Transcript - Can The Acolyte Redeem Star Wars on TV? (2024)

Listen to this episode

Speaker A: This ad free podcast is part of your Slate plus membership.

Speaker A: I’m Stephen Metcalf, and this is the slate culture gabfest.

Speaker A: Can the acolyte Redeem Star wars on tv edition?

Speaker A: It’s Wednesday, June 12, 2024, on today’s show.

Speaker A: The acolyte is the latest Star wars tv show.

Speaker A: It’s on Disney.

Speaker A: It was created by Leslie Headland.

Speaker A: The show runs runner and co creator of Russian Doll, of course, the Natasha Leone vehicle.

Speaker A: It stars Amandla Stenberg and Lee Jung Jai he of Squid game fame and then Godzilla minus one.

Speaker A: It had a funny release.

Speaker A: They got it out in 2023 to qualify for the oscars.

Speaker A: Came out slightly wider after that, was beloved by critics, but added all up, it kind of disappeared.

Speaker A: Well, it hit Netflix last week and went to number one.

Speaker A: We will discuss what I think is a visionary film.

Speaker A: And finally, espresso.

Speaker A: It’s the song of the summer, but which summer, 2024 or 1982?

Speaker A: We discussed Sabrina Carpenter’s song, and it’s a long backstory with the music writer Dan Charnas.

Speaker A: But joining me first is Dan Kois, the author of the novel vintage contemporaries.

Speaker A: And Dan Kois has also got a forthcoming book coming out in the fall.

Speaker A: Dan, is that correct?

Speaker B: That’s correct.

Speaker B: It’s called Hampton Heights.

Speaker B: Vintage contemporaries is old news.

Speaker B: We’re over that.

Speaker B: We’re on to the new one.

Speaker A: Tell us a little bit about this forthcoming one.

Speaker B: It’s an adventure story set in 1987, Milwaukee in its most haunted neighborhood.

Speaker A: I’m psyched, and I’m psyched to talk about it when it comes out.

Speaker A: And of course, we’re joined by Julia Turner, who is at the USC Annenberg School of Journalism.

Speaker A: Hey, Julia, how’s it going?

Speaker C: Hello.

Speaker C: Hello.

Speaker A: Let’s make a show.

Speaker A: All right.

Speaker A: Well, Leslie Hedlund co created the acclaimed tv show russian doll with Natasha Leone.

Speaker A: How promising, then, that she was handed the Star wars brand to make a tv show.

Speaker A: The acolyte stars Amandla Stenberg as Osha, a young Jedi in training who left the order due to, quote unquote, internal turmoil, and Lee Jung jai as her ex Jedi master.

Speaker A: He was the star of Squid game.

Speaker A: When the show opens, it appears that Osha has broken bad and is using her Jedi powers to be an assassin who’s out for pitiless revenge.

Speaker A: But not everything is as it seems, as we find out in this scene.

Speaker A: Another of Sol’s ex students is Osha’s twin sister, and it is she who is hunting down the Jedi.

Speaker A: Let’s listen.

Speaker B: Do you believe the maze behind the ndara’s murder.

Speaker A: It’s the only way to explain all of this.

Speaker A: She must have survived somehow, even though we are.

Speaker B: I wanted to save you both.

Speaker A: What happened that night wasn’t your fault, soul.

Speaker A: I’ve told you that.

Speaker B: You did.

Speaker B: And I have made peace with what happened on Brandhog.

Speaker A: I know you have.

Speaker A: That was a lesson you tried to teach me many times to accept what I lost.

Speaker A: Julia.

Speaker A: Here you have this, you know, seemingly inexhaustible treasury of IP Star wars coming up on its going to be, I don’t know, 50th anniversary now.

Speaker A: It’s had mixed success, interestingly, on both ends of that equation on television.

Speaker A: What do you make of the acolyte?

Speaker C: Well, I was super interested to check this out because the showrunner, of course, is Leslie headland, who made russian doll and is just an interesting, visionary television creator.

Speaker C: And the story of Star wars over the last decade has been what happens when a great Hollywood talent tangles with the big, complicated, many tentacled mess that is Star wars ip.

Speaker C: Can you make something interesting, zippy great?

Speaker C: Or do you end up kind of subsumed in the Star wars swamp?

Speaker C: And I’m probably on our show, one of the biggest partisans of Andor, I guess.

Speaker C: Dan, I don’t know your official position on Andor, but Andor was just a brilliant, brilliant show.

Speaker C: If you didn’t go back and watch it, listener, go watch it.

Speaker C: It’s one of the best shows I’ve seen on tv in the last decade.

Speaker C: It just happens to take place in the Star wars universe.

Speaker C: It’s full of interesting political ideas and amazing performances and somehow makes the Star wars world feel real and fresh.

Speaker C: This show arrives on the heels of that show, but also a bunch of other Star wars shows that were met with kind of gigantic mez from the culture and the fandom, basically.

Speaker C: So it’s got a lot of interesting backdrop.

Speaker C: My response to the show is that the jury is a little bit out because you can see both the talent and vision of the actors and creators here, and you can see the wrestling with the Star wars beast.

Speaker C: At the same time, there’s a lot to enjoy in the visuals.

Speaker C: There are a couple of scenes in which the assassin fights master jedis that are very cool visually.

Speaker C: I found those fight sequences to be quite cool.

Speaker C: Amanda Stenberg, who’s a much lauded next gen actor, does great with the hoary old Hollywood playbooth twins assignment.

Speaker C: And it’s interesting to be in the prehistory of Star wars and to set this detective show in the before and the detective show works to some degree.

Speaker C: Like I am curious to figure out.

Speaker C: I guess the question is not whodunit, but whyd she do it?

Speaker C: And whos right?

Speaker C: And are the Jedi when theyre in power actually good?

Speaker C: On the other hand, its like a little murky and goofy and there are a lot of people with their faces painted different colors that you end up spending the scenes watching them not thinking, whats their motivation?

Speaker C: Whats going on?

Speaker C: Whats happening to these Jedi?

Speaker C: But wow, that lady sure is green and that one has orange paint on it.

Speaker B: Is fun to go, as you say, a longer, longer time ago in presumably a galaxy even further, further away.

Speaker B: The prehistory of Star wars is not something I’ve thought about that much.

Speaker B: And I like the idea of this taking us back before the most familiar of the stories for most viewers.

Speaker B: I julia, I’m actually basically in the opposite position as you.

Speaker B: I have watched essentially none of the Star wars tv shows.

Speaker B: Like, I haven’t even watched the Mandalorian.

Speaker B: My Star wars experience is solely through the movies.

Speaker B: I’ve seen all the movies.

Speaker B: I haven’t, like, tapped into that sort of recurring mythos, and that hasn’t been a regular part of my tv diet.

Speaker B: And maybe, I think, directly as a result, I totally enjoyed the sort of like, old fashioned space adventure vibes of this one.

Speaker B: And the complaints I’ve heard about this show from Slate’s Sam Adams, among others, are that it’s, it gets too bogged down, as so many Star wars shows seemingly have before it in the Star wars mythology, as, you know, sort of alluded to that.

Speaker B: It’s always that there’s always this battle between a sleek, fun space show and the, you know, the 24,000 tons of Star wars lore that must lie behind it and all the jigsaw puzzle pieces that you have to fit together to make that work.

Speaker B: The great news for me is I don’t know any of that lore.

Speaker B: I can’t even identify it when it’s alluded to.

Speaker B: I don’t have to do any of the work of trying to put any of this together.

Speaker B: So all I see when I watch this show, I’m, like, watching it purely on the surface, and all I see is a pretty good mistaken identity murder mystery with funny creature design.

Speaker B: And I’m like, oh, nice.

Speaker B: It sort of makes me feel like that Star wars products might have an.

Speaker B: A totally inverse enjoyment to experience ratio.

