Latest / Normal Men / Episode 74 - Songs in the Key of Me

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Episode 74 - Songs in the Key of Me · Normal Men

• 0:07
  George: This is Normal Men, a podcast from four men who are clinging desperately to normalcy in an era when that's asking a bit too much. I'm George in Charlotte.
• 0:15
  Propter: In D.C. i'm Propter Malone in outer Florida.
• 0:18
  Lowtax: I'm Lowtax, Speedrun enjoyer.
• 0:20
  Ed: And I'm Ed in Boston.
• 0:25
  Lowtax: This. This playlist is a freaking nightmare. I'll give him Jolene.
• 0:33
  George: Teenage Wasteland is fine in isolation. I'm not saying in the context of the broader list it's fine, but, like, come on, what's wrong with Teenage Wasteland?
• 0:39
  Lowtax: Baba. Baba O'Reilly is the only good who song.
• 0:43
  George: They're both good.
• 0:45
  Lowtax: Nah.
• 0:47
  George: Ed's looking very skeptically at either me or Lowtax. I'm not sure who I will actually take.
• 0:53
  Lowtax: I will actually take the Undertaker entrance music over abba.
• 0:58
  George: Absolutely.
• 1:00
  Ed: Absolutely.
• 1:01
  Propter: So my compatriots are discussing Trump's playlist. I guess. I guess this is what he. He. I'm making air quotes works to on Air Force One. And we have brought in returning guest Musicology Duck as our expert heavy to. To help us dissect the musical choices of President Donald J. Trump.
• 1:25
  George: Welcome, Musicology. Doug, you are our first repeat guest, so.
• 1:28
  Musicology Duck: Oh, wow.
• 1:29
  Propter: Yeah.
• 1:30
  Ed: Second.
• 1:30
  George: Second. Second repeat guest.
• 1:33
  Ed: A certain Pacific Northwesterner has arrived twice in the past. Theophite.
• 1:41
  George: Oh, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right. I thought it was like. I was like, wait, hold on. Go like hell Machine does not count.
• 1:47
  Lowtax: No, wait, wait, wait, wait. Does Idaho count as the Pacific Northwest?
• 1:51
  Ed: It does.
• 1:52
  Musicology Duck: Yes.
• 1:52
  Ed: Absolutely. Yeah.
• 1:53
  George: No, we count those.
• 1:54
  Ed: Yeah.
• 1:55
  Lowtax: But it's nowhere near the Pacific.
• 1:57
  Musicology Duck: I'm still. Still honored.
• 2:02
  Ed: Second isn't bad.
• 2:03
  Musicology Duck: I'm neither normal nor men, so it's always nice to be invited.
• 2:08
  Propter: Well, it's. It's great to have you back. So Musicology Duck holds a doctorate in musicology. That part of the handle is not a joke. And so we are hoping to class up the joint a little bit by. By bringing in some expertise to dissect Trump's musical choices, which, as. Which, as you have heard, range from WWE theme music. I guess that goes back to being WWF theme music.
• 2:36
  George: Definitely.
• 2:36
  Propter: All the way to. All the way to Dolly Parton.
• 2:41
  George: The five songs that were on this list that were publicly disclosed, and I think there may be more, but this is what the tweet that's floating around about it included was, was Jolene by Dolly Parton. The Undertaker's WWE entrance music, Teenage Wasteland by the who, Nessun dorma by Pavarotti, and Fernando by abba. So just there's. That's the list, I guess, before we dive too deep into those five songs and what they might say about the fetid swamp of the president's brain. Musicology doc, can you sort of explain to a layperson, like, what. What is musicology? Like, I, you know, obviously it's the study of music, but, like, what does that entail? I've never talked to a musicologist about what they do before, so, you know, what does that. What does that mean?
• 3:30
  Musicology Duck: Great question that sometimes I have trouble answering because it's a very broad study of the history of music, the culture of music, how the music actually works. A lot of times, musicologists will dig into the analysis of things and kind of overlap with a sister branch of music studies that tends to call themselves music theorists. But looking at song structure, harmony and melody and lyrics and putting it all together, then understanding kind of stylistic changes, how things have worked over time, there's a lot of different methodologies that fall under that broad umbrella.
• 4:14
  Propter: I know, I know. We have also the ethnomusicologists over there that are. That are sort of sitting at kind of the juncture of musicology, and I guess anthropology is that.
• 4:27
  Musicology Duck: Yeah, more anthropology, like ethnography studies, there's more and more overlap, and some degree programs will sort of broadly train you in both sets, but ethnomusicologists will work with oral histories and field studies and things of that nature as well.
• 4:43
  Propter: So what is the WWE Undertaker theme, which I assume he's choosing for its nostalgia value rather than for its musical value, although I admit I don't immediately know the undertaker theme. What does that tell us about Donald Trump?
• 4:58
  Musicology Duck: See, look, I've been thinking about this. Sort of my in into this is that I actually wrote a book, like, 15 years ago about classical crossover music, like in the 1990s. Do you remember the Ten Tenors and the Three Tenors and the Irish Tenors and like the tenor mania that was kind of going on. And in academia, if you write a book, you have to get it peer reviewed. And the peer review for my manuscript took almost two years, and by the time they sent me the revisions, like, my life had completely changed. I never published this book. Still sitting unwritten. And as we've entered the Trump administration, people are constantly texting me, like, why is he playing Pavarotti singing Nessun dorma? This makes no sense. Like, what does this have to do with all this other random music that he's. He's always playing? Because this playlist on the plane isn't the first time we've heard some of this. Like, this goes back to, like, the. The rally music of Trump 1.0 campaign. I think this was the first time I could find Dolly Parton explicitly.
• 6:13
  George: Yeah.
• 6:13
  Musicology Duck: Mentioned in something.
• 6:15
  Lowtax: Yeah. I think he's gotta be. He's gotta be doing that because she just died. And there was all this outpouring of public support, so.
• 6:22
  Ed: You mean he noticed, right?
• 6:23
  Musicology Duck: Yeah, he noticed.
• 6:24
  Lowtax: Yeah.
• 6:25
  Musicology Duck: So I've been trying to, like, break this down, because when I went to the. I did end up going to his opening rally for the America 250 stuff on the mall the summer. Cause it was here in D.C. and you could just kind of walk right in. And so I had this. It's a bizarre experience to hear it firsthand, where you're just, like, careening from one genre to another. It's like. All right, now the military bands are playing a solemn hymn. Okay. Now there's a tenor singing something vaguely operatic. Now the operatic tenor is covering Leonard Cohen's Alleluia. What is happening? I think. I don't know if I can say what it tells us about Trump, but I have kind of, like, three hypotheses about what all this is. All right, maybe I could just throw them out and you can help me test.
• 7:21
  Propter: Sure. Yeah, sure.
• 7:22
  George: Yes, definitely.
• 7:23
  Musicology Duck: Okay. So the first one. The first thing I think is that Trump kind of routinely strips the context and the meaning of. From cultural artifacts that either he personally likes, or maybe he thinks is popular that other people like, and makes them part of his own personal brand. You know how when he, like, claims to have invented a word that we've all been using really, a long time, I think it's sort of like, okay, well, like, you might know why YMCA is a gay anthem, but now it's Trump's theme song. Like, sorry, I. I took it. Forget everything that you ever knew about what that song means to the rest of society. Like, that's my first.
• 8:11
  Propter: So this is. This is. This is kind of taking ownership of shared cultural properties, which has some resonance. We'll get to later for current events.
• 8:19
  Ed: It's really weird that he keeps doing it to artists who are still alive. Like, they can just be like, no. And it doesn't work like it. They. They stop that one. But he has so many others to. To co. Opt and ruin forever.
• 8:36
  George: He does this outside of music, too. Like, the World cup this summer was the perfect example. Right. Like, he's just trying to glom onto something that is currently in the news,
• 8:45
  Ed: that is currently popular, which is to say, not him.
• 8:48
  George: Right.
