group could put up something called, like, Fuck the Generals, and next thing you know... some Spotify executive can't vacation in St. Petersburg.
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
Well, actually, as you, I don't know if you're aware of this, PJ, Spotify, it's not just music. They're actually involved in the podcast business, too. Oh, really? Yeah, I don't know if you're familiar with that. Hadn't seen. So, yes, if you're Spotify, yes, the idea of are you going to monitor all your podcasts for anti-Russian military content?
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
Yeah, that you'd be horrified by all the stuff that's not in my brain. Your kids' birthdays?
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
So, for whatever reason... They jump out of the market. They're like, yeah, we're not operating in Russia. So Russian Cake is in this situation where he's trying to fix the mistake. It's proving pretty hard to do because Spotify doesn't officially exist in this country. And so eventually he tracks down a Spotify person in America and tells them, hey, there's this issue. Yeah.
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
They have to contact someone like Glenn, like Glenn's successor, some of those people that are working there whose job it is to get this all figured out. And so do they try? Yeah, they try and eventually they do it.
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
We actually reached out to Spotify and a spokesperson told us that when the issue was brought to their attention, they, quote, contacted the provider and got it fixed, making sure the song was correctly placed. So right now, if you're a fan of the American band Cake and you go to their Spotify page, you will no longer see a collaboration track with Puglia Navetro.
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
Okay, are you familiar with the hip-hop artist, and I may have mispronounced this, Pollyanna Vetruh? No. Russian hip-hop. I don't know how well you know Russian hip-hop.
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
But so it's so funny, I would assume that this was all, like in my mentalization, the way I imagine this all going down is the American rock band was like, yo, you gotta get this off our page. It was actually the people who were getting
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
more attention than they normally would because it wasn't attention from the fans they were trying to reach, they proactively said like, hey, our music doesn't belong there. I believe it was actually both.
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
So I communicated with Cake's manager who said like, yeah, this was a big pain in the ass. I see.
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
Okay, so both sides were like, please fix the giant infinite library of music Spotify.
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
Which is fixable. I think at this point there are, there's a lot of cakes. I believe there are 15 cakes I found with a quick search on Spotify who all have different artist accounts. That's going to be more and more of a problem. Well, especially with a name like cake. Yeah. Nice four-letter word. Yeah. It's an appealing word, so it's not that shocking that there are a lot of them.
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
You need to be like Cake182 at this point. Yeah. Exactly right. And so, yes, this guy known as Cake that I talked to, he was like, yeah, it was a kind of a pain. It's cool to him that some people heard this song.
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
Yeah, I think a lot of listeners find me by this groove because... Like, I'm not popular, I'm, like, no name, but ByeBye has a lot of streamings for me. It's, as far as I remember, 70,000, yeah? Or something like that. And it was very great for me that it posted on their page.
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
So yes, this is their big hit, but it doesn't seem like it's a big hit that was part of a scam or that they were able to monetize.
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
And has it gotten them any... Like, I imagine the overlap among listeners to the American alt-rock group Cake. Like, there's not that many people in the one circle who would Venn diagram into the next, the people who are like, I don't want to start listening to rap, but from Russia. Right. But have they picked up some fans from this?
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
No, you could be making this up just to trick me and get me to say, like, oh, yeah, first album's great, and then it turns out it's fake.
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
You know what it really actually got them is a full episode on one of America's most beloved podcasts. LAUGHTER God, if this is what blows them up. Their plan has worked, TJ. Because you and I are sitting here. Just two pawns. Talking about Russian cake.
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
You can check out the song Bye Bye by Polyadna Vetru and Cake, the Russian rapper, not the American rock band. We will have a link to the song in our show notes. You can also find it on Spotify, where it is now properly filed. Kay, you want to read the credits?
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
No, no, no, real band, real band, real, not an entirely popular group, but a group that does perform music.
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
Sure. Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey and Jigsaw Productions. It was created by you, PJ Vogt, and Shruti Pinamaneni, and is produced by Garrett Graham and Noah John. Fact-checking by Mary Mathis. Thanks, Mary. Theme, original composition, and mixing by Armin Bizarrian. Additional production support by Sean Merchant and Kim Koople. If you would like to support our show...
