I just finished listening to the Shit Town podcast. Has anyone else listened to it? After the first episode, my wife said “That guy (John B.) sounds a lot like someone from Balloon Juice.”
Overall, I liked it a lot but I thought it dragged a lot after the first three or four episodes. I could listen to people from Woodstock, Alabama all day, but there’s only so much of that totebagger narrator I could take. It was like going from the voice of Gregg Allman to the voice of the guy from Death Cab For Cutie. I also thought the handling of sexuality and relationships was a bit tone deaf. But, all in all, it was fascinating, and not at all what I was expecting.
What did other people think of it?
Baud
Never heard of it until now.
Doug!
@Baud:
I recommend it, though the later episodes don’t live up to the early ones. (The early ones were completely transfixing.)
AMinNC
I’m half way through and riveted.
schrodingers_cat
I have no idea what you are saying but then I think peeps must have a similar reaction when I drone on about Hindi movie music, my new found love since the last 2 years or so.
MSinCA
My wife and I started it on our way back from the bay a few weeks ago. I liked it but she loved it, which is a first for her and “story time” radio/podcasts
Mnemosyne
I only listen to podcasts when my husband is driving us on a trip of at least an hour. So, not very often.
Jane2
Loved it – the first four or five episodes were stronger than the last two. Very tightly edited – many podcasters could learn from that. I liked the narrator – he was so obviously from “away” and didn’t hide it, and also showed how he developed genuine relationships with John B, etc – probably as much of a surprise to him as to the people he was interviewing.
Doug!
@Jane2:
Very true about the editing.
Mai.naem.mobile
@schrodingers_cat: when I was a little kid parents used to take us to the drive in practically every weekend to see Bollywood movies.i don’t remember the movies as much as I remember the songs. I saw a few of the old movies as an adult and the acting and sound dubbing was pretty bad but there’s a lot of good music. Nowadays the acting has improved and the music for the most part sux.
bystander
I was hoping it was a new Firesign Theatre recording. Mayor Penisnose is perfect for S-Town.
Mai.naem.mobile
I’ve been listening to the Pod Saves America podcast from the Obama guys – Favreau, Vietor and another guy. It’s a kinda sorta version of BJ in pod form without JCs nekkid mopping.
?BillinGlendaleCA
Interesting trivia, ‘Death Cab for Cutie” was a song performed by the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band in the Beatles Magical Mystery Tour made for TV film. One of the writers was Neil Innes was better know as a member of the Rutles.
schrodingers_cat
@Mai.naem.mobile: I have to disagree about the music in the newer films. Yes there is a lot of detritus but there is some phenomenally good music too. A.R.Rahman, Vishal Bharadwaj, Sanjay Leela Bhansali, Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy are really bringing it.
Peale
@schrodingers_cat: try being a fan of ThaiTV. I think there are probably six other Americans who share my guilty pleasure and I know five of them. 555
schrodingers_cat
Husband kitteh likes Death Cab by Cutie, I thought for the most part it was meh, with the exception of a song or two.
laura
@Mai.naem.mobile: If you like Pod saves America, you will LOVE The Professional Left with Driftglass and Blue Gal!
Joe Bob says check em out…
MomSense
I thought the same thing.
MomSense
@Mai.naem.mobile:
I love Lovett so much I want to adopt him. He is hysterically funny. His show Lovett or Leave it is great as is Pod Save the World. The last podcast was an interview with Denis McDonough and it made me miss having intelligent, competent, ethical people in the White House so, so, so much.
@laura:
They were the guests on the last two episodes of Cesca’s podcast. I adore them.
trollhattan
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
Did not know about the MMT tie-in, but do have a decent Bonzo collection, vinyl, natch.
Caravelle
I haven’t listened to the podcast, but heard of it from this article which I found very interesting:
http://www.vox.com/culture/2017/3/30/15084224/s-town-review-controversial-podcast-privacy
I don’t know how pertinent the point of view presented in the article is given I haven’t heard the podcast, but the article DougJ links to certainly doesn’t disagree with it. I would be interested in the takes of people who’ve listened to it.
laura
@MomSense: They are adorable, lovely, thoughtful, hella-smart, and learned me up on Cesca.
Truly we live in an age of miracles and wonder when we can join communities such as this and make connections and feel the deep humanity that exists despite, well all the reasons why we need deep and lasting connections that reinforce our humanity in these very troubling times.
There’s more of us than there are of them.
dedc79
@Caravelle: Read the article before I started the podcast so I felt like I was pretty attuned to the privacy question it raised. In the end, I didn’t find myself share the author’s concerns. The problem is that it’s a bit hard to get into the “why” without spoiling the story.
In any event, for me, it had a lot of parallels to a biography or a memoir – the main differences being that the a lot of it was recorded in real time rather than being purely retrospective, with the result that it took twists and turns that could not have been anticipated at the outset.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@trollhattan: It’s a scene towards the end where The Beatles go into a strip club. It’s really TV on an acid trip, being that the directors were on acid at the time.
