Transcript
Speaker: Music
Speaker: Bonjour and welcome to Sabet, the podcast about psychology, philosophy, and minor grievances which shall not stand.
Speaker: I'm Greg.
Speaker: This is Sophia.
Speaker: Salut.
Speaker: And what's this, two weeks in a row?
Speaker: I will explain what's up in just a second, but if you are a listener for whom this is your first episode of Sabet, how this show usually works is Sophia starts the show by introducing a topic that's been on her mind.
Speaker: She lays everything out, and then we spend some time talking through her ideas until we start circling the drain, and then we call it a show.
Speaker: Last week, against her better judgment, Sophia let me pick the rant.
Speaker: I had a grand old time, and now I've convinced her to let me do a little follow-up.
Speaker: Sophia, I have given you very little information about what we are going to be talking about today.
Speaker: This is true.
Speaker: How are you feeling about riding in the viola seat for the second week in a row?
Speaker: I'm kind of scared, but also very excited.
Speaker: Kind of like last week.
Speaker: Okay, well.
Speaker: You will recall, and keen listeners will recall, that our last show was about reacting to things and why that is an important concept in building relationships.
Speaker: And at the end of that show, as a parting gift, Sophia recommended the musician Still Woozy.
Speaker: You'll also recall that I had never listened to Still Woozy, so I made a solemn vow to dive in and report back.
Speaker: So we typically record our show on Fridays after work, before our weekends start.
Speaker: The Tuesday after we recorded that episode, I made tacos for dinner, Taco Tuesday.
Speaker: And the kids finished eating and started getting ready for bed, and I was cleaning up the kitchen.
Speaker: And I finally got around to putting Still Woozy on the kitchen speakers.
Speaker: So first, Sophia, I just want to give you the long story short.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Everything you said about Still Woozy in your recommendation last week was accurate.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And I was correct when I said, based on the words he used to describe his music, it was going to tick a lot of boxes for me.
Speaker: So I listened to probably 20 songs.
Speaker: And I didn't skip any.
Speaker: So, you know, really good, like I said.
Speaker: Trading Recommendations is one of the great joys in life.
Speaker: And you don't steer me wrong.
Speaker: So, gold star.
Speaker: Thank you, thank you.
Speaker: I'm glad you liked it.
Speaker: I feel like he's very loopable.
Speaker: Like even if you don't like his music, you can play 20 songs of his and don't realize it's like 20 songs later.
Speaker: So I'm glad it checked multiple boxes that you liked it and you could listen to it multiple times in a row.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: But, however, when I was listening...
Speaker: I was thinking about the fact that the way you described the music, I knew pretty much immediately that it was going to be a winner.
Speaker: And I was standing in my kitchen.
Speaker: The music was going.
Speaker: My brain started doing the thing that it does all the time where like the scraps of information I have floating around in there start kind of hodgepodge together.
Speaker: And that, you know, it's like that galaxy brain meme with the aliens guy from History Channel.
Speaker: Whatever.
Speaker: Anyway, I started like free journaling all this stuff as it was zipping by.
Speaker: I put the kids to bed and then I texted Sophia at like 11 that night and I was like, I'm pretty sure Still Woozy just gave me like a whole episode's worth of content.
Speaker: And Sophia is a real one.
Speaker: She texted back and I quote, let's wooze.
Speaker: I love that.
Speaker: I am going to take you on a walk through the still woozy rabbit hole I went down Tuesday night.
Speaker: And maybe we'll all come away with a better understanding of what the hell is wrong with me.
Speaker: So you ready for this?
Speaker: I am so ready.
Speaker: Buckle up.
Speaker: I could let you have it.
Speaker: Okay, first, when I think of my platonic ideal of a rabbit hole, I'm going to an internet show from the early 2010s called Scott Bromley's Internet Rabbit Hole.
Speaker: And that show was this guy, Scott Bromley, and he was a video games and pop culture guy.
Speaker: And he'd pick a topic to start with, say, Saturday morning cartoons.
Speaker: And he'd start talking about Saturday morning cartoons.
Speaker: And then he'd get to talking about animation.
Speaker: And that would lead him to looking up famous animators.
Speaker: And then he'd talk about animators, which would lead to, say...
Speaker: The History of Vellum Paper, right?
Speaker: And this would go on for like a half hour.
Speaker: And then by the end of the show, he'd be talking about the collapse of the Soviet Union and how He-Man was an allegory for Boris Yeltsin or whatever.
Speaker: Scott Bromley, my spirit animal.
Speaker: Scott Bromley was on Revision 3, which was an internet video collective that got started by the dude who founded Dig as a place for all these nerd culture shows.
Speaker: And nobody had figured out how to be their own essay channel yet.
Speaker: And G4 was a channel that was getting taken off the air.
Speaker: Anyway, they sold the company to Discovery Digital Networks, which is the same guy who came in and got at HBO.
Speaker: So long story short, that whole thing is no more.
Speaker: But in the meantime, I loved Revision 3.
Speaker: And they had a division called Rev3 Games.
Speaker: And Rev3 Games is awesome.
Speaker: They kind of found the spectrum between...
Speaker: classic old G4 shows where they were doing game reviews and interviews with developers and kind of news show stuff like that.
Speaker: But then since they had a studio and it's the internet so nobody was telling them something had to be 22 minutes long, they started doing pre-Twitch live streams where they'd hang out after hours and do couch co-op games or they'd do an interview that would go two hours, like proto-podcast stuff.
Speaker: It was kind of a bridge to what we've turned into a science now.
Speaker: One of the hosts I really liked on that channel was a guy named Anthony Carboni.
Speaker: And besides doing some of the better interviews on Rev3, he also hosted science shows on the discovery side of things.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So he was hitting multiple points of interest for me.
Speaker: And I'd watch like five shows a week that he was in.
Speaker: So when that whole channel imploded, I followed him over to his next project, which was a science podcast called We Have Concerns, which I think I've talked about on here.
Speaker: It's still going.
Speaker: It's a show where he and his co-host start each episode with a science news topic, and then they find a way to riff on it and do little improv bits about the people in the story.
Speaker: It's like this American life meets upright citizens brigade.
Speaker: It's great.
Speaker: So I like Anthony Carboni.
Speaker: His co-host on We Have Concerns is Jeff Cannata.
Speaker: Jeff Cannata is on a ton of shows.
Speaker: He's a very prolific podcaster.
Speaker: And his video game show is called DLC, which I also listen to every week.
Speaker: And when we started this podcast, I stole the parting gift segment from that show because, as we've established, sharing recommendations makes my brain go nuts.
Speaker: Um, but Rev3 Games.
Speaker: One of the things I loved about that channel at the time is they use these chiptune artists to score all their segments.
Speaker: Um, and I'm sure this is me being a little bit behind the times, but like this was before there was such a thing as chill study mix as a concept.
Speaker: So it was new to me.
Speaker: One artist that came up a lot was a guy named Bill Kiley.
Speaker: And he has since done a bunch of fairly high profile, like indie game soundtracks.
Speaker: But at the time, he had an album called Your Soundtrack for Becoming Invisible in a Crowd of Strange People.
Speaker: And it's a mix of like lo-fi hip hop, classical piano, chiptunes,
Speaker: And it's not quite what Still Woozy is doing.
Speaker: But if you listen to him back to back, I mean, you could put him on the same playlist and you're not going to get any weird looks, right?
Speaker: So like the DNA is there.
Speaker: So that got me thinking about lo-fi hip hop.
Speaker: And you can't go too far into that rabbit hole without running into J Dilla.
Speaker: Safiya, have you ever heard of J Dilla?
Speaker: Yes, I've heard of him, but I can't think of the song that I know of his.
Speaker: Or maybe someone name dropped him, but I've definitely heard his name.
Speaker: I'm sure he gets name dropped a lot.
Speaker: So he kind of bridged the sound and feel of East Coast hip hop from the late 90s to the early 2000s.
Speaker: So if you think of what that sound was like before J Dilla, you can maybe picture like a turntable is taking a drum sample and looping it, right?
Speaker: Well, if you do that, you have a really consistent beat.
Speaker: And sometimes it's called boom bap because you have this really defined kick snare loop.
Speaker: And to go back to our conversation about drumming, you can go down the list of high profile hip hop at that period.
Speaker: And it all has that really rigid one in three beat.
Speaker: Don't call it a comeback beat.
Speaker: Right?
Speaker: So pretty classic.
Speaker: So J. Dilla was known for using a specific sampler called the Akai MPC-3000.
Speaker: And Vox did a documentary about it that's really cool called How J. Dilla Humanized His MPC-3000.
Speaker: It's kind of on the nose, but...
Speaker: Anyway, to be at least a little bit short, basically a sampler like that, it has a bunch of programmable buttons that are touch sensitive.
Speaker: So you can hit them loud or soft and you can load them with the sound you want.
Speaker: So say you have a section of eight buttons that are all the parts of a drum kit.
Speaker: So you have a snare, you have a kick drum, you have cymbals, and then you can set up sequences so it plays a drum beat.
Speaker: You can lay bass or piano or whatever over the top and you can kind of create a whole song on the fly and tweak it.
Speaker: And that was kind of the evolution from turntable sampling to something more sophisticated.
Speaker: And that's what every hip hop producer has as a tool.
Speaker: Well, one of the features of the MPC-3000 is it has a thing called quantizing.
Speaker: And quantizing is like a little mistake fixer.
Speaker: So say a song is 90 beats per minute, which is the one that we just listened to.
Speaker: You can put that in so the machine is keeping track of how fast everything is supposed to be hitting.
Speaker: And if you're playing a drum beat and you're human and you're not playing it absolutely perfect on the beat, it'll kind of snap all the things that you're doing to the beat.
Speaker: So if you push a snare button a fraction of a second too early, it'll kind of slide it to where it's supposed to be.
Speaker: It's like a drum auto-tune.
Speaker: So producers of pretty much all genres kind of rely on that feature when you're recording nowadays.
Speaker: And you hear old people complain about how music doesn't have the same feeling as it used to.
Speaker: And usually when they're saying that, they're referring to quantizing and how everything is kind of gridded.
Speaker: Well, what made J. Dilla special, you're a band kid, so you know the idea of rubato in music.
Speaker: True.
Speaker: Right?
Speaker: So it's flexible beats.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So you're staying on time, but you're like borrowing an eighth note from one part of the measure and a sixteenth note from another part of the measure.
Speaker: And you're kind of smearing the drum figure around to make it feel loose and weird.
Speaker: Right?
Speaker: Well...
Speaker: When Jay Dillard would make a track, he would go into the system and he'd turn quantizing off or he'd turn it way down.
Speaker: And he'd take all the guardrails off that were built into the sequencer and he'd play freehand.
Speaker: So all of his songs are kind of sloppy and he would like miss a snare hit and he wouldn't go back and fix it.
Speaker: And it made all his stuff feel different from what was going on at the time and like weird.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And it's in tension with all the other instruments and the flow of the rap over the top.
Speaker: And basically it's all the things that make lo-fi study mix feel good, right?
Speaker: But like handcrafted.
Speaker: So anyway, that documentary is good.
Speaker: And J. Dilla is great.
Speaker: And that's another part of what makes the DNA of Still Boozy click with me.
Speaker: which got me to a tangent.
Speaker: One of my favorite albums of all time turned 30 this year, and it's the self-titled debut of G-Love and Special Sauce.
Speaker: And they are a live three-piece blues hip-hop band.
Speaker: And just by the nature of a live band doing hip-hop, they're always pushing and pulling against the tempo all the time.
Speaker: And G-Love, the lead singer, guitar player, he plays his guitar with a lot of reverb and wide-open big seven chords.
Speaker: And he has this really slurry delivery and a thick mid-Atlantic accent.
Speaker: Um, and they have this upright bass player, which, you know, I like, um, and he plays a lot of vibrato and slides and chromatic stuff.
Speaker: So again, it feels kind of drunk and slurry.
Speaker: And then their drummer, uh, Jeff Clemens has this detuned snare.
Speaker: So instead of it sounding like a pop, when he hits it, it kind of makes this pong sound and he hits it hard.
Speaker: And he's like,
Speaker: finding the space in the groove of these other two guys who are making this really messy sound cloud over the top of them.
Speaker: It always kind of feels like they're almost veering out of control.
Speaker: Anyway, you should listen to the album and you should drum to the song Garbage Man because I think you'd have fun with the feel of it.
Speaker: It's very funky, the beats.
Speaker: We're getting there.
Speaker: And I think you're seeing a theme here.
Speaker: But that was a tangent.
Speaker: So now we're back to lo-fi hip-hop and SoundCloud DNA in Still Woozie.
Speaker: And that made me think about Casey Neistat.
Speaker: Did you ever watch Casey Neistat?
Speaker: I've heard him mentioned so many times, but I've never watched his videos.
Speaker: He's so famous.
Speaker: He's very famous.
Speaker: And he is famous because he kind of defined the vocabulary of vlogging, right?
Speaker: Like getting brand deals, travel vlogs, running around New York City.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: One of his trademarks was pulling SoundCloud musicians into the soundtracks of his videos.
Speaker: And the video I thought of when I was thinking about this was a pre-vlog thing he did called Surprise in South Africa, where his girlfriend at the time, now his wife, was visiting her family in South Africa, and he decided he was going to max out a credit card to go see her.
Speaker: And the video is about getting himself to South Africa and trying to find where her family lives without letting her know he's coming because he doesn't know where they live.
Speaker: It's a really sweet video.
Speaker: But the song in that video, which I teased a little bit, is by an Australian artist named Yukio.
Speaker: And the song is called Love.
Speaker: And that song reminds me of Goody Bag by Still Woozy.
Speaker: I was going to say it sounds very, very woozy.
Speaker: And see, we made it back around still woozy.
Speaker: And the first song that comes up to him, like for him in Amazon music is Anyone But You.
Speaker: You got me.
Speaker: which I have to ask, Sophia, did the fact that this song is in the soundtrack for a very popular rom-com play into your rediscovering Still Woozy last week?
Speaker: Actually, no.
Speaker: I think he came up on one of my playlists or on Shuffle, and then I looked at his music or his page again, and I saw he released a new song from that movie, which I haven't seen, but I've seen a lot of things about it, like a lot of discourse, so I listened to it, and I really like the song, but I was just glad he released the music.
Speaker: Not that it would have diminished anything if that had been the case, but I was curious.
Speaker: Well, the fact that Still Woozy had the title track and a movie soundtrack then got me to thinking about another movie soundtrack.
Speaker: And that movie was Juno, which is the, the Elliot Page, Michael Cera, Diablo coding movie about a girl getting pregnant.
Speaker: Uh,
Speaker: And the breakout song from that movie was the song Anyone Else by the Moldy Peaches, which was not written for the movie, but I would say exponentially more people know about it from Juno than from anything else.
Speaker: This reminds me, th is is so random, sorry not to interrupt.
Speaker: It reminds me of the band The Front Bottoms, just like the lyricism is so straightforward that it reminds me of that band.
Speaker: I like it.
Speaker: Well, yes, so a lot of similarities to them and also a lot of similarities between anyone but you and anyone else, like besides the words in the title.
Speaker: And The Front Bottoms and The Moldy Peaches are both in a movement called the anti-folk movement.
Speaker: which means they take folk music and they kind of lean into straightforward, silly lyrics and amateur production and instrumentation.
Speaker: I think you're starting to see the theme here.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Then it just so happened that my Amazon music glitched.
Speaker: And every still woozy song that played, it showed everyone but you as the album or anyone but you as the album, which then I learned that it's only that one song that's on the soundtrack.
Speaker: But that led me down the rabbit hole of soundtracks that are by one musician.
Speaker: Like Prince did the whole Batman soundtrack.
Speaker: Randy Newman did the whole Toy Story soundtrack.
Speaker: And to bring it back around to another thing we talked about last week, Jack Johnson did the whole Curious George movie soundtrack.
Speaker: This sounds like him.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: All you Curious George heads probably thought I was going to play a different one.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Anyway, the song that I played was when the show came out on PBS, they switched to Dr. John, and it's all piano and New Orleans jazz.
Speaker: Which we could talk about how much of a...
Speaker: how much of a shift PBS has had in the type of shows that they have.
Speaker: When I was a kid, it was like Barney.
Speaker: And now they have these banger music songs.
Speaker: As far as theme songs or Peg Plus Cat, that whole show is like a ukulele musical.
Speaker: Interesting.
Speaker: There's Peep in the Big Wide World, which all the music is by Taj Mahal, who's a famous blues musician.
Speaker: He did the song She Caught the Katie, which is the opening song for the movie The Blues Brothers.
Speaker: She caught the Katie, left me anew.
Speaker: which is one of my favorite movies and one of the greatest musicals of all time, which I will fight you on that.
Speaker: But anyway, Taj Mahal is from Hawaii, which is where Jack Johnson is from, which brings me back to Jack Johnson, which brings me to when he did the show Last Call with Carson Daly, which was like in the James Corden time slot.
Speaker: And instead of having two guests in a band, he would have one guest and the band would do three songs in an interview.