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
Their show, really. Keep it alive and get ad-free episodes, zero reruns, and the occasional bonus audio. Search Engine Engine. Please consider signing up for incognito mode. You can learn more at searchengine.show. Our executive producer is Leah Reese Dennis. Thank you to the team at Jigsaw, Alex Gibney, Rich Perello, and John Schmidt.
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
And to the team at Odyssey, Rob Morandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Colin Gaynor, Maura Curran, Josephina Francis, Kurt Courtney, and Hilary Shelf. Our agent, their agent, is Oren Rosenbaum at UTA. Follow and listen to Search Engine for free on the Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you for listening. They'll see you next week.
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
I have a certain linguistic prejudice when it comes to hip-hop, so my knowledge of non-Anglophone hip-hop is almost non-existent. Have you listened to any German hip-hop? Not voluntarily.
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
Better than you'd think. Anyway, our listener is a Cake fan, and Cake, he knew, had not put out a new record in years, so he got excited when he saw this notification saying there's a new Cake song out, and also that it's a collaboration with this little-known Russian hip-hop artist. I just want to play you this song. It's called Bye Bye. Bye Bye.
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
Check, check, check, check, check. All right. Are we doing an intro? I don't have an intro. No, I'm just, I can say, hi, Kay.
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
The 808 Kicks and some production that, you know, sounds a little bit like chronic era, like West Coast hip-hop, right? It has those zap-derived synthesizers, maybe.
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
Like I said, I haven't really listened to much German hip-hop, so I don't know... Russian hip-hop. Oh, Russian hip-hop, excuse me. So I don't know how it fits into the Russian hip-hop landscape.
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
You have not pointed out that you hear a lot of Cake's influence in this collaboration.
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
No, no. If you had not mentioned Cake and you'd asked me to list 500 groups that might have influenced this, Cake would not be among them.
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
So our listener had been curious about why Cake was releasing such an un-Cake-like song. And our listener was not the only person wondering about this. Okay, there's this website called Reddit where fans of something, whether it's a band or a podcast, can gather to talk about how that thing used to be better in the past. Reddit, you say? I try not to go.
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
And on the Cake subreddit, people were losing their minds about this new song. Somebody says, I'm just going to read this, quote, Hi, fellow fans. Does anyone know the story of this song? Just released on Spotify, but definitely doesn't sound like the cake I know. Does anybody have any information about it for me or about the other band, Pull Ya Net Vetru?
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
I can't find anything with my meager Google skills, if only there was a podcast for this. He didn't say that. Someone else chimes in, just like to say one thing, what the actual fuck is this song? It's in a different language. And then the third person says, I'm so confused. Is this a hack? Is this a hack? Which basically, it seems like there's three possible theories for what has happened here.
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
If you have somehow prepared a thing, you can always do a thing. Do you have a thing? You don't even know why you're here. How can you have a thing?
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
One, which I would like to be true, but I'm pretty sure is not true, is just that Cake was like, we're pivoting. Musical makeover. Musical makeover. The other possibility is that the Spotify had been hacked. The third is just that Spotify had made some very strange filing error, which you would think they would be set up to not do.
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
But we wanted to investigate, so we wanted to know if you could look into this.
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
That sounds like exactly something I can do. It involves messing around on Spotify, you say? Yes. Yeah, I think I was built for this. Okay, great.
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
After the break, Kay gets some answers. Welcome back to the show. So a few months after that first conversation with Kay, he texted me and told me he thought he had an answer. We went back to the studio to discuss. Okay, let's go to our story. Where are we? Where are we, PJ? What I recall is that a listener had sent in a question. They went to Cake's Spotify page.
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
They hit play on what seemed like a surprising... Surprising because Cake is a relatively quiet band. But there's a new Cake song. They hit play. Doesn't really sound like a Cake song. Sounds like Russian rap music. Yeah. By this artist named... Pulya Nevetru. Pulya Nevetru. And the question was kind of like, obviously something is wrong here.
