SPEAKER_06: AppleCard is the perfect credit card for every purchase. It has cash-back rewards unlike others. You earn unlimited daily cash back on every purchase, receive it daily, and can grow it at a 4.15% annual percentage yield when you open a high-yield savings account. Apply for AppleCard in the Wallet app on iPhone and start earning and growing your daily cash with savings today. AppleCard subject to credit approval, savings is available to AppleCard owners subject to eligibility requirements. Savings accounts provided by Goldman Sachs Bank USA. Member FDIC. Charms apply. Every kid learns differently, so it's really important that your children have the educational support that they need to help them keep up and excel. If your child needs homework help, check out iXcel, the online learning platform for kids. iXcel covers math, language arts, science, and social studies through interactive practice problems from pre-K to 12th grade. As kids practice, they get positive feedback and even awards. With the school year ramping up, now is the best time to get iXcel. Our listeners can get an exclusive 20% off iXcel membership when they sign up today at ixcel.com slash invisible. That's the letters ixl.com slash invisible. Squarespace is the all-in-one platform for building your brand and growing your business online. Stand out with a beautiful website, engage with your audience, and sell anything. Your products, content you create, and even your time. You can easily display posts from your social profiles on your website or share new blogs or videos to social media. Automatically push website content to your favorite channels so your followers can share it too. Go to squarespace.com slash invisible for a free trial, and when you're ready to launch, use the offer code invisible to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Here's someone you should know.
SPEAKER_08: Julie Shapiro. I'm executive producer of Radio-Topia, and we're going to talk about Showcase.
SPEAKER_06: Showcase is a new project from Radio-Topia, and the first series in Showcase, and really the whole concept of Showcase, happens to make a good 99% invisible story. So I asked Julie to come talk to me about it. And this is very much your project that you're spearheading. So can you tell us a little bit about Showcase and how it serves the mission of Radio-Topia?
SPEAKER_08: Sure. Well, Showcase directly came out of our experience with PodQuest, which we ran about a year ago, where we invited anyone and everyone to submit podcast ideas about whatever they were interested in or wanted to make a podcast about. And we got over 1,500 entries, and we chose one. It was called Ear Hustle. It's now a show in Radio-Topia. But it's the thing that- Incredibly popular show in Radio-Topia.
SPEAKER_06: Yeah, it's a show we're very, very proud of and amazed at the response it's been getting,
SPEAKER_09: et cetera. So the point was we had so many great ideas, but they weren't all necessarily sustainable
SPEAKER_08: long-term show ideas and thought, well, what if Radio-Topia could get behind a podcast that featured all of these different ideas one after another? Without them being separate podcasts that had to go out and gain their own audience and live on their own, how could we use the Radio-Topia name and reputation to help support even more producers with different kinds of ideas that wouldn't be ongoing shows? And so what Showcase is, is one podcast that has limited run series one after another with short breaks in between. And these will be shows of all stripes. We're really going to play with form, play with topics, push boundaries, give new producers a chance and really see how we can provide really high quality listening for our audiences.
SPEAKER_06: How do you conceive of something that sort of sticks together, holds together enough to be a Radio-Topia show or kind of represent our values in a certain way, but also be disparate enough to make this an experiment worth having?
SPEAKER_08: I'm just looking for ideas that I know, like I'm interested in automatically. I haven't heard anything like that before, but the producers kind of fit the Radio-Topia profile. They're independent. They're highly ambitious. They have big ideas about the subject that they're bringing to my attention, but they have a sense of humor and they can play a little bit and they're sound inclined. I think every pitch I'm considering right now has a lot of sound involved because that's really a hallmark of a lot of Radio-Topia shows. This is careful crafting, again, how to experiment with the form, how to hear from new voices. So part of it is like, what are topics we haven't heard yet, you know, go in those directions and also just encourage people to like really come up with something brand new, original, something we can take a bit of a risk on because the reward is going to be in trying something new and giving listeners like a new listening experience.