Speaker: And on that show, he did a set with Ben Harper, and they did a cover of Bob Marley's High Tide or Low Tide.
Speaker: In high tide or in low tide, I'll be by your side.
Speaker: And great cover.
Speaker: Ben Harper plays a Weisenborn lap steel guitar, sings that pretty falsetto.
Speaker: Anyway, it's great.
Speaker: During the interview, they're talking about wanting to collaborate on something and they throw it offhanded that they could do a kid's album.
Speaker: And that show was on NBC, which is the same company as Universal, which made the Curious George movie.
Speaker: So evidently someone was listening and thought that was a good idea.
Speaker: Anyway, one of the other bands that was on last call was The Format.
Speaker: And they did a song called Ape Man by The Kinks.
Speaker: I'm an ape man.
Speaker: I'm an ape big man.
Speaker: No, I'm an ape man.
Speaker: I'm a King Kong man.
Speaker: I'm a foodie man.
Speaker: No, I'm an ape man.
Speaker: And we talked last week about how the format was my favorite band.
Speaker: And they broke up and their singer Nate went off and started the band Fun.
Speaker: Well, the other guy in that band, Sam Means, started an anti-folk band with the guys from Limbeck, which is an alt-country band from that scene.
Speaker: And their album, High Everything's Great, is one of my favorite records.
Speaker: Julia is so smart.
Speaker: I'm here.
Speaker: Yeah, Julia is so smart.
Speaker: She used to be a goth kid.
Speaker: Anyway, Nate Witten did fun.
Speaker: Sam Witten did an entire soundtrack for an indie movie called The Sinking of Santa Isabel.
Speaker: And one of the songs on that album is called Yeah, Yeah.
Speaker: which I thought of that song when I heard the song Pool by Still Losey.
Speaker: I like that song.
Speaker: One of the things that ties Jack Johnson and Sam Means and Ben Harper together is they have very cool and very distinct acoustic guitars.
Speaker: Ben, like I said, plays all these old wise and born slide guitars, which he started collecting because you can find them for dirt cheap because nobody wanted them.
Speaker: And I've always liked the idea of finding a niche guitar that is cool and good, but not like a halo instrument that you need to be worried about ruining, you know?
Speaker: Conversely, Sam Means plays an old Gibson Texan, which is a super cool guitar.
Speaker: It has electric guitar pickups in it.
Speaker: The Beatles played them.
Speaker: You can't really afford them unless you either inherit them or you went to dental school.
Speaker: By the time he was on Carson Daly, Jack Johnson was playing Cole Clark guitars, which are high-end Australian guitars.
Speaker: But when he toured his first album, he played an old Guild Dreadnought.
Speaker: Old Guilds are awesome.
Speaker: Another musician who plays old Guild guitars is Ryan Adams.
Speaker: And his probably most famous guitar is a 70s Guild D25, which is like a mahogany bluegrass guitar.
Speaker: And one day I was in Twin Town Guitars, which is a music shop in Minneapolis.
Speaker: It's where Sophia learned how to play drums.
Speaker: And they had this 1973 Guild D25 hanging on the wall.
Speaker: Which, audio medium, so if you're listening, you can't see.
Speaker: But I have the guitar here.
Speaker: Sophia can see it.
Speaker: I sold two bikes to pay for it.
Speaker: But this thing is everything I hoped it'd be.
Speaker: I play in D standard, which is a step lower than a normal guitar.
Speaker: But like...
Speaker: Sounds really nice.
Speaker: It holds tune really well.
Speaker: It's really warm and it's all beat up.
Speaker: Like it has this arched violin back that somebody must have had a big old cowboy buckle on their belt.
Speaker: So it's got these big buckle rash spots.
Speaker: And the neck has these places where you can tell they played the same chords over and over again.
Speaker: So there's these thumb prints worn into the side.
Speaker: This thing is 50 years old.
Speaker: If you ever find one, you should just buy it because these are great guitars.
Speaker: Anyway, Ryan Adams, that's the guitar that he plays.
Speaker: And he did an entire album cover of 1989 by Taylor Swift.
Speaker: And it's like if 1989 was recorded like folklore, like super sparse instruments slowed down, but like way before that album came out.
Speaker: And like not all the songs work.
Speaker: Like Shake It Off needs to be a bop.
Speaker: And this version is not a bop.
Speaker: but his cover of Bad Blood is really good.
Speaker: Last week we talked about Alex Melton doing country ballad covers of punk songs, and this kind of scratches that same itch.
Speaker: Nice.
Speaker: And that, as this show has taught us it always does, brings us back to Taylor Swift.
Speaker: Did you know, dear listener, that the theme song for this podcast, which is the French National Anthem, although the first place I heard it was as Glass Joe's intro and Mike Tyson's Punch Out.
Speaker: He has the French National Anthem as his intro song?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: He's French.
Speaker: Oh, he's French.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: The character is French, so it makes sense.
Speaker: Oh, I thought this was a real person.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: No, no, no.
Speaker: He's a video game character.
Speaker: It all makes sense.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: The French are real people.
Speaker: Oh, that's crazy.
Speaker: We're not just controversial.
Speaker: But anyway, so our version of that puts a little bit of Taylor Swift in every episode because I pulled instrument stems from a cover of 22 by Taylor Swift and I stirred that into the song.
Speaker: And you haven't stopped me from putting it in the beginning and the end of the podcast yet.
Speaker: So Taylor Swift is in every episode we do.
Speaker: Which that got me to another tangent.
Speaker: And actually, this is going to be my small rant, but I'm going to put it in the middle of my big rant.
Speaker: And I promise this comes back later for the big rant.
Speaker: Music copyright lawsuits are out of control.
Speaker: There is a long history of mashing old riffs and quoting other musicians.
Speaker: And that's like the foundation of pop music.
Speaker: Like every blue song is the same three chords.
Speaker: And an example that makes me mad is Olivia Rodrigo had to give songwriting rights to Paramore because Good For You sounds like misery business, which is stupid.
Speaker: Literally, you said that?
Speaker: Yeah, you said that, and that was the first thing I was thinking of.
Speaker: Now, I will grant, both songs are in F minor, and they both have an E, G, D, A chord progression.
Speaker: I love that song.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But that does seem pretty damning.
Speaker: Except, that's how scales work.
Speaker: Right?
Speaker: Olivia Rodrigo and Hayley Williams have similar vocal ranges.
Speaker: So, of course, they're going to play in a key that fits their voice.
Speaker: And if you play in F minor, E, G, D, A is like the most basic punk chord progression.
Speaker: Right?
Speaker: Like, there's only seven notes in a scale.
Speaker: That's just the option.
Speaker: You know another song that's in F minor and uses E, G, D, A chord progression?
Speaker: Taylor Swift?
Speaker: Boulevard of Broken Dreams by Green Day.
Speaker: And the melody of Good For You is way more similar to that song.
Speaker: So if anything, Green Day should be making songwriting royalties.
Speaker: But that would be stupid because then they'd have to pay royalties to Tears for Fears because Mad World is E-G-D-A.
Speaker: You know what else is EGDA?
Speaker: Sexual healing.
Speaker: Sexual healing.
Speaker: It makes me feel so fine.
Speaker: By the way, that's a Ben Harper cover from Bonnaroo.
Speaker: You know what else is EGDA?
Speaker: Today is gonna be the day that they're gonna throw it back to you.
Speaker: By now, you should have somehow realized what you gotta do.
Speaker: You know what else is E-G-D-A?
Speaker: You and me, baby, ain't nothing but mammals, so let's do it like they do on the Discovery Channel.
Speaker: You and me, baby, ain't nothing but mammals, so let's do it like they do on the Discovery Channel.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: It's so stupid.
Speaker: Record companies doing these lawsuits should be ashamed of themselves.
Speaker: End of rant.
Speaker: Okay, so let's bring this back around to Happy Talk.
Speaker: My absolute favorite song that gets sampled all the time is I Want You Back by The Jackson 5.
Speaker: Oh, baby, baby.
Speaker: But let's make this a little bit more French.
Speaker: So there is a French music variety show called, and I don't know, my pronunciation is terrible, Territata.
Speaker: Anyway, KT Tunstall did a cover of I Want You Back on that show that is just like chef's kiss.
Speaker: When I had you too much to, didn't want you around.
Speaker: Pretty faces always make you stand out in the crowd.
Speaker: And I don't know if you can hear it in that clip, but her whole thing is she does live looping on an old Akai head rush pedal, which is basically a super stripped down version of the Akai MPC 3000 that Jay Dilley uses.
Speaker: Except it only lets you do one sample at a time, and that sample can only be 12 seconds long at the most.
Speaker: But you can record over the top of it as many times as you want.
Speaker: Anyway, the way she uses that basic tool to do the song is like masterclass.
Speaker: So much so that I saw that performance in 2005, and I went out and bought a head rush, and that's how I taught myself to play with myself.
Speaker: So I Want You Back has this turnaround at the end of each chord progression, and it goes...
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: OK.
Speaker: So if you do just the first three chords in that little section, so.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: If you do that and you loop it over and over again.
Speaker: You get jumped by crisscross.
Speaker: Sorry, I like that song.
Speaker: Anyway.
Speaker: I hear it.
Speaker: So that's great, which is cool.
Speaker: But then check this out.
Speaker: If you add the next two chords of that section, so basically if you finish that turnaround off, so it's.
Speaker: So anyway, if you just do that part.
Speaker: and you loop that over and over again, you get Hova by Jay-Z.
Speaker: And I love that song.
Speaker: What a lot of people don't know is the producer on that song is Kanye West.
Speaker: That was his first big break.
Speaker: And from producing that song, that gave him the clout and the money to record his first album, which is College Dropout.
Speaker: And my favorite song on that album, Kanye samples a rough vocal line from Lauryn Hill's Unplugged Concerts.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: And he pitches it up and he grids it and he turns it into this.
Speaker: So for all the garbage Kanye has brought into the world,
Speaker: that the chipmunk soul sound was kind of his trademark on those early albums.
Speaker: And that trick of taking an old folky acoustic song and turning it into a hook is how 10 years later, you get a nerdy white guy taking an old Irish folk song like this.
Speaker: Do you recognize that vocal line?
Speaker: I don't think so, actually.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: How about now?
Speaker: It's Passion Pit.
Speaker: Oh, so close.
Speaker: But without Kanye, I'm not sure if we get a band like Passion Pit.
Speaker: And without bands like Passion Pit, you wouldn't have Stowoozy.
Speaker: How much longer will you keep me on your train?
Speaker: I think of all the Still Woozy songs I've listened to so far, that's my favorite one.
Speaker: Me too, actually.
Speaker: Really?
Speaker: Nice.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So what I love about this podcast is every time we talk about something, I get to spend the next week going down rabbit holes like this.
Speaker: And that makes me very happy.
Speaker: So long story long, Still Woozy is great.
Speaker: Thanks for sharing.
Speaker: Yay.
Speaker: I loved that peek into your brain.
Speaker: If you did that like all freehand, like you just thought of that and then you thought of it again just now while you were ranting, I would have been really impressed.
Speaker: I mean, I did.
Speaker: Really?
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: I mean, I pulled the clips, but no.
Speaker: So pull the curtain back.
Speaker: Before we started recording, I texted Sophia the notepad that I took on my phone.
Speaker: that had all like as I was just sitting there thinking about this stuff I was just writing that stuff down but that that was note for note and that's what I was looking at just to remember the rabbit hole that I went down but yeah that that's how my brain works pure stream consciousness honestly actually same because when I'm ranting I also think I do the same thing where I just have words and then my thoughts come out so it's more organic that way I guess but yeah
Speaker: That was very interesting.