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
Well, the thing about the podcast world, PJ, is it can be kind of competitive. It can be very exciting. And I don't know if you're aware of this, but that kind of competition can cause hurt feelings.
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
Is it that Pulya Nevetru has gamed the system and hijacked Cake's page? Is it an error? Is it some third stranger option?
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
Is it a very unlikely collaboration? You never know. Maybe a member of Cake is playing almost inaudible guitar on this track.
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
That is the outcome I would most hope for. Secret cake? Secret cake. So you looked into this.
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
Yes. What did you find? Okay, so the first thing we did, we wrote to the American band Cake. We emailed their manager who confirmed that, yeah, he had received some questions and complaints from American Cake fans. He said this was not a real collaboration. Which we expected. So instead, we decided to look at the Spotify side of this. We talked to a guy who actually used to work at Spotify.
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
Hi, Glenn. Hello. How are you? Can I start by just having you say your name and to level set, what's the last song you listened to on purpose?
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
This is one of many things I learned from your book is that you love goth metal covers of popular songs.
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
Okay. And so Glenn, like me, is like a real music nerd. I would argue he's more of a music nerd than I am, and I don't say that lightly. I've never heard you say that about anybody.
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
So like literally when you were like sort of the handshake that people that don't do sports do, which is like, what do you listen to? Where'd you find that? Oh, I like this. Like when you were doing that with him, he knew bands you didn't know?
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
Yeah. He knew like genres I didn't know. Really? Glenn tried to build a map of all the music genres in the world, which involved coming up with new names for new genres based on clusters of listeners that he was finding. And he's analyzing the waveform of the song, but he's also building like a multidimensional social map to see like, oh, people who like this thing also like this thing.
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
Here's how far this genre is from that genre. Okay. Glenn doesn't work at Spotify anymore, but he used to be one of the lead engineers there. And when he was there, he had access to all kinds of data and information. And he also had his hands on all the different levers trying to make Spotify better at recommending new music for its users.
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
No, but I appreciate the fact that although you have your own podcast that you're working on, you don't feel so competitive that you're not willing to invite the host of a competing podcast, Search Engine Engine.
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
And so part of what Spotify does is it tries to show people new music that they might like that's different from music they're listening to, but not too different. Otherwise, they're going to be unhappy and maybe turn off the app. And so the search engine listener who wanted to hear Cake and ended up hearing Russian rap had like the bad version of the Spotify experience.
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
This is what's not supposed to happen on Spotify, is you hear something that sounds like it has no relationship to the thing you actually wanted to hear. So I thought Glenn might be able to explain how this could possibly happen. So I actually read him the question from our listener.
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
So we here at Search Engine International Corporate Headquarters got an email from a listener who understands that when we say no question too small, we really mean it. Can I read it to you? Yeah. All right. So here's the email. I went to listen to the band Cake, and they had a new song on Spotify. Their first release in like 20 years or so. I think it was actually maybe 13 years or something.
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
And it was the least cake-sounding song ever. It sounds like Russian rap and bad Russian rap. You know what they say, everyone's a critic, right? Yeah. The band they apparently collaborated with is Pulya Navetru. I think they, Cake, may have been hacked. But how can that happen? Wouldn't this be an easy fix? So confused. This is a great question.
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
The show that has been launched within my show and apparently is now competing with my show.
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
And then here is Pulla na Vetru featuring Cake. So there we have it, Pulja na Vetru featuring Cake. That track has about 76,000 listeners, which is less than anything from the last Cake album, but more than anything else from Pulja na Vetru. Is this an honest mistake?
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
This podcast Califah hosts, a competitor to Search Engine called Search Engine Engine does in fact exist. There's one episode so far published behind our paywall, which means it's only available to our incognito mode listeners. But that was not why Kay was here today. Kay knows more about music than anybody I know.
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
So Glenn explained that Spotify doesn't work the way YouTube works. YouTube, you can put whatever you want on there, but Spotify, you, PJ, can't just record a song, or in your case, a rap, and upload it to Spotify. Generally, you need a middleman. You need what's called a distributor.
