Nickolai Hammar/NPR
What's Good With Stretch And Bobbito: I can’t imagine the letters “NPR” make too many people think of hip-hop freestyles and old-school East Coast boom-bap rap, but the new interview show from New York legends Stretch and Bobbito’s might change that. What’s Good with Stretch and Bobbito debuted on the ever-respectable media network earlier this summer. From 1990 to 1998, Robert "Bobbito" Garcia (aka Kool Bob Love) and DJ Stretch Armstrong held things down on the graveyard shift at Columbia University radio station WKCR and became ringmasters and documentarians of hip-hop’s growing popularity. On any given night you could hear Jay-Z, Busta Rhymes, the Wu-Tang Clan or The Notorious B.I.G. blessing the duo with new rhymes. Nas even stopped by to drop off a copy of Illmatic for them before it hit stores. Twenty years on from that show, Stretch and Bobbito have thankfully re-joined forces, this time as a chat show. Older and wiser, they hit the ground running back in July with Dave Chappelle as their debut guest. Since then, they’ve talked almost exclusively with famous people of color, including chef Eddie Huang, Chance the Rapper and Stevie Wonder. It’s great to hear these guys back on the air together. Their disarming goofiness is still intact — but these days, it’s tempered with legit conversationalist chops. Fitting for their new public radio home.
Treks & The City: There are already a ton of podcasts out there that recap and repackage old shows. Even without looking, I can guarantee that there are more than a few exploring the ever-expanding Star Trek universe. With Treks & The City, the comedy is the focus. But the real star is the unique and breezy feminist approach that hosts Alice Wetterlund and Vero Videtta take when tackling these early Next Generation episodes. Found on the up-and-coming comedy podcast network Forever Dog, Treks & The City leans much more on the Trek side of things than the Sex and the City half of their titular portmanteau, but the handful of revealing personal asides the two slip in brings some brightness to things when the nerdiness gets to be a bit much. For a relatively new podcast, they’ve landed some big names for guests so far, including Jackie Kashian, Rhea Butcher, and Paul F. Tompkins. In a clear “game respect game” move, the first two episodes brought on the Gilmore Guys themselves, Demi Adejuyigbe and Kevin Porter. For anyone in Madison who is particularly bummed that Q himself, John De Lancie, recently bailed on the big Wizard World Convention this coming weekend, Treks & The City is an easy recommendation.
Support For This Podcast: Normally I don’t go in for this sort of hyper-self-aware, bone-dry satire that takes a big toothless bite out of so-called “white people problems,” but here we go. Support For This Podcast, which takes its name from the ubiquitous midroll bumper preceding ads for Stamps.com or Casper mattresses or whatever, is a big elbow to the ribs for anyone who perhaps owns more than one pledge marathon tote bag. Despite the businessy title, the ads here are all for fake companies selling pitch-perfect millennial schlock like “My Horoscope My Choice,” a service that "curates" (cherrypicks) published horoscopes to suit whatever mood you’re looking to validate (“coupon code: garbldeygook”). If you’re looking for a taste of how subtle the humor is going to be here, fictional host Emily Amy Lauren Becca (played by Jessica Fontana) claims to live “in Greenpoint, Park Slope, Morningside Heights, and the Upper East Side.” Yeah, you might get some NYC inside baseball jokes about missing a southbound G train, but on the whole things trend towards the more universal. Take Emily Amy Lauren Becca’s chat with Spencer Temple, inventor of the “latergram” hashtag. Created by artsy up-and-coming over-achiever multi-hyphenates Fontana and Ryan Langer, it’s a tightly written and slickly produced comedy podcast that would fit in nicely with an eventual Reductress podcast network. They’re only six episodes deep this far, and the longest clocks in at under 30 minutes — so you can catch up in an afternoon biking between dive bar happy hours.
From the Pod Morgue:
The Dead Authors Pod: It’s been almost two years since famed science fiction pioneer H.G. Wells closed up shop on his podcast. Of course, that was 69 years after he died. From 2011 to 2015, Wells (reanimated by comedian Paul F. Tompkins) brought dozens of fellow writers, all currently existing in the past tense, to the present day, where he would ask them questions and prod them for stories. These bits of improvised theater put Tompkins across the table from a murderer's row of wildly talented goofball performers. The very first episode, for instance, found Andy Richter coming to life as, unexpectedly enough, poet Emily Dickinson (died 1886). The subjects ranged from well-known scribes like The Brothers Grimm (d. 1859 and 1863, respectively) to Argentinian magical realist Jorge Luis Borges (d. 1986). Whoever books these guests from beyond the grave even rolled high enough to land Dungeons & Dragons creator E. Gary Gygax (d. 2008). The real joy of the show comes from the wildly inconsistent degree to which the performers are informed about the writers they portray. Scott Aukerman builds new and profoundly silly details of Ben Franklin’s life from the ground up; Andy Daly plumbs the depths of a seeming encyclopedic knowledge about the lore surrounding L. Ron Hubbard’s charlatan Scientology chicanery to craft his character. Recorded (roughly) once a month at LA’s Upright Citizens Brigade Theater, The Dead Authors Pod ran for 50 episodes as a benefit for the nonprofit writing and tutoring center 826LA and is well worth discovering if you have not had the pleasure.
Let us know what new podcasts you’re digging, especially ones that are made right here in Madison! We’re always looking for new shows to plug our earbuds into.Next time we’ll have an interview with American Bandito host Tom Ray.