Speaker B: Like, if you watch every Star wars thing, you can’t stop noticing that they all suffer the same repeating problems and they all fall apart in similar ways, but if you just watch one Star wars thing every five years or so, you find them refreshing throwbacks.

Speaker A: Well, according to that logic, I should have loved this, and I definitely didn’t.

Speaker A: I can go you one better, Dan.

Speaker A: I did not even know that the Mandalorian was a Star wars related product.

Speaker A: So I really genuinely was averse to this.

Speaker A: I mean, I suffer from a very specific problem, which is I saw the original Star wars, the very first movie in the theaters when I was in, I believe, 7th grade, 6th or 7th grade.

Speaker A: And then I proceeded to see it nine more times in the theater over the course of whatever the calendar year.

Speaker A: This back when movies were, if they were hits were in the theaters almost indefinitely, often for an excess of a year.

Speaker A: And it was just a moment in movie history, because it was the transition from the early self serious auteur moment of the seventies, which was glorious.

Speaker A: But I was a little too young for to the Spielberg Lucas blockbuster era.

Speaker A: And it was the first time that young, especially males, created a new kind of fandom, whereby you went and saw a movie in the theater over and over and over again and wanted to re enter the universe that had been created.

Speaker A: I mean, Lucas having been the kind of progenitor of that attraction, like creating an enveloping, mythologically saturated world, that returning to is such a powerful draw that you have this built in audience.

Speaker A: But the problem of course, with that, well, for me personally, is that, I mean, I can never recreate that moment as a viewer.

Speaker A: And secondly, all you do is increase the debt to the fan service imperative with every passing decade, to the point where the desire to re enter the universe is so overwhelmingly powerful, and it has to feature certain touchstones, there have to be certain kinds of plot beats, callbacks, the aura, the gesture, so much of the palette of it and flavor of it has to be determined by that core fan that if youre not connected to it in that way, I dont understand how this isnt just a sort of draggy, overly familiar at this point.

Speaker A: To me, it looks like kind of kids in pajamas or Halloween costumes, the cute sidekick, droid, or whatever sort of piece of technology that has kind of an odd human personality implied in it, all of that, I fail to find it even remotely, remotely compelling.

Speaker A: I’m amazed that you guys got something out of what we watched.

Speaker B: Steve, do you think that if 7th grade, you had seen this show, he would have been like, this is incredible, or do you think he would have seen it as like, derivative and as you say, defined by the strictures of recreating this product over and over and over again.

Speaker A: I mean, that’s just one counterfactual too many for me.

Speaker A: Somehow it’s impossible to say, because, really, the question is, can I separate out my 7th grade self from my admiration for what Lucas did in the first film?

Speaker A: What I remember about that movie, and having seen it now, a total probably of like 15 times, having had kids, is that it had pace and verve and energy and crackle and freshness, probably inextricable from it being 1976 versus 1977 and the state of Hollywood at the time, but it had this zest and unfamiliarity and a certain odd soulfulness to it as well.

Speaker A: I don’t think it suffered from the just fundamental pacing and beat problem that this does.

Speaker C: I think you’re right that just the kind of zip and pace of the characters is zestier in that film than in this show, in part because the Jedi culture is a little pompous and stultifying.

Speaker C: And I do think when I heard Leslie Hudlin detective show set in Star Wars World, I think I was hoping for Veronica Mars in Star wars, something that was a little bit more tart and really actually focused on solving crimes.

Speaker C: And the actual mystery of the show is not who did the crime, but the mystery is a mythological mystery, not a murder mystery.

Speaker C: It’s like, well, why did she do the crime?

Speaker C: And what’s the deal with the culture and what’s happening with the Force?

Speaker C: It’s a mystery about the Force and the right way to use it.

Speaker C: Not a mystery.

Speaker C: It’s not like Agatha Christie or Michael Connelly in Star wars.

Speaker C: Like, Michael Connelly in Star wars would be my dream, and that is not what this is.

Speaker C: But I don’t know.

Speaker C: There’s some really interesting performances, interesting physical performances.

Speaker C: And we should also shout out Manny Jacinto, who plays kind of like a creepy smuggler dude with just a bunch of amazing tics and mannerisms.

Speaker C: And I don’t know.

Speaker C: He’s squirrely is the best word for him, I think, and really fun to be on screen with.

Speaker C: So I don’t know.

Speaker C: I don’t know.

Speaker C: I found it like an amiable ride, I guess.

Speaker C: Despite wishing that the mystery were literally.

Speaker B: Whodunit, I maintain once again that my total, almost total lack of interest in Star wars caused me to find this entirely charming.

Speaker B: Like, I don’t have any real emotional connection to the original movies, despite being fairly close to your age, Steve.

Speaker B: They didn’t.

Speaker B: For whatever reason, they were not the movies that drove my childhood.

Speaker B: And so it serves for me, less as a kind of signal formative moment of my youth and more as universe that I’ve revisited every couple of years with a certain amount of familiar pleasure in both movie form and amusem*nt park form.

Speaker B: And each time I’m like, oh, yeah, it’s kind of fun to be in this ratty, s***** space world where everything breaks and there’s, like, grime on everything.

Speaker B: Like, I like that.

Speaker B: That’s fun.

Speaker B: And this show plays with that do think in, like, fun ways for people who just sort of like the idea of the Star wars universe and, like, exploring a different corner of it.

Speaker B: There’s, like, treats in this, like, the dumb decision to transport a bunch of very dangerous prisoners on a spaceship that has an all droid crew when one of the prisoners can turn off droids with his brain.

Speaker B: Like, that’s a great, like, ramshackle, bureaucracy in decline moment that leads to a very funny jailbreak scene and even, like, the goofy character makeup.

Speaker B: Yes, I did spend a lot of time thinking, wow, is that lady Green?

Speaker B: But I just kind of love that s***.

Speaker A: Fair enough.

Speaker A: Okay, before we go, I got to ask the panel.

Speaker A: The movie that in 7th grade upended your world that you saw multiple times and is a touchstone, Dan, I very.

Speaker B: Much regret to say that it was the gods must be crazy.

Speaker A: Oh, no kidding.

Speaker A: Oh, that is so.

Speaker A: That is between you and your therapist, Anne and Julia.

Speaker A: What about you?

Speaker C: You know the answer to this, Steve.

Speaker C: It’s sneakers.

Speaker C: And when Leslie headland makes a mystery show set in the sneakers extended universe, I will be thrilled.

Speaker A: Well, this is the acolyte.

Speaker A: It’s on Disney.

Speaker A: It’s someone’s 7th grade touchdown.

Speaker A: So we’ll treat it with some respect, but go check it out.

Speaker A: Let us know what you think.

Speaker A: All right, before we go any further, this is typically in the podcast where we discuss business.

Speaker A: Julia, what do we have?

Speaker C: Two pieces of business today?

Speaker C: Steve?

Speaker C: The first is that we are still collecting songs for Summerstrat, our annual playlist exercise where we count on you, our listeners, to send over the steadiest and most exciting tunes for our listening and consideration.

Speaker C: We are accepting songs until the end of June, so you’ve got about 20 days left, a little less the time this airs.

Speaker C: You can send them to Culture festlate.com.

Speaker C: we’re asking you to limit your suggestions to three songs this year, so we have a manageable list to digest and to send them by June 30.

Speaker C: So Culture festlate.com.

Speaker C: we’ve got a great study list already, so get your picks in there.

Speaker C: Also.

Speaker C: We will be having a slate plus segment this week.

Speaker C: As usual, we will be discussing my decision to throw a birthday party for my three year old and whether I have made a dreadful mistake.

Speaker C: Steve and Dan will school me on that subject.

Speaker C: If you are a Slate plus member, you will get to listen to that bonus segment.

Speaker C: If you are not, why aren’t you?

Speaker C: If you’re a Slate plus member, you get bonus segments.