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
But he said that even with this middleman system, which greatly limits the amount of content that's uploaded to Spotify, it still isn't feasible to review every song before it gets uploaded. There's still way too much stuff.
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
He even had some tools, including some algorithmic tools that he could check and be like, oh, the WAV file of this audio recording doesn't actually look like the way a WAV file of cake would usually look like.
Search Engine
The Russian Cake Switcheroo
So it's almost algorithmically or through machine learning or whatever, doing something similar to how your credit card company is like, oh, it's weird that all of a sudden you're trying to use your Chase card in North Dakota. You've never been there and you're buying 30 boxes of diapers. You've never bought any baby stuff. Like we think something's going on. Like they're doing a
Something You Should Know
The Backstories of Your Favorite Music & Money Mastery in a Changing World - SYSK Choice
well, maybe it's not that great. Maybe it's not built to last. Maybe these teenagers are going to move on and find something else. And one of the most fun and exciting things about pop music is how wrong those judgments often are, right? You think about the way people looked at Led Zeppelin in the 1970s, and the idea is this is music for a bunch of high school morons smoking dope, right?
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The Backstories of Your Favorite Music & Money Mastery in a Changing World - SYSK Choice
And it turns out that Led Zeppelin is almost as popular now as they were then, right? This turns out to be kind of one of the classic bands that generations discover and rediscover. In a very different way, if you think about Madonna in the 1980s, there was this idea like, oh, well, this is very superficial music. This is MTV era.
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The Backstories of Your Favorite Music & Money Mastery in a Changing World - SYSK Choice
People just like these music videos that look good and there's really no substance there. And now we look back at Madonna's career as one of the most important figures in popular culture probably in the past half century. So often people are making these judgments about popular music, about what will last and what will fall away.
Something You Should Know
The Backstories of Your Favorite Music & Money Mastery in a Changing World - SYSK Choice
And often it's really hard to predict what is going to be popular and what is going to have influence over the years. Where did rap come from? Rap? It's funny, rap... There's a way of thinking about it where it's almost not quite a mistake, but rappers weren't supposed to be the stars. In the early days, this movement starts with DJs.
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The Backstories of Your Favorite Music & Money Mastery in a Changing World - SYSK Choice
It starts with cool DJ Herc and other people basically who had big sound systems and big record collections, and they'd play a party. And they found ways to go mix back and forth between records so they could play funk records or disco records or R&B records. And they'd find the most rhythmic part, the break, where everything would stop except the drummer.
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The Backstories of Your Favorite Music & Money Mastery in a Changing World - SYSK Choice
And they could play the break backwards and forwards. And so they'd be able to create a great soundtrack to a party where people would dance and it would be really up-tempo. And it was kind of like they were manipulating these records in an interesting way. So in the early days, the rappers were just the hired help. They were the guys on the microphone.
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The Backstories of Your Favorite Music & Money Mastery in a Changing World - SYSK Choice
They were emcees in the old-fashioned sense of the term, E-M-C-E-E, right? They were the party host saying they'd welcome everyone. They'd say, I hope you're having a good time. They would sing the praises of the DJ. Isn't this the best DJ? And as they started doing that, they started doing that in rhyme. And then, you know, they ended up basically stealing the spotlight.
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The Backstories of Your Favorite Music & Money Mastery in a Changing World - SYSK Choice
The rappers became the star of the show and the DJ became just this extra appendage. You know, you think about someone like Will Smith. When Will Smith first gets popular, he's part of a duo. And the duo is called DJ Jazzy Jeff X. and the Fresh Prince, right?
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The Backstories of Your Favorite Music & Money Mastery in a Changing World - SYSK Choice
In the early days, the rappers often got second billing to the DJ, even though it turned out that rapping is such a powerful and charismatic form that many of us end up paying more attention to the rappers than the DJs, and the rappers kind of take over, and now you have a whole form of music that's basically built around rapping.
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The Backstories of Your Favorite Music & Money Mastery in a Changing World - SYSK Choice
But the way it started was, yes, in this funny way, a little bit backwards.
