The Jan Diaries — To the Bottom of the Internet and Back: Podcasts

Red Bull Hrvatska · The Jan Diaries · 1 September 2020

Podcasts are the vice Jan Kinčl admits to openly, and this entry in The Jan Diaries is the shortlist that survived years of filtering. He listens while running, walking, cleaning and travelling, and reckons two thirds of it is about music. Shows that combine substance, decent production and the discipline to keep going for years are rare — which is why a list of six is worth writing down.

What the piece covers

Top of the list is Questlove Supreme, which the column calls the alpha and omega of music discourse. Ahmir ‘Questlove’ Thompson of The Roots runs episodes stretching from two to five hours, pairing record-collector obsession with a real grasp of social and political context; guests have included George Clinton, Bootsy Collins, Patrice Rushen, Kenny Gamble, Solange, Spike Lee and Michelle Obama, and the detail runs down to how James Brown ran his backstage in the early 1970s. Next is Stripped: The Story of the White Stripes, which works on devotees and newcomers alike largely because Ben Blackwell, the man who runs Jack White’s Third Man Records, edited it.

The rest of the list comes with caveats, which is the point. Resident Advisor Exchange holds over five hundred episodes across a decade — Kenny Larkin, Gene Hunt, Matthew Herbert, DJ Sprinkles, Ricardo Villalobos, RP Boo, Jeff Mills, Ron Trent, Dimitri Hegemann, DJ Bone, Larry Heard — but Kinčl argues its editorial line has turned so uniformly affirmative that he now listens to one episode in five. Berlin Zwanzig: A City in 20 Songs tells the story of Berlin as electronic capital through twenty tracks, from Atari Teenage Riot, Peaches and Jazzanova to Bushido and Lotic, with the advice not to skip segments that look unpromising — the Paul and Fritz Kalkbrenner episode being the test case. Broken Record, produced by Rick Rubin, lines up the Beastie Boys, RZA, Alicia Keys, Andre 3000 and Nile Rodgers, and gets the same criticism: too much admiration, not enough friction. Gilles Peterson, an underrated British broadcasting institution, posts so seldom that the last two episodes date from 2018 — but the archive holds Goldie, Chaka Khan, Charles Tolliver, Marcos Valle, Moodymann and Theo Parrish.

The part that stayed

What lifts the entry above a listicle is that Kinčl recommends and criticises in one breath. “Moj grijeh su podcasti i slušam ih non-stop”, he writes — podcasts are his sin, and he listens non-stop — and that volume is what earns him the right to say where each show goes soft. He signs off by pointing at the Red Bull Music Academy lecture archive as a category of its own, too large to list.