Speaker C: You get ad free versions of our podcast and other slate shows, including Slow Burn, which has a fantastic new season out.

Speaker C: What are you doing, man?

Speaker C: Be a Slate plus member.

Speaker C: You can sign up for that@slate.com.

Speaker C: culturePlus and back to our show.

Speaker A: All right, well, Godzilla minus one is believe if the Internet is not lying to me, the 37th entry in what amounts to the longest running film franchise still going.

Speaker A: What could they possibly do at this point to refresh this ip and get this with a $15 million budget to do it with?

Speaker A: Well, what they did is they turned in a thoughtful, soulful, quite beautifully filmed and acted parable about wounded masculinity and national trauma.

Speaker A: Improbably, this is, in my estimation, just a tremendously original and captivating film.

Speaker A: It is written and directed by Takashi Yamazaki.

Speaker A: It has turned out to be the most successful at the box office japanese produced Godzilla film of all time.

Speaker A: It stars Ryunosuke Kamiki as a kamikaze pilot haunted by his own supposed cowardice near the end of the Second World War, and Minami Hamabi as the woman with whom he has set up a kind of ad hoc post war home.

Speaker A: In the clip we’re about to hear, the ex fighter pilot has re encountered Godzilla.

Speaker A: He saw him during the war.

Speaker A: He’s encountered the monster again, and he’s explaining to his partner what that experience was like.

Speaker C: The monster Godzilla, that was its name.

Speaker C: The other day I saw it again, and just like back then, I couldn’t do anything to stop it.

Speaker C: I don’t deserve this.

Speaker C: Why should I get the chance to live?

Speaker A: Okay, Julia, I broke with form a little bit by just announcing outright that I quite loved this movie.

Speaker A: But tell me I’m right.

Speaker A: Tell me I’m wrong.

Speaker A: What’d you make of Godzilla minus one?

Speaker C: My favorite thing about this movie is that the humans in it are afraid and experience fear.

Speaker C: It’s not as though humans don’t experience fear in other monster movies.

Speaker C: They sort of do.

Speaker C: They run when the thing stomps.

Speaker C: They, you know, scheme to corral and control and put the thing in its place.

Speaker C: But because our hero is a former kamikaze pilot who’s abandoned his mission and who’s choked in the face of pressure a couple times, and who is really full of guilt, remorse, shame, and who experiences those decisions as a shameful cowardice.

Speaker C: It just makes you realize that all the other monster movies are kind of like pantomimes of those emotions.

Speaker C: And I think it’s actually that choice to center human fear and human feelings about fear and what fear is, which is like a desire to be alive instead of not alive, which is actually maybe not so shameful.

Speaker C: That makes this movie so emotionally resonant.

Speaker C: And of course, the director, who also was the writer and supervised the VFX, this film won the Oscar for VFX, one of the smallest budget movies ever to do so.

Speaker C: And I think part of why the effects done with such a small budget land so well is the grounded emotional reality that that choice to make fear one of the central themes.

Speaker B: That is super interesting, Julia.

Speaker B: And I don’t think I clocked that point while I was watching it, but it now strikes me as totally true.

Speaker B: It’s like there’s never a scene in this movie, even when they’re facing Godzilla, where they get Godzilla to eat a mine and he blows up and someone wisecracks like, eat that monster or whatever.

Speaker B: Even every time they do something to Godzilla, they just wait in terror and ask, oh, f***, did that work?

Speaker B: And then it didn’t work.

Speaker B: And then they’re freshly terrified and the movie ends up.

Speaker B: I think that real palpable fear on the part, not only of that main character, but of everyone who encounters this monster, is one of the reasons that the movie is such a rich allegory.

Speaker B: I guess for the japanese post war experience, it’s about a totally traumatized population that is forced to face, once again, something difficult and terrifying.

Speaker A: I mean, I totally agree with Julia’s point.

Speaker A: And Dan, your take on it, I’ll refine it a little further.

Speaker A: I think it’s a movie in which the fear of being eaten by a gigantic seafaring or sea dwelling reptile is bound up inextricably in the fear of being humiliated and being humiliated as a man.

Speaker A: I love this movie.

Speaker A: If Paddington two is the Citizen Kane of movies about talking bears, this is the Paddington two of monster movies.

Speaker A: I think it’s like Paddington two.

Speaker A: You cannot believe you’re watching something as good as it is, Steve.

Speaker B: You’re just giving them incredible poster blurbs.

Speaker A: The theme of this movie is useless men, right?

Speaker A: Like the origin of fascism in Italy is after the First World War, humiliated.

Speaker A: And now useless ex soldiers were looking for a way to remasculinize themselves.

Speaker A: So the movie, even though this movie takes place in the 1940s, presumably what it says in 19, 45, 46, period, it’s very current because we’re living with a superabundance of men who, because they suspect they’re useless, are looking to compensate for it in all of the worst, most toxic ways.

Speaker A: I thought also that this movie was an interesting, in its way, sort of history lesson from a very kind of social psychological perspective, because it’s, yes, drawing upon very deep national feelings of woundedness and loss that I would assume are persistent in japanese culture because of the way World War Two ended, but that woundedness, defined not just by the firebombing of Tokyo, the dropping of the atomic bombs, unconditional surrender, and bear in mind, a medieval honor and shame based society, was asked to basically become non imperial.

Speaker B: Right?

Speaker A: Like that was the reason why we didn’t want to actually invade that mainland.

Speaker A: We knew that they would fight for the emperor and for the right to retain that emperor to the last living man, which is among the rationales, whether you agree with it or not, for dropping the bombs.

Speaker A: But for the japanese point of view, it was a battle for the mainland that didn’t happen.

Speaker A: Right?

Speaker A: To defend the mainland was what every single breathing human being on that archipelago was ready to do.

Speaker A: And by the far more equivocal reality of what actually happened, which was a radioactive superweapon that no one knew existed until literally the moment Hiroshima blew up, was dropped on them, and all of a sudden they had to relinquish it almost in a relative instant.

Speaker A: It took, obviously, Nagasaki and some other events, and then to be an utterly devastated, humiliated society, entirely rebuilt by what turned out to be, by the standards of history, a beneficent enemy.

Speaker A: The psychology, I think that.

Speaker A: That which I don’t think I fully understood until I saw this movie, that.

Speaker A: That foisted on a population of men.

Speaker A: And what I loved about this movie was that historical specificity, how beautifully shot and acted it is, how much it honors this weird, if you think about it, ip by understanding what its psychological and emotional roots are, but also because its a movie about the psychology of men.

Speaker A: I will never forget doing the end of Men segment with Hannah Rosen was one of the first times people had really started to thought through.

Speaker A: I said, we’re not going to go quietly, which I did not say on my behalf.

Speaker A: I love going quietly.

Speaker A: I can’t wait to go quietly.

Speaker A: But it was only that if this is going to play out.

Speaker A: It is going to get so f****** ugly.

Speaker A: And what I love about this movie is it doesn’t pretend that that problem doesn’t exist.

Speaker A: It doesn’t pretend that men, to some degree, do have a psychology that is prone to toxicity.

Speaker A: But then it makes this argument over and over and over again on behalf of heroism without that toxicity and ultimately the choice of life and ongoing life in the face of humiliation and masculine humiliation.

Speaker A: It’s a soulful and a beautiful film, and for me, it is the best film of 2023.

Speaker A: Alongside zone of interest.

Speaker A: Those two, for me, were by far the most captivating cinematic experiences.

Speaker B: I had two totally different, but interestingly, revisionist looks at World War Two.

Speaker A: Yeah, exactly right, Dan?

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: One thing I want to make sure we capture, too, though, is that I feel like this discussion is maybe making this film sound like a heavy tangle with the japanese psyche.

Speaker C: And I cannot describe how much it is just like a fun stomper movie, just one that’s executed with an emotional seriousness that feels really refreshing.