Speaker: Thank you.
Speaker: I feel like when I'm listening to music and also like when we talk, because we often talk about music, you always like, or not always, but you like recommend me a song.
Speaker: And then I think of another song that sounds like it.
Speaker: And then you think of another song that sounds like it.
Speaker: And that's like kind of like 90% of our conversations.
Speaker: But I never think of like why it sounds like this.
Speaker: Like in my mind, I just have like a repository of music that I've ever listened to because I always listen to music.
Speaker: But I don't think about like the theory or the chord progressions in it or like why someone's doing something like another artist.
Speaker: I'm kind of just like, oh, this reminds me of this.
Speaker: And it just makes me think of how like, kind of like you were saying in your small rant that...
Speaker: you know, it's hard to come up with something original now.
Speaker: Like what is originality even?
Speaker: Like you're going to be inspired by someone.
Speaker: Someone's going to want to sample another piece of music.
Speaker: Someone's going to like take something from someone else and like make it their own.
Speaker: But I feel like it's so hard to like be original nowadays, which is fine.
Speaker: I think as long as you're making.
Speaker: I think originality is in the eye of the beholder, right?
Speaker: Like if you go back far enough and like I said, you know, a
Speaker: a scale only has eight notes in it.
Speaker: So there's only so much that you can do.
Speaker: You're going to bump into stuff and you're always going to be influenced by things.
Speaker: And I was just kind of what made me want to talk about this is it, for me, it works on both sides.
Speaker: On the one side, I like to think about how different things influence the others, but then on the side of listening to things and on the side of going down a rabbit hole, it's interesting to think about
Speaker: why I like stuff.
Speaker: And it is, I think, usually because I think both of us listen to a lot of stuff.
Speaker: And that means that we have this big back catalog of things that we like and our tastes have kind of shaped over the years.
Speaker: And if you find something that hits, it's usually because there's, what did I put down?
Speaker: 38 songs off of one.
Speaker: And like that was like, I don't know, I didn't have to think about that very hard.
Speaker: Like it was a lot of things, but it was just, it was all right there.
Speaker: It just kept coming.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: What's impressive is that it keeps coming though.
Speaker: Because I feel like it would be easy to forget things that I've listened to when I was like 10.
Speaker: And yet sometimes I'm listening to a song and I'm like, this reminds me of something I listened to in my pop punk phase.
Speaker: You know, like how does that happen?
Speaker: I mean, I don't know the real answer, but I've heard basically as far as memories go, the more senses and memory triggers, the more likely it is that you're going to remember it.
Speaker: So like music really hits it because you remember the song.
Speaker: So you have the sound part, but then if it has lyrics that you like, you're also remembering...
Speaker: the words and not in a different way.
Speaker: You're thinking about them not as what the sing song is, but what the actual words are.
Speaker: So that's triggering two different senses.
Speaker: And then usually you're tying it to like a time and place.
Speaker: So like riding in the car with somebody or going to a concert or something like that.
Speaker: And so it's a really, really strong sense memory.
Speaker: And so you think about this stuff forever.
Speaker: Interesting.
Speaker: I guess I have a strong sense memory with every song I've listened to because it's very easy for me to go down.
Speaker: rabbit holes as well but I feel like I mean I don't have a lot to counter rant about because I feel like that was that was like the whole episode basically was just the history I'm still boozy but it was a lot no I mean I liked it but when I'm thinking of like a response to that I mean really I go down rabbit holes all the time and not just like for music also like
Speaker: For culture, for languages, like realizing that like, I mean, I guess I can like bring up the example of like French, the whole show name is in French.
Speaker: I took French in high school, I learned it for like four years.
Speaker: And I would say, that was the first language that I've like had to learn, like,
Speaker: like put effort into learning.
Speaker: So whenever I learn another language, I view it through the lens of French.
Speaker: Like when I was learning Spanish, for example, like I would, my brain would like, someone would ask me something in Spanish and my brain would like make connections with French.
Speaker: And then I would think in French and respond to them in French, even though they were clearly not speaking French to me.
Speaker: And I was like, why am I doing this?
Speaker: And now I'm, yeah.
Speaker: Oh, no.
Speaker: I mean, I didn't really have anything to say or like,
Speaker: anything deep to say about that.
Speaker: It was just like reminding, it reminded me when you were talking about like things that make connections.
Speaker: I was like, I think I just do that in my day-to-day life.
Speaker: And I don't know why.
Speaker: but I do.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So when you were learning French, did, um, did you do that same thing, but with English?
Speaker: Cause when I was learning Spanish, that was the hardest thing was the processing time of hearing something in Spanish, processing into English, processing what I wanted to say in English to Spanish and then responding.
Speaker: And then eventually you get fluent enough that you think in Spanish when you're in that mode.
Speaker: I was wondering, so you learn French first.
Speaker: You got to that point, I assume, or at least to some extent.
Speaker: So then you're learning Spanish on top of it.
Speaker: Was it even one step further where it was you translated to French, you translated to English, you translated to French, you translated to Spanish?
Speaker: Or was it just French, Spanish?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: That's actually true.
Speaker: I think I was like in my mind translating it to French and then to English.
Speaker: And then for some reason I went back to French and then Spanish.
Speaker: I don't know why, but it's like, it's like that connection, you know?
Speaker: I don't know if that even makes sense, but.
Speaker: I think so.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It makes you appreciate somebody who is speaking a language you know really well, like English, when it is not the first language.
Speaker: Oh, definitely.
Speaker: How much brain energy it takes to just stay in a conversation with someone.
Speaker: Definitely.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I was doing this the other day, actually, where...
Speaker: I mean, this is a whole tangent at this point.
Speaker: But yeah, where I was struggling to understand something in English, even though someone said it to me multiple times.
Speaker: And I was like, I feel like I'm learning a new language.
Speaker: And I don't even know why it took me so long to process this.
Speaker: But I was like, for some reason, it took me so long to figure out what they were saying.
Speaker: So it definitely makes me sympathize.
Speaker: I mean, sometimes that happens to me in English.
Speaker: I don't even, yeah.
Speaker: Processing is hard.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But...
Speaker: Rabbicles are easy.
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: Maybe they are.
Speaker: For me anyway.
Speaker: For me too.
Speaker: I feel like it's easier for me to just think of something that reminds me of something else instead of come up with an original thought about it, I guess.
Speaker: But again, I think original thoughts are only original if you don't think about it too hard.
Speaker: That's true.
Speaker: What is originality?
Speaker: It's all subjective.
Speaker: It's coming from somewhere.
Speaker: And whether you're inspired by another piece of music or if it's whatever song your mom sang when you were a kid or something like that, there's going to be something there.
Speaker: That's nice, though.
Speaker: I feel like everything in the world is connected in some way.
Speaker: Or at least your memories are connected.
Speaker: Your life has a grand arch, I guess.
Speaker: It's cool to think.
Speaker: And you're standing on shoulders of rabbits.
Speaker: The hole is right there.
Speaker: So this is a section of the show where after our big rant of the day, we like to just bring up something, a small grievance, a small something that's been itching at the back of our head just to get it out before we get together next time.
Speaker: Like I said, I snuck mine into my big rant talking about...
Speaker: music copyright lawsuits.
Speaker: So I will see the floor.
Speaker: And Sophia, what is your small rant today?
Speaker: Yeah, I was trying to think of what to rant about because I'm not particularly angry about anything right now.
Speaker: I mean, I guess it doesn't have to be anything like negative, but with the theme of your like rabbit hole, like connections and stuff like that, this isn't a rant, but it's a realization that I had.
Speaker: I made
Speaker: Greek lasagna the other day.
Speaker: I made it for you, your family once, masaka.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And I accidentally bought too many ingredients.
Speaker: So we all had, we had that dish once and then I had a bunch of leftover like eggplants and zucchini.
Speaker: And I was like, what should I make with this?
Speaker: Because I don't want to make masaka again.
Speaker: Like that's too much.
Speaker: And then I like had the realization that masaka is basically the same as ratatouille.
Speaker: Like the ingredients are the exact same.
Speaker: It's just, you know,
Speaker: eggplants, zucchini, tomatoes, potatoes.
Speaker: It's like basically the same thing, but remixed.
Speaker: And then I was like, oh.
Speaker: And I feel like this combination of eggplant, zucchini, tomatoes, et cetera, is very common in like the Mediterranean, Italian food, Greek food, Turkish food, Southern French food.
Speaker: Like there's so many dishes that involve like those similar ingredients.
Speaker: And when I'm learning things like,
Speaker: For example, my boyfriend is Turkish, so what I'm learning is about his cuisine and the food that he eats.
Speaker: I'm like, wait, is this what Turkish cuisine is?
Speaker: Because, I mean, for the most part, growing up, all I knew about Turkish food was kebabs and stuff.
Speaker: But then when I started eating more food that was more home-cooked and domestic vibes, I realized that a lot of it has similarities to Mediterranean, Southern European foods.
Speaker: It's just...
Speaker: I think it's just like history, just a lot of migration and a lot of overlap between the cultures in general.
Speaker: But like, I went down the rabbit hole this week of basically international cuisine and how similar they are.
Speaker: And this goes with a lot of things, I think also like, like Asian food in general, like Malaysian food.
Speaker: A lot of it is like influence from Indian food or Chinese food.
Speaker: And we call it a name of Malay.
Speaker: but it's actually like it originated in China, for example, or it originated in India.
Speaker: So it's cool to see like, kind of like how I was mentioning earlier, like how the world is connected, how many ideas are like influenced by other people and everyone has like their own spit on it.
Speaker: So that was my rabbit hole of the week that your rabbit hole rant reminded me of, but just like in a different context.
Speaker: So what are the, what are the three ingredients?
Speaker: Eggplant,
Speaker: Zucchini and tomato paste, I would say are very Mediterranean.
Speaker: Got it.
Speaker: I'm just thinking of like mirepoix, right?
Speaker: Like you have your Holy Trinity that you put in pretty much every dish in French cuisine.
Speaker: So it's interesting that Greek food and the variants of it have a different mirepoix almost.
Speaker: Like that's the base and then you build on top of that.
Speaker: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker: I thought it was interesting too.
Speaker: What was I going to say?
Speaker: My brain is dying.
Speaker: But yeah, apparently Greek food and Turkish food are very similar.
Speaker: So they have those similar ingredients of tomato paste, Greek yogurt, et cetera.
Speaker: So it's just cool to see how cultures just have the three things that you like.
Speaker: Malaysian food, too.
Speaker: My mom, when she's teaching me how to cook, she always teaches me about the three friends, she calls them, which are the three spices that you use in every dish.
Speaker: And I'm like, wow.
Speaker: It doesn't take a lot.
Speaker: What are the three friends in Malaysian cooking?
Speaker: Oh, it's like star anise, cloves, and a cinnamon stick.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: I can see that.
Speaker: The limited... It's spicy.
Speaker: It's like... What is it called?
Speaker: Like when you're drinking a mulled cider, like that kind of spice.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Spicy like spiced wine, not spicy like hot, hot, hot.
Speaker: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker: Like you can make it hot, but it's like that kind of back end spice.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: But again, it's like you can be really creative with cooking.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But as you know, when you're learning a type of food, you have that underpinning that you use to give to make it feel Malaysian or to make it feel French or to make it feel Greek.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: Like when I'm cooking.
Speaker: Oh, sorry.