SPEAKER_06: Yeah. So this is going to be the type of podcast for the adventurous listener and will reward that type of person. And so it was like, just, I'm going to just do this, like input my 99 PI hat on as a, from a design perspective, why all one podcast, like through this format, what do you, what type of experience are you trying to shape and sort of cultivate with the audience?
SPEAKER_08: It's a really good question because we also talked about all of these series just being separate podcasts. There's some liability here. Will people stick with it from one to the next? But I really hope, you know, the through line for all of these series is going to be an original Radio-Topian sense of surprise and quality. And no matter what the topic is, hopefully people will, will tune in. And you know, people thinking of it as a showcase experience, not just thinking about the series that comes up next, but really having this like comprehensive sense of what this offering is from Radio-Topia. Right.
SPEAKER_06: I mean, that's the thing I like about it because there's something about this where, you know, hopefully you, you get a little further into it to judge, you know, because you trust the idea of the channel. Like it, it means something to be a listener to, to showcase. And so I'm just really intrigued by the new type of listening that might come out of that, that isn't based around building a hit around a single podcast.
SPEAKER_08: You know, we talk about Radio-Topia as the kind of music label a lot. And so this is kind of like a compilation record, LP, CD. Yeah, like our seven inch series.
SPEAKER_06: And so, you know, you've obviously have you lined up, like, I don't want to spoil anything, but can you sort of talk generally about the types of shows that are going to be on?
SPEAKER_08: We're going to kick off with a very sort of essayistic sound rich series about listening in the digital age. How listening has shifted for us through analog technology changing into transforming into digital technology. And this was proposed by a musician, Damon Krakowski, who was in a band that I used to love Galaxy 500 and then Damon and Naomi. Oh really?
SPEAKER_09: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I had to get over that to begin with when we started talking to him. But you know, I have an ex-girlfriend who's going to be very impressed.
SPEAKER_06: Oh, I can't wait for her to hear this. Make sure she gives us a rating on iTunes, please.
SPEAKER_08: So Damon, this is a perfect example. He's actually wrote a book about this in the past year. And we were talking about how it had to be a podcast. It was about listening, shifting from analog to digital culture. How would you represent that through sound and in a way that people could understand? It wouldn't be too technical and wouldn't be too sort of intellectualized. But how does he convey how lives are changing through these technological shifts? And so he came up with six different episodes. They're sort of based on the book, but it's really departed from the book and become its own engine. It's called Ways of Hearing. And that's what we're going to kick off the showcase with. And I think there couldn't be a better starter series because it's really about how we listen, how we listen in this age. And I really want to get people engaged with their ears and thinking about, you know, what is it about podcasting that they respond to?
SPEAKER_06: This is Ways of Hearing, listening in the digital age, from Radio Topia Showcase.
SPEAKER_05: The first record I made was all analog. It wasn't a choice. That's just how it was done in the 80s. My friends and I lived in an all analog world. There were no computers in our lives. That didn't feel weird. It would have been weird if there had been. At the time, computers were something you saw on TV during a moonshot.
SPEAKER_05: You saw people sitting at computers at NASA mission control.
SPEAKER_05: Making a record wasn't anything like a moonshot. It didn't use numbers. It didn't use data. One, zero, all engines running.
SPEAKER_05: Not that there was no technology involved. The tape decks, mixing board, microphones, they all seemed very magical. But they were made of magnets, gears, motors, electricity, like all the mechanical objects in our lives then. And so my bandmates and I set up our instruments in the studio. We counted off. And we played our songs. In many ways, it's simply nostalgia to think that it was so different. People are people. Sounds are sounds. And our technology is always changing. Still, there's something particular about that analog experience, which seems hard to conjure back up in the digital present. And for that very reason, it feels important to try.
SPEAKER_05: In that analog studio, there was a feeling when the tape started rolling that this was the moment we would capture. A feeling of time moving both more slowly and more quickly than usual.