• 8:50
  Ed: Like, like, I still wonder how, how like, as this continues to spiral, are we going to get to the point where he is like, like more, more and more outlandishly just trying any sort of pop culture that exists. Like, is he going to be having Odyssey opinions next week?
• 9:10
  Musicology Duck: Well, this is what happened to Richard Nixon, like when he was starting to sort of like, like at the same time Haldeman and all these people are exchanging memos about Watergate stuff. They're also investigating what celestial liberties to try to bring into the fold to impart some cultural currency. And like you can find like, literally they brought in Donald Rumsfeld to try to find some cool hip young musicians. Like, it's not a new thing in politics, but Trump takes it to a certain never before seen level.
• 9:48
  Ed: I think the closure at least gets them like superficially young people as opposed to like, like, like they're all deeply aged inside and, and desiccating rapidly before your eyes. But like some of them at least like probably exfoliate. Like, like it's so weird seeing, seeing that, that there's just so many people who will line up for this, but even they're running away now. It's great.
• 10:12
  Propter: I mean, he had Kanye and Nicki Minaj on side, right.
• 10:16
  Musicology Duck: Like, but they never make the playlist.
• 10:19
  Propter: True.
• 10:21
  Musicology Duck: You never hear about Nicki Minaj. Like, like that. Do you remember that rally? I forget where he was, but it was in 2024 where he made Kristi Noem stand on stage with him for 40 minutes while he just played his jams.
• 10:33
  George: Yeah.
• 10:34
  Musicology Duck: Started dissociating on stage.
• 10:36
  Ed: And was that this year or last year?
• 10:38
  Propter: That was 2024, I think. 24, yeah. And we elected him anyway right before the election.
• 10:44
  Lowtax: Yeah, that was 23 years ago, Ed,
• 10:48
  George: I gotta say, I would love to just hear any take from him on wap. Like that would be great just, just to hear anything like positive, negative. I'd love to hear what he had to say about.
• 10:59
  Ed: Might be the first time I'd want to listen to him.
• 11:03
  Musicology Duck: You know, there's certain things that he is happy to take people's endorsement, but it just doesn't like when the rubber hits the road, it doesn't show up anywhere.
• 11:15
  Propter: You know, he's still, he's still a very old man from Queens. You, Kanye's entire productive artistic wife is, you know, after, after Trump turned 60. So not quite. Almost.
• 11:30
  Lowtax: Yeah. I mean, remember Trump, Trump's brain is frozen in time in 1994. And like you said, he is, he is an old man from Queens. So, I mean, Pavarotti is the only one on here that makes any sense to me whatsoever.
• 11:43
  George: Yeah, that one tracks so perfectly.
• 11:45
  Musicology Duck: Yeah.
• 11:48
  George: So, musicology Duck, what's your second hypothesis? We got the first one. I think we are in broad agreement with the first one. What's number two?
• 11:54
  Musicology Duck: That's where Pavarotti comes in for me. So my second thesis is that he is a genre agnostic power ballad guy. All right.
• 12:07
  Propter: No, that tracks.
• 12:08
  Ed: Yeah. Say no more. Done.
• 12:10
  Musicology Duck: If you take the playlist, the undertaker theme maybe even falls into this a little bit. If you sort of strip out the singing style and some of the instruments that sort of clue you into what genre it's supposed to be. And you just look at the song structure. Like, starts kind of quiet and speech. Like, then you get, like, kind of a lyrical chorus, and then the chorus might, like, repeat and it builds and lots of instruments come in and it, like, hits some kind of huge climax either at the end or, like, right before it fades out at the end. If you go through his playlist, so many of the songs fit that model. So, like Nessun dorma, the operatic aria that Pavarotti made super famous. Like, some of the Aerosmith songs and stuff that he has gotten in trouble for playing in the past. Some of the sort of schmaltzy, like, Andrea Bocelli stuff. Like, he's brought Bocelli to the White House a few times, but they all have the same structure, formula, and I think it's perfect. Emotional manipulator music like Donald Trump operates through manipulating people's emotions, getting them to. To feel things. And, like, what works better for that than, like, a really dramatic 80s or 90s power ballad?
• 13:30
  Propter: I love this because it strongly suggests to me that Donald Trump owns a copy of Bat out of Hell and.
• 13:36
  Musicology Duck: Oh, absolutely.
• 13:37
  Lowtax: Oh, he 100% does.
• 13:43
  Musicology Duck: I don't know if it's ever made, like, the official playlist, but that would be zero percent surprised.
• 13:48
  Lowtax: That. And wasn't. Wasn't Meatloaf on the Apprentice?
• 13:53
  Propter: Oh, my God. Yeah, he was. Yeah, he absolutely was. Yeah, that must have.
• 13:58
  Lowtax: He was probably on there because Trump
• 14:00
  Musicology Duck: owns Bad Advil and what's his name from Poison.
• 14:04
  Lowtax: Yes. Bret Michaels.
• 14:05
  Musicology Duck: Bret Michaels, who, like, wouldn't come this summer to play the state fair. So. Power, guys. Yeah, that's what I'm saying.
• 14:15
  Lowtax: You got to be down bad not to get Bret Michaels, man. You could be. You couldn't even let land Bret Michaels, let alone Poison. Like, Bret Michaels on his own turned you down.
• 14:28
  Propter: I mean. I mean, Vanilla Ice had Prior commitments. Like, he had a real problem this summer. All right, so what's our third hypothesis, Doug?
• 14:37
  Musicology Duck: So my third hypothesis is that this is the probably most ridiculous one, but I really think it's true that he has. Trump has an inner fantasy world in which he is the leading tenor.
• 14:52
  Ed: I think that's just fact.
• 14:54
  Musicology Duck: So, like, this extends to both, like, on stage, because we know, like, he has this obsession with Phantom of the opera. Like, in 2022, he bizarrely accused Biden of having gotten it canceled on Broadway. There was that one day, was it last year, where when he was redoing the Rose Garden or whatever and the press were posting videos of Phantom of the Opera just, like, blasting out of the White House. But, like, in his head, I think he's like a lead heroic tenor of some sort of. But also the tenors themselves as singers, sometimes the really, really famous ones, like Pavarotti or, like, you could trace this history at least even just focusing on the United States, let alone Italy or opera countries, you know, 100 years or more for these Enrico Caruso, like, these huge celebrities. And he has. So, like, he's obsessed with Pavarotti. He's obsessed with Andrea Bocelli. Have you guys seen that Chris Macchio guy that he keeps bringing into stuff? He's operatic style, like a crossover style singer. And he performed at the America 250 thing, and they had a big slide behind him that said America's presidential tenor. He performed at the RNC in 24. He performed it the inauguration. He sang the national anthem. He's been at a couple of the rallies, and he. And then at the 250 kickoff this summer. So Trump, and, you know, he just. He just sings the songs Pavarotti would sing if Pavarotti was still alive, basically. So he's. Trump is, like, lending his patronage to this guy who, as far as I can see, like, wasn't really super a thing before all this started happening.
• 16:52
  Propter: He's just. He's just Trump's favorite, favorite current tenor.
• 16:55
  Musicology Duck: He's Trump's favorite. And I think it's because in Trump's head, he wants to be. He wants to be America's presidential tenor.
• 17:02
  Propter: Now I'm. Now I'm thinking about Trump singing in the shower, and I wish I hadn't done that.
• 17:07
  Lowtax: There is a world in which Trump grows up in, like, a normal household and doesn't have, like, Fred beating the hell out of him all the time, where Trump grows up to become, like, a theater critic and the best gossip columnist Page Six could Ever have. And he is the happiest guy on earth. And that somewhere out in the multiverse, that world exists, and those people are so much happier than all of us.
• 17:39
  Ed: Imagine a world where someone likes him.
• 17:43
  Musicology Duck: Yeah. I think in his head, he's like, goes off into this fantasy world where he is at the theater all the time. And that's why Stephanie Grisham's autobiography, or her memoir, where she was writing about how one of the staffers had to be the music man and come play songs from mega musicals for Trump when he was getting ragey, to calm him down.
