The Organist

William Bell never became a household name. His debut single, the one he wrote and recorded the year that Satellite Records changed their name to Stax, barely cracked the Top 100 chart. That song, "You Don't Miss Your Water," worked out a bit better for Bell's friend Otis Redding, and for a band called The Byrds. That's more or less the same story as "Born Under a Bad Sign," the song he cowrote with Booker T. Jones, which got covered by Cream and pretty much every blues rock band since 1968. Bell might have had a better chance at stardom if he hadn't got drafted to serve in the U.S. Army in the middle of the sixties, right when Stax was taking off. After Stax dissolved in 1975, Bell tried to reinvent himself. He had a top forty hit for Mercury, an easy-listening number with a funk beat called "Trying to Love Two." He moved to Atlanta, put out a few self-released albums, ran a business, and did well with songwriting royalties. He didn't lose himself in God or women or indulgence after the peak of his career, like some of the other stories we've heard before. He kept his voice and lived a comfortable life. You might say he was hiding in plain sight. This summer, Stax released Bell's first album for the label in forty years, in what may be the best album of his life. For the Organist, the writer Wyatt Williams drove around Georgia with Bell to bring us this story. Produced by Wyatt Williams and Jenny AmentÂ

Kyle Mooney grew up in San Diego, and many of his characters resemble hilariously contradictory and authentic depressive SoCal bros and antisocial, tenderhearted high school goths. In this interview, he talks about the deep YouTube research he does to produce the perfectly pitched homemade videos he makes for Saturday Night Live. Also: David J, the bassist from Bauhaus and Love and Rockets, recounts an uncanny encounter with David Bowie, where a single harmonica line spans the ages, from a jukebox in 1971 into the afterlife.

Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdwchohlMjI

Image: Film still from The Hunger (1983), dir. Tony Scott

A man screams “why are you closed? Tell us the reason!†over and over as he rattles a pair of locked doors outside a Toronto shopping mall. Klaus Kinski berates the officiant at his own wedding while he lavishes a disturbing amount of affection on his bride. A clean-cut guy in glasses beatboxes the entire drum part of Rush’s “YYZ.†The Tumblr Weird Dude Energy is singularly devoted to collecting the most inexplicable male behavior on the internet. It’s funny, and it’s weird, but if you study it carefully, it also raises some troubling and complicated questions: questions about contemporary masculinity and community. It even raises questions about violence, misogyny, and Donald Trump. For the Organist, the writer Mark Sussman stared into the testosterone abyss of Weird Dude Energy and sent us back this report.

Written by Mark Sussman. Produced by Mickey Capper.

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Louis Chude-Sokei is a Nigerian-Jamaican- American writer and scholar at the University of Seattle, Washington. In this episode, he discusses the music culture surrounding Nigeria's internet scammers (known as "Yahoozees"), his own experience as a black immigrant in Los Angeles' Inglewood neighborhood during the era of NWA, and the way blackface performance is perceived outside the U.S. He's the author of The Last Darky: Bert Williams, Black-on- Black Minstrelsy, and the African Diaspora (Duke University, 2006), which examines the life of Bert Williams, a top vaudeville performer-- a black blackface performer-- and one of the most famous entertainers of his era.

His new book, The Sound of Culture: Diaspora and Black Technopoetics (Wesleyan, 2015), tackles the complex relationships between blackness, robotics, and technology. In this way, the book is in conversation with Afrofuturism. First coined by the cultural critic Mark Dery, Afrofuturism is a growing field of art, music, and academic scholarship which finds its roots in sci-fi imagery in black culture: Sun Ra, George Clinton, Octavia Butler, and Samuel R. Delaney. Afrofuturism seeks to find alternates to the current sometimes harrowing circumstances of contemporary black life through imagined futures and emergent possibilities. Its expression is visible in the work of Janelle Monae, producer Flying Lotus, and rap duo Shabazz Palaces.

In his conversation with Ben Bush for the Organist, Chude-Sokei emphasizes the emerging field's pre-20th century roots as well as non-US aspects that have until now fallen outside the critical paradigm related to Afrofuturism—from PT Barnum's black cyborg to the metaphysical echo of instrumental dub reggae. Links: A playlist based on songs discussed in this episode (and in The Sound of Culture) Louis Chude-Sokei on Joice Heth, PT Barnum's black cyborg Bina48 on the Organist Video trailer

Credits: Interview by Ben Bush. Produced by Mickey Capper.