Speaker C: Our dear Dana is traveling this week, but reviewed the movie last year, and she shouts out the spielbergian ness of it, that there’s kind of a wonder, a sincerity, a quick sketching of scrappy personality, particularly in the scenes where our hero works as a minesweeper in the harbor, is the job that he finds after the war.

Speaker C: And guess what’s also in the harbor besides mines?

Speaker C: Guys.

Speaker C: But the camaraderie on that boat and the characters on that boat are fun to hang out with.

Speaker C: And part of how some of these points about war and about masculinity are made are just in these characters having human interactions that are fun to watch.

Speaker C: Like, this is not a film full of thesis length speeches about masculinity and trauma and.

Speaker A: Yeah, no, that’s this show.

Speaker B: You’re right that it’s spielbergian.

Speaker B: I mean, obviously, that minesweeping section feels a lot like jaws in a lot of ways, but it also really gave me Yamazaki, who wrote and directed this, is known in Japan for his live action versions of very popular manga and anime.

Speaker B: Like, that is sort of how he made his name.

Speaker B: And this really gave me manga vibes, especially in those secondary characters.

Speaker B: Each one of them has a really striking design and is consistent in that design.

Speaker B: Each one of them has a big personality.

Speaker B: They behave in extremely essentially predictable ways.

Speaker B: They’re not even characters as much as they’re tropes.

Speaker B: The Krusty captain who’s always shouting, and then brainy doc with his big ideas, and the grouchy neighbor who warms to the young family.

Speaker B: But it becomes so elemental in this context that it’s very satisfying.

Speaker B: And you’re right that in addition to all the other things this movie is, it also is a very fun movie about a monster just blowing s*** up.

Speaker B: And, like, the scenes where the monster’s tossing around people and ships are all thrilling and extremely well executed on a visual effects standpoint, especially when you understand how little they spent and how ingenious those visual effects are.

Speaker B: One question I do have coming out of this, and maybe you guys who know more about Godzilla than me can answer.

Speaker B: He doesn’t actually ever eat any of those people.

Speaker B: He just loves picking people up and.

Speaker A: Throwing them, flinging them.

Speaker B: Do we understand what Godzilla actually eats?

Speaker B: How is he fueling his, like, his nuclear reactor in his core?

Speaker B: Do we know the answer to that?

Speaker C: I assume it’s krill.

Speaker C: Like all big cpu creatures, he’s completely.

Speaker B: Denuded the south Pacific of krill.

Speaker C: Yeah, he’s got.

Speaker C: There’s some of.

Speaker C: Underneath some of the nuclear unlocking vertebrae are gills.

Speaker C: Or Baleen, I guess.

Speaker C: Baleen.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker C: Godzilla’s related to the humpback.

Speaker C: It’s not.

Speaker C: It’s not.

Speaker C: Everybody knows that.

Speaker C: But.

Speaker C: But as a funny thing I know.

Speaker B: About Godzilla is that he spends 23 hours a day just chasing food and only has 1 hour a day for throwing ships.

Speaker C: Well, it’s true that we do see him, like, chomp humans in half at the torso, but then he’s not like.

Speaker B: No, no.

Speaker C: Interesting, interesting.

Speaker A: Who knew that you had a tight three on the feeding habits of undersea monsters?

Speaker A: Juliet, that was really f****** impressive.

Speaker A: Oh, my God.

Speaker A: All right.

Speaker A: Well, yeah, I hope I gave no one the wrong impression here.

Speaker A: It’s not like 4 hours on a therapist’s couch.

Speaker A: It’s an incredibly good genre picture.

Speaker A: It just has all these other elements seething beneath the surface.

Speaker A: But anyway.

Speaker A: Okay, it’s Godzilla minus one.

Speaker A: It’s now on Netflix.

Speaker A: There is no excuse not to watch this movie.

Speaker A: It is so unbelievably good.

Speaker A: It works on every level.

Speaker A: It’s just a great action film and.

Speaker C: A good, good family watch.

Speaker C: Officially rated pg 13.

Speaker C: Watched it with my 211 year olds.

Speaker C: The scares were the right level.

Speaker C: Not too violent.

Speaker B: Huge hit with my teens.

Speaker C: Apart from the torso.

Speaker C: The torso gore, which is, I guess, violent, but it felt like a good family watch.

Speaker A: Exactly.

Speaker A: All right, check it out and report back.

Speaker A: Sabrina Carpenter’s espresso is an irresistible song about irresistibility and was widely declared to be the song of the summer.

Speaker A: Before we even got to the end of April.

Speaker A: Those words were written by Dan Charnas.

Speaker A: Our guest, Dan, is the author of Dilettime, a bestseller and the big Payback, the history of the business of hip hop.

Speaker A: I’m not alone in thinking maybe that’s the best book on hip hop.

Speaker A: It is certainly one of them.

Speaker A: Dan Charnas, welcome back to the podcast.

Speaker D: Thank you so much for having me.

Speaker D: It’s great to be back.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.

Speaker A: It’s awesome to have you back on.

Speaker A: This is a very, very sharply framed, thesis driven piece.

Speaker A: I should get to what that thesis is.

Speaker A: It’s not that espresso is the of the summer, but that it’s not clear whether the summer in question is 2024 or 1982.

Speaker A: Can you explain why this is the song of the summer of 1982?

Speaker D: That’s exactly right.

Speaker D: Well, yeah.

Speaker D: So espresso is essentially the news peg.

Speaker D: Right.

Speaker D: Espresso is an incredible piece of music.

Speaker D: It’s a great pop song, but it’s musical ideas are all rooted in a genre that was very popular on black radio and among black audiences in the early 1980s.

Speaker D: Let’s say 1980.

Speaker D: 1980.

Speaker D: 119.

Speaker D: 82.

Speaker D: Back in that time, it was called funk.

Speaker D: Right?

Speaker D: It didn’t have a special name.

Speaker D: Some people even still called it disco because it came in the wake of disco, but it was really musically distinct from that.

Speaker D: But these years, like 81, 82, 83 were years of exile for black artists in american popular music.

Speaker D: After disco, black artists en masse were essentially racketeered out of the business.

Speaker D: They weren’t played on m, the videos weren’t played on MTV.

Speaker D: The records weren’t played on pop radio.

Speaker D: So they existed in this sort of re segregated music marketplace where you had all of this wonderful music.

Speaker D: Right.

Speaker D: But none of it having the kind of access, say that espresso has today.

Speaker D: Does that make sense?

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker C: I mean, one thing I loved about this piece, Dan, is that it landed in my brain as though it were the answer to a question I had asked when I first heard this song.

Speaker C: So I found the song through the various pop culture podcasts I listened to and the various blogs suggested to me I needed to cue it up.

Speaker C: I obligingly watched the video, thought, huh, catchy tune.

Speaker C: And then it, like, earwormed its way into my brain.

Speaker C: And then I made my husband listen that night, and he was like, I don’t get it.

Speaker C: And then the next day, at, like, 04:00 p.m.

Speaker C: he was like, I’m obsessed with this song.

Speaker C: I’ve played it all day long.

Speaker C: And then as we were driving around listening to it, a little later that day, I was like, what is this sound?

Speaker C: What is this genre?

Speaker C: It does not sound like other pop.

Speaker C: It sounds so breezy.

Speaker C: It has this.

Speaker C: I could hear that it wasn’t quite what you expect the pop hit to be.

Speaker C: And I was like, what is the name?

Speaker C: What is this?

Speaker C: And then literally, like, your however many thousand words showed up, and we’re like, voomphazy.

Speaker C: This is what it is.

Speaker C: But I’d love it if you could describe, and maybe we could use this by way of setting up a clip, just kind of sonically what it is about espresso that hearkens back to this type of music from the early eighties.

Speaker D: Sure.

Speaker D: So in order to really get your head around what this genre is, you have to reference disco.