• 18:05
  George: Emotional security. 1990s musical soundtrack collection.
• 18:09
  Propter: Like, to be fair, Cats also has that effect on me, but we all do.
• 18:14
  Musicology Duck: I mean, and it's like everybody has their comfort songs or their. What you listen to. To pump yourself up before, you know, job interview or whatever. But I think in Trump's head, it's the mega musical, it's the Pavarotti. I think that's my thesis.
• 18:31
  George: All three of these are very compelling. And I'm going to say this not to disprove any of them, but just to sort of offer a also potentially true take that doesn't contradict but sort of fits in as well. I think he, in a large way, he's just totally stuck in the 80s and 90s. And this is what he was listening to then. So that's what he listens to now. And there's nothing more to it than that now why he was listening to it in the 80s and 90s. Your three hypotheses are much more thought out than this one. But, yeah, I just like, so much of his mental gymnastics he does with himself, like his true social posts, the stuff he talks about at rallies or press conferences or whatever, you know, musical taste, taste in food also. Right. Like, like everything. It's just a freeze frame of roughly 1985 to 1997. I mean, maybe I'm a little.
• 19:28
  Musicology Duck: I would say 1978 to 1999. But, yes, I broadly agree with you.
• 19:34
  George: Yeah, I mean, yeah, go ahead.
• 19:37
  Musicology Duck: I just think that there's a little bit of a disco obsession that runs through some of this with, like, abba. And like, he put. He made Gloria Gaynor one of the Kennedy center honorees this past year when he decided them himself. And I think there's like a little disco vein that pushes it. Like just before the 80s.
• 19:55
  George: Yeah.
• 19:56
  Musicology Duck: Plus, yes, yes, I agree with you.
• 19:58
  Lowtax: The late, great Hannibal Lecter, folks.
• 20:04
  George: Oh, Lord.
• 20:05
  Musicology Duck: Like, it makes sense. Like, there's some research. I don't know how Good. It is. I didn't really dig into the surveys they did or anything that says a lot of people's musical taste is formed when they're a teenager. And for Trump, that would have been like, 50s, early 60s rock and roll, which you hear a little bit of, too. He has his Elvis. Elvis shows up from time to time.
• 20:25
  George: Every boomer loves Elvis, though, right? Like, that's.
• 20:28
  Musicology Duck: Yeah, for him, it seems to be like the music that was playing during the. I don't want to say the height of his career, because what is the height of his career, being president, but, like, when he was building big buildings in New York City and guest starring in Hollywood movies, like, you know, they
• 20:44
  Lowtax: told me never to go into Manhattan, folks.
• 20:49
  Propter: He was. He was. He was kind of stepping out as his own man, right? Like, yes, he had.
• 20:54
  Musicology Duck: So I think that's why there's, like, a little bit of a freezing on that period instead of some other people his age that might just still listen to the Beatles over and over again or something like that.
• 21:06
  George: The other thing, too, looking across your three hypotheses, like, they fit well into the sort of fascist characterization of Trump. Right? Like, it's all about the tenor that is the star of the show, the leading man, like the power ballad, like that. That sort of using culture and using music to advance something.
• 21:30
  Ed: Right.
• 21:31
  George: Like instrumentalizing the art.
• 21:33
  Propter: Right.
• 21:34
  George: In a very obvious way. Do we have any history around what Mussolini or that other guy in Germany liked musically and, like, how that sort of led to their. Or sort of commented on their worldviews? I don't expect you to have this off the cuff, but, you know, you don't have a musicologist on the podcast every day, so that's fair question.
• 21:55
  Musicology Duck: The one that everybody kind of studies the most in music history classes, that sort of textbook example is Stalin. And where it gets discussed a lot is with the composer Dmitri Shostakovich. And there's. There's a lot of controversy. There's a lot of things that are a little bit murky about the history. But Shostakovich wrote an opera that was very, very popular. I want to say it came out in 1834. And then a couple years later, Stalin just completely says, no, we don't like this anymore. Never mind, and starts developing all these very. He tries to come up with stylistic conventions that would really be what Soviet music is, but is definitely a characteristic of fascist regimes that they try to suppress what doesn't support their aims and goals and to elevate what does. But it's surprisingly hard with something like music to objectively say what that is. So something that might seem to fit all the descriptions you get out of the regime. Like, they could just say they don't like it and then it is what it is. So I do see that with Trump just in the whole personalist style that he has going on. It's about like you almost couldn't guess if you just composed a piece and he didn't know who wrote it, how he would, how he would react to any given piece. Like, it becomes a very difficult environment for artists to operate within because you're trying to imagine what's in someone else's head as far as the musical style. Like, there are some rules that become easy to follow, but some that get really murky, and it's that way on purpose so that if you step out of line in other ways, you can be, you can be punished. So I definitely think there's some, some of that going on here for sure.
• 24:03
  Propter: And you do have this history in fascist and personalist regimes of artists tending to run away from the regime, both physically and often politically, that you have this sort of dance of distancing where like, I mean, for Hitler, some of it was because a lot of the musicians and a lot of the composers were Jewish, but you had a massive exodus of what was a lot of talent in Germany at the same time as, as the Nazis were kind of trying to, to reify things like Wagner as being, you know, the soul of the Germanic people and the, and the epitome of Aryanism that, that, you know, you often had many of the actual music makers trying to position themselves in a way that was not a bear hug to the administration. And, you know, I think part of that is that musicians are dangerous to personalist regimes because they are themselves potentially cults of personality that, that it's hard to have tastemakers out there that are not fully regime controlled in a personal, in a personalist regime, because anything that kind of takes the shine off what the, off what the monarch likes is problematic. It's. It's something that's interesting that is not the monarch. And you want everything to be running through, you know, the tastes of the personalist regime, that it has to be kind of vetted by and acceptable to the personalist for it to be amplified by the regime.
• 25:55
  George: And it turns out that the kind of stuff that people like turns out to not survive that vetting process. It's like a, you know, like personalist regimes don't create much good art, at least not in favor of the regime, because the people that can create that good art are generally not in favor of the regime, as you said. So it's like you get squeezed from both ends.
• 26:17
  Musicology Duck: Yeah. It's often as much about who is making the music as to what it is or what it, what it sounds like.
• 26:23
  Propter: So we've talked about, we talked about opera and we've talked about Trump trying to co opt, you know, public cultural icons. But I understand that you were out at the Kennedy center protest this weekend. What's, what's going on? Are we going to save the Kennedy Center? Is it already doomed?
• 26:42
  Musicology Duck: And it's, it's just such a mess. If you read the, if I'm keeping up with the lawsuit that Joyce Beatty filed and just the back, the back and forth and the arguments about it are getting. So I don't want to say nonsensical because there's certain logic to it, but what the government or what Trump et al are trying to argue, it's, it's hard to know. It's hard to know. I think clearly there's a lot of community support. That rally was huge. I'm sure they had at least a thousand, they were expecting a thousand people. I'm sure they hit that, if not more. And just social media is flooded with people talking about it. Not just Bluesky, but Facebook. And it's definitely hit something for a lot of people. I felt like that was very present at the protest. It was very all ages. People are very mad walking around afterwards. There are people with protest signs all over the whole city.
• 27:49
  Propter: It may be kind of hard to understand for people who have not spent significant time around D.C. what the Kennedy center means to this area. That it's, it's, it's very public, very accessible space that, you know, they have, they have free concerts there a couple times a week that are just like in, in one of the hallways and you know, you go and there's like hors d' oeuvres some of the time. And it's just, it's a nice community thing to do. I've gone there with one of my kids who was playing trombone as an elementary schooler and you know, they had a bunch of different elementary schools performing at the Kennedy Center. That's, that's one of the uses it goes, it goes to, there are local awards that, that happen there. You know, like teachers get honored there. That it's, it's in addition to like its high art functions, it's very much like a large space that, that sort of the DMV Area uses for things like this.
• 28:57
  Musicology Duck: And it's the people who are employed by the Kennedy center who made all of that happen, who organized it, who made sure chairs and music stands were where they needed to be and lighting was done and sound was amplified. It's like these are. This is hundreds of jobs that supported all kinds of community functions.