Adam Colman examines the brutalist yearning of legendary punk band the Ramones and uncovers the rigorous curiosity that serves as the guiding principle for the scientific method. Then, Ross Simonini talks to musician and writer Sonny Smith (Sonny and the Sunsets) about his new album, "Moods Baby Moods." Smith performs two songs from the album, describes how he is able to use drawings and comics to write songs (and vice versa), and laments the modern age. Photo credit: Flashback

Craig Dykers is a founding partner of Snøhetta, whose projects include the expansion of San Francisco's Modern Art museum, the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Egypt, and the redesign of Times Square. In these projects and others, Dykers and his team contend with an invisible challenge all architects must face: acoustics. In his conversation with the Organist, Dykers argues that proper acoustics can lower your blood pressure, speed up or slow down your movement through a space, and even encourage gentle smooching.

A lot of artists under the age of 30 find it natural to promote themselves and their work online. But the Bay Area rapper Lil B, and Steve Roggenbuck, in conversation with each other on this episode, both put social media at the center of their art. Their work lives and expands online, in an ceaseless stream of tweets and self-produced YouTube videos. Both artists communicate constantly with their fans, who speak to each other in the specialized idioms of their respective communities: Lil B's followers gather around the idea of anything #based -- a notion he says has to do with "Just being who you are, and not afraid of that." Roggenbuck's fans assemble under the hashtag of #YOLO— theirs is an ecstatically earnest embrace of the beauty and absurdity of life on earth in 2016. Lil B also embraces the absurd, but his work is darker and more ambiguous. One the one hand, he can be overwhelmingly earnest and positive: the video for his track "I Love You" ends with Lil B weeping in a pet store, surrounded by aquariums, giving thanks for everyone in his life. He distributes his music mostly through hours-long mixtapes, some with nearly fifty tracks. His fans delight in discovering nuggets of lyrical genius buried within hours of first-take freestyles that range from brilliantly rough-edged to difficult-to- listen-to. Lil B inhabits a wide range of personae: he's a self-described feminist urging his listeners to "stand up against rape" in one track, and then talks about "bitches" as currency in another. He recently posted a transphobic tweet that read, "I might start saying I'm trans and I'm a woman so I can be in the girls locker room with the ladies!!!!!!" He later apologized, saying, "I am transphobic and I need help to learn to accept." Steve Roggenbuck asked Lil B about this incident and others, including the importance of his musical partnership with his adopted tabby cat, Keke. photo credit: Generation Bass

Christopher Owens is an American singer/songwriter best-known as the frontman for the recently disbanded San-Francisco indie-rock band Girls—and for his curious backstory, which features both a fundamentalist cult and an eccentric Texan multimillionaire. Since his departure from Girls, Owens has been recording music independently, attempting through his more recent writing to confront in reflection the realities of his childhood.

In this episode, recorded live at The Organist's first podcast event at PROXY in San Francisco, Owens chronologically retraces his evolution as a song-writer, which inevitably mirrors his evolution as a person, from his desire to capture momentary emotions in song, then eventually reaching into his complicated and difficult past.

Free Black Press Radio, a new podcast by the avant-garde rapper Busdriver, is half lecture on the history of black resistance, and half freewheeling entropic swirl of cut-up Pharoah Sanders riffs. FBPR expands what's possible in the emerging podcast form, while also hearkening back to programs like Radio Free Dixie by the civil rights leader Robert F. Williams.

Toni Morrison once said that good writing shouldn't be "harangue passing off as art," but Free Black Press Radio (and its civil-rights-era forebears) are good models for how both impulses – the political and the artistic, the polemical and the musical -- can successfully merge (and how that confluence may only be possible within this medium).

What sort of liberation does the "free" in Free Black Press Radio and Radio Free Dixie demand?

CREDITS: Written by Niela Orr. Produced by Myke Dodge Weiskopf. Voice of Mabel Williams provided courtesy of the Freedom Archives, from their documentary Robert F. Williams: Self-Respect, Self-Defense, and Self-Determination.

Banner Image: Watts Towers via Joanna/Flickr