RadioLab started a series about Dolly Parton and country music. I haven\u2019t listened to their first episode but did listen to their next three podcasts: \u201cBirdie in the Cage\u201d, \u201cSongs that Cross Borders\u201d, and \u201cDolly Parton\u2019s America: Neon Moss\u201d. In the series they take a step away from scientific topics and focus on culture and music, origins of musical elements and where they travel to. I want to use \u201cSongs that Cross Borders\u201d to highlight some of the patterns that I\u2019ve noticed in the series that helped create a consistent identity between podcasts.
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One of which are the introductions and outros they do in their show. In all episodes, the listeners are greeted with their introduction, a mixture of different audio clips of different people saying \u201cRadioLab\u201d and \u201cWNYC\u201d in an interesting way. It\u2019s like a remix of everyday speech with more artists than you thought was possible but still somehow sounds coherent. Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich then introduces themselves and begin to give context. For \u201cSongs that Cross Borders\u201d, they referred back to previous episodes about song, dance, and the main question that centered each: who did it belong to? Who claims that a type of song, beat, dance belongs to them and their culture? This question is brought up to explore how music move through culture. It\u2019s approached in two different ways in \u201cSongs that Cross Borders\u201d (SCB).
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SCB looks at this question by first focusing on what makes country music so popular across the world. We learn that a lot of country music is about migration, longing, and nostalgia. People across the world can relate to these messages. The style of music that is country (the \u2018cries\u2019 and lonesomeness of the vocals and instruments) transcends its roots when cultures adopt these features and make it their own. The creators of the podcast used primarily lyrics\/ sound bites of old country music with the cracks of static on top of the singer\u2019s voice and direct narration in this portion. It\u2019s effective because we\u2019re given examples of nostalgia in the Western lyrics of the music itself and from the twangs of the guitar accompanying the singer. What\u2019s interesting is the transition that they used to shift attention to how the Western influences music in other parts of the world. The journalist goes to Afghanistan in search for stories and what he finds are Afghanistized versions of country music. It\u2019s more personal because we get sound bites from the events themselves as our hosts explain them to us. We hear the echoes of the room as the journalist asks his translator what he means about how the Western music is actually a famous Afghan singer\u2019s songs. (This makes sense. I promise. The American journalist started to play his accordion as translator was doing ab crunches but translator was confused because journalist was playing Afghan music.) In this section we hear the conversations instead of just soundbites. It brings the conversation back to the present time. It\u2019s easier to think that these discussions about how cultures influence one another is outside of our personal world but we\u2019re hearing the direct conversations between journalist and translator about how Johnny Cash and Elvis were actually Ahmad Zahir. It\u2019s jarring and mashes up worlds very effectively. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Word Count: 543
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RadioLab started a series about Dolly Parton and country music. I haven\u2019t listened to their first episode but did listen to their next three podcasts: \u201cBirdie in the Cage\u201d, \u201cSongs that Cross Borders\u201d, and \u201cDolly…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":37,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[23],"class_list":["post-565","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","tag-engl200c"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/mattpoland.net\/sherlockpod\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/565","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/mattpoland.net\/sherlockpod\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/mattpoland.net\/sherlockpod\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mattpoland.net\/sherlockpod\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/37"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mattpoland.net\/sherlockpod\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=565"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/mattpoland.net\/sherlockpod\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/565\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":566,"href":"http:\/\/mattpoland.net\/sherlockpod\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/565\/revisions\/566"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/mattpoland.net\/sherlockpod\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=565"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mattpoland.net\/sherlockpod\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=565"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mattpoland.net\/sherlockpod\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=565"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}