SPEAKER_05: Like when you're in an accident, each split second is suddenly so palpable as if you're living in slow motion. Yet what do we say when it's over? It all happened in an instant. Analog recording is like an accident in other ways. On tape, there was no undo. You could try again if you had the time and money. But you couldn't move backwards. What's done is done for better and worse. Today, life as a musician is very different. In the digital studio, and I'm using one now, everything you do is provisional. That is, it can be redone, reshaped, rebuilt. There's no commitment, because each element of a recording can be endlessly changed. It can even be conjured from digital scratch, as it were, and entered into a computer directly as data, without anyone performing at all. This means there's no moment from lived experience that is captured forever, and unalterably so, in the digital studio. Which is why it's more than nostalgia that makes me remember the analog studio as different than what we know today. Because the digital era has not just altered our tools for working with sound, or image, or moving images. It is changing our relationship to time itself. This is Ways of Hearing, a six-part podcast from Radio Topia's showcase, exploring the nature of listening in our digital world. I'm Damon Krupkowski, a musician and a writer. In each episode, we'll look at a different way that the switch from analog to digital audio is changing our perceptions of time, of space, of love, money, and power. This is about sound, the medium we're sharing together now. But I'm worried about the quality of that sharing, because we don't seem to be listening to each other very well right now in the world. Our voices carry further than they ever did before, thanks to digital media. But how are they being heard? Episode 1, Time. Musicians know time is flexible. Classical players call this tempo rubato, Italian for stolen time. You steal a bit here, give a bit back there. Jazz players call it swing. Rock and funk players call it groove. This flexibility of time is something we're all familiar with, whether or not we play an instrument. There's the time it takes for dawn to arrive while you lay awake after a nightmare, and there's the time it takes when you're out all night with your friends. What musicians' terms like rubato, swing, and groove acknowledge is that time is experienced, not counted like a clock. And our experience of time is variable. It's always changing. Even if our eyes look at a clock and see 12 equal hours, our ears are ready to steal a bit here, give a bit back there. And the analog media we use to reproduce sound, records and tapes, reflect this variable sense of time, a time that's elastic. The first turntables, victrolas, were hand-cranked. You wound up a spring, which spun the platter as it wound down. The speed was hardly steady, at least never for long.
SPEAKER_05: At the opposite end of the 20th century, hip-hop DJs used speed controls on turntables to change the tempo of a record, to match it to another and keep the groove going, or, in the studio, to pile up samples from older records and make a new one. In 1990, a tribe called Quest sampled the bass from Walk on the Wild Side, along with the surface noise from the LP, added it to a drum loop from a Lonnie Smith LP, and made a new hit out of it. They also had to give up on collecting any royalties.
SPEAKER_03: One of the biggest samples that we were able to clear was the Walk on the Wild Side by Lou Reed. And by clearing that, he just took 100 percent of that song.
SPEAKER_09: Wait, really?
SPEAKER_03: He did.
SPEAKER_08: Wait, you're saying Lou Reed gets 100 percent? That's Ali Shaheed Mohammed from A Tribe Called Quest and Franny Kelly.
SPEAKER_05: They host a podcast about hip-hop called Microphone Check.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, that's his song. Ali, I always thought, you know, my band, Galax500, we ripped off the Velvet Underground
SPEAKER_05: way more than you did. We didn't have to pay them a dime. I asked Ali how Tribe used the variable speed of turntables to make their own records.
SPEAKER_03: You know, sometimes we would change the speed on a turntable because the staple hip-hop turntable is the Techniques 1200, and so that has a pitch control. We would sometimes pitch it high there, sometimes a 33 RPM record, you put it on 45. And one thing with Tribe, we layered certain sounds, and so you kind of had to pitch them because often they weren't in the same key.
SPEAKER_05: Layering these sounds, A Tribe Called Quest discovered something else about their samples.
SPEAKER_03: The records we were recording, they might not have been playing to a metronome, and they were free-flowing, so there are moments within, let's say, even a two-bar phrase that maybe a drummer or a bass player were aligned in the first two bars and the tempo seemed to be consistent, and then the last three beats of a bar, it sped up or slowed down.
