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I don't know that grunge killed Guns N' Roses so much as Guns N' Roses killed Guns N' Roses but, regardless, Appetite for Destruction lives on in radio waves and arenas everywhere. "Welcome to the Jungle," "Paradise City," and "Sweet Child of Mine" are pretty close to unkillable. They're also reflective of a different time in the pop landscape, a bigger and louder and more leathery time. A time When Dinosaurs Roamed, as is the theme for this episode considering the innovation and success of, along with Guns N' Roses, The Cult's Electric and Def Leppard's Hysteria. Throw up your best sign of the horns and bang your head, it's time to rock. 

We’re all trying to hold back the darkness these days, but the folks in these movies especially so. Tim takes quick stock of the most annoying child actors, then talks the dark circumstances surrounding the protagonists of Shane, Bringing Out the Dead, and Maria Full of Grace. A mysterious gunman, an ambulance driver, a drug mule all fighting to hold back the pain of the past and future. Plus one is Nicolas Cage.

The 2009 Grammys were weird as hell. Matt and Tim cover that weirdness in great depth before digging into the especially weird Best Album category. Robert Plant and Allison Krauss won that year, and Ne-Yo was there too. But Lil Wayne’s Tha Carter III gets the Spin nod here and man is he as odd as ever. After Weezy discussion, Matt goes fully in his bag and gets to talk about Radiohead’s In Rainbows and, finally, Coldplay and Viva La Vida. He’s got an uphill battle with Tim, tune in to see if he can pull off that Coldplay best exemplifies the 2009 of it all.

Anything that gets Tim and Matt close to Beefsquatch is dangerous, and Tim’s just not even trying to avert it here. Come for the Beefcake chants, stay for the measured and considered analysis of masculinity and gender performativity. Gaze upon the beefy males of It Happened One Night, The Swimmer, and The Vikings and question your own gendered expectations and the deep sadness of them all.

For all the Shoegaze lovers out there - and apparently you’re a sizeable contingency of our audience - here are three albums that are, at most, a stone’s throw from stuff featured in the My Blood Valentine and Shoegaze Decile episodes. Scottish alt-rockers The Jesus and Mary Chain debuted with Psychocandy in 1985 to massive and continued acclaim. All shiny melodies drenched in feedback, Psychocandy casts a long shadow of influence. Matt offers the similarly foundational Cocteau Twins and their 1990 album Heaven of Las Vegas and the David Lynch-approved 2012 effort from The Chromatics, Kill for Love.

A regular concern for Tim and Matt is the art of translating the stage into film, which so often goes awry. We’ve talked other instances of this in previous episodes, but Tim builds the whole ship out of Pulitzer Prize adaptations this time. Transforming the intimacy of the playhouse into the spectacle of the cinema is no easy feat, and a dying one at that. A Streetcar Named Desire remains the gold standard, by critical consensus anyway, yet remains an uncomfortable movie. Tim brings back Norman Jewison and Sidney Lumet for other examples of making the stage work on the screen with A Soldier’s Story and Long Day’s Journey Into Night, respectively.

“Get the point? Good, let’s dance.” Such is the ethos of Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation 1814, a massive and eminently funky album which, along with Jackson’s Control, helped define and kick off New Jack Swing. Teddy Riley, who was instrumental to the New Jack Swing sound, describes the genre as “a new kid on the block who’s swinging it,” which Matt takes as a guiding star for how Karyn White’s self-titled album and Bell Biv DeVoe’s Poison come out swinging in more ways than one. We talk the actual music signifiers of New Jack Sing, an astounding Archer joke, the art socially conscious balladry, and try to wrest Janet Jackson from bad faith Super Bowl connotations.

We joke about how when the Podcat looks out the window he’s watching TV and, well, that’s more or less what’s happening in Rear Window! Hitchcock really knew how to wrestle profundity out of a kind of silly concept. After Matt and Tim investigate and learn some interesting Manhattan  geography, Tim outlines Scopophilia, or the love of looking, and how it operates in Tod Browning’s Freaks and David Lynch’s Blue Velvet. Good psychological concept and three movies interested in the horror of the everyday, you love to see it.

After a good conversation about P.J. Harvey and her cattle experience, Matt and Tim talk the blunt force marvel that is Rid of Me. 30 years in, Harvey remains a titan with an immense shadow of influence, which sets up the somewhat cheeky theme of Canon Fodder. Matt looks at two other artists he thinks have a great shot at being canonized in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (a fun if sort of functionally unimportant honor) and what styles and influences they filter through their own artistry: St. Vincent’s Strange Mercy and Sharon Van Etten’s Are We There.

Part 1 is an album to illegal to stream. Part 2 has a movie with a director too tarnished to love. Intolerance serves as the D.W. Griffith cut-out on the AFI list given The Birth of a Nation is more trouble than it’s worth at this point. As it’s poster says, Intolerance is “colossal spectacle,” and Tim guides us through the ways in which it’s a Film School standout. He excites Matt a whole lot too with two genre movies in Forbidden Planet and Night of the Living Dead, both of which are technical marvels.