Author: zachary.hoskins@gmail.com

  • Dystopian Listening Party Podcast: Memorial Day, 2015-2016

    With every passing week, 2016 feels more and more like a never-ending, real-life Grammy Awards tribute montage. We couldn’t even go the six days between recording and posting the podcast without losing another pop music icon: this time, Marshall Jones of the Ohio Players, word of whose death regrettably reached us only after we had finished…

  • Dystopian Video Game Party Podcast: 30 Years of Zelda

    As some of our geekier listeners may already know (oh, who am I kidding, all of our listeners are “geekier”), 2016 marks the 30th anniversary of Nintendo‘s Legend of Zelda series. We wanted to mark the occasion with a podcast, which we did in mid-April–but then Prince died, and the original podcast we recorded went back on…

  • Dystopian Listening Party Podcast: Prince, 1958-2016

    If it wasn’t official before, it is now: 2016 is a terrible year for musical icons. Callie and I were blindsided by the news of Prince‘s untimely death last Thursday; it hit us even harder than the news of David Bowie‘s passing back in January (and that, as you might recall, hit us pretty damn hard).…

  • Dystopian Listening Party Podcast: The Gospel According to Rock ‘n’ Roll

    In American popular music, there’s always been a fine line between the sacred and the secular. On this episode of the Dystopian Dance Party podcast, we talk about a few of the songs for which that line is finer than most: nominally “secular” songs with the lyrical and/or stylistic underpinnings of gospel music. Just in…

  • Dystopian Listening Party Podcast: Je Suis Kanye

    Earlier this month, Kanye West (basically) released his seventh solo album, The Life of Pablo. And, since Zach won’t get around to writing about it for a while, we thought we’d dedicate this episode of our podcast to sharing our impressions. It’s a bit of a messy, meandering conversation, but then, that’s only fair when it comes…

  • Dystopian Listening Party Podcast: David Bowie, 1947-2016

    Last week, we decided that our next podcast would be devoted to one of our mutual favorite artists, David Bowie, in celebration of his 69th birthday and the release of his 25th studio album, ★: sort of a more personal companion piece to the career-spanning Bowie guide we published that Friday. We didn’t expect to be recording…

  • Dystopian New Year’s Party Podcast: Our Favorite Songs of 2015

    Well, here we are, at the cusp of the New Year: that sacred time when bloggers from all over congregate for one last chance to opine about the pop culture year that was. And we’re no exception–even though, as we note in the introduction, we’re barely up for the task, having spent most of 2015 listening to…

  • Dystopian Listening Party Podcast: The True Meaning of Thanksgiving

    Dystopian Listening Party Podcast: The True Meaning of Thanksgiving

    Last year, Zach wrote that Thanksgiving is about two things: whitewashing the brutal history of colonialism against America’s native peoples, and eating a lot of goddamn food. We took care of the latter topic at the time; so now, we’re turning our attention to the former. This month’s Dystopian Dance Party Podcast is all about the relationship…

  • Dystopian Halloween Party Podcast: Rock ‘n’ Roll Nightmare

    Dystopian Halloween Party Podcast: Rock ‘n’ Roll Nightmare

    Well, here it is: coming in two days after Halloween, but better late than never, we have our first-ever podcast. This is something we’ve been talking about doing for a while, and overall it was pretty fun–even if we’re both so unprofessional that it required hours of post-editing to make us listenable. And yes, this…

  • Jheri Curl June: Calloway’s “I Wanna Be Rich”

    Well, folks, they say all good things must come to an end, and sadly, that applies to Jheri Curl June as well. But we want to go out on a high note, and so here’s one of my favorite late-period jheri curl tracks: Calloway’s “I Wanna Be Rich.” Calloway was of course the solo–or, erm,…