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The Backstories of Your Favorite Music & Money Mastery in a Changing World - SYSK Choice
One of the things that hip hop did was it retained this connection to the cultures where it was born. And this is generally working class, predominantly black neighborhoods. And one of the really surprising things about hip hop is that over the decades, it has maintained this connection to those neighborhoods.
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The Backstories of Your Favorite Music & Money Mastery in a Changing World - SYSK Choice
Part of what that means is that means that through hip-hop, we get to hear from people that we otherwise wouldn't necessarily get to hear from. People who wouldn't necessarily end up making a film or even making a podcast make records, and those records really resonate. And so that's really exciting.
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The Backstories of Your Favorite Music & Money Mastery in a Changing World - SYSK Choice
But part of what it means is that in these communities, if there are these issues, if there are issues of crime, not only are you going to hear rappers talk about that, but there is an expectation that rappers really be part of that community. And sometimes being part of that community can be really dangerous if that's a dangerous community, if that's a dangerous place to live.
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The Backstories of Your Favorite Music & Money Mastery in a Changing World - SYSK Choice
And because the culture is so important in hip hop, there is an expectation that rappers not separate themselves from that culture and still be part of that culture. And I think that's a very double-edged thing. It's part of what makes the genre even now still so vivid. But it can mean that the lives of these stars are really dangerous because they're in dangerous places with a big target on them.
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The Backstories of Your Favorite Music & Money Mastery in a Changing World - SYSK Choice
And they're talking in ways that make it seem as if they're still part of these communities.
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The Backstories of Your Favorite Music & Money Mastery in a Changing World - SYSK Choice
Well, this is one of the really interesting and really vexing things about genres in music, especially in America, which is that one thing that popular music is great at is reflecting the world that we live in. And to the extent that we live even now in a segregated country, you'll see that segregation reflected in music.
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The Backstories of Your Favorite Music & Money Mastery in a Changing World - SYSK Choice
And over the years, R&B musicians themselves have had mixed feelings about that. Luther Vandross, one of the great R&B singers who had a string of incredible records in the 1980s especially, never had a number one pop hit. And he used to, you know, he used to say he really wanted one.
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The Backstories of Your Favorite Music & Money Mastery in a Changing World - SYSK Choice
And he was kind of upset that he was sort of – and he was upset that he was sort of categorized as R&B and in that sense kept away from the pop chart. Right. The flip side of that is someone like Whitney Houston comes out and she is – from the moment she comes out, she has big success on the pop chart and she is often categorized as a pop artist or as being, quote unquote, not really R&B.
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The Backstories of Your Favorite Music & Money Mastery in a Changing World - SYSK Choice
headline in either Time or Newsweek called her the prom queen of soul, which was kind of a compliment and an insult at the same time. And so by comparison, Whitney Houston sometimes suffered from the perception that she wasn't R&B enough.
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The Backstories of Your Favorite Music & Money Mastery in a Changing World - SYSK Choice
And, you know, one of the things I talk about with genres is that generally to have a genre, just like any community, you need some inclusion and you need some exclusion, right? That's what makes it feel like a community. And one of the things we love about a musical community is it gives you a sense of intimacy, a sense that we're all here listening together. It's just us.
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The Backstories of Your Favorite Music & Money Mastery in a Changing World - SYSK Choice
And so one of the things you get in R&B is that sense of intimacy precisely because it's a tradition that doesn't include everybody.
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The Backstories of Your Favorite Music & Money Mastery in a Changing World - SYSK Choice
Radio has always been, and actually still is to a surprising extent, old-fashioned, what they call terrestrial radio, still does a really good job of introducing listeners to new musicians they might enjoy. And all these newer outlets are trying to figure out how to do that, right? If you're Apple Music or you're Spotify or even you're YouTube, you're trying to figure out how do we –
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The Backstories of Your Favorite Music & Money Mastery in a Changing World - SYSK Choice
How do we get people and point them towards something that they love? For someone like me who's a music obsessive, I love logging on to Spotify and I'll just go to the new release page and listen to everything, literally everything. But to someone who's a more casual listener, sometimes that interface can be a little intimidating sometimes.
