Sub Titles

Burial’s Untrue (which, amazingly, we only reverse once in this podcast) is a seminal electronic album but Matt is rude and still not really digging into electronic music. Instead, he’s talking about how engrossing and generous the world of Untrue is and how well Burial brings listeners in. Such an Intimate experience with music is incredibly powerful, and Matt presents Julien Baker’s Turn Out the Lights and Death Cab for Cutie’s Transatlanticism as two albums with which he has had close, intimate relationships, as have countless listeners with both.

Cabaret is a movie of many wonderful moments funny and somber. Standing tall among them is when everyone realizes they can’t control or stop the rise of the Nazis. Tim guides us through The Towering Inferno and Ace in the Hole, two movies that also upend any sense of control the protagonists might feel whether that’s via some human element or some element of nature.

You, dear listener, may well have staunch Beyoncé, and/or Beyoncé, opinions. Matt does not. Still he ventures on, chatting with Tim about the relative strengths and weaknesses of the Queen’s self-titled album (there are more of one than the other and you can guess which…) and how it functions as a sort of reset in her career, one in which Beyoncé defines Beyoncé for all to hear. Matt looks to other examples of self-titled albums telling us something about how those artists perceive themselves with Bon Iver and Paramore after and in the face of pretty firm narratives.

We recorded this episode before the passing of Ned Beatty, and now an eerily prescient movie is even more sadly topical. Tim and Matt talk just how prescient Network, a movie regularly labeled as such, is, and for reasons you may not expect. Then Tim introduces Speedy and All That Heaven Allows as two other movies with similarly biting and pressing commentary on Modern Times, whenever they may be. Which is also to say there's a lot of talk about Harold Lloyd and Rock Hudson. 

An album with more fun emphasis points in the title than fun songs! More seriously, Achtung Baby was a big reset moment for U2 in the midst of their global domination and did signal some stylistic shifts for the band. Matt and Tim talk how Achtung Baby is and isn't different from prior U2 affair, the respect we have for a band that just shoots their shot, and the importance of Berlin and Hansa Studio, where the album was recorded and a place of regular artist reinvention. Matt offers two other albums recorded at Hansa, both of which are markers of change and/or development for their respective artists: Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds and The Psychedelic Furs. 

The real story here is how well can Tim and Matt resist doing the Toto bit. One of them fares better than the other. Also they discuss The African Queen, its precipitous fall between AFI lists, grungy Bogart, screen chemistry, and Africa. Tim then presents two films with African settings that are vital to the primary romance plot, John Ford's Mogambo and Anthony Minghella's The English Patient. Talk of orientalism, megafauna, The Scramble for Africa, world war geopolitics, and, of course, maps ensues. 

Matt and Tim looked at the significance of Public Enemy back in the Fear of a Black Planet episode and they re-up that discussion here in the context of the predecessor, 1988's It Takes a Nation of Millions. That album was released during a quietly, and as we discuss catastrophically, consequential year. It also topped 1988's Pazz and Jop list. Matt presents two other top five albums from that poll in Tracy Chapman's self-titled debut (you probably know "Fast Car" and nothing else) and Midnight Oil's Diesel and Dust (you probably know "Beds are Burning" and nothing else), which came in third and fourth, respectively. In addition to the accolades, both albums also speak to the particular tensions of 1988. But which most embodies the year? 

After Tim and Matt discuss the sheer joy of Raiders of the Lost Ark and how to basically hush and have fun, Tim starts to target Matt and call out his graduate exploits. Really he’s looking at Indiana Jones as the ultimate Poindexter Come Alive, a character type he traces in Ball of Fire and Losing Ground. Are you the type of academic who mugs at the camera in Peruvian temples, fights crime, or gets pedantic about the concept of art?

If you’ve been pining for Matt to explain more philosophy here’s the episode you’ve been waiting for! Pulp’s Brit Pop staple, Different Class, regales with withering and genuinely funny tales of class relations, hipster posturing, and love as class warfare. Matt introduces two albums with similar preoccupations with class and revolutionary politics in Rage Against the Machine’s The Battle of Los Angeles and Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s F# A# ∞. All three albums were released in the mid to late 90s, so tune in to hear about that particular historical context and which album makes the most profound argument about class relations.

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (I am, George) features one of the most compellingly uncomfortable arcs of any movie as we watch George and Martha destroy their entire imagined world. Other married couples crack-up much less metaphysically, including the mental and emotional fracturing of A Woman Under the Influence and, well, the fracturing of nearly everything in the coldly violent The Shining.