Felonius Monk
That’s the daily news coming out of Washington D.C., amirite?
Mai.naem.mobile
@schrodingers_cat: the way I look at it is I used to like watching AMC and I thought “gawd,the movies were much better back then” and then I figured out it’s because AMC was filtering all the crappy movies out. Its hard to beat the RD Burman/SD Burman stuff and the lyrics of the older stuff are really good poetry and I like that the older stuff sounds indian using Indian instruments. The newer stuff at times sounds like Western music sang in Hindi. I agree on AR Rahman, he is absolutely a treasure.
Miss Bianca
@?BillinGlendaleCA: Wait a minute – are you saying that the Bonzos actually appear in MMT playing that song? (I think I tried to make it thru’ that movie once, and honestly don’t remember whether I made it all the way or not, but you’d think I’d remember *that*, at least!)
Mai.naem.mobile
@laura: I’ll tune into that.@MomSense: Cesca is good. I’ll have to listen to Lovett or Leave it. I’ve seen it on my Tune In App. I’ve been cutting back on my teevee stuff anyway.
I also like Freakonomics. It just makes you look at stuff in a different way.
dedc79
McSweeney’s nailed it.
schrodingers_cat
@Mai.naem.mobile: Nope not all of it. Bajirao Mastani which was released in 2015 has a classical score, with a distinct Marathi flavor, also SLB’s Ramleela set in Gujurat, has a distinct Gujarati flavor. Hindi movies are embracing India’s immense diversity while earlier everyone was a generic north Indian Vijay. Also Vishal Bharadwaj’s Shakespeare trilogy has some amazing music. This does not take away from SD or RD Burman, I don’t think.
MomSense
@laura:
I think it was a couple of weeks ago that blue gal shared a story of how she broke out into sobs at the end of the day because she felt so discouraged from an evening spent watching the propaganda on Fox News. And then driftglass consoled her by reminding her that she had purchased some items for her daughter’s school and had volunteered in her classroom that day. He told her that she did something to make the world a better place and that was what was important. It’s easy to get caught up in all that is wrong with our media and politics but we can’t forget that there is so much we can all do to help each other. Fox and GOP can’t take that away from us.
burnspbesq
The creator of the podcast was on a local radio show yesterday and some major spoilers got revealed, so all I’m gonna say is … taint nuthin wrong with Benjamin Gibbard’s voice.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Miss Bianca: Yes, I have the DVD.
cmorenc
I grew up in a small shit Southern town back in the 1960s, when homosexuality was universally regarded as a particularly loathsome perversion, and being “outed” as gay was a social death sentence. IRONICALLY there were several well-known middle-aged men (and women) in town who were never-married, and never-known to have any romantic relationships with the opposite sex, whom everyone in town damn well kinda knew were probably gay (think: Lindsey Graham) – yet they were well-accepted without any issues because they carefully kept any definite evidence of such discreetly out of sight. For example, the dude who taught ballroom dance to most of the upper-middle class kids in town (taking his class was a rite of passage in our town). Had this dance teacher ever come “out”, I have no doubt he would have been instantly shunned, forced to quickly close his studio and move somewhere far, far, away, probably out of state.
zmulls
I am new to podcasts and several people recommended S-Town for a long drive. I enjoyed it but didn’t know what to expect. Took me a while to realize it was non-fiction — I had no context and assumed it was a script with actors. I think the last two episodes were the point, but it was vital to obfuscate, seduce and beguile to get there. The “murder plot” was the bait, and by the time you got to the heart of the piece you weren’t willing to turn it off. If it had been sold as a “slice of life” or “character study” you wouldn’t have started listening.
J R in WV
I can listen to good music while I read, but I can’t listen to someone telling me important things and read a challenging book at the same time. Since I’m always reading if I’m not working on stuff around the place, I’m not doing podcasts at all.
I don’t watch much TV either, Big Bang and the CBS evening news since the Democratic National Convention. We watched NBC before, but Andrea Mitchell’s lies about what I had just watched with my own eyes put me off those guys forever. And the old guys talking about how it was different, better, when they were in charge.
And Shit-Town? what the fuck kind of name is that? Where is it? Why would anyone care to immerse themselves in it? I can think of several towns I would call that, but not if I intended to attract an audience.
Smitty
Superior podcast! Excentricity, genius, paranoia, verbosity dripping with Faulknerian themes. Well worth your time, even if you don’t drive!
snarkyspice
@Caravelle: I didn’t feel the article was valid because I felt that the main subject of the podcast desperately wanted to be known for who he really was – that’s why he reached out in the first place. I felt he would have appreciated the way it was done and he would really have loved knowing how much interest there was in him
snarkyspice
@J R in WV: It’s call Shit-town because that’s what the subject of the podcast called it – always and to everyone. It seems to have done just fine attracting an audience ;-)
Davey C
I loved it and thought the latter episodes were superior to the earlier ones.