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The Backstories of Your Favorite Music & Money Mastery in a Changing World - SYSK Choice
You pull up Spotify and Spotify says, great, we have almost all the albums ever made. What would you like to listen to? And for a lot of people, that's a little bit paralyzing, right? Too much choice. And so one of the things you're seeing now is a bunch of companies and a bunch of technologies trying to figure out how to get people into what they like.
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The Backstories of Your Favorite Music & Money Mastery in a Changing World - SYSK Choice
And one thing that can be a little difficult, in fact, in the streaming era is finding that sense of community, right? Do you have a sense that, okay, there's a playlist you might like to listen to on Spotify? Do you have a good sense of who else is listening to that playlist? Do you feel like you're part of something?
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The Backstories of Your Favorite Music & Money Mastery in a Changing World - SYSK Choice
Sometimes I think that that sense of community is shrinking down to the individual level of an artist. If you're a fan of a particular artist, whether it's a huge K-pop band or a relatively unknown country singer-songwriter, it's really easy now to find other fans, to go on social media or go on Reddit or... go wherever.
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The Backstories of Your Favorite Music & Money Mastery in a Changing World - SYSK Choice
And so you can really become part of a community in a way that makes the fan club era look really prehistoric, right? The era when you'd send your name in an envelope to some address and join the fan club, which is the way it used to work. Now it's much easier to become an active fan and feel like you're part of a community of fans. So I think you've seen that on the level of an individual artist.
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The Backstories of Your Favorite Music & Money Mastery in a Changing World - SYSK Choice
But I talk to listeners all the time who are trying to figure out, like, what should I be listening to? And that's a question that companies like Spotify are trying to help them answer.
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The Backstories of Your Favorite Music & Money Mastery in a Changing World - SYSK Choice
And it's generational, of course, right? For a younger listener, they're discovering stuff on TikTok all the time. And if a song – if a snippet, right? On TikTok, it would just be a snippet. But you're seeing snippets of songs go viral. You're certainly seeing people get signed to record deals and become stars because they first were discovered on TikTok. And you're seeing the somewhat –
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The Backstories of Your Favorite Music & Money Mastery in a Changing World - SYSK Choice
somewhat comical phenomenon of established stars trying to figure out how to use TikTok as well as the teenagers do because they're trying to get that kind of engagement there on TikTok as well.
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The Backstories of Your Favorite Music & Money Mastery in a Changing World - SYSK Choice
Thanks. That was great. That was so much fun.
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The Backstories of Your Favorite Music & Money Mastery in a Changing World - SYSK Choice
rock and roll, R&B, country music, punk rock, hip hop, dance music, and pop, right? A genre is, in some sense, a musical community. I feel like within each of these communities, within each of these genres, there is a story to tell.
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The Backstories of Your Favorite Music & Money Mastery in a Changing World - SYSK Choice
In fact, often when you ask people that I've found, you get the opposite, right? You get people saying, I like all kinds of music, right? And my mischievous response is usually, I bet you don't. Which is just to say we like to think of ourselves as being very open-minded, right? And many of us are to one extent or another.
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The Backstories of Your Favorite Music & Money Mastery in a Changing World - SYSK Choice
But for most of us, loving music also means there is some other kind of music that we don't love quite so much.
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The Backstories of Your Favorite Music & Money Mastery in a Changing World - SYSK Choice
Well, it's often a little bit of both, which is that they come from below and they come from above. What I mean by that is they come from people getting together, doing a thing, right? You think about a Jamaican immigrant named Kool Herc throwing parties in the Bronx in 1976. He wasn't necessarily saying like, oh, I'm starting a genre. He was just playing records at a party.
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The Backstories of Your Favorite Music & Money Mastery in a Changing World - SYSK Choice
In the 1960s, people used pop music to refer to, like, everything. Like the Beatles were pop, the Rolling Stones were pop, the Supremes were pop. And in the 1970s, that starts to change and you start hearing people using pop as a derogatory term.
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The Backstories of Your Favorite Music & Money Mastery in a Changing World - SYSK Choice
And more and more people started playing records at these parties, and they're playing old disco records, and they were kind of cutting them up, and people started maybe talking over them a little bit. And soon you had this thing that came to be known as hip-hop, right? So you had a cultural phenomenon and just – For ease of reference, people give it a name.
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People in other parts of the city and then other parts of the country start hearing like, oh, there's this thing going on. There's this thing. And a couple of different, you know, people called it rap music. There's different words for it. But hip hop ends up being the name that kind of sticks. So in that sense, a genre can be a really grassroots phenomenon.
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The Backstories of Your Favorite Music & Money Mastery in a Changing World - SYSK Choice
At the same time, you have these big corporations always trying to figure out how to make money off of this stuff, how to market to us more effectively. And so for these corporations, it's really helpful for there to be a name, a genre, sometimes a subgenre.
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The Backstories of Your Favorite Music & Money Mastery in a Changing World - SYSK Choice
You think about classic rock, which is a radio format that's born basically in the early 1980s is when it really starts to thrive as a way of radio programmers realizing like, oh, there are some maybe – young but also not quite so young listeners who would love to hear the music of the 60s and the 70s, and it's not exactly oldies, and we'll call it classic rock.
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The Backstories of Your Favorite Music & Money Mastery in a Changing World - SYSK Choice
So sometimes a genre can feel a little bit like a publicity stunt or a conspiracy, and sometimes it can feel kind of like a secret or a local tradition that gets discovered. And often... I mean, this is often true in popular music that you see a bit of both, right? You see the sort of grassroots phenomenon, and then you see the corporate marketing scheme.
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The Backstories of Your Favorite Music & Money Mastery in a Changing World - SYSK Choice
And many of the things that we love, including rock and roll itself, end up being a bit of both.
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The Backstories of Your Favorite Music & Money Mastery in a Changing World - SYSK Choice
It's a great question. When I started working full time as a music critic back in 2002, one of the things I realized that was kind of heartwarming to me is that record labels were always trying to launch you know, new acts, new bands, sometimes new sub-genres, and much of the time they failed, right?
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Much of the time, the thing that the record companies told you was the next big thing turned out not to be. And that was heartwarming to me because it made me realize that there was a limit to how much anyone, even these powerful record companies, could control anything. And so I tend to think at the end of the day, the most important force is what people are into.
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The Backstories of Your Favorite Music & Money Mastery in a Changing World - SYSK Choice
And you see that well in country music where there's a bunch of different definitions of what country music might mean, right? You might have someone who is country music because of the instrumentation, right? They have a band and there's a fiddle and a banjo player and a mandolin, maybe a pedal steel.
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And they're doing something that sounds as if it's inspired by Hank Williams and maybe Johnny Cash and some Patsy Cline in there, right? That's one way to be country music. But there's another way to be country music, which is there is now an audience that thinks of itself as country fans. They listen to country radio. And to a large extent, country music is whatever those people say it is.
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The Backstories of Your Favorite Music & Money Mastery in a Changing World - SYSK Choice
Whatever those people want to listen to is country music. And so that's why country music evolves over the years. Generally, what happens in musical genres is in order for the genre to stay vibrant and stay popular, usually it has to change. And often what that means is there are a number of people who are upset about the way that it's changed. You see the same thing in hip hop.
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The Backstories of Your Favorite Music & Money Mastery in a Changing World - SYSK Choice
People sometimes say that the question of when hip hop sounded best is whenever you were in high school. That was really the peak of hip hop. And, you know, today's hip hop doesn't even sound like it sounded 20 years ago, let alone 40 years ago. And again, I think that's proof of the health and the vibrancy of hip hop. But it's also tricky for anyone who loves, you know, the older sounds.
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The Backstories of Your Favorite Music & Money Mastery in a Changing World - SYSK Choice
And the question of how it's possible for hip hop to evolve and yet remain recognizably hip hop is a really interesting question.
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The Backstories of Your Favorite Music & Money Mastery in a Changing World - SYSK Choice
in the 1960s, people used pop music to refer to like everything. Like the Beatles were pop, the Rolling Stones were pop, the Supremes were pop. It was just what was popular with young people. And in the 1970s, that starts to change and you start hearing people using pop as a derogatory term, right? The Carpenters are merely a pop act. Because they aren't rock and roll.
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The Backstories of Your Favorite Music & Money Mastery in a Changing World - SYSK Choice
And pop is often used in the 1970s to describe musicians who don't belong to any musical genre. They are homeless in terms of musical genre. Or maybe they've been kicked out of a musical genre because they've tried to cross over. They've left genre behind, right? Olivia Newton-John had some country songs, but really she goes pop.
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The Backstories of Your Favorite Music & Money Mastery in a Changing World - SYSK Choice
And so this idea of going pop and this suspicion that maybe going pop is a bad thing really takes hold in the 1970s. And in the 1980s, that's where you have an interesting reversal. You have, especially in the UK, you have a whole cohort of musicians. They're glamorous. They're wearing makeup. They're very kind of theatrical, influenced by David Bowie. And they're reclaiming the idea of pop, of
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The Backstories of Your Favorite Music & Money Mastery in a Changing World - SYSK Choice
pop music as a good thing. Pop music is cool. The idea is like, actually, rock and roll is old. It's been around too long. It's a bunch of sweaty guys in blue jeans. We're going to do something cooler, younger, sexier, more fun, more glamorous, and we're going to embrace this term, pop.
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The Backstories of Your Favorite Music & Money Mastery in a Changing World - SYSK Choice
And so, you know, ever since then, you've seen pop used as kind of a narrower sense, often to describe a particular sound. And so nowadays, if you think about a pop artist, a pop singer like Katy Perry or someone like that, she really is working. You can hear in her music that tradition of 80s pop, right? The tradition of Madonna and musicians like that.
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The Backstories of Your Favorite Music & Money Mastery in a Changing World - SYSK Choice
So in that sense, pop sort of starts as a catch-all. It becomes an insult. And then especially since the 1980s, it becomes a real genre unto itself, which is to say a community and a musical tradition.
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The Backstories of Your Favorite Music & Money Mastery in a Changing World - SYSK Choice
Well, I got to say, Barry Manilow has had an extraordinary career and by many metrics remains an extremely popular singer. But it's true that over the years, I mean, this is part of what makes popular music different from some other things, right? It's devoted to novelty and innovation, right? Those are values that traditionally have been championed in popular music.
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The Backstories of Your Favorite Music & Money Mastery in a Changing World - SYSK Choice
There's always someone new doing something new, catching people's attention. And also because often the target audience has been so young, there's always been this idea or perhaps this fear that the young people that love popular music, broadly defined, are going to move on to something else. And that's linked to an idea that if what you're doing is popular among young people,
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and the Confounding Politics of Junk Food. Plus, Kelefa Sanneh on the Long Influence of Kraftwerk
The Catholic Church was made for this moment. I think 2,000 years ago, the Catholic Church basically anticipated TikTok, Instagram, X. You don't have those little Swiss guard outfits and think they're not being photographed. Oil painting is not enough.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and the Confounding Politics of Junk Food. Plus, Kelefa Sanneh on the Long Influence of Kraftwerk
The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Meryl Garbus of Tune Yards, with additional music by Louis Mitchell.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and the Confounding Politics of Junk Food. Plus, Kelefa Sanneh on the Long Influence of Kraftwerk
This episode was produced by Max Balton, Adam Howard, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, Jared Paul, and Ursula Sommer, with guidance from Emily Botin and assistance from Michael May, David Gable, Alex Parrish, Victor Guan, and Alejandra Deckett.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and the Confounding Politics of Junk Food. Plus, Kelefa Sanneh on the Long Influence of Kraftwerk
The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Tarina Endowment Fund.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and the Confounding Politics of Junk Food. Plus, Kelefa Sanneh on the Long Influence of Kraftwerk
This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.