SPEAKER_05: In 1988, the songs my bandmates and I recorded slowed down and sped up, just like Ali Shahid described. I know, because I was the drummer. We played as steadily as we could, but this was a performance. We were nervous and excited, and we sped up at the chorus.
SPEAKER_05: You might find that a flaw in our recordings, or you might feel it's a part of their charm. Musicians have been speeding up at the chorus for as long, I'm sure, as there have been choruses. Our experience of time is flexible. But not long after we recorded that first Galaxy 500 album, the commercial music world, for the most part, decided that this was most definitely a flaw. Bands on major labels, even bands who came out of our DIY indie scene, started recording to a click track, that is, a metronome. Fashions in music come and go. At the time, everyone was also using the swirling effect called a flanger. No one remembers why. But the click track proved more than a fad. It was a change that stuck. Because what truly changed in popular music during the 1980s was that digital machines entered the mix for the first time. And machines have a different sense of time. The first drum machines to be widely used in commercial recordings were introduced in 1980, and MIDI, Musical Instrument Digital Interface, the language machines used to share musical information with one another, was launched in 1983. Together, these tools can lock musical time to a clock, which doesn't speed up at the chorus.
SPEAKER_05: When Galaxy 500 recorded, we played our songs in what audio engineers now refer to as real time. Real time, as the name implies, is lived time, time as we experience it in the analog world. Digital time is not lived time. It's machine time. It's locked to a clock. And that clock, a time code, makes everything more regular than lived time. Time in the digital studio is stored in discrete cells on a grid, like figures on a spreadsheet. And if you've ever worked with a spreadsheet, you know those cells can be sorted any which way, and refigured to most any desired outcome. What this means is that a given experience of digital time is only one among many equally plausible experiences. Take this podcast you're listening to. Since this is a digital medium, you could choose to hurry me up without changing the pitch of my voice, seemingly without changing any of my words or pronunciation. Which means I can be equally fast, speaking at 1.5 times my normal pace, like I'm manic. Or I can be equally slow, speaking at three quarters normal pace, like I'm drunk. Neither need be how this happened in real time. In fact, none of this need ever have happened, in the sense that we understood that term
SPEAKER_01: in 1988.
SPEAKER_05: That's a track made entirely by software. The singer is a program made by Yamaha called Vocaloid. Vocaloid tracks have been cropping up on the Japanese pop charts for a number of years, and are now making their way into other forms of music around the world.
SPEAKER_05: As for podcasts, Adobe is developing a program called Voco that will read text aloud for you in your own voice. What could possibly go wrong? Making time conform to machines, making it regular, would seem to make it more unified, like a standardized timeline that any of us can tap into at any moment. But there's a surprising twist to digital time. It's actually very difficult to synchronize. It's a challenge in digital recording to line up the different layers that make up a song. If you play a guitar into a digital recorder, and then play it back and add singing, your voice won't line up with the music exactly the way you performed it. The reason is what's called latency. Latency is the lag in digital communications introduced by the time it takes a computer to process them. Computers move very fast. That's what computers are good at. But analog time, it seems, moves faster. Let's consider an example from outside music.
SPEAKER_05: It's the radio voice of the Boston Red Sox, Joe Castiglione.
SPEAKER_10: I don't have a signature home run call because all the good ones were taken. Mel Allen going, going, gone.
SPEAKER_10: Bye bye baby, Russ Hodges. At times I've used forget about it because you know it's gone. Some fans didn't like this. We don't forget about it. It's a big home run.
SPEAKER_02: The role of a broadcaster is to describe what you see and what is happening as it happens.
SPEAKER_10: That's why we broadcast in the present tense. It's larger deals and it's in there for a call strike. You can't be too soon. Anticipate because you can get burned that way. Sometimes the ball doesn't carry as far as you think it's going to or sometimes it carries farther.
SPEAKER_10: You can always tell if a broadcast is behind the action, if the crowd's cheering and you're still building up to what's happening. You have to be quick. You have to be current. You have to be right on time.
SPEAKER_05: Joe is such an important voice here in Boston. It used to be common practice to watch baseball games on TV, but with the sound off and the radio on so we could watch the game, but listen to Joe.