Speaker D: Right?

Speaker D: You know, Sylvester’s mighty real.

Speaker D: That is a quintessential disco track because it contains pretty much all of the basic disco tropes.

Speaker D: The kick drum that hits on all four beats, right.

Speaker D: The open and closed hi hats.

Speaker D: So when you hear people making fun of disco, you know that Geico commercial where he goes, boots and pants and boots and pants, boots and pants and.

Speaker C: Boots and pants and boots and pants.

Speaker D: You’Re hearing that kick drum and that hi hat that is very endemic to disco.

Speaker D: Very tropey.

Speaker D: And, you know, there’s also the octave bass that this Sylvester song has, right?

Speaker D: That boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

Speaker D: When we think of disco, those are the things that come to mind, and those are the things that trigger us about a song to say, hey, this is disco.

Speaker D: Now, what happened with this movement in the 1970s is that it became so big that everybody could kind of disco fi a song by putting those little tropes into theirs.

Speaker D: So you had Blondie doing heart of glass, and you had the stones doing miss you, and you had Rod Stewart doing do you think I’m sexy?

Speaker D: And I think to a lot of folks, especially those who had become alienated from disco, it felt metastatic, right?

Speaker D: It felt like it was just taking over everything.

Speaker D: And that was part of the aesthetic backlash to disco.

Speaker D: And so what happened in disco’s wake, really, is that the tropes, especially for dance music, kind of half fell away and it became more funky.

Speaker D: Now, what does that mean?

Speaker D: Right.

Speaker D: Well, funk is essentially a system of rhythmic tension and release, and there’s very little tension and release in disco because everything is sort of very even and repetitive.

Speaker D: What post disco was, what post disco funk was, essentially, was to keep some of that metronomic exactitude of disco, that four on the floor, but to really, really lean in on the backbeat.

Speaker D: So heavy hand claps, right?

Speaker D: That’s a big trope of post disco, if you will.

Speaker D: Another one is that the bass lines are incredibly melodic, and espresso has both of those things.

Speaker D: Then you have these incredibly rich piano or synthesizer chords that really give the song an almost, sometimes like a gospel like feel.

Speaker D: So in some ways, these are aesthetic markers of blackness, right.

Speaker D: For those of us who think about how music moves socioculturally, and that’s what this music did, it sort of reclaimed a lot of those aesthetic signifiers at a time when this music was going to be rejected resoundingly by pop radio.

Speaker D: And so with the slate piece, I have a whole playlist of different songs to sort of reference with regard to where these ideas in espresso came from.

Speaker B: An interesting result, Dan, of the fact that pop radio wouldn’t play these songs is that for a lot of white listeners particularly, these songs often first came to my attention, for example, via sample.

Speaker B: These are songs that ended up being sampled in a lot of great hip hop in the eighties and nineties particularly.

Speaker B: And so I would hear these grooves that I didn’t recognize because I hadn’t heard them originally on pop radio.

Speaker B: And only years later would I recognize that the sample from Juicy is by Mitsume’s juicy fruit, a truly great song that I never heard in its original version.

Speaker B: What are some of the songs in this genre that listeners at the time loved that maybe have been repurposed or sampled over the years in ways that might surprise listeners who don’t know this genre at all?

Speaker D: That’s such a great story, and I love that.

Speaker D: And it’s funny that one of the turning points of this music happens in the summer of 1979, just as disco is cresting.

Speaker D: It’s just a few months after the famous disco demolition derby in Chicago.

Speaker D: Essentially that white riot against disco at the White Sox doubleheader.

Speaker D: But a couple months later, now, Rogers and Bernard Edwards, with their band Chic, produced a song called good Times.

Speaker D: Good times.

Speaker D: These are the good times.

Speaker D: Sheik had come to, you know, a great success as a disco group, but here they turn towards funk.

Speaker D: And so good times by Chic is a great sort of early harbinger of what’s going to happen.

Speaker D: And of course, you know, it also is the ground zero alpha song of recorded hip hop because it’s the base for rappers delight.

Speaker D: But I would say two songs that are really important to understand what this music is.

Speaker D: Tom Brown’s funkin for Jamaica, which was a top five r and b hit, and basically nowhere on the pop charts.

Speaker A: Jamaica funk, that’s what it is.

Speaker D: Another group called D Train, they had a couple of songs called keep on and you’re the one for me.

Speaker D: But other artists, too, like Evelyn Champagne King, unlimited touch, Renee and Angela.

Speaker D: And a lot of these groups are New York based.

Speaker D: It’s a very, very New York sound.

Speaker B: I love your description in this piece of this music as irrepressibly happy, even as the history you’re telling of essentially radio segregation is unbelievably maddening.

Speaker B: But that description really applies to the music just as it really applies to espresso.

Speaker B: That’s that bounciness and the air underneath it that Julia described when she was talking about how the piece just sort of, like, lifts you.

Speaker B: And one sort of side effect of this I found, and I’m curious, Dan, whether you’ve seen this, too, is that if you are a person who likes to play old vinyl, this is basically, this post.

Speaker B: Disco is basically the last remaining great genre of music that you can find at any record store for, like, under $7.

Speaker B: Like, if you can, if you walk into a used record store, Dan, with your article in hand, and you just buy every record you see by any of the artists you mention, you will leave with this incredibly joy inducing pile of albums that will make you happy for years on end.

Speaker B: Why was it that radio wouldn’t play this music?

Speaker B: Why was it just that the backlash against disco was so harsh that they were moving in other directions?

Speaker B: Why, when I was listening to white radio in the early eighties, did I never hear any black people until basically prints again?

Speaker D: Such a great question.

Speaker D: And now you’re motivating me.

Speaker D: Go to the record store.

Speaker D: But before I do, I will.

Speaker D: I will answer your question.

Speaker D: We use this term structural racism often, and here is a real concrete example of structural racism.

Speaker D: First of all, the music business was born in the 1920s, right?

Speaker D: Or at least the record business at the height of Jim Crow.

Speaker D: And so the categories that this industry created were essentially an echo of Jim Crow.

Speaker D: There were three markets.

Speaker D: There was the popular market, the hit parade.

Speaker D: Then there was what they called race records, and then the hillbilly charts.

Speaker D: And of course, the lie behind all of this is that all of the music, even hillbilly, is essentially blues based, right?

Speaker D: It’s essentially black music.

Speaker D: And so this situation kind of comes to a head in the 1950s when that blues based music, rhythm and blues, starts to be called rock and roll.

Speaker D: And by the 1960s, and obviously, this is going along with a lot of social movements like the civil rights movement.

Speaker D: And the passage of the Civil Rights act and the Voting Rights act.

Speaker D: By the end of the 1960s, the market is not so segregated.

Speaker D: An AM radio station, a top 40 station, will be playing Aretha Franklin and James Brown.

Speaker D: And Motown artists.

Speaker D: Right next to the Beatles and the Stones.

Speaker D: It didn’t matter.

Speaker D: Right.

Speaker D: But then something happened at the beginning of the 1970s.

Speaker D: And I do.

Speaker D: I mentioned, you know, like the year end chart for Billboard in the 1970s, the pop chart.

Speaker D: Half of those artists are either Motown artists or Motown related.

Speaker D: Right.

Speaker D: It’s a.

Speaker D: It is as good as it’s ever been.

Speaker D: In terms of countering that structural racism.

Speaker D: But the structures are going to rear their head again.

Speaker D: And how they rear their head is through the corporate takeover of radio and records.

Speaker D: So what happens at radio is these new FM stations start to really micro target their demographics to advertisers.

Speaker D: And, of course, advertisers, notoriously, they don’t think black people have any money, right?

Speaker D: So they’re not going to advertise on stations that play primarily r and b in Seoul.

Speaker D: And a rock station will drop essentially artists like James Brown or Stevie Wonder.

