Something You Should Know
The Backstories of Your Favorite Music & Money Mastery in a Changing World - SYSK Choice
Sat, 29 Mar 2025
The clothes you wear project an image to others. But those same clothes you wear influence you as well. Listen and discover how different clothes and different colors you wear change the way you act and even how you think of yourself. https://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/03/science/clothes-and-self-perception.html Think of all the different kinds of popular music there are: country, rock, hip-hop, pop, R&B, jazz and more. All that music came from somewhere. And those musical origins tell some fascinating stories. If you enjoy music, listen to my conversation with Kelefa Sanneh. He is a writer for The New Yorker, former pop music critic for the New York Times, contributor to the CBS Sunday Morning program and author of the book Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres (https://amzn.to/3npafT2). You are going to hear some great stories! Who hasn’t found themselves in money trouble at some point? One big reason why that happens is that people don’t closely examine how much money they earn or how they spend it. Interestingly, even people who think they do, often do not – according to my guest Jill Schlesinger. Jill is a certified financial planner, award winning business analyst for CBS News, host of the Jill on Money podcast and radio show and author of the book The Great Money Reset (https://amzn.to/3JGJ91e). If you want to get some sound financial advice and ways to get a clear view of your financial life, you’ll want to hear what Jill has to say. A lot of Italian food tastes even better the next day with one big exception – pizza! While it may never be as good as fresh pizza, there is a way to reheat it that will bring that pizza back to life. Listen as I explain how to do it. https://www.americastestkitchen.com/cooksillustrated/how_tos/6453-the-best-way-to-revive-leftover-pizza PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS!!! FACTOR: Eat smart with Factor! Get 50% off at https://FactorMeals.com/something50off QUINCE: Indulge in affordable luxury! Go to https://Quince.com/sysk for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. TIMELINE: Get 10% off your order of Mitopure! Go to https://Timeline.com/SOMETHING HERS: Hers is changing women's healthcare by providing access to GLP-1 weekly injections with the same active ingredient as Ozempic and Wegovy, as well as oral medication kits. Start your free online visit today at https://forhers.com/sysk INDEED: Get a $75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility at https://Indeed.com/SOMETHING right now! SHOPIFY: Nobody does selling better than Shopify! Sign up for a $1 per-month trial period at https://Shopify.com/sysk and upgrade your selling today! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: How do clothes influence your personality?
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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Just to be this person who says you want to tell your boss to take the job and shove it and having no game plan is a terrible idea. But if you go through the process where you say, hey, you know what? Maybe I don't have to make as much money as I thought I had to make. And I don't have to stay in this job that's kind of making me miserable.
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Something you should know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers.
Hi, welcome to Something You Should Know. Have you heard the saying, I'm sure you've heard the saying, that clothes make the man or the woman? Well, that saying may be more true than you realize. This is according to some research that was published some years ago in the Journal of Experimental Psychology. For example, if you want to feel smarter and actually be smarter, wear a white coat.
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Chapter 2: What are the origins of popular music genres?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And many of the things that we love, including rock and roll itself, end up being a bit of both.
And so who defines a genre? Or is it just an organic-y thing that happens? Or is there some sense of there's somebody pulling the strings here that this is what... This is what country music is. This is what rap is.
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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Chapter 3: How did hip hop become a genre?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And the question of how it's possible for hip hop to evolve and yet remain recognizably hip hop is a really interesting question.
What is pop music? How do you define that genre? Because it seems to change a lot, and a lot of songs and artists fall out of that genre and then are homeless.
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.
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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Chapter 4: Why do artists fall out of their music genres?
We are talking about popular music through the lens of popular music genres. My guest is Calafasane. His book is called Major Labels, A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres.
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Hey there, I'm Rachel Fultman, and I host a podcast from Popular Science called The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week. Every other week, I circle up with guests like Bill Nye, Josh Gondelman, Mary Roach, and many more to prove that the lofty and noble pursuit of science can also be profoundly weird.
From flying Ford Pintos to the world's most illegal cheese, The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week is the ultimate source for all things interesting, informative, and, most importantly, frickin' weird. Check out The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week, wherever you get your podcasts. Come on over whenever you're ready to get weird.
So, Kelifa, I find it interesting, I've always found this interesting, how an artist can fall out of a genre, like be really hot in a genre, and then fall out, and then they can't come back. Say, Barry Manilow, he's like a monster pop artist. Yeah. Then he kind of fell out of favor. And another artist could release a song that sounds a lot like Barry Manilow and could be a big hit.
But if Barry Manilow puts out the song, it won't be a big hit because he's not allowed back in.
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Chapter 5: How is R&B defined and perceived differently?
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.
And they're talking in ways that make it seem as if they're still part of these communities.
R&B is an interesting category to me because R&B implies a certain kind of music, but it's also defined by the artist and typically black artists. And it is the only genre that is typically defined by a race. So what is R&B?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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