SPEAKER_05: And then a strange thing happened. On June 12th, 2009, Joe started calling the plays before we saw them on TV. That's because on that day, every TV station in the US switched from analog to digital transmission. And that lag in the digital television image, the gap between it and the real time of the game as Joe was calling it, that is latency. It takes time for computers to translate the world into data and translating data to analyze analog, so we can perceive it slows things down enough to put the tag after the call by Joe Castigliano. Tucker's throw, throw and time and he's out.
SPEAKER_10: Took a second half. It was an old saying in radio, when you read it, it's history. When you hear it, it's news. And we're ahead of the satellite picture on TV. So we are first. And I think the immediacy of radio is something that is so critical and so germane to it.
SPEAKER_05: Back before digital broadcast, that immediacy was audible in the city. You always knew when there was a home run at Fenway, because you heard a simultaneous collective cheer all around Boston from every open window and passing car.
SPEAKER_11: Can you believe it?
SPEAKER_05: Today, those shouts are staggered. We get a splattering of cheers like scatter points on a graph. That's because latency is different, slightly different, but different on each digital device receiving its own particular stream of digital information. Professional music producers and engineers in the digital studio worry about latency all the time. The lag it introduces can be very, very small. And yet, it's always there, and always threatening to knock the different layers of a song out of sync with one another. If a young drummer today manages to cast a wide net around the beat, perhaps that's not so different from my own speeding up and slowing down on Galaxy 500 recordings. It may be a flaw, or it may be part of the charm. Yet there's something very distinct about an experience of analog time, time that flexes slower and quicker. Tempo rubato, and this feeling of blurred time from latency. For one, I can't think of a musical term for latency, perhaps because it's not like anything we experience in lived time. However, this experience of latency is typical of life online. For all our seemingly instant and global digital communications, life online is in practice filled with chronological confusions. Social media like Facebook and Twitter shuffle posts according to various algorithms, most obviously popularity. The net result being that yesterday's news bulletin can interrupt today's string of think pieces about it. Texting too is often tripped up by crossed posts or missed posts or abrupt silences followed by ten bings in a row. Temporal hiccups and information exchange that would never happen face to face. In conversation, in real analog time, we can gauge reaction to our statements before anything further is said. We can pause without lapsing into silence, and we can fall silent without ending the conversation. Digital time is time designed for machines. We benefit in all kinds of ways from the convenience that makes possible. But those conveniences come at a sacrifice. Because when we trade broadcast for podcast, we give up the opportunity to experience time together in the same instant through our media. And when we trade real time for machine time in music, we lose the ability to share our individual timing with one another. Musicians use rubato, swing, and groove to move us together, not locked to a machine, but to one another. Analog time is flexible but unified. We share it so easily, without tinkering with technology, without even thinking about it. Maybe that's why we seem to be surrendering it so quickly. But without it, it's harder to share a moment in time together. Like those moments I once shared with my bandmates in a recording studio, in a particular place, at a particular time, on West Broadway, just south of Kanoa, in New York City, 1988. This is Ways of Hearing. In the next episode, I'll take a trip to today's New York and look at the effect of digital sound on our perception of space. Thank you for listening. Ways of Hearing is a production of Showcase from Radio Topia and PRX, produced by me, Damon Krakowski, Max Larkin, and Ian Koss, with sound designed by Ian Koss. Thanks to Julie Shapiro and Alex Bronstein, recorded at the PRX Podcast Garage in Alston, Mass. Our theme song is Trickle Down by Robert Wyatt. Find out more about Ways of Hearing at radiotopia.fm slash showcase.
