Sub Titles

A regular concern for Tim and Matt is the art of translating the stage into film, which so often goes awry. We’ve talked other instances of this in previous episodes, but Tim builds the whole ship out of Pulitzer Prize adaptations this time. Transforming the intimacy of the playhouse into the spectacle of the cinema is no easy feat, and a dying one at that. A Streetcar Named Desire remains the gol...

“Get the point? Good, let’s dance.” Such is the ethos of Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation 1814 , a massive and eminently funky album which, along with Jackson’s Control , helped define and kick off New Jack Swing. Teddy Riley, who was instrumental to the New Jack Swing sound, describes the genre as “a new kid on the block who’s swinging it,” which Matt takes as a guiding star for how Karyn White’s se...

We joke about how when the Podcat looks out the window he’s watching TV and, well, that’s more or less what’s happening in Rear Window ! Hitchcock really knew how to wrestle profundity out of a kind of silly concept. After Matt and Tim investigate and learn some interesting Manhattan  geography, Tim outlines Scopophilia, or the love of looking, and how it operates in Tod Browning’s Freaks and...

After a good conversation about P.J. Harvey and her cattle experience, Matt and Tim talk the blunt force marvel that is Rid of Me . 30 years in, Harvey remains a titan with an immense shadow of influence, which sets up the somewhat cheeky theme of Canon Fodder. Matt looks at two other artists he thinks have a great shot at being canonized in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (a fun if sort of functio...

Part 1 is an album to illegal to stream. Part 2 has a movie with a director too tarnished to love. Intolerance serves as the D.W. Griffith cut-out on the AFI list given The Birth of a Nation is more trouble than it’s worth at this point. As it’s poster says, Intolerance is “colossal spectacle,” and Tim guides us through the ways in which it’s a Film School standout. He excites Matt a whole lot too...

Welcome to the episode with the hardest album to find! De La Soul’s seminal 3 Feet High and Rising is, notoriously, not streaming given the legal mess of its remarkable amount of samples. Matt’s fully in his bag here talking the construction of music and interrogating what music entails. We discuss the theoretical underpinnings of Assemblage as a concept and process, then talk the legacy and impac...

It’s a good question! The AFI will have to deal with the 21st century more at some point; Fellowship of the Ring certainly has a case, though. Tim and Matt talk the trilogy in general, then Tim makes the big case for Fellowship, Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master , and Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life . (This is Malick’s final appearance in what has been a wonderful running bit.) Tune in to see w...

One of the earliest albums on the Spin list (January 1985), Husker Du’s New Day Rising proves a fun favorite for both Matt and Tim. We talk the band’s place in the Our Band Could Be Your Life of it all (i.e. 80s punk and early hardcore) and their sonic take on the line “it aggravates and it pacifies.” Matt brings two post-hardcore darlings to the table in Cursive and Thursday and talks abrasive mu...

Been 10 episodes, which means it’s time for another bonus pod. In this decile, Matt takes inspiration from the discussion of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot as an album given particular significance from it’s proximity to 9/11. Rather than looking at the “most” 9/11 albums, though, he instead ranks the actual releases on 9/11, which was banger of an album day including the likes of Jay-Z, Bob Dylan, Mariah C...

Topical! Recorded before Spielberg dropped his but nonetheless weary of the impending discourse. After necessary, and sadly topical, love for Stephen Sondheim and quick rankings from Tim and Matt both, Tim clamors down the fire escape away from the usual West Side Story talking points to talk love in weird places and doomed circumstances with Desert Hearts and They Live by Night .

You know him, you could just as easily love or hate him, and you have to respect his technique. (Technique I say! Not content.) As a bonafide Suburban White Boy Matt has a lot of Eminem thoughts and love. He traipses through how hard it is to like Eminem, why he probably shouldn’t, and then gushes about Em’s craft as well as the mind-bending work of Aesop Rock and MF DOOM.

Tim is getting technical today, looking at vibrant (and lurid) weaponizations of Color Cinematography. Taxi Driver might be gritty in general, but it along with The Hunt for Red October and Niagra show us a different way from the dull, brown, arid cinematography of modern blockbusters.

After awhile of hand-wringing about the importance of Wilco’s magnum opus,  Matt settles in on the deconstructive and experimental bent of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot . (He’s also sorely tempted by the 9/11 significance of it all, but stay tuned for more on that!) Bonny Light Horseman’s updated folk standards go toe-to-toe with Ben Howard’s moody and destabilizing landscapes in this battle of deeply...

Two things of note here. First, our (somehow) first ever play-in Sub Title! Tim pits two versions of Father of the Bride against one another and Matt decides which gets to face The Birdcage. Second, I’m not sure there’s been a bigger tonal shift between entry and Sub Title options before. The violence and despair of The Deer Hunter gives way to the hilarity of Steve Martin, Martin Short, Robin Wil...

Korn famously (notoriously) insisted that their musical lineage starts with Red Hot Chili Peppers and Faith No More. More generally, their history begins in alt rock of the late 80s and early 90s, an era of experimentation, forceful expansion, and quite a bit of weirdness. The Chili Peppers aren’t in this episode, but Matt appreciates the violent ache of Nine Inch Nails’ The Downward Spiral before...

A disproportionate amount of this episode is Matt railing on Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, which features one of the worst people in his estimation. Tim keeps things fair and moving though in his analysis of M*A*S*H* as a movie about terrible people maybe sorta learning to be not as terrible before talking Ferris, where no one learns a damn thing, and Five Came Back , where a lot of people learn some...

Remember the aughts when most indie music was dance-y? Good times? Good times. Innocuous times, if we believe the worry of one James Murphy who warns as much on the opening of LCD Soundsystem’s Sound of Silver . Matt looks at the legacy, longevity, and punchiness, or lack thereof, of Murphy’s totem of an album. Up as replacements are Phoenix’s gargantuanly popular Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix and Hot...

Tim and Matt have shown previous interest in naming the “Most” of various things - most 00’s, 90’s, and 80’s songs, for example. The things that best embody and symbolize an era or genre or concept. Tim returns that thought experiment here with three movies that are the Most their respective directors. North by Northwest has all the Hitchcock you know and expect, while Moby Dick and My Darling Cle...

Last week was Myth and History; this week is the Cosmos. The Moon and Antarctica , an album near and dear to Matt’s heart, tries to speak (with) God with layers of guitar in a Cosmos entirely of Modest Mouse’s design. Built to Spill, MM’s Pacific Northwest counterparts, and Hum, of Shoegaze Decile fame, have similarly searching and vast 90s albums in Perfect From Now On and You’d Prefer and Astron...

Tim, as is his wont, is working with another AFI list here in 100 Years…100 Thrills , a list that he and Matt decide is truly bonkers but in a charming way. Jaws - which, hey, good film - lands number 2nd on that list. The Exorcist is 3rd, which is the first Sub option since Tim can actually watch it now. And while Tim can’t use the movie in 1st, Psycho , he looks to another Hitchcock film, Notori...

Kendrick Lamar’s Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City is probably the most widely beloved and respected debut from 2010s hip-hop, and which Kendrick album is his best is a Discourse deserving of the capital letter. Matt doesn’t wade into that, rather he considers GK, MC for the autobiographical origin story that it is, Kendrick’s concept album about the creation of Kendrick Lamar. Danny Brown’s Old and Lupe Fi...

Y’all remember Rocky loses in the first one, right? Well Tim and Matt are here to remind you - and remind you why that’s a good thing - and Tim is being the depressing one this week when he talks about The Cincinnati Kid and Make Way for Tomorrow , two movies where loss looms large and some everyday folks are working hard to survive. Everyone loses, but who loses most meaningfully?

This is the first recorded episode after that summer break we took, so forgive any ring rust. No better way to get revved back up than with our favorite band to hate: Pavement. We say things about Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain (we like it more! I think! Kinda!). Then Matt introduces Tim to two bands that draw on Pavement’s style. Speedy Ortiz’s Major Arcana and Cymbal’s Eat Guitars’ LOSE vie for indi...

The sweetness of Chaplin making dinner rolls dance shines in The Gold Rush , and gives Tim his jumping off point for this episode. Things escalate quite a bit as we move from dancing bread to two antagonists realizing a secret, anonymous letter writing love, to dinosaurs and the sins of science. In each Tim finds moments of beauty and wonder. Tune in to see how he pitches all this to Matt, grumpy...

Few things get Matt more excited than concept records and jarring indie music. Put the two together and you have In the Aeroplane Over the Sea , Neutral Milk Hotel’s classic that’s beloved, hated on, called overrated, and beloved again in regular cycles. Anais Mitchell and Hurray for the Riff Raff aren’t as, well, batshit as NMH, but their albums Hadestown and The Navigator, respectively, are hist...