Speaker: No, I was going to say like music.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: You have your chord progressions that make it feel like punk or make it feel like Oasis.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: But there's always like the base of like oil and aromatics.
Speaker: Like you got to have that.
Speaker: But it's different for everyone.
Speaker: I just think it's interesting.
Speaker: Because whenever I cook something that's just like garlic and oil, I'm like, this isn't authentic.
Speaker: But then I'm like, it is authentic.
Speaker: Like you have to start from this and then build off of it.
Speaker: Like there's a starting point somewhere.
Speaker: And it's the same for a lot of different things, I guess.
Speaker: Music
Speaker: Well, this is the, okay, wait, I'm starting over.
Speaker: This is the section of the podcast where we start sharing things that we like for you to hopefully listen to or read or partake in.
Speaker: As we mentioned at the beginning, as Greg mentioned at the beginning, I think an important part of being a person is sharing the things that you like.
Speaker: So that's what we're trying to do here.
Speaker: I will go first, I suppose.
Speaker: The only thing I have to recommend is not even a new recommendation.
Speaker: I feel like my recommendations aren't really that new anyway, but I'm reading a book.
Speaker: It's called The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell.
Speaker: I think everyone has heard of this book at this point, but I haven't read it until now because someone gave it to me.
Speaker: But I've heard of Malcolm Gladwell because he has a podcast himself called Revisionist History, which I enjoy.
Speaker: But I've never read his books.
Speaker: So I started reading this and I read it after I read another book called...
Speaker: in a similar vein called Big Bets, which is about, um,
Speaker: I actually do not know what foundation he's part of.
Speaker: I think it's the Ford Foundation.
Speaker: He's like head of one of the nonprofit philanthropic development foundations.
Speaker: And he writes about like his life, what he's done and how he got to be in the position he's in.
Speaker: That was also a gift, but I read it and I was like, okay, this is a good book.
Speaker: It's very interesting to see his perspectives and the things that he's done.
Speaker: And then after I read it, someone recommended me this book.
Speaker: Because it's kind of like in a similar vein of like storytelling to basically tell a point.
Speaker: And I'm not really like a self-help book kind of person.
Speaker: Like I don't really like those kinds of books.
Speaker: But I tried reading it.
Speaker: Not really having many expectations about it.
Speaker: But he's actually a very good writer.
Speaker: Like a very good storyteller.
Speaker: Like the way that he explains things.
Speaker: He like discusses it like in the lens of like...
Speaker: a story that happened before like crime in New York, for example, or like how Sesame Street got popular.
Speaker: And then he uses that as an example to talk about like a greater point about how things are influenced in society, for example.
Speaker: But anyway, I've been reading it and I find it really interesting.
Speaker: And I talk about it like at least once a day because the things that he says are very thought provoking.
Speaker: And it kind of reminds me of this podcast also in the way that he like randomly has these thoughts.
Speaker: I'm like, oh, this guy, this guy is thinking about these things.
Speaker: So I really like his book, The Tipping Point.
Speaker: I think he has other books and anything that he writes or like talks about, I feel like is very interesting to read or listen to.
Speaker: So recommending him.
Speaker: I will have to download that to my Kindle.
Speaker: I would recommend.
Speaker: I feel like I've seen and read so many things that are exerting that, you know, and like taking pieces of it and doing their own little think piece or whatever.
Speaker: But I've never actually read the book.
Speaker: I hadn't either, but it exceeded my expectations.
Speaker: So maybe it would exceed yours.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: I have pretty high expectations for Malcolm Gladwell, but I'm sure he'll be good.
Speaker: Really?
Speaker: Because, I mean, he just has a reputation as being real smart and a really good writer.
Speaker: I guess that's true.
Speaker: Honestly, I met my expectations, though.
Speaker: I was like, oh, he is smart and a good writer.
Speaker: But I have low expectations in general.
Speaker: If you're going with low expectations, you'll rarely be disappointed.
Speaker: Fair.
Speaker: Well, my parting gift is a little bit of a cop-out, but I'm going to say...
Speaker: pick a new song, any song.
Speaker: Don't tell me what it is.
Speaker: Don't show me what it is.
Speaker: But then take a minute, listen to it and go down your own rabbit hole.
Speaker: Think about the things that you like about the song.
Speaker: Think about why you like those things and think about what has informed that opinion.
Speaker: Maybe it's another song.
Speaker: Maybe it's a book.
Speaker: Maybe it's something in your life that somebody said to you at some point.
Speaker: Think about why something resonates with you and just
Speaker: Make a list.
Speaker: See how far you can go.
Speaker: See how many things you can think about.
Speaker: See how many new memories you can unlock.
Speaker: It's a really fun exercise.
Speaker: And you'll probably learn something about yourself.
Speaker: You might even learn something about the song that you're listening to in the first place.
Speaker: So go down a rabbit hole.
Speaker: I like that.
Speaker: That was a good way to tie it up.
Speaker: I don't think it's a cop out.
Speaker: Au revoir.
Speaker: Au revoir, Phoebe.
Speaker: Au revoir, Simone.
Speaker: Well, that was our episode on rabbit holes.
Speaker: We hope you enjoyed it.
Speaker: And as Greg said, go on your own rabbit hole, on your own journey of discovery.
Speaker: It could lead to very interesting things.
Speaker: Anyway, our email, if you want to reach out to us about the things that you've discovered or anything in general, feedback or thoughts or recommendations of your own, is sabetpodcast.dreamel.com.
Speaker: We also have social media channels, Instagram, YouTube, etc.
Speaker: at sabetpod or sabet or sabetpodcast.
Speaker: Just Google it.
Speaker: I'm sure you'll find it because I think we are the only people with this name.
Speaker: And with that, hope you enjoyed.
Speaker: And until next time, au revoir.
Speaker: Au revoir.