• 29:16
  Propter: Hundreds of jobs that people have been at for a long time that, you know, that at least it feels like to me that. That the median Kennedy center worker had been there for 20 years, and it was clear that these people were working there because they loved working there. That, you know, this was. This was. This was. This was passion project. And,
• 29:42
  Musicology Duck: and speaking of someone who's worked for cultural institutions, institutional memory is really important. Like, you could always hire someone else who has experience being artistic director or a stagehand. But every arts organization has its little idiosyncratic things, its own. You know, the Kennedy center is a huge operation. Several different theater spaces that you have to organize, market, sell tickets, all that stuff. And it's the people who forget how to do it in that space. Space. So the people who know how to do it leave. And I can tell you, some of them have moved to other parts of the country and fortunately have gotten some good positions. But replacing that talent and that institutional knowledge is extremely difficult and will take no matter what happens to the building, whether you take it all and do it someplace else. Replacing that arts administration talent is such a tall order, it's terrifying.
• 30:48
  Propter: So. So the Kennedy center arc has been that. It seemed like this was something that Trump didn't Super care about, or at least super didn't act on during his first term. But come Trump to, you know, he rolled in, he fired the Kennedy center board, he installed people who were answering directly to him and who, I mean, he got. He got Ric Grenell in there, and as far as I can tell, his only qualification is that he's gay. So.
• 31:12
  Musicology Duck: And he says he likes celebrities, which is actually a terrible quality, a terrible thing if you're in that kind of job. So you have to treat everyone you work with like a working professional. But, yes, yes, not. Not replacing what was there before in any stretch.
• 31:32
  Propter: So, so, so he, He. He crashed in. And it was clear that the Kennedy center was going to be something that was more directly under White House purview this time around, which is of questionable legality. Kennedy center is in sort of a weird position because it's. It's established by act of Congress, but administered by a board that the president at least, at least by the law runs, but by tradition, kind of leaves alone most of the time. And all of a sudden, that wasn't happening. But immediately fundraising just tanked across the board. Like, ticket sales tanked everywhere. The. The good people of Washington, Maryland and Virginia who had been coming to go see events at the Kennedy center for years and years and years, basically threw up their hands and said, no, we're not. We're not doing this anymore. Which meant that an operation that never exactly was well funded suddenly had massive budget problems because they weren't selling tickets. They still had outlays, they still had building maintenance. They still had all these expenses. More. Because you've got Trump and he's not exactly good at running operations. Lean to the bone and you have nothing coming in the front door because your traditional ticket base and donor base have entirely revolted on you. So, like Doug said, even in the best scenario, we're in a situation where you're going to need to rebuild and you're going to need to rebuild that sort of trust in those sort of relationships with the community to get people back in the door.
• 33:12
  Lowtax: I mean, as long as it's there in 2029, you know, I think you can probably get those people back without too much headache. If you get someone normal back in the White House, it should be fine. Whether it can make it to 2029 is probably a pretty good big question.
• 33:33
  Propter: Yeah, like, they're talking about knocking it down,
• 33:39
  Ed: which just seems punitive. I mean, is punitive.
• 33:44
  Propter: So, like, if you haven't been to the Kennedy center or driven along that stretch of river, you may not realize this. But, like, part of the Kennedy center overhangs a highway. So, like, there, There. There are maybe some issues here in trying to. In trying to demolish the Kennedy Center. I'm not sure exactly how that.
• 34:03
  Musicology Duck: It's also. It's also right by the Saudi Embassy and the historic Watergate Hotel. And it's. It isn't like the East Wing, where he can just keep everyone from getting anywhere.
• 34:13
  Propter: Yeah.
• 34:14
  Lowtax: Does it. Does it overhang the Saudi Embassy at all?
• 34:20
  Musicology Duck: They're like kind of catty corner across the street, but it's a strange little section of D.C. but, yeah, to the point, it's not as easy to just sort of see whatever you want without people being able to notice or protest or intervene. So, like, the legal situation is a little bit different. The physical situation is a little bit different. It's. It's very hard to predict, of course, but it's. It's not quite the same as Some of his other beautification in heavy scare quotes projects around town.
• 34:56
  Propter: Yeah, like it's. It's going to be harder to just junk and say, okay, well, now it's broken. At least without the part.
• 35:02
  Musicology Duck: The part that kind of gets me is the guy who's exact acting as executive director, Matt Floca. I don't know if that's how you say it was the direct vice president of operations. So, like, if anything's falling apart, is it kind of his fault? Yeah, they're just making a bunch of stuff up and discovery has been ordered. So we'll kind of see what Joyce Beatty's team digs up and if that does anything. But they don't seem inclined to just let this go. There was a moment where he was like on Truth Social or whatever saying, I just don't care anymore. Do what you're going to do. That doesn't seem to have held. He still seems pretty obsessed with putting his name on this and putting his stamp on this. And it comes back to what we were talking about a minute ago with authoritarian regimes and kings. And they need to have their box where they go to the theater to be. To see and be seen. And the courtiers do all their socializing. That's why I was a little bit surprised that they didn't try a little harder. But there's also. Administration is hard, but also they just
• 36:21
  George: in general refuse to admit defeat or do any kind of cost benefit analysis on continuing legal efforts that are clearly doomed. Like what. What's the stuff they've dropped, like, out of hand. I'm pretty sure the Powell investigation would lightly qualify. They didn't carry that pat it to the D.C. circuit and then Supreme Court. I'm struggling to come up with anything else that they haven't just appealed all the way up every single time. It's. It's not a long list. Whatever else is on that list. So it may just be that where it's like, you know, in addition to all the stuff you said for sure. But also admitting any defeat is admitting total defeat. And again, that. That fits with the whole vibe, right?
• 37:06
  Ed: Yeah.
• 37:07
  George: Both legally and otherwise.
• 37:11
  Lowtax: Or you do what Denmark and Iceland or Greenland did and you do something symbolic and he just declares victory and goes home.
• 37:23
  George: Yeah.
• 37:25
  Lowtax: Like maybe we could let him, like, pick his favorite director or whatever and put on a showing of Phantom of the Opera, like, like no expenses, once a week. No expenses spared. Yeah, yeah. Once a week. Phantom of the Opera. He can spend as much on it as he wants, and in exchange for that he'll just leave the Kennedy center alone.
• 37:54
  George: Could we resurrect Pavarotti? Have we. Have we explored this hologram Pavarotti?
• 37:59
  Musicology Duck: It did come up. Do you remember in. It must have been the first campaign where he said in a rally that Pavarotti is a really good friend of mine. And everyone's like, dude, Pavarotti has been dead for 10 years. And, like, people were making fun of Trump being friends with Pavarotti's ghost. So, yeah, not. Not out of the question as far as I'm concerned.
• 38:26
  Lowtax: I mean, he spends all day on Truth Social with AI Psychosis. I think we could. We could make something happen here.
• 38:35
  George: Yeah, I think that's a very underrated outcome for after this historic loss they're about to take in the midterms that he just retreats into a little bubble and never emerges, either because his brain completely falls apart by 2029, or something else happens, in which case that's not a champagne cork you hear in the background, that's a noisemaker, as opposed to the.
• 38:57
  Ed: The incredible integrity of that casu marzu going on right now.
• 39:05
  George: The what?
• 39:06
  Ed: You know, the. The maggot cheese George.
• 39:09
  George: Oh, yeah, But I. I just mean, like, you know, it wouldn't be that hard to stick him in a room if you're J.D. vance or whatever. Stick him in a room. And he does all kinds of posts and everybody knows, like, we just ignore those. Those aren't actually what's going on. And you play him his gorillas on the TV and his Pavarotti or his Phantom of the Opera or whatever, and
• 39:31
  Ed: he just good enough to have endless gorillas.
• 39:34
  George: Yes, yes. We give him as many gorillas as he needs. And we need to.
• 39:39
  Lowtax: Need to explain gorilla tv.
• 39:42
  George: Oh, yeah, yeah.
• 39:44
  Ed: At this point, somebody has to, like,
• 39:48
  George: there's a story from. What was it, 2024?
• 39:52
  Lowtax: It was. It was a pixelated boat post.
• 39:55
  Propter: Yeah, yeah. It's not. It's not.
• 39:57
  George: Wait, wait, no, I thought. I thought it was real, though. Am I thinking of something different where they literally had a staffer that would.
• 40:05
  Propter: No, you just got by. Pixelated.
• 40:08
  George: Wow.
• 40:12
  Propter: Yeah.
• 40:12
  Ed: So.
• 40:12
  Lowtax: So.
• 40:13
  Propter: So, I mean, there was. There was something about how there was a staffer that would set things up for him that would, you know, curate his news to make him happy. But. But the joke was that there was a guerrilla channel on TV that consisted of gorillas fighting each other. That. That was the thing that you went to. To calm Trump down and, you know,
• 40:33
  Lowtax: like, no, remember, he got. He got mad because the gorillas weren't fighting. And then the staffer had to adjust it so that it was all guerrillas fighting
• 40:45
  Propter: anyway.
• 40:46
  Ed: Which, I mean. Yeah, that track given literally. Literally, like you can just do that now that. That is the world we live in. As long as the grill is only go 60 seconds or less.
• 40:58
  George: I apologize for my lack of sharpness tonight. I did run 20 miles this morning. Feel like death, but you know, that's on me.
• 41:03
  Propter: That's so many miles, man.
• 41:06
  George: Yeah.
• 41:06
  Ed: This is a really convenient and repeated excuse you have here, George.
• 41:10
  George: Yeah, it's only gonna last till mid November.
• 41:11
  Propter: Then.
• 41:11
  George: I do not have any more excuses. But you know what? It's does bring up a really fun segue into a segment where I am going to have a musicologist make fun of my running playlist. So is. Is that something that everyone would like to.
• 41:25
  Musicology Duck: I'm a runner with an embarrassing playlist myself, since this is.
• 41:27
  George: Oh, beautiful.
• 41:28
  Musicology Duck: Maybe not going to be as antagonistic as you think.
• 41:32
  George: All right, so I'm going to. I'm going to read through. You know, I'll skip some because they're frankly boring. There's a lot of Fat Boy slim on here, but the first song, and this is structured for a 10k, which for me running flat out is about an hour. Give it less than an hour, maybe low 50 minutes.
• 41:48
  Musicology Duck: Beats per minute. It doesn't dare you.
• 41:51
  George: No, this is just my security blanket of up tempo happy music so that I don't think about the screeching pain of my entire cardiovascular system. So, yeah, so we're going to lead off with. Okay, I'm going to see if anyone can guess this. This is an early 90s white wrapper. And the.
• 42:14
  Propter: This is 100% snow off the album. 12 inches of snow.
• 42:19
  George: Okay, that's a good guess. It's not that low tax guess.
• 42:23
  Lowtax: I'm going to guess it's a Marky Mark song of some kind.
• 42:28
  George: Yeah, that's Good Vibrations second song.
• 42:34
  Lowtax: So many. There's only so many white rappers in the early 90s.
• 42:38
  George: Well, I. I thought Propter's guest was good too, for the record, but over and the Canadianity. Yeah, that song did get a lot of play when I was growing up. Okay. Barbra Streisand by Duck Sauce is number two. If regular listeners will be familiar with the song because we played a clip of it a couple weeks ago. Number three is. Yeah, yeah. The D. Ramirez vocal edit by Bodyrox. Wham by ASAP Ferg. And I don't even know how to pronounce that. MadeinTYO. I don't know the Major Lazer remix of Don't Go yet by Camila Cabello and Major Lazer. I mentioned a lot of Fat Boy Slim. We've got some Sofi Tukker on here. We got Gasolina by Daddy Yankee, Lil Jon Noreaga, and Pitbull. And then the Giver by Chappell Roan. All right, musicology. Duck Destroy me.
• 43:32
  Musicology Duck: Oh, no. That's so much less embarrassing than my playlist. Like, one time I did a job interview for a arts. Pretty prestigious arts organization, and one of the people who was interviewing me wasn't really, like, a music person, and they asked me what my favorite song is. It's just, like, not a question you ask in the music world, because we don't. It's like picking your favorite child. And I panicked because I don't answer this question. I don't have a favorite song. And so, like, I just thought I had been on my run that morning to, like, pump myself up. And the last thing I had listened to before going to this interview was Katy Perry's Firework. That's what I answered. That's what I said my favorite song was. But
• 44:20
  George: it's funny, though, you mentioned that there's research suggesting that your musical tastes kind of get frozen in ice in your late teens. And I used to not think that was true, but, man, I listened to a lot of, like, early 2000, like, late 90s to mid 2000, mid aughts, you know, maybe late aughts dance music these days. And boy howdy, was I listening to a lot of that at 16 years old. Like, I listened to an absurd amount of BBC Radio 1, like, dance music rips from roughly 1998 to 2008. And yeah, there is. There is only one reason for that. Like, that is what I was listening to at 16, 17 years old.
• 45:00
  Propter: So we got like S Club 7 out there. We've got.
• 45:04
  George: No, no, no, no. Think like, like, like Fat Boy Slim. Like, breakbeat stuff, like a skills like Bodyrox. Like, like that kind of stuff. Not like, not like pop. Gotcha. You know, there's obviously samples of pop in it, but it's not like pop. And yeah, it's. I'm a poster child for this phenomenon and very boring in that respect. But you know what?
• 45:29
  Ed: Whatever.
• 45:30
  George: You listen to the art that makes
• 45:31
  Musicology Duck: you happy or what makes you run faster. I think Linda Ronstadt makes me run faster. It's just like a weird. Actually, one time I was teaching a rock and roll history course, and then my students had to do a research project on something that interested Them. And one of them was a physical therapy student and he wrote about pump up songs like, what. What actually gets, like a physiological response. And I think he, if I remember right, actually proved that Eye of the Tiger, which. You hear it like every. If you're a runner, you know, it's like the start off song for every race. We can actually prove there was some physiological foundation for that. So you might be able to optimize your playlist a little bit with Tiger.
• 46:14
  George: I can still remember the Jock Jams remix thing that was played for my middle school basketball team. Like, you know, like when we ran out to start playing or whatever. And. Yeah, like. Like even from when I played college football, like, not even songs that we would listen to on the way out or anything like that, but like, guys would sing in the tunnel, like. Like stuff like that. Where, like, even to this day, if I hear that song that guys would, like, sing, I'm like, oh, yeah, I'm ready to run through a wall. It's like, it's. It's totally. Where, you know, it's an innocuous, like, southern hip hop song from 2007. Like, it.
• 46:54
  Ed: It's.
• 46:54
  George: It's wild how music works on our brains and our bodies. Like, literally on our bodies.
• 47:01
  Propter: All right, so Duck, we've got Linda Ronstadt. What else? What else is on your Pump up playlist?
• 47:09
  George: Katy Perry, of course.
• 47:11
  Musicology Duck: Okay, Katy Perry, which is the Madonna. There's a Gloria Gaynor is great writing music because of the beats per minute. That'll keep you going. Pretty sure this Green Day, like all my 90s jams.
• 47:29
  George: Yeah, I don't know, like 90s Green Day, not like American Idiot.
• 47:34
  Musicology Duck: Yeah, what else is on there? Walking on Sunshine.
• 47:40
  George: Nice. Oh, man, every time I hear that song, all I can think of is American Psycho.
• 47:47
  Musicology Duck: Like, I don't know, one time I was listening to Spotify or whatever at work and it shifted to that playlist somehow and I realized my headphones weren't plugged in. I've never slammed my laptop shut so fast. But yeah, no, it's all about the emotional effect and what can keep your endorphins going for up to four hours running.
• 48:15
  Propter: So are you building a custom playlist for the actual marathon event, George, or what's etiquette on that?
• 48:20
  George: It's on the to do list. That's a lot of playlist building. That's a weekend project. That's not something you can just kind of whip together in an afternoon. So I may just put a couple essential mixes back to back and go off that. It's about four hours. So we'll see Pete Tong's Never Let Me Wrong Before.
• 48:40
  Ed: I don't know.
• 48:45
  George: If you know who Pete Tong is. If you know who Pete Tongue albums
• 48:49
  Lowtax: and two Guns and Roses albums. We're done.
• 48:53
  Musicology Duck: Now we're back to Trump's playlist.
• 48:57
  Lowtax: I don't think Trump is a big Soundgarden guy, but he's definitely a November. He's definitely a November Rain guy.
• 49:05
  George: Underrated Pump up song. Actually, my. My wife and daughter started watching racing car movies and. And how that came about I could not begin to explain to you. But this weekend they watched both F1, the. The Brad Pitt Formula One movie and the earlier effort not as Good as F1 Gran Turismo, which is based on the story about the gamer kid who qualified for like a racing team by being really good at the video game Gran Turismo. And one of the things he does to calm down is he listens to Enya before the race. And Orinoco Flow is like, that's kind of an underrated hype song. I gotta be honest. Like, every time I hear it, I'm kind of like, yeah, yeah, that this is great. Like let's. Let's do something.
• 49:48
  Propter: Yeah, that gets you in the zone. It's interesting. I feel like. I feel like Eminem owns the market basically now that that's. That's where we're going to be for at least the next half decade or. Oh my God. George has his daughter here and she's ador. You're on mute, George. Still on mute.
• 50:23
  George: You were saying about Eminem. Don't let my adorable daughter distract you. Come on.
• 50:26
  Propter: I think, I think, I think Eminem is going to continue to own the hype up song market for like, I guess the median hype up song market for at least another half decade or so before we're totally rolled off of that. That we've just got. We've just got 8 mile 2 ingrained into us now that it's never going away. But every so often, like, you see something else emerge that is a potential Pantheon entrant. And it's. It's kind of cool to. Doesn't seem like a lot of people set out to write hype up music. Maybe I'm wrong about that. Maybe I'm listening to the wrong artists. But
• 51:08
  Lowtax: I mean, I think like all of the arena rock acts are basically writing hype up music.
• 51:14
  Propter: Well, except when they're writing power ballots. I mean,
• 51:19
  Lowtax: has ACDC ever written a power ballad?
• 51:22
  Propter: No. That's a fair point.
• 51:25
  Lowtax: I don't think you shook me all night long counts.
• 51:27
  Propter: No, it does not.
• 51:29
  Musicology Duck: Really?
• 51:30
  George: Does not.
• 51:30
  Propter: Neither does American thighs. Yeah. Okay, so American thighs is you shook
• 51:37
  Lowtax: me all night long.
• 51:41
  Propter: Yeah.
• 51:41
  Lowtax: So.
• 51:48
  Ed: Continue.
• 51:49
  Propter: So, like. Like, I was going through this. I was going through this with my kids, trying to find hype up music for them, and it's surprisingly barren that there is like. Like, it's like. It's like the Riot Music League of Legends crew that is making hype up music for the new generation. And a couple of rap songs, some of which have been orchestrated by the League of Legends Riot Crew, and, like, not a lot else from the past decade or so that even. Even, like, what you think of as, like, jock jams now are all. Are all like, early teens, late, late 2000s, that, you know, like, Kid Cudi's not a young man anymore.
• 52:40
  George: I will say, a lot of the hype up music when I was in, like, middle school, high school, or whatever was stuff from the 90s. So that feels kind of normal that whatever the current thing is doesn't just automatically get piped over. Like, there is an element of nostalgia. I think you need for something to be a hype up song. Like, there's gotta be. Or an element of, like, a callback of some kind of. Like, there's. This is a tradition or this is something that other people have used, and so now we're gonna use it. Like, it can't just be like, oh, it's a current top five single. And so that's gonna hype us up.
• 53:14
  Propter: Right. I mean, it's kind of like wedding music. Right. You gotta connect with an intergenerational crowd. So it's good if it's been in the bloodstream for a while. Maybe. Maybe that's the driver and we'll get.
• 53:23
  Musicology Duck: Yeah. To get pumped up by something, you know already because you don't want to be, like, distracted by trying to follow what's happening at a piece of music you've never heard before.
• 53:35
  Propter: Yeah. So, like, you want. You want simple. You know, we've got We Will Rock You. We've got whatever the Gary Glitter song is, and welcome to the Jungle. Welcome to the Jungle. See, welcome to the Jungle is kind of complicated. Like, you've got. You've got Axl doing, like, three different voices.
• 53:55
  Ed: Yeah. But no one has actually listened to the song in their entire life.
• 53:59
  Musicology Duck: Yeah.
• 53:59
  George: Like, the guitar riff alone is. I mean, you know exactly what's going on in the sirens, and it's just like, no this is. Don't overthink it. I mean, which isn't to take away from the.
• 54:08
  Lowtax: Those are not sirens. That's actually. Axl, I'm not joking.
• 54:16
  George: I do, I do think 8 mile is like a good example of that too. Where, like that, that baseline that like dun, dun, dun, dun, like I don't care who you are. Like that, that's gonna do something at the margin, right? Even if you don't have all the context of the movie and like being a teenager when that came out.
• 54:39
  Lowtax: I bet Mr. Bright side is big in like the Premier League.
• 54:46
  George: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 54:50
  Lowtax: That really shouldn't be a hype song.
• 54:52
  George: Well, it's not a hype song so much as like a drinking song and like a thing you'd hear sung in the stands or something like that. It's not like, you know, like stadium warm up music,
• 55:07
  Propter: So just kind of
• 55:07
  George: benefits from podcasting with a three year old on your lap is tough, let me just say that. But yeah, you benefit from familiarity. Another one is. What's the one they always free from desire? That's like the classic. Every major cup final that gets played afterwards. And like that song is very old. I don't. It's got to be 20 years old, I think, right?
• 55:37
  Lowtax: 20 years is very old now.
• 55:40
  George: Well, I just mean in the context of like popular music, right? Yeah, 1996. So it's. It's 30 years old. Not like, not like something 20 years old is very old, but in the context of like popular music. And you're talking about players, many of whom are 20 years old, right? Like this song was 10 years old when they're born and it's like a classic. Everyone knows it. So like.
• 55:58
  Ed: Sure, but having that. Nothing ejects anymore though, right? Like everything. What do you mean, Spotify? Like, like music doesn't go away the way it used to, right? Like
• 56:10
  Musicology Duck: you don't have to tape it off the radio to put it on your plate.
• 56:15
  Ed: I mean like there's a reason other than his shitty Twitter account that people know who the Eve 6 guy is in 2026.
• 56:22
  Propter: It's true.
• 56:25
  George: Yeah, but there was always like a lot of intergenerational transmission of music, right? Like you would get in the car and your dad would play like the 70s oldies radio station or whatever, right?
• 56:33
  Ed: Like Spotify will just go do that now. Like it'll give you. It'll give you.
• 56:36
  Propter: It will be.
• 56:37
  George: You have to go looking for it though.
• 56:38
  Musicology Duck: Like weirdly spotty. Like there is stuff that will go through, but yeah. Oh man, if you ever want to feel old, teach music history to undergraduates. I remember this wasn't even that long after REM Broke up. Trying to teach a class about REM and they're all like, who started playing, like, losing my religion and getting like, increasingly desperate for, like, at least one of them to recognize. Recognize the songs. But then there'll be. There'll be something else that I will not expect them to have heard of that.
• 57:11
  Ed: I'm 38 and I say that.
• 57:14
  Musicology Duck: You know that. So it's. It does continue. But sometimes it's strange to me what does and doesn't make inroads.
• 57:21
  Propter: Yeah, some.
• 57:22
  Musicology Duck: Sometimes generationally.
• 57:24
  Propter: Sometimes things you think are going to hang around, don't. Like, like, I. I would have. I would have sworn to you and you know, 2,000 that that REM would be one of the enduring artists. And I'm not sure they have been like. It felt like the Kinks maybe should have had a longer tail than they have.
• 57:44
  Lowtax: I mean, the Kink.
• 57:45
  Musicology Duck: But then like, TikTok randomly set something off that, like, what was it? Connie Francis was like, viral on TikTok for a little while. And it's like, what. It could be unpredictable.
• 57:58
  George: Yeah.
• 57:59
  Propter: I mean, like.
• 57:59
  Lowtax: I mean, the Kink weren't all that big in the first place, though. Like, did they even have a platinum record?
• 58:11
  Ed: What's a record?
• 58:17
  Propter: Well, I guess.
• 58:18
  George: I guess the thing with the warm sound, I'm reliably told, ah, yes, I
• 58:22
  Ed: have one on my wall that has never been played.
• 58:28
  Propter: That's. That's got to be kind of a. Kind of troubling from like a preservation perspective too, that you've got different things kind of coming across that are ephemeral in a lot of ways that,
• 58:43
  Ed: you know, I mean, there's nothing that's ephemeral anymore. Like, everything that has ever been. Been considered of being uploaded on SoundCloud is in 10,000 different places. We have too much stuff.
• 58:57
  Lowtax: All right, I looked it up. The Kinks have never gone platinum.
• 59:00
  George: Okay.
• 59:00
  Lowtax: They did have two. Two gold records, though, so they're a solid candle box, I'll give you that. Propter.
• 59:10
  Propter: I'm over indexing on the Kinks. I do like Candlebox.
• 59:17
  George: One of my favorite places to discover new music when I'm in the mood to do so. And not just in the mood to relive my. Relive my teenage years. Audiophonically is TikTok, because you get. Because it's an audio visual medium. You get a lot of exposure to different music very quickly. If that's what you want to go find, like, you can find a TikTok that's 60 seconds long, and you'll get five or six different songs out of it in a hurry. Now, there are downsides to this approach to discoverability, because if you're only clipping a song for five or six seconds or maybe 15 seconds, obviously that's like an incomplete presentation of something, like a song that lasts three or four minutes. But all the same, I mean, you can. You can run through a lot. And there's a lot of cool content creation around the background and, like, the context. And you know what that adds that you used to get, I think, through a lot of radio stations, but maybe not as, I don't know, like, sociologically conscious or like. Or, like, conscious across mediums. I don't know.
• 1:00:26
  Lowtax: I. I will just note, I discovered Candle Box went four times platinum on their first record. So I apologize. Candle Box. I was not familiar with your game.
• 1:00:35
  George: Wait, Candle Box? Who's Candle Box?
• 1:00:38
  Propter: Far behind is the song you might know. Nope. George is too young for Candle Box.
• 1:00:43
  George: Sorry.
• 1:00:44
  Propter: Yep.
• 1:00:46
  Musicology Duck: To playlist later.
• 1:00:48
  George: Yeah, please do. Although I'm an Apple music guy, not a Spotify guy, so that may be a limitation.
• 1:00:51
  Musicology Duck: No, that's. That's. That's, You know, nothing. Nessun dorma was a sports pump up song, too. It got really famous because the BBC used it as the opening theme music for the 1990. Well, yeah, 1990 World cup was in Italy. Huh. That's. That connection with sports is part of what. It's probably part of why it gets played in the White House today.
• 1:01:23
  George: So underrated.
• 1:01:24
  Musicology Duck: There you go.
• 1:01:26
  George: Underrated opera pump up song In Taberna Quando Sumus from. What's it called? The adaptation of the. There's an ad. There's an opera that's. It's not an opera, really. It's like an hour long and it's kind of a pastiche, but it's. It gets played on the BBC Proms all the time. And it's like 13th century monks, like, song sheet, basically, that got adapted in the 1910s or 1920s into, like, an operatic format. And it's basically just a monk's drinking song. And they're talking about all the stuff they do when they get hammered. And it sounds like it's very, like, imposing and. And like. I don't know. How do I describe it? Like, it's very dramatic, but it's a drinking song. I'm thinking of Carmina Burana, I think, is the name of the overall work.
• 1:02:25
  Musicology Duck: Oh, yes, yes. Know what you're talking about Al Carmina Burana. So if you market that one a few times.
• 1:02:33
  George: Yeah, yeah, yeah, sorry. I think I got most of the background right there off the top of my head. I did not have Wikipedia app when I would say that.
• 1:02:39
  Musicology Duck: I just. That first title you said went by me and I. Yeah, I mean, it was just like a bunch of earlier, but I don't know what he's talking about.
• 1:02:46
  George: Bunch of medieval monks talking in Latin about, like, how they're getting wasted and it's like. And it's like. It sounds like a battle rap.
• 1:02:57
  Musicology Duck: One of my cousins texted me one time and he's like, you know a lot about music. I'm thinking of this, like, really epic song that's like in Latin or something. I was just like, is it Carmina Burana? And like 10 minutes later he text me back like, yep, thanks.
• 1:03:11
  George: And like the rest of Carmina Burana is great too. But like, that specific song is just so fun because it's like battle rap in Latin about getting hammered.
• 1:03:22
  Propter: Looks. They're just like us.
• 1:03:26
  Musicology Duck: Make a whole operatic pump up songs playlist too. Could be done.
• 1:03:32
  George: That's me on a marathon playlist.
• 1:03:34
  Lowtax: I have a theory that the Undertaker intro is what led him to Japan and the bowling ball test.
• 1:03:42
  Propter: Say more.
• 1:03:45
  Lowtax: He was definitely watching one of the wwf then WWF shows and then switched over to Letterman in time to watch Rupert and the audience member drop the bowling balls on cars.
• 1:04:05
  Musicology Duck: It's also based on a classical music song. I listened to it today because I couldn't, you know, watch wrestling and I didn't know, like, oh, that's Chopin's Funeral March.
• 1:04:23
  George: Is it literally based off of Chopin's funeral Funeral march,
• 1:04:28
  Musicology Duck: like the dirty thing? Yeah. Oh, my God. Quoted. Quoted right in there. So it is also super technically classical crossover.
• 1:04:41
  Lowtax: When you watch him walk, like to the White House from Marine One or something. The way he walks is kind of reminiscent of the Undertaker too. I think Pavarotti,
• 1:04:55
  George: he's definitely got the body shape Pavarotti cultivated.
• 1:04:58
  Lowtax: Yes.
• 1:05:01
  George: Maybe not the bowel control, but that's a different story.
• 1:05:05
  Musicology Duck: It's all coming together. This is all connected.
• 1:05:08
  Lowtax: We're not getting into that, George.
• 1:05:11
  George: Into what? Into what?
• 1:05:17
  Lowtax: Not taking the bait.
• 1:05:20
  Propter: Did you guys see today about how apparently the victory arch is now going to have drones in it? That. That's in it. In it? Yes. It's going to be a. It's going to be a launching platform for drones. Also a sniper nest. So we are apparently now in the Transformers or possibly Mask phase of this presidency.
• 1:05:41
  George: Wait, this was something that actually happened or was this a fever dream of a columnist?
• 1:05:45
  Propter: No, this is, he posted this as a true social that that apparently, I mean presumably he's trying to. This is some preamble to illegal maneuver where he claims that the, the Victory Arch is important for national defense, but.
• 1:06:01
  George: Right.
• 1:06:01
  Musicology Duck: I've always wanted a militarily viable target a mile from my house. Sounds great.
• 1:06:09
  George: I mean when your house is the White House, I think, I think that is a military viable target. Right.
• 1:06:13
  Lowtax: Like what are the snipers shooting at people on the scenario.
• 1:06:22
  George: I don't know.
• 1:06:22
  Propter: The invading hordes
• 1:06:26
  Musicology Duck: of warring bases across the river.
• 1:06:29
  Lowtax: They're just taking potshots at like the cemetery or.
• 1:06:34
  Musicology Duck: Yep.
