A couple weeks ago the RNC presidential primary debates opened with a segment where each candidate got to explain why they best epitomized the conservative values for the real american laid out by Oliver Anthony’s country folk song “Rich Men North of Richmond”. They sounded like idiots, and even more so when Anthony himself released…
Category: Politics
Call For Comments: Politicians and Protest Songs
From Mav: If you know me at all, you probably know that I’m kind of a politics junkie. So, that means that among other things I tortured myself by watching the Republican Presidential Primary debate last week. It was… kind of a train wreck. And for the most part it wasn’t even really a very…
e261. PCA2023 After Dark!
After two years being held virtually, and a cancelled conference in 2020, the Popular Culture Association returned to in person conferences for PCA2023. There were some good notes (Mav won a major award for his doctoral dissertation) and some bad notes (Mav ended up catching COVID during the trip) but along the way there was…
Call For Comments: Pouring some “edgy” on it
From Mav: Last year, we did an episode that I called “pour some gritty on it” which was all about the recent trend of doing gritty reboots of classic media IP. The obvious example there was shows on the CW like Riverdale and Nancy Drew. Shows where the idea is that it takes place in…
e240. Reality Twitter? (and Politics)
Running a pop culture podcast isn’t easy. One of the biggest problems is that popular culture is a moving target. There’s just… always stuff happening! We can’t really get to it all. Every once in a while rather than pick a stable topic, we like to get together and just do a sort of free…
e237. So, We Need to Talk About Kanye…
Three weeks ago, Kanye West decided to premiere a line of White Lives Matter t-shirts at Paris Fashion Week… and somehow with that at the starting point pretty much every day since he has somehow managed to become MORE racist and problematic. And so, in the last few weeks, Kanye has continued a persistent stream…
e225. Can We Talk About Climate Change?
If you line in the United States and follow political news you might have noticed something crazy last week. The Democrats kind of… did something! In fact, they did something potentially huge. On Thursday, July 28th, essentially out of nowhere, senators Joe Manchin and Chuck Schumer announced that they had come to terms on what…
e222. So, The World’s On Fire… Everything is Fine…
It’s been a while since we spent the show just talking about the state of the world. Mostly because… well, the state of the world kinda sucks right now… and we sort of didn’t want to deal with it. But this is a show about culture and the culture in the world right now, particularly…
e220. Obi-Wan Kenobi & the Star Wars Legacy
This week saw the end of the Disney+ Star Wars series Obi-Wan Kenobi, a show devoted to… actually it’s really hard to talk about. Arguably, one of the biggest problems with the Kenobi tv show is that it is arguably impossible to talk about without spoilers. But it’s over now… so we’re going to spoil…