Pop Records: keep digging after the episode ends!

Season 1 listener survey! 👉 I’d love to hear your feedback via email or this brief survey.

Did Pop Records spark your curiosity? Want to delve deeper into the topics and figures discussed? We’ve got you covered!

Each episode comes with annotated threads, your personal gateway to explore further. Think of them as handy bookmarks pointing you towards articles, interviews, and other resources related to the episode’s theme.

Pop Records: Your springboard to a deeper dive into pop culture and archives!

Subscribe now and get ready to pull on those threads!

Episode 1 | Pop Records: Who Gets Away With Murder? The Archive Tells All

That’s what fires me up about the records is that records do have this potency to rewrite the past, but also reshaped the present by holding people to account.

This week’s annotations dig into people and publications David Wallace at the intersection of archives and social justice:

• The opioid crisis archives: Get a sneak peek at David’s upcoming book chapter on this critical topic.
• A mind-blowing analysis of the 9/11 commission archive. You won’t believe what David uncovers!
• Social media addiction and the fight for legal recourse in an interview with Matthew P. Bergman, a lawyer with the Social Media Victims Law Center challenging social media giants.
• The legacy of Ronald L. Haeberle, the photographer who captured the My Lai Massacre.

Episode 2 | Pop Records: To Digitize or Not to Digitize? That is the Archival Question!

This week on Pop Records, Paul Conway challenged our misconceptions about digital preservation.

In the annotations, explore:

• The “use it or lose it” principle: Paul argues that digital survival depends on user engagement.
• The Performer’s First model: just what musicians and the recording industry needs?
• Consider the archivist’s dilemma: Should we delete unused materials?
• A cool historical footnote: How Cold War anxieties led to the rise of microfilm!

Episode 3 | Pop Records: the call is coming from inside the archive

Due to unforeseen ethical considerations, I’ve made the difficult decision to pre-empt our upcoming episode on archival theft.

If you want to know more about this topic and how its played out in troubling ways at Columbia University here are a couple of articles detailing questions of free speech repression, over-policing, how and whether to collect student protest materials, and what happens next:

A Columbia archivist took art from the ‘Gaza Solidarity Encampment.’ Students are demanding space to archive their movement in return.

I’m thinking about alternative approaches to this complex issue and will keep you informed about any future developments.

Episode 4| Pop Records: Is Therapy Going Pop? Diagnoses in Your Playlist and the Body as an Archive

Huge shout-out to Dr. Brittany Heins for helping to sort through my many muddle thoughts about where we’ve been as a society with mental health diagnoses, where we are, and where we might be headed.

And addendum to why a therapist might keep notes: legal reasons! Whether required by an employer, by an organization providing services, a legal case, courts, etc. Britany wanted me to be sure to note that one.

• How Psychiatry Broke the Top 40
• A Beautiful Mind (2001) – For someone who loves movies, I’m notoriously bad at remembering them, but our conversation about this made me want to rewatch with an eye to diagnoses and how it plays out. But I’m mad at Ron Howard for the propaganda film, Hillbilly Elegy, so my rewatch might not happen. Lmk what you think, if you decide to brave it!
  
• 13 Reasons Why – I’m vaguely curious about this TV show because of the cassette tape usage. And perhaps the mental health fumblings have, with the passage of time, come full circle to prescient?
• Stutz (2022) – I have no investment in Jonah Hill and at least two reliable sources recommended his documentary about his therapist. His alleged weaponizing of therapyspeak against a former girlfriend adds, for me, a vaguely salacious, but also critical approach to viewing this movie. Otherwise: divest from celebrities’ lives. 😬
• The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (2014) – Again, reliables swear by Bessel van der Kolk’s book about the connections between mind, body, and trauma. Do you recommend it?
  • In readings about disability and disability justice, I accept and think through the “bodymind” paradigm as the two being interconnected and often inseparable. It’s an approach to holism and a rebuke of dualisms that I try to use in most of my interrogating of ideas and theories.

Episode 5 | Pop Records: House Music, Sampling, and the Archival Hustle!

Wtf is a “sparky friend?!” It’s someone who you immediately get along with for whatever reasons are important to you in friendships. My sparky friend criteria include: asking great questions, sharing educated guesses, laughing, being fun, and kindness–because, lol, I can be talkin’ mad-shit sometimes. So thanks to Gavin for a sparky conversation.

Here are just a few notes from a jam-packed episode (PUN INTENDED):

• You can find Gavin’s website here.
• Gavin mentioned the Korg M1. So fun to have someone knowledgeable parse my favorite house music techs and technique.
• We also discussed Creative Commons as a more recent way of protecting and sharing intellectual and artistic property and musician and historian Alice Russell’s excellent deep dive into the Black roots of country on Today, Explained.
  
• Some of the places/dance experiences I had in mind as we planned this episode:
  • Here’s a little bit about the sound system at Heaven, one of the best nightclub experiences of my life. So hot the WALLS were sweating (or maybe that was unsafe condensation. I dunno HVAC.). And a longer piece about the cultural and social context for Heaven and Detroit through the life of DJ Ken Collier.
    
  • The Nectarine Ballroom was the place to be in Ann Arbor because they had well-drinks that cost $.25 and “Gay Night” was every Tuesday–two nights a week was after my time! If you use Facebook, the Nectarine Ballroom Alum Circa 1984-1993  is a nostalgia fest that looks cute. And bless the archivists and librarians at the Ann Arbor Public Library for hosting a Nectarine collection!
  • Fiction at The Cross in King’s Cross London offered some formative, fun, and epic nights out for me in the early 2000s. Three rooms of dance/house sounds and welcoming to folks across the sexual spectrum made it a choice spot for being with friends and everyone had a chance of pulling (maybe too good a chance). 💅🏾 From The Cross website’s 30th anniversary marker of the inimitable Fiction:

In February 2000 Fiction opened the doors for the first time at 10.30pm at The Cross in King’s Cross, London. The Cross was a unique venue spread across several arches and had a wonderful terrace, full of exotic plants and sofas directly off the arches, giving the place a truly mediterranean feel. Thanks to the electric atmosphere provided by a mixed orientation, cosmopolitan crowd and incredible sets played by resident DJ’s, Fiction soon became the place to be on Fridays & clocked up more parties than ANY other promotion!. People flocked to King’s Cross every Friday to enjoy the sounds and sights of Fiction which has since become clubbing legend. The music, the people, the vibe all combined to create a Friday institution loved and enjoyed by many. Fiction produced more parties at The Cross than any other promotion over our 7 year residency.

And so much good listening for your earholes and bass for your booty bumpin’:

Jail Paul’s cover of the 1998 song, “Crush”(TIL: the original recording artist Jennifer Paige is not Black 😅)

Crystal Waters talks about the song, “Gypsy Woman” and how it came to be.

I’m obsessed with Clean Bandit and Jesse Glynne’s “Rather Be,” which consistently gets me to drop everything and dance.

Gavin mentioned Crystal Waters’ singing a dance version of tribute to The Price Is Right called, “Come on Down” so here it is: