DISCOOOORD AAAAND RHYME! ONE, TWO, THREE, FOUR! This is our shortest, leanest episode to date, and it’s a rush! This podcast isn’t just prog, soul, and synths. We’re also into punk rock, and if it happens to have saxophones, well, that only sweetens the deal. In his first outing as host, Dan leads Rich, Mike, and Will through Germfree Adolescents by X-Ray Spex, a London punk quintet that existed aggressively for about a year before bandleader Poly Styrene started seeing visions of dayglo in the night and decided the life was too much for her. Adolescents’ 12 tracks are loud, colorful, diverse, and hilarious — though have a lyrics site on hand, because the brilliantly shrieky Poly can be nigh-on indecipherable. Germ-Free Adolescents turns 40 in just a couple weeks, and we hope this episode earns it some new fans!
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We’re sorry, Miss Jackson. For nearly two decades, Janet Damita Jo Jackson was one of the world’s most reliable hitmakers, but her reign came to a complete halt after the Super Bowl XXXVIII halftime show and its infamous “wardrobe malfunction.” After a stunning career spent deliberately pushing boundaries, somebody else took it a step too far and she suffered the consequences.
However, her legacy of pop masterpieces and powerful feminism was never forgotten. She kept living her life, putting out terrific albums, and never relinquishing control. Janet may have been less visible for a while there, but she never truly went away - and now that she’s been nominated to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for the third time, we’re going to do whatever we can to make sure she gets in, including making sure all our listeners know how excellent Control is. We hope you enjoy this as much as we do.
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Discord & Rhyme is excited to welcome its first guest co-host! David Weigel is a politics reporter for the Washington Post, but more importantly for our nefarious purposes, he is the author of the truly excellent progressive rock history The Show That Never Ends: The Rise and Fall of Prog Rock. But this episode is also a reunion: Dave used to geek out about music with your hosts on the teeny-tiny ‘90s music websites we lovingly called the Web Reviewing Community (WRC). And today, he’s geeking out with us all over again by helping us tear apart Todd Rundgren’s A Wizard, a True Star, track by minute-long track.
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In Prog John’s first go-around as host, the Discord & Rhyme crew (John, Amanda, Mike, and Dan) turn their attention to the debut album of Emerson, Lake & Palmer, an album and band that everyone in this episode agrees is far better than consensus critical opinion would suggest. John offers a spirited defense not only of the band and this album, but also of prog rock in general as well as of one of his favorite classical composers, the 20th-century Hungarian composer Bela Bartok (Mike agrees wholeheartedly with John’s Bartok love, while Amanda is far more ambivalent). This podcast offers deep dives into each of this album’s six tracks (the 12:27 “Take a Pebble” is discussed over six parts), as well as close examination of the band’s roots and influences, collectively and individually. We can practically guarantee that this will be the only podcast you ever hear that contains excerpts from ELP, the Vince Guaraldi Trio, a Bach keyboard suite, and, somehow, the Japanese anime “Cowboy Bebop.”
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Do we really need to introduce Aretha Franklin? Undisputedly the best soul singer around — perhaps the best singer, period — her string of massive hits and modern classics is longer than some other artists’ entire careers. Her voice is so recognizable now that it’s easy to take for granted, but when she moved to Atlantic Records in 1967 and released I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You, she made gospel-style music blare from American radios at a volume then unheard of, and with a confident feminist swagger.
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Everybody go put on your sundresses over babydoll t-shirts and turn your baseball caps backward, because this is a mid-’90s party! Amanda took the opportunity to make Phil, Rich, and Will revisit 1994 and Under the Table and Dreaming, Dave Matthews Band’s studio debut. We all enjoyed this album when we were teenagers in the ‘90s, but since then, at least one of us has soured on it considerably. Join us for lots of discord, as well as plenty of rhyme.
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It's Discord & Rhyme's first hip-hop album! In this watershed episode, our producer, Mike, walks Rich, Will, and Phil through hip-hop supergroup Deltron 3030's self-titled 2000 dystopian sci-fi opus. Deltron 3030, a collaboration between emcee Del the Funky Homosapien, turntablist Kid Koala, and producer Dan the Automator, is at once funny, action-packed, thematically dense, and searing in its social commentary. It also boasts an encyclopedic range of samples, both typical of Automator's eclectic taste and of particular interest to Mike as a fellow producer. The album served as a gateway drug to hip-hop for all four hosts this week, and if you're on the fence about the genre, we hope it will do the same for you.
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Yikes — things are getting a little brown on this episode of Discord & Rhyme. For his first outing as host, Phil Maddox leads his co-hosts through New Hope, PA, alternative rock duo Ween’s highly idiosyncratic and mildly sophomoric 1997 release The Mollusk. Ween initially gained notoriety in the early ’90s, when major labels were snapping up every weird band under the sun in search of the next Nirvana, and it was awesome. The band is best known for its grating MTV hit “Push th’ Lil’ Daisies,” but The Mollusk is more of a loving homage to progressive rock and sea shanties — with a few jarring doses of Ween humor. Rated R for language.
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In Episode 2, we talk about an album all four of us know by heart and love passionately: On the Threshold of a Dream, the third album by the Moody Blues. We start with our own adaptation of “In the Beginning,” the poem that begins the album, and we couldn’t resist throwing in a Simpsons joke. (You get a bunch of thirtysomethings together, Simpsons jokes are inevitable.) We provide an overview of the Moody Blues' entire career, using this album as an anchor. If you enjoy listening to people talk enthusiastically about stuff they really, really love, this is the episode for you.
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For the inaugural episode of Discord & Rhyme, host Rich Bunnell uses EWF’s 1977 release All ‘n All to illustrate that EWF were far more than a playlist’s worth of hit singles. All ‘n All is the arguable peak of an incredible run of late-’70s albums, several of which deserve to be viewed as part of the canon alongside Revolver, Songs in the Key of Life, and Dark Side of the Moon. Three out of four co-hosts this week had little to no experience with All ‘n All before researching this episode, so this premiere should be educational!
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