Vital stats:
Format: lightly comedic pop culture talk
Duration: 1h-1h15m
Frequency: “bi-weekly(ish)”
Archive available on iTunes: all
If podcasting has a dominant subject, it’s pop culture. Easy to see why: we’re all immersed in it, whether we want to be or not. Therefore, we can all talk about it. Any given developed-world citizen, if they strain hard enough, could slap together an opinion about, say, Justin Bieber’s hair. This makes for pretty thin conversational gruel, though it’s one everyone can eat. This is especially true in the realm of comedy: assemble a few comedians or public “personalities” of other stripes, get ‘em talking about reality TV, and bam, podcast.
That seems to be the thinking behind the uncommonly upfront Pop My Culture [RSS] [iTunes], a show about “movies, music, television, cebrity gossip, etc. without all those pesky ‘serious’ topics like politics, religion and the environment.” The hosts, SF Sketchfest co-founder Cole Stratton and actor/writer/comic Vanessa Ragland, go around to the houses of various pop-cultural figures from the last 30 years and chat with them about their own careers (about which they even quiz them) and whatever happens be in the zeitgeist at the moment. There’s a slant toward actors, though many of their guests (though, technically, Stratton and Ragland are guests in their guests’ houses) seem pulled from the Greater Southern California Comedians’ Podcasting Circuit: Mo Collins [MP3], Paul F. Tompkins [MP3], Chris Hardwick [MP3], and so on.
The conversations tend to skitter across the surface of entertainment, media, and technology like a skipping stone. As much as I might have extolled pop culture’s accessibility two paragraphs ago, there turns out to be a lot to know even in such surface-y kind of talks. In an uncomfortable paradox, I found myself having to look up about three times as much as I do in an average prim, erudite BBC sort of thing. Crystal Bowersox, for instance. Had to Google her name once when the hosts brought her up, and again now to remember how to spell her name. And I stand on the humiliating precipice of needing to look up Brett Michaels a third time.
But if you know bout Bowersoxes from your Michaelses, perhaps this is the podcast you want. Perhaps it’s a sterling example of pop-cultural discourse. Yet I fear that the show’s most interesting episodes, to my mind, might constitute violations of the rules of pop culture talk. Matthew “Cereal Killer” Lillard [MP3] gets into some of the ambitious despair and oddly hopeful hopelessness of the modern acting industry, which I found quite interesting, though you can tell he felt apologetic about maybe getting too “heavy.” To be fair, Stratton and Ragland don’t discourage this kind of thing, though it happens less often than I’d like.
Almost all of Pop My Culture’s best moments come from going there, “there” being to that place where entertainment types take long, hard looks at themselves, brows furrowed. In the massive amounts of pop culture podcast-listening I do in this line, I routinely catch glimpses of a strange sort of self-loathing on the part of so many actors and comedians. I’d like to hear that self-loathing and its associated thoughts probed a little more deeply. Marc Maron’s WTF is probably the apex of this specifically for comedy, but there are so many more of entertainment’s sub-industries that I’d like to see get unflinchingly reflective. Maybe that really is too heavy for show like this, but it’d be a way through the thick, undifferentiated pop-culture-jokin’ fog.
[Podthinker Colin Marshall also happens to be the host and producer of public radio’s The Marketplace of Ideas, the blogger of The War on Mediocrity and the writer of The Ubuweb Experimental Video Project.]