The New York Times’ pop music podcast has once again descended into the perilous, flattening expanse of the listener mailbag. The latest episode offers answers to a staggering array of inquiries that demand we view the Eras Tour, the Fab Four, and a Brooklyn post-punk quintet as equal participants in the grand pantheon of human expression.
The listener mailbag, as a rhetorical form, has always operated as a kind of violent ontological leveler, stripping away the necessary hierarchies of taste to present a terrifyingly democratic landscape of curiosity; yet rarely has this medium been stretched to such perilous, dizzying extremes as in the latest installment of Popcast, which endeavors to treat the stadium-conquering hegemony of Taylor Swift, the calcified canonical heritage of the Beatles, and the jittery, post-punk posturing of Geese as if they were merely different rooms within the exact same theoretical house.
To pivot from the industrial monolith of Swift’s mechanized heartbreak directly to the Beatles’ increasingly distant melodic innovations requires a certain psychic elasticity, but to then unceremoniously drag the listener into an earnest dissection of Geese—a band whose primary cultural function appears to be reassuring aging Brooklynites that angular guitars have not yet been entirely eradicated from the earth—borders on the pathological. One is reminded inevitably of the fourteenth-century polyphonic motets of Guillaume de Machaut, wherein fiercely independent vocal lines collide in a sustained, agonizing tension; or, perhaps more accurately, of the ruinous, unfinished fragments of Walter Benjamin's The Arcades Project, attempting to map the totality of capitalist detritus; though in its sheer, exhausting commitment to reconciling the fundamentally irreconcilable, the episode most closely evokes the desperate narrative continuity of the 1993 talking-animal film Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey.
The hosts, tasked with translating the disparate grunts of the listening public into something approaching a cohesive critical worldview, engage in a breathless high-wire act of synthesis, seamlessly bridging the gap between Swiftian lore and British Invasion mythology with the kind of grim, unsmiling professionalism usually reserved for hostage negotiators attempting to establish a baseline reality with their captors.
It is a profound, if ultimately tragic, exercise in cognitive dissonance to pretend that the person asking about Paul McCartney's bass tone and the person asking about the sophomore album from Geese are inhabiting the same timeline.
Ultimately, the episode serves not as a clarification of pop music’s current state, but as a devastating indictment of the modern listener’s fractured psyche; a listener who, gorged on algorithmic playlists that treat all recorded sound as interchangeable auditory content, can no longer distinguish between a civilization-defining pop star, a sacred 1960s artifact, and five young men from Brooklyn who recently discovered the distortion pedal, viewing them all simply as equidistant nodes in a sprawling, meaningless web of audio ephemera.