A record etched onto an x-ray of a (probably, now) dead Soviet citizen’s head. That is the uniquely cursed object Stephen Coates came across in a Russian flea market in 2014.

Weird, eerie, and almost polyphonic in quality, these DIY records captivated him and sparked a mission to find the bootleggers who had risked up to *five years* in a gulag for their love of music. How did they turn x-rays into subversive ‘rib music’? And what can a flimsy bit of plastic show us about subcultural life in the USSR? 

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Theme music and production: Mr Beatnick

Artwork: Archie Bashford

Oh god, not another one! When BREAKING NEWS bursts through the wall, we spring, gently and apologetically, into action, with a (cough) emergency p for the snappy g. That’s right guys, we’ve got a bootleg Keir Starmer mug and we’re not afraid to do a podcast about it.  

Real change. Change you can believe in. Change for you, change for me, change for the entire human race. This week we are talking about campaign slogans, and the surprisingly long and contested history of “for the many, not the few”. Who is the ‘many’ in this sentence?? And who are the few? How can it be that figures as diffuse as Blair, Corbyn and Starmer have all deployed the same slogan? And what was Theresa May’s unique twist on it? 

We also call in on one of our favourite subjects, TIME. How have the 1983, 1997, 2017 and 2019 election years come to stand-in for an entire political philosophy, and strategy? And what does it mean when election campaigns try to invoke mythical pasts – ‘we want our country back’, ‘let’s make Britain great again’ – rather than imagined or promised futures? Also, can the Microsoft Paperclip icon help our political parties make a bit more sense?

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Theme music and production: Mr Beatnick

Artwork: Archie Bashford

What if there was an object so cursed that it was never even made? This week we are joined by culture studies don Prof Anamik Saha to discuss anti-racism, racism and corporate diversity in pop culture - via Agatha Christie, Yellowface, American Fiction and One Day - woke agendas and cultural elites, colourblind casting, sensitivity readers and cultural consultants. What does diversity and anti-racism really mean in publishing, TV, film and music – and when is it just for show, or to assuage white guilt? What happens when a long-dominant culture is dramatically challenged, as happened in the aftermath of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests?

ALSO: What does an authentic depiction of a space cowboy look like? Is it ‘race-bending’ when Anne Hathaway plays someone from Leeds? Is culture studies an entirely vibes-based discipline?

You can get stuck into Anamik's brilliant, enlightening work here: https://ahc.leeds.ac.uk/media/staff/4390/professor-anamik-saha. His most recent book is Race, Culture and Media (SAGE, 2021). 

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Theme music and production: Mr Beatnick

Artwork: Archie Bashford

Were you into Cursed Objects before it was cool? Like Grandpa Simpson remembering the war, this week Dan and Kasia are holding a seance for those perennial whipping boys and girls, the hipsters – and recalling the green remembered hills of artisan beards, cereal cafes and small-batch trucker hats. Kicking off with a revisit to seminal, frequently painful 2005 sitcom Nathan Barley, we ask whether it is possible to make a defence of hipsters? Isn’t it a better world when people are enthusiastically pursuing their own mad little niches and styles – even if their moustaches look a bit daft? Why do hipsters get blamed for gentrification instead of property developers? Why did Adbusters blame them for the demise of the counter-culture?

And what about the future: does the word mean anything anymore, when they sell flat whites in Costa? Are we ready to declare the hipster officially dead, and have we identified the assailant: the influencer? 

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Theme music and production: Mr Beatnick

Artwork: Archie Bashford

The police just follow the law, right!? Our guest Melayna Lamb thinks we need to flip this thinking around - and see the police as a law unto themselves. Using the example of the very cursed ‘thin blue line’ police badge, Melayna challenges the police’s foundational idea that they are the ‘thin blue line between order and chaos’. What happens if - as we have seen on multiple occasions - it is the police who are a danger to the public and not the other way around. Expect discussions of the worst police merch you’ve ever seen, 90s sitcom The Thin Blue Line ft. Rowan Atkinson, kettling, colonial boomerangs, and yes, somehow we’ve managed to get Walter Benjamin in there too. 

Melayna’s investigated the relationship between the police and law in her co-authored book Policing the Pandemic - How Public Health Becomes Public Order, and in her brand new book A Philosophical History of Police Power, out with Bloomsbury now. 

For further listening on the horrors of the police force, check out the Bad Gays podcast on Cressida Dick.

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Theme music and production: Mr Beatnick

Artwork: Archie Bashford

How do you like your eggs in the morning? Hopefully not wet?? It’s Easter, so in the spirit of bringing you some seasonal #content, Kasia and Dan explore what came to be known as ‘wet egg discourse’ via a Morrisons food-to-go container of six hard-boiled eggs.

Is it ever appropriate to eat an egg on a train? Why are eggs eaten around the beginning of spring? Why are there so many phrases and idioms that reference eggs? How much is the most expensive Fabergé egg on the market? And why is Frank from Always Sunny in Philadelphia so obsessed with them?

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Theme music and production: Mr Beatnick

Artwork: Archie Bashford

Forget everything you thought you knew about the housing crisis! This week we have a very special guest, housing lawyer Nick Bano, with a hugely enlightening and at times shocking lesson in just how we got into this mess. Drawing on his searing new book Against Landlords, Nick argues that the YIMBY / NIMBY argument is distracting us from the real problem - landlordism (even if we build more bloody houses, who will be able to buy them??)

What does Enoch Powell's 'Rivers of Blood' speech tell us about the long history of racism in the private rented sector? Why do all the worst people want to build on the Green Belt? What does it mean when Keir Starmer says he will build a "patriotic economy" through home ownership? Just how recently was landlordism unprofitable? And HOW can we bring in old pal Marx and use the state to fix all this?

Against Landlords: How to Solve the Housing Crisis (Verso) by Nick Bano is OUT NOW, do go and buy a copy.

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Theme music and production: Mr Beatnick

Artwork: Archie Bashford

Kasia and Dan are earning their lunch. And it’s a big, steaming bowl of cuteness! They go to the Somerset House ‘Cute’ exhibition to unravel how this seemingly benign cultural phenomenon has come to infect our brains with adorable kittens and kawaii.

Often seen as infantile and saccharine - can cuteness be emancipatory or is it an escape from the grim reality of the world? What does it mean for accountability when you turn yourself into a ‘smol bean’? Who or what is behind the ‘cute’ disciples who preach the Hello Kitty gospel on internet forums and instagram reels? Kasia and Dan discuss the sinister influences of global capitalism while simultaneously mourning the lost utopian futures of PC music via the very cursed object of Hello Kitty-branded motor oil.

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Theme music and production: Mr Beatnick

Artwork: Archie Bashford

This week, Dan and Kasia are getting into a submersible and heading into the dark blue depths, poking around the extremely cursed domain of Britain's unnatural party of government, THE CONSERVATIVE AND UNIONIST PARTY. The Tories. The true Blues. That lot. 

Specifically, we're talking Tory merch. Just what the hell is going on in the Tories' online shop, who is all this crap for, and what does it tell us about the British right in 2024? Who are the Tory faithful, and what stories do they want to tell about themselves? Why did any of them 'TRUSS' in Liz? Why does Theresa May get a £32 commemorative toby jug but Harold Macmillan doesn't? Why are so many Conservative leaders depicted by their own side as mournful dogs? Why did we coin the term 'shagorama', and is it too late to take it back?

Elsewhere, we discuss the role of the infamous 'Hang Nelson Mandela' posters in the 1980s, and Dan tells us about the time he went undercover to a young Tory Christmas party in the name of journalism.

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Theme music and production: Mr Beatnick

Artwork: Archie Bashford

We're baaaack! And we're feeling FIT, while also reassuring you that it's what's inside that counts.

Kasia and Dan return with a new series, where today we're talking about the beauty industry, vanity and gender, and - following a Cursed Objects outing to the Wellcome Collection's new exhibition The Cult of Beauty - early modern German wife-prettying windmill technology. 

From the masterful make-up artists of Glow Up: Britain's Next Make-Up Star to the hall of rubbish mirrors of the Palace of Versailles, this episode has it all. We also hear about the beauty industry exhibits in the Museum of Transology – as liberatory objects that affirm a sense of self in a culture that would too often deny it to trans people. 

Also: if pretty privilege is really a thing, shouldn’t the parliamentary Conservative Party be a party of hotties?

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Theme music and production: Mr Beatnick

Artwork: Archie Bashford