As luck would have it, two of Discord & Rhyme’s most powerful villains have been turned loose for an episode that will strike terror into the hearts of men! This week, Rich and Mike take on the 2004 hip-hop classic Madvillainy, a team-up between MF DOOM, a rapper with a metal mask and a tragic, comic-book backstory, and Madlib, a DJ with eclectic taste and an unpredictable, artfully imprecise style. The album’s 22 tracks unfold like a fever dream over just 46 minutes, with samples drawn from Bollywood, Brazilian music, Zappa, and Sun Ra crashing headfirst into snippets from old cartoons. And this is all presided over by DOOM, who packs almost unfair amounts of wordplay and meaning into every line. It may seem like chaos at first, but there’s a method to Madvillainy, and it shows how hip-hop can contain the world.
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The Jefferson Airplane's drugged-up, hyper-political jams are often dismissed as a relic of the late 1960s. But the band's talent was in abundance on their earnest debut album The Jefferson Airplane Takes Off; and when they added vocalist Grace Slick to their lineup and recorded their second album, 1967's Surrealistic Pillow, the whole world discovered what they were capable of. In discussing that album, Ben, Amanda, and John make the case that the Airplane's musicianship, harmonies, and attitude all hold up today.
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John was always going to tackle a classical work for the podcast at some point, it was just a matter of finding the right piece. For our first visit to the orchestral hall, Discord & Rhyme is also taking a trip to the circus by covering The Carnival of the Animals, a 25-minute suite of musical jokes that 19th century French composer Camille Saint-Saëns wrote to put off writing the symphony he’d been paid to write. The Carnival of the Animals was John’s introduction to classical music as a kid, and when he fell back in love with classical music in his late 20s he was delighted to find that he still loved this piece (even without the silly poems in his version from when he was a kid). John (host), Mike (moderator), and returning special guest Sean Rodgers had a wonderful, in-depth conversation, ranging from the niche (like John’s love of birdsong in classical music), to the serious (like Saint-Saëns’ feelings about the musical world changing around him more than he liked), to the ridiculous (the notion of a tortoise doing the world’s slowest can-can). Come listen to us make the case that classical music is for everyone, and that The Carnival of the Animals is one of the funnest gateways to classical music anyone has ever written.
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In 1968, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr traveled to the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s ashram in Rishikesh, India, buckling under the pressures of more fame than any band had experienced to that point and seeking spiritual release. It didn’t work, but their colorful experiences formed the bedrock of the double album The Beatles, colloquially referred to as “the White Album.” It’s a sprawling, diffuse, maddening, and bloody brilliant group of songs, and whether or not it’s your favorite Beatles album, it did a lot to expand the definition of what an album could be and what types of songs a band could even write. Which makes it the perfect album for Discord & Rhyme’s gala 100th-episode celebration! We’ve rounded up the whole D&R gang for this one, and we all have completely different perspectives on which songs are keepers. And true to the spirit of the album, our discussion spans two super-sized episodes, so you have been forewarned: This one’s gonna be long, long, long.
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Phish are a band who tend to inspire extreme reactions. Their particular blend of progressive rock, funk, pop, and extended improvisation has attracted what may be the most dedicated fanbase in the world, but there seems to be a never ending supply of people who use the band as a punchline. Phil falls firmly into the “love them” category - he’s listened to hundreds of shows and counts Phish among his all-time favorite bands. He’s extremely excited to be discussing A Live One - the album that served as the world’s introduction to the sound of live Phish - with Dan and Rich.
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What if you and your friends want to form a punk band, but the instruments you play are the banjo, accordion, and pennywhistle? The Pogues showed us that’s entirely possible, as long as you also have plenty of punk rock attitude, a frontman who can snarl vaguely in tune, and the ability to scream bloody murder at the slightest opportunity. Amanda, Ben, Rich, and special returning guest Sean Rodgers talk about how the Pogues used traditional Irish and British musical forms to tell new stories about ghosts, racehorses, immigration, injustice, loneliness, and the general hopelessness of the human condition, and made you want to get up and dance to all of it.
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Special guest Dave Weigel joins Discord & Rhyme once again to talk about Sparks, “your favorite band’s favorite band.” It’s been a good couple of decades for Ron and Russell Mael. After decades of toiling in semi-obscurity, the brothers saw a late-career renaissance in 2002 with the symphonic, beatless dance album Lil’ Beethoven, and Edgar Wright’s 2021 documentary The Sparks Brothers cemented their status as elder statesmen of irreverent pop music. For today’s episode, Producer Mike is taking us back to the band’s early years with the 1974 album Kimono My House, which demonstrates that the Maels’ sense of songcraft was in full force from the very beginning. Despite what the interviewees in The Sparks Brothers (including Dave!) might tell you, Sparks aren’t for everybody, and the Maels occasionally revel in being grating in a way that even our hosts can’t abide. But if you listen to “This Town Ain’t Big Enough for the Both of Us” and adore it, good news: this is only the beginning of a gloriously warped musical journey.
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It somehow took us 96 episodes for Discord & Rhyme’s first movie soundtrack, so we’re rectifying this with possibly the greatest movie soundtrack of all time. In 1972, Curtis Mayfield had just capped off a career writing legendary civil rights anthems with the Impressions and defining the sound of Chicago soul by launching what would prove to be an equally legendary solo career. For his soundtrack to the classic blaxploitation film Super Fly, Mayfield served as both the film’s Greek chorus and its conscience, subtly critiquing the film as a “cocaine infomercial” while acknowledging that this was the only life path available to its protagonists. And it’s a truly musically groundbreaking work, paving the way for both the musical language and verbal iconography of the hip-hop genre. Rich will be your pusherman this week, so join him as our hosts run wild and give a stellar soundtrack all of their love.
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Things get weird again at Discord and Rhyme as we dig into Mr. Bungle’s 1999 genre-defying opus California. After the demise of his day job with Faith No More, singer Mike Patton returned to his more esoteric side hustle to record a collection of songs that fuse Beach Boys pop, death metal, lounge music, and Eastern-European influences together as if they’re natural bedfellows. Join us as we discuss how the band managed to synthesize all of these disparate influences into what is easily their most cohesive and accessible album.
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After going more than a full calendar year without covering a Moody Blues album, Discord & Rhyme has reverted to its truest self with this episode on A Question of Balance, the 1970 album that the band created after realizing they needed to start recording more songs they could actually play live. Join us as we discuss the band’s most democratic and often weirdest album, one where the band tried to figure out how to make the transition from the 60s to the 70s and tried to make sense of all of the world’s problems simultaneously. They didn’t completely succeed with either of these tasks, but they did a fine job nonetheless with both, and this made for an interesting album that we had a fun time talking about.
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