Speaker D: Because their quote unquote, research tells them that their white male audience.

Speaker D: Doesn’t like that as much as Led Zeppelin or Rush or.

Speaker D: Yes.

Speaker D: So there’s this resegregation that happens at radio.

Speaker D: That’s kind of stunning and very quick in the 1970s.

Speaker D: And then there is a concurrent segregation at major labels.

Speaker D: One of the inciting incidents for this is the Harvard Report.

Speaker D: That’s commissioned by Larry Isaacson at CB’s Records.

Speaker D: During the reign of Clive Davis there.

Speaker D: And Clive Davis was essentially encouraged by this report.

Speaker D: That was generated by graduate students at the Harvard business School.

Speaker D: To move into the soul music market.

Speaker D: And what that meant was doing distribution deals with external labels like stacks.

Speaker D: But also creating his own soul music department.

Speaker D: And staffing it with executives who are very familiar with the market.

Speaker D: And promoting that music to the stations that play soul music.

Speaker D: But essentially what’s happening is a resegregation or a segregation, really, right.

Speaker D: That’s never happened before on this scale.

Speaker D: That there are black executives and black artists.

Speaker D: Who promote to black record stores and black radio stations.

Speaker D: And that if those things are going to go pop.

Speaker D: They have to be crossed over to another department within the company.

Speaker D: That didn’t happen at Motown in the 1960s.

Speaker D: Because they wanted all of their records to go pop.

Speaker D: Right?

Speaker D: So there’s this selection process that begins to happen.

Speaker D: So that by the end of the 1970s.

Speaker D: One of the reasons for the backlash to disco.

Speaker D: Is that the white male audience wasn’t listening to as much James Brown and Aretha Franklin and Stevie Wonder.

Speaker D: And I think that there was a kind of a cultural selection process going on.

Speaker D: And it’s that structural change that really provokes the backlash.

Speaker D: And so very common terminology throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s in the record business, when considering whether a record was popped, people would use language like, well, that’s a little too black.

Speaker D: That’s more of a black record, right?

Speaker D: Imagine that all of this stuff is black music.

Speaker A: Dan, I wanted to just say personally why I love this piece so much is that just, I entered high school in 1979.

Speaker A: I happened to have a friend who was working on construction sites in the Bronx, and he came back with all of this music on a boombox.

Speaker A: And so Curtis blow chic double dutch bust.

Speaker A: Like, all of these songs were kind of being delivered straight to my ears, and it just got lost between the end of and vilification of disco and the mainstreaming of hip hop.

Speaker A: Exactly.

Speaker A: That period was when I was in high school hearing this music.

Speaker A: It’s just incredible.

Speaker A: Would you, as is your piece, would you pick a track for us to go out on?

Speaker D: Well, I think if we’re talking about happiness and buoyancy, keep on by d train is pretty much right up there at the top.

Speaker A: Excellent.

Speaker A: All right, well, Dan Charnas is the author of Dilettime and the Big Payback, a couple of extraordinary books of music history.

Speaker A: Dan, it’s really great having you on the show.

Speaker A: I hope you come back soon.

Speaker A: Right now is the moment in our podcast when we endorse Dan, why don’t we start with you?

Speaker A: What do you have?

Speaker B: I know that several years ago on the show, we talked about the first season of Girls Five Eva, the then Peaco*ck Hulu, who can remember at this point?

Speaker B: Show that eventually moved over to Netflix, where they gave it an extra season.

Speaker B: My whole family just caught up on the third season of a girls five, Eva, which remains an incredibly funny, quick witted, totally stupid show about wonderful people that has a higher density of jokes per second than almost anything currently on tv.

Speaker B: Like a 30 rock esque level of joke density that I find so enjoyable.

Speaker B: Everyone on the show remains really funny.

Speaker B: Renee Lees Goldsberry is great.

Speaker B: Sarah Bareas is great.

Speaker B: Paul Impell is great.

Speaker B: I just still really love this show and endorse if you fell away from it because you couldn’t even remember what streaming network it was on.

Speaker B: All the seasons are now on Netflix, and you can watch them and it’s great.

Speaker C: A couple of our listeners shouted out too.

Speaker C: We did a plus segment a couple weeks ago about making the art in the project about art work, and a couple listeners shouted out that the songs in girls five, Eva work and are.

Speaker B: They are legitimate bops, though often about unbelievably stupid things.

Speaker C: Yes, in the classic tradition of songs that are associated with Tina Fey’s husband, who I believe does the music for that show, Jeff Richmond is his name, which we should shout out.

Speaker C: He’s not just Tina Fey’s husband.

Speaker C: But yeah, that show is really fun and it’s so interesting.

Speaker C: I’ve been rewatching 30 rock and it was such an interesting moment when a show with that level of joke density could really only be seen on primetime and thus had a pretty big following.

Speaker C: Because if you follow the lineage of that group of writers who become showrunners, there are these little Kimmy Schmidt style sort of joke dance shows studded across the streaming landscape, but they end up feeling like the audiences are much nichier than they were.

Speaker B: They assume an incredible amount of either knowledge, like broad cultural knowledge on the viewer’s part, or a willingness to just not understand a certain number of the jokes and roll with it.

Speaker B: That is sort of anathema to the idea of mass tv comedy.

Speaker B: Generally.

Speaker B: I eat it up with a spoon, but I understand why it is actually sort of a niche scenario.

Speaker C: Yeah, it just makes you realize how rare the moment was when that style of comedy and 30 rock had the kind of national viewership that it did.

Speaker C: But yes, girls five, Eva, definitely worth checking out.

Speaker A: Julia, what do you have?

Speaker C: I would like to endorse a book.

Speaker C: The writer, editor, and podcaster Jen Romolini has just published a book called Ambition Monster, a memoir of her growing up, her breaking into the publishing industry, and sort of wrestling with her own relationship to work and to ambition and where that comes from.

Speaker C: And it’s f****** great.

Speaker C: I should stipulate here that I know Jen.

Speaker C: We met, I don’t know, 25 years ago and have been friendly since.

Speaker C: I don’t know her very well.

Speaker C: But this book is really everything you want in a memoir.

Speaker C: It’s just incredibly emotionally honest and fearless in its excavation of hurt, and there’s just a fearlessness to it and a curiosity to it that is really brilliant and compelling and unputdownable.

Speaker C: I am to the degree to which I was unable to complete sharp sentences today.

Speaker C: It’s because I stayed up past my bedtime last night tearing through it.

Speaker C: So blame Jennifer Romellini and ambition monster for any deficiencies in my performance today.

Speaker B: It is no surprise to me, Julia, that you were totally infatuated by that book.

Speaker B: One of your successors, a slate editor in chief, Hilary Fry, is also totally obsessed with that book, and in fact, interviewed did a Q and a with Romalani for Slate, which is really interesting.

Speaker B: And this nexus of very ambitious media women who have been grappling with these issues for a long time, issues that are of great interest, I think, to lots of people, but become particularly charged in this specific professional niche, is very potent.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker C: Obviously, I’m at a moment of exploring my career priorities, too, which is probably part of why it resonates.

Speaker C: Although truly, I think why it resonates is, like, just the power and fearlessness of the writing.

Speaker C: It’s always good to read a memoir by an acquaintance of yours because you’re like, oh, what’d they think of that thing we both went through?

Speaker C: But you can tell when one just has the kind of emotional fearlessness and the verbal precision to really land the plane, and it’s just great.

Speaker C: But, yeah, I mean, one’s relationship to ambition in any context is worth interrogating.

Speaker C: And then what ambition means in an industry that is been through so much during the same decades during which the three of us and many other people have been ascending through it, it does add a layer.

Speaker C: I think you’re right.

Speaker C: Anyway, it’s a terrific book.

Speaker C: Ambition Monster by Jen Romolini.

Speaker C: And I also want to say, do go check out that playlist that Dan Charnas mentioned in our segment with him for the 1982 genre that’s criminally under known, but it’s a great, great playlist.

Speaker C: Definitely worth checking out.

Speaker A: Oh, yeah.

Speaker A: Hear.

Speaker A: Okay, so this is a two parter, but not really two endorsem*nts.

Speaker A: I want to endorse the song that Emmylou Harris covered under the title, the ballad of the Runaway horse.

Speaker A: But really what I want is for people to listen to the song, not look at who wrote the song, and then come up with guesses as to who wrote the song.

Speaker A: Dan, you won’t be on the show next week, but you can still participate via email.

Speaker A: Julia, will you commit to listening to this song and then, without doing any googling, just guessing a songwriter?

Speaker B: Yes, we’ll do it.

Speaker C: Sure.

Speaker C: But I’m gonna suck at that.

Speaker C: But.

Speaker A: Okay, the point of the exercise is everyone’s gonna suck at it except for.

Speaker C: Me, but that won’t mean anything.

Speaker C: Cause I’m terrible at that anyway.

Speaker C: But let’s go.

Speaker C: Let’s play.

Speaker A: Literal.

Speaker A: Okay, that’s good.

Speaker A: So that’s next week’s endorsem*nt.

Speaker A: But it just as a preview, I’d like the listenership to do that further for their buddy Steve.

Speaker A: In the meantime, Julia, yet another offering of solo piano music.

Speaker A: I’d never, I’m embarrassed to say I’d never heard of this musician, Abdullah Ibrahim, who is a south african pianist.

Speaker A: I know, I know.

Speaker A: I’m so sorry.

Speaker A: I’m so sorry.

Speaker A: But now I think roughly 89, 90 years old.

Speaker A: I believe he’s still alive.

Speaker A: Black South African who came during the apartheid era to the United States, to New York City, has since returned.

Speaker A: Do you know the album solo tude?

Speaker A: Obviously a portmanteau of solo and solitude.

Speaker A: God, that is such a great record.

Speaker A: I didn’t know it.

Speaker A: It’s such a beautiful record.

Speaker A: And Julia, if I’ve come to understand your taste in jazz or jazz influenced piano music, solo piano included, this one is just right in that wheelhouse.

Speaker A: I love this record and have been listening to it over and over and over again.

Speaker A: So Abdullah Ibrahim, solo tude oh, I’m.

Speaker C: Gonna check it out.

Speaker C: But I actually, I went through a huge, this is like such a helpful tip because I went through a huge phase of listening to Abraham’s music years ago, and it just, you know how things just, like, fall out of your head.

Speaker C: Like, I just forgot about him.

Speaker C: So this is exciting on many levels.

Speaker C: I will check out that album, which did not exist back when I was listening to Abraham.

Speaker A: All right, well, check it out.

Speaker A: We’ll link to it.

Speaker A: Dan Kois, thank you so much for coming on the program.

Speaker A: As always, just great chatting with you.

Speaker B: My great pleasure, Julia.

Speaker A: Fun episode.

Speaker A: Really nice.

Speaker A: Really nice chat.

Speaker C: Thanks, Steve.

Speaker A: You’ll find links to some of the things we talked about today at our show.

Speaker A: Page that slate.com culturefest and you can email us@culturefestlate.com dot our introductory music is by the composer Nicholas Bertel.

Speaker A: Our production assistant is Kat hong.

Speaker A: Our producer is Kevin Mendes or Dan Kois.

Speaker A: And Julia Turner.

Speaker A: I’m Stephen Metcalf.

Speaker A: Thank you so much for joining us.

Speaker A: We will see see you soon.

Speaker C: Hello and welcome to the slot plus segment of the slate culture gabfest.

Speaker C: Today we are discussing the children’s birthday party, prompted, I hasten to say, by my decision to throw a birthday party for my three year old, one which you can both savage as you see fit.

Speaker C: Dan, children’s birthday parties, pro or con?

Speaker B: I am pro parties in general and extremely con.

Speaker B: What I worry and suspect is the exact kind of party you have felt socially forced into creating for your beautiful, almost three year old child.

Speaker B: The lavish big party with lots of children’s entertainment and the sort of creeping sense that you have been led by cultural expectations to celebrate a three year old’s birthday party with the kind of effort and perhaps even budget that once might have accompanied, say, a quinceanera.

Speaker C: All right, I’m offended by what you apparently think of my life now.

Speaker C: But first, before I express my offense, Steve, children’s birthday party is pro are con.

Speaker A: But first, though, Dan, that reminded me of nothing less than Godzilla clamping his teeth, kind of mid torso on the person, but not severing them in half painlessly, you know, raising them off the ground in the mandible, feet still around a little bit, getting a little momentum going, and with one jerk of the head sending them like a mile and a half out to sea, that was.

Speaker A: That was really well done.

Speaker A: So kids birthday parties, I mean.

Speaker A: Well, so the only way to describe my philosophy of kids birthday parties, well, first of all, in reference to my own, were you the kid who.

Speaker A: Your overwhelming association with your own birthday parties growing up was the euphoria of having all of your friends in one room and the noise and the activity and just the sort of centering of you for a special occasion.

Speaker A: Were you the kid for whom the dominant affect was the bereft feeling afterwards, and the house is sort of a mess and feels evacuated of not only activity but feeling?

Speaker A: I’ll leave it to you to guess which one I was.

Speaker A: But what I will also say is that I guess my parenting philosophy was a very bizarre one, and it was arrived at totally in an unarticulated way with my life partner, which is kind of, sort of, in one sense, sort of spoil the s*** out of your kids, but in another sense, not at all right?

Speaker A: Like, actually kind of demand in a weird way, a lot of them, but on what you think of really meaningful life metrics in some sense, but otherwise, you know, just kind of basically be a rather indulgent parent, otherwise.

Speaker A: So that the actual day itself of Christmas ended up massively de emphasized.

Speaker A: It was like, every f****** day is Christmas.

Speaker A: And I mean, not quite.

Speaker A: I don’t want to exaggerate it.

Speaker A: My kids aren’t drowning in material objects.

Speaker B: Jesus wasn’t born every day, Steve, the.

Speaker A: Secular Christmas, but consumers Christmas.

Speaker A: And same thing with birthdays.

Speaker A: It’s like, you know, I don’t know.

Speaker A: We never fixated on it.

Speaker A: They never fixated on it.

Speaker A: And so to the extent that we did it, I can’t even really remember, frankly, birthday parties for my kids when they were more like Julia’s kids age they’ve just been disappeared completely from the memory banks.

Speaker A: But in terms of making them in any way lavish or getting entertainment, we took a pass.

Speaker A: And then also, once you move up to the country, it’s like they don’t have 50 friends who live within driving distance that’s out the window.

Speaker A: So whether that adds up to a philosophy or not, I’m not entirely sure.

Speaker A: But speaking from my own sense, I don’t like being.

Speaker A: I had a huge milestone recently and I ended up at the last minute doing something and I don’t regret it at all.

Speaker A: So I see how they can be really meaningful, but by and large, I don’t like being the center of attention.

Speaker A: So we never made birthdays at the end of the day a big part of our kids childhoods.

Speaker A: But Julia, you’ve got to be chomping at the bit here.

Speaker A: I mean, you’re the one who’s been flung out to see swim back to shore.

Speaker A: What do you have to say?

Speaker C: Well, so I am throwing a birthday party for my three year old, but I’m sorry.

Speaker B: A wonderful child.

Speaker B: It should be true.

Speaker C: A wonderful child.

Speaker C: It’s true.

Speaker C: A wonderful child.

Speaker C: And I’m not actually throwing it because I feel any social pressure.

Speaker C: When my sons, who are now eleven, were in preschool, I was like, forget this, they don’t even know about birthday parties.

Speaker C: They don’t need a birthday party.