SPEAKER_02:
SPEAKER_06: This series, Ways of Hearing, reminded me of one of my favorite 99PI episodes about music and design. And if you're one of the people who never go through the back catalog, I thought I'd just present it to you here. It's short and fun, but first, I should pay some bills, because thanks to these fine sponsors, we're allowed to listen to all this for free. The International Rescue Committee works in more than 40 countries to serve people whose lives have been upended by conflict and disaster. Over 110 million people are displaced around the world, and the IRC urgently needs your help to meet this unprecedented need. The IRC aims to respond within 72 hours after an emergency strikes, and they stay as long as they are needed. Some of the IRC's most important work is addressing the inequalities facing women and girls, ensuring safety from harm, improving health outcomes, increasing access to education, improving economic well-being, and ensuring women and girls have the power to influence decisions that affect their lives. Generous people around the world give to the IRC to help families affected by humanitarian crises with emergency supplies. Your generous donation will give the IRC steady, reliable support, allowing them to continue their ongoing humanitarian efforts, even as they respond to emergencies. Donate today by visiting rescue.org slash rebuild. Donate now and help refugee families in need. If you're in a hurry, you can just add two scoops of Kachava Superblend to ice water or your favorite milk or milk alternative and just get going. But I personally like to blend it with greens and fruit and ice. Treat yourself nice. Take a minute and treat yourself right. You'll get all the stuff that you need and feel great. Kachava is offering 10% off for a limited time. Just go to kachava.com slash invisible, spelled K-A-C-H-A-V-A, and get 10% off your first order. That's K-A-C-H-A-V-A dot com slash invisible. Kachava dot com slash invisible.
SPEAKER_06: This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. Do you ever find that just as you're trying to fall asleep, your brain suddenly won't stop talking? Your thoughts are just racing around. I call this just going to bed. It basically happens every night. It turns out one great way to make those racing thoughts go away is to talk them through. Therapy gives you a place to do that so you can get out of your negative thought cycles and find some mental and emotional peace. If you're thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online, designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist and switch therapists at any time for no additional charge. Get a break from your thoughts with BetterHelp. Visit betterhelp.com slash invisible today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp. That's betterhelp.com slash invisible. So this is a very old 99 PI and you can tell because I sound very young and much less exhausted, but it's an all time favorite so I had to share. Enjoy. Goethe said that architecture is frozen music. That's lovely. Of course, that was before audio recording. So now for the most part, music is frozen music. It's only very recently in the history of music that we've been able to freeze music into an object. And in my life, the form of this object mattered a lot. I once bought vinyl albums and cassette tapes, and there were two first songs per album, Side A and Side B. The energy of a first song made it stand apart from the other songs, at least in my head it did. Then the CD came along and eliminated Side B and there was only one first song. And the actual number of the track that you could see prominently displayed on the CD player UI, that became my index for sorting songs. Then MP3s jumbled my sense of track order and albums began to feel more like a loose grouping of individual pieces rather than a conceptual whole. I could do this all day and you're welcome to chime in. Let's just let's totally hash this out on the website. But my point is this, when it comes to music, the form of the thing matters. But no effect has been as world changing as the original innovation, freezing music in time onto a recording where a single version of a song, a single performance of a song became the song. This inherently mutable method of communication was fundamentally changed.
SPEAKER_07: Songs are astonishing things and I also don't think most people really even know what they are.
SPEAKER_06: That's the songwriter, composer and producer John Bryan. Now I didn't talk to John Bryan, but I know people who did. Jim Durogatus and Greg Cott are the hosts of a radio program I'm a huge fan of called Sound Opinions. It's a rock and roll talk show. And if certain niche-y, snarky corners of the internet have darkened your concept of music journalism, well, Sound Opinions is your beacon of light, my friends. Anyway, John Bryan came to WBEZ in Chicago to talk to Sound Opinions in 2006. And at the time, Bryan had just co-produced Kanye West's album Late Registration. And he was also already well known as a film composer of a lot of really great movies, many by Paul Thomas Anderson. I heard the show broadcast on WBEZ while I was sitting in my car in a parking lot of a taqueria in Logan Square. And I've thought about this section of their interview about songs versus performances at least once a month since then for six years. But only recently did it dawn on me that this is a perfect 99% invisible story. So here it is. John Bryan on Sound Opinions in 2006.