Speaker C: We’ll have a nice little gathering with family.

Speaker C: We’ll attend a couple of the preschool birthday parties.

Speaker C: And we managed to get, I think till they were like five, till we had a birthday party with some peers.

Speaker C: And then it was like the pandemic.

Speaker C: I mean, they haven’t had that many peer birthday parties, but we’ve had a few.

Speaker C: My favorite was maybe a couple years ago we took them to a laser tag place on Ventura, which is great and has caused me to fantasize that I should throw myself a laser tag birthday party with adults, which I may yet do.

Speaker C: But like, I was very savvy as a parent of my first kids about not over investing in kid birthday party culture.

Speaker C: And the cause of my doing a party this time is the frickin third kid of my kid who does know what birthday parties are and has clocked them and is excited about her brothers and wants to know when it’s going to be hers and wants to know what kind of cake there’s going to be.

Speaker C: Like, this is a child driven party and has sort of been to some of her peers and is like excited about what’s going to happen at hers.

Speaker C: So we’re throwing a party.

Speaker C: I also used to.

Speaker C: One thing we did for a while with the boys was not really throw a party for their friends, but throw a party for our friends.

Speaker C: Like, we would just use it as an excuse to have a small house party with everyone we liked and serve them some cake and hang out and chit chat.

Speaker C: And then when the boys got a little older, they were like, why do you have this party with, like, all of your friends?

Speaker C: We don’t like those people or their.

Speaker B: How is this my birthday party?

Speaker C: Yes, exactly.

Speaker C: So they basically called me on that bullsh*t, and I had to stop that.

Speaker C: And then we started throwing them some proper birthday parties for their own friends.

Speaker C: But I sort of feel like the social pressures are actually familial in that my daughter wants a party, and she does have this lovely group of peers at her little preschool, and so we’re inviting them over.

Speaker C: And, yes, there will be balloon animals, Dan, if you want to.

Speaker C: If you want to, just buy a.

Speaker B: Certified, licensed balloon animal creator, a man.

Speaker C: And our woman at the top of yelp will show up, and.

Speaker C: And balloons will be turned into animals.

Speaker C: And then I’m gonna make a cake, and there’ll be some pizza and some salad, and it’ll be fine.

Speaker C: So I’m not too chagrined, but you.

Speaker B: Don’T have a bouncy castle?

Speaker C: Nope.

Speaker B: Hmm.

Speaker B: No mute?

Speaker B: No magician?

Speaker C: I considered a bubble artist, but rejected.

Speaker B: All right.

Speaker B: Sounds like you’re handling it in a fairly healthy manner.

Speaker B: I can.

Speaker C: Oh, good.

Speaker C: I’m so glad I have your approval, Dan.

Speaker B: Here in the Washington, DC greater metro area, there is and has been for years, an enormous arms race of birthday parties for children so that you end up with these large parties in McMansions featuring two to three entertainment stations with different hired hands doing different kind of entertainment y things, sort of deluxe gourmet kid food with maybe some special editions for the parents who are forced to stay.

Speaker B: And the results of those, when my kids were little, were always them coming home, looking around our house, and saying, why don’t we have a second floor?

Speaker B: Or, why isn’t our house bigger?

Speaker B: Or, why don’t we have a whole room that’s just a bouncy house or whatever?

Speaker B: So there’s a lot of class tension and anxiety wrapped up in birthday parties in the Arlington Bethesda metroplex.

Speaker B: And perhaps I’ve let that get to me too much.

Speaker B: The only truly great birthday party we ever threw for either of our kids, we had a bunch of perfectly fine ones where we, whatever, went to a pool, and we had a cake that we bought it at Safeway.

Speaker B: But the only truly great party was Harper’s third birthday party, which was just after we had moved to Arlington from New York City.

Speaker B: She had barely made.

Speaker B: I mean, you know, she was just turning three.

Speaker B: She didn’t truly have friends in the real sense of the word.

Speaker B: We didn’t also really have friends yet.

Speaker B: We were very new to town.

Speaker B: We just invited everyone whose emails we had gotten from her preschool class and told them that there would be ladybugs.

Speaker B: And then we spent dollar 60 on 3000 live ladybugs on Amazon.com.

Speaker B: and then we had a cake.

Speaker B: And at the end of the party, we just gave all the kids these bags of ladybugs, let them open them, and then the sky and our garden and their faces and probably mouths were filled with ladybugs.

Speaker B: And there was so much screaming and joy, and we really felt like we hit a home run on that one.

Speaker C: Oh, my God.

Speaker C: Okay, that makes me realize that there’s a separate story to tell here, which is the incredibly creative, brilliant birthday party.

Speaker C: And I do need to shout out my parents, because my first grade birthday party was so memorably awesome that kids talked to me about it, like, until we graduated high school, which was.

Speaker C: We were.

Speaker C: Let’s see, we.

Speaker C: I mean, I guess we moved to that house when I was born.

Speaker C: So we were maybe, I don’t know, six years into living in this old house, and my parents were kind of slowly fixing it up as we lived there.

Speaker C: And there was an unfinished attic that they were turning into a finished attic, and they had put the drywall up, or maybe there was even drywall already, but they’d, like, cleared out all the garbage.

Speaker C: And so they let 26 six year olds up into the attic and gave them just boxes and boxes of crayola markers and just told everybody to write on the walls.

Speaker B: Oh, yeah.

Speaker C: And it was so transgressive and very not.

Speaker C: There was not a lot of writing on the walls in my childhood, but let me tell you, those walls were specific and needed to not be written on in general.

Speaker C: So it was transgressive to me.

Speaker C: I don’t think the guests even understood what a crazy thing that was to happen in my home.

Speaker C: But it was so fun.

Speaker C: And I think all their parents were like, what the f***?

Speaker C: To my parents.

Speaker C: Because it may have left some six year olds with the misimpression that writing on walls was just cool, a cool thing that you could do.

Speaker B: That’s not a misimpression.

Speaker B: That’s correct.

Speaker C: I see they, yeah, that was, that was, kudos to Bob and Otiel.

Speaker B: Have you guys read Jean Weingarten’s classic Washington Post style feature about the great Zucchini?

Speaker C: No.

Speaker B: The great Zucchini is, or was in 2006 when he wrote it and probably still is to this day.

Speaker B: WashinGTOn, the Arlington Bethesda metroplex is most desired children’s magician for three to six year old birthday parties.

Speaker B: He has long been sort of a local legend.

Speaker B: And the piece is an incredible profile of a guy who is, who every aspect of his life is a total disaster and mess, except for that he is preternaturally able to connect to and delight children between the age of three and six, but he simply cannot handle any other aspect of adult life.

Speaker B: It’s an incredible character portrait and also a really great sociological picture of parents of a certain class struggling with how to delight their children on what they believe should be one of the best days of their lives.

Speaker B: It’s a really great feature.

Speaker C: Ooh, I will check that out.

Speaker C: All right, well, children’s birthday parties, I’m throwing one I may or may not report back.

Speaker C: Hope the birthday sounds like I’m not invited.

Speaker C: I mean, if you want to, you’re so welcome.

Speaker C: I did sprinkle in a couple of our friends.

Speaker C: I can’t let, it’s like if I’m going to go to the trouble of throwing a party, why shouldn’t it be full of the people I want to see, right?

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: If you can get out here, it’s on Saturday.

Speaker B: All right, great.

Speaker C: Okay, slate plus listeners, thank you for indulging this conversation of children’s birthday parties.

Speaker C: Send us your thoughts on the subject and or whether I should throw a laser tag birthday party for grownups was met with stony silence from my colleagues on that.

Speaker C: But I continue to think it’s a good idea.

Speaker C: Thank you for listening.

Speaker C: Thank you for supporting us and our show and making it possible.

Speaker C: Thank you for supporting slate and its journalism.

Speaker C: We will see you next week.