SPEAKER_07: I distinguish between what for lack of better terms I call songs and performance pieces. And what most people like are specific performances. We've grown up in an era of recording. And one of the very things I love, recording, has killed people's ability to hear songs purely as chord change, melody, and lyric. It's a very strange and beautiful art form because when it's right, boy, do you know it. But what we have sort of lost is, I don't know, the best example I could probably give would be Led Zeppelin. Those things are the ultimate performance pieces. And I'm a big fan. I think they're just absolutely astonishing. And the sort of dynamics they had are sorely lacking in music today. Record making is great. A true band in the sense that you really could tell who the individuals were. Remarkable thing. And I don't consider most of those things songs. And the way I can sort of prove my point is, have you ever listened to anybody else play Led Zeppelin song and gone, oh, that was a great, satisfying experience? Except for Dred Zeppelin, who I loved. What people like is that specific guitar sound, that specific performance in concert with that specific drum sound, with that specific drummer playing that specific part. And it's beautiful. It's a beautiful thing. They're all different types of art and creative expression. However, if I were to sit and go here over on the piano, go, this is the melody to a Led Zeppelin song.
SPEAKER_07: And I could play 30 others. That's the thing. I know it could sound like a snobbishness. It's not. I'm telling you, I love these records. They're great. However, there's a difference between that and a song, say a Gershwin song, you could actually play in the style of Led Zeppelin and have a completely satisfying experience. I do it all the time. I want to hear that. But when you start playing Zeppelin songs, say in the style of 1920s music, suddenly it's laid bare that it's like, oh no, it was about those people and those people were in a room and it was great. And I love it. But I consider it a performance piece. And I consider a lot of rock that people listen to be performance pieces. They're not necessarily songs. I heard you had Thom Yorke here recently and there's a guy who's a songwriter. Comes into the band and goes, here's the thing I've got. And then they rock with holy hardness and all the greatness they've got with them getting in a room. That's part of what makes a band like Radiohead stand out. You know, when that second record came out, we all collectively went, oh my God, somebody
SPEAKER_07: who actually has songs and this guy's an amazing singer. It isn't extinct yet. Yeah. Or Cobain, right? Right. Exactly. And I mean, okay, here, let's do a little musicology course.
SPEAKER_07: Okay. If you just go, yeah, it was cool. It was, you know, punk rock. It was popular. We had it factor for days, but if you take the average punk rock song, it is that same Led Zeppelin melody, even though they hated Zeppelin so much.
SPEAKER_07: It's like, you know, one of a thousand punk songs. Sure. And the difference between that and...
SPEAKER_07: I mean, I can sit here on grand piano, play an unaffected version, and we can all go, oh my God, yeah, that's the best thing ever. My spine tingles any time I play that melody over those chord changes. That to me, lithium is no different. It's in the same realm as being able to go, you know, where, you know, probably like most
SPEAKER_02:
SPEAKER_07: people, I remember exactly where I was first time I heard lithium. I remember back of the friend's car and it came on and I just freaked out. I mean, I was nearly in tears. I'm like, oh my God, that guy's better than everybody's. Yeah, it's true. Yeah. It was so palpable. Like that's one of the best chord changes I've ever heard. It's absolutely as good as, you know, Gershwin or Thelonious Monk or any great thing that's existed.
SPEAKER_06: That was John Bryan talking with Jim DeRegatis and Greg Cott on Sound Opinions in 2006. Sound Opinions is produced by WBEZ Chicago and distributed by PRX. Find out more at soundopinions.org. 99% invisible is Katie Mingle, Delaney Hall, Sharif Yousif, Emmett Fitzgerald, Kirk Colstead, Avery Truffleman, Taran Mazza, Sean Rial, and me, Roman Mars. We are a project of KALW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. 99% invisible is part of Radio-Topia from PRX, a collective of the best, most innovative shows in all of podcasting. We are supported by the Knight Foundation and coin carrying listeners just like you. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet me at Roman Mars and the show at 99PI.org or on Instagram, Tumblr, and Reddit too. But our fabulous home on the internet with more design stories than we can ever manage to tell you here on the podcast is our website, 99PI.org.
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