• 1:06:36
  George: In case the south rises again. And by the south rises again. I mean I 85 supremacy and North Carolina going at the Democrats along with Virginia, the good Democrats this time we
• 1:06:52
  Musicology Duck: had, we had some interesting Virginia like legal. The ability to fight the Arch. Now have we made them a party?
• 1:07:01
  George: This is, this is something I don't understand and I've asked this on this podcast before and you know, I, I, I, I'm just gonna ask it out loud again. Like how, how do they have the legal authority to do this in Virginia if they were inside the district? I, I don't know.
• 1:07:15
  Propter: Whatever.
• 1:07:15
  George: It's the federal government. But like how are they just usurping the right to do this? Like, like what it might be federal land property.
• 1:07:23
  Propter: Yeah. Yeah.
• 1:07:24
  Lowtax: Okay. Yeah.
• 1:07:27
  Ed: And I mean you have, you have to put snipers up there to keep an eye on the Virginians.
• 1:07:34
  Propter: I mean I think that's it is
• 1:07:35
  George: actually really, really close to Robert Lee's old house.
• 1:07:37
  Ed: So.
• 1:07:38
  Propter: Right.
• 1:07:39
  Lowtax: I would give you that, Ed, if the snipers were out in like Loudoun county watching those people. But no Arlington.
• 1:07:47
  Ed: I mean I understand there's some curvature of the earth issues here, but I think we can work them out.
• 1:07:57
  George: Should we talk midterms polling since we get it was, it was quite a week.
• 1:08:00
  Propter: It was over.
• 1:08:02
  George: Is coming around.
• 1:08:03
  Propter: Yeah. Do we, do we want to go deep cuts here? Are we, are we talking about like stretch goals for, for what might be possible?
• 1:08:13
  George: Well, I mean let's, let's do a high level first on kind of the more competitive stuff. I think everybody in their dog has come around to my position that Roy Cooper is about to put up Assad margins. Georgia similar. The polling is just, it's, it's, it, yeah. It's not going to be competitive at this point. New Hampshire Maine.
• 1:08:34
  Lowtax: Was anyone ever not on your Side on a. Roy.
• 1:08:40
  George: No, but there weren't anyone, there weren't that many people loudly against it. But, you know, I was very loud and early saying that he was going to crush whoever came up against him
• 1:08:48
  Ed: and just, just, just let George have this.
• 1:08:51
  George: I'm very sore and ornery today.
• 1:08:54
  Ed: Okay.
• 1:08:55
  Propter: George is, George is interesting because I think they would, I think Republicans would probably triage the race, except that they really want to stay in it for a Georgia governor. And if Republicans pull out and Ossoff just gets to apply $100 million to the jaw, then they're going to lose governor on coattails too. So, like, if you want national, if you want national Georgia money from the Republicans right now, you basically have to do it through the Senate race because the donor base is not activated and the organs are not activated to give it straight to the governor. I think they're gonna lose.
• 1:09:34
  Ed: By the way.
• 1:09:35
  Lowtax: I need, I need John Ossoff to stop beginning speeches with did you hear about this? Because whenever he does that, I hear Jay Leno in my head going, you
• 1:09:49
  Ed: see this in the news.
• 1:09:49
  Propter: You hear about this might kind of grow into some like Nixon-esque jowls. I think there's potential for that. Like, he's got, he's got some, he's got some pretty, they're, they're, they look good on him. I don't mean, I don't mean to make fun of him that way, but
• 1:10:02
  George: like I was gonna say, God damn, dude, he's like, he's younger than me. Can we not like,
• 1:10:11
  Lowtax: Wait. No, he's not.
• 1:10:13
  George: Okay. He's within two years of me. Whatever.
• 1:10:17
  Ed: Wait, really?
• 1:10:18
  Propter: He's a young.
• 1:10:19
  George: Yeah, he's like 30. He's 37.
• 1:10:21
  Ed: 38. No, 39. He's older than 39 or 40. Okay.
• 1:10:25
  George: He's within two years. I'm turning 37 in December. So he's within two years.
• 1:10:30
  Ed: 36 is more than two years away from 39.
• 1:10:35
  George: I will be 37 and that's within two years of 39. You know what?
• 1:10:39
  Ed: Yes, but it's different when low tax makes fun of him. I have to, I have to stand up for George when I make fun of him. It's different.
• 1:10:51
  George: Speaking of the curvature of the earth,
• 1:10:53
  Lowtax: do you hear about this?
• 1:10:55
  George: Speaking of the curvature of the earth, it's a good thing Boston is so far north of me.
• 1:11:01
  Propter: So, okay, so we've got, we've got the likely Dem winds are now, are now mostly being cemented in as pretty much done deals. Maine is still very competitive According to the polling, Dems are up, but not by a sufficient margin to make us comfortable. Not that after 2020, there is a sufficient margin for us to be comfortable. Michigan is working good for.
• 1:11:24
  Ed: For what it's worth, I have heard that Republican folks in Maine are pissing
• 1:11:30
  Propter: themselves, I mean, like, real bad. Yeah, I hope they are.
• 1:11:33
  Ed: Like, yeah, like, I just.
• 1:11:36
  George: It's worth going back and looking at Susan Collins last two victories. Like, this national environment looks nothing like 2020 or 2014.
• 1:11:43
  Ed: No, not at all.
• 1:11:44
  George: So, like, I, you know, if the polling's close, okay, fine, it's, you know, it's not. Gimme. But like, I'm sorry, you cannot convince me that the polling in Maine is going to overestimate Collins. I just Like. Or underestimate Collins. I just. You can't. You can't convince me of that. Because her fearsome, you know, like, fearsome reputation was built on two elections where one, Trump was on the ballot in the highest voter turnout in American history. And two, 2014 was a wave election against the Democrats in office. And, you know, 2008, we're now far enough back that the coalitions look different. It's a different story. So I just.
• 1:12:25
  Lowtax: I don't know if she survives this time. I'm going to assume that she's like the guy in Widow's Bay where you have to drive him out past the buoy so that he.
• 1:12:36
  Ed: If she survives this, we have to start talking about Highlander rules.
• 1:12:43
  George: So stretch goals. Because we had some interesting polling there, too.
• 1:12:46
  Propter: Yeah. So we had. We had one polling that's really making some people sit up and take notice.
• 1:12:50
  Ed: Out of.
• 1:12:50
  Propter: Out of Idaho for Todd Achilles. I think the poll is bullshit, but that doesn't necessarily mean he's drawing dead. My theory on. So there was a poll that came out that showed Todd Achilles, who is the independent who is running in place of the Democrat. He's an interesting guy. He is a lifelong Republican who was appointed by the governor to fill a Democratic seat, switched parties to Democrat, and now has switched back to independent. I would guess that his politics are probably pretty at home on the right edge of the Democratic caucus if he actually gets in. But, you know, like, I mean, he's a. He's running for Senate in Idaho. Like, like, this guy is not. This guy's gonna.
• 1:13:36
  Ed: Not.
• 1:13:36
  Propter: This.
• 1:13:36
  Musicology Duck: He's.
• 1:13:37
  Propter: He's not gonna be turbolib. But what we're hoping for here is a Manchin situation. Anyway, there. There was a poll that came out from a organization that is a cutout for a Republican Aligned consulting firm that had Achilles up by nine points had him up 50 to 41 on the head to head top line. I don't think this is correct. What I think is happening here is that this firm does campaign message testing and occasionally they drop data out of it and if it looks interesting, they pretend it's a poll. That said, just because it's bad polling methodology doesn't necessarily mean that it's a lie. It just means that it's highly pre selected. There hasn't been a whole lot of other polling in Idaho from, you know, responsible pollsters. Maybe that'll change going forward. So to a large extent we're kind of flying blind there. The incumbent, Jim Risch is 83. So if you think that there's something of a tide against old incumbents in this country and against Republicans, these are things that could add up to something.
• 1:14:52
  Ed: Anyway, I have very little to add except the Libertarian candidate in that race. His profile picture has him literally wearing a fedora.
• 1:15:01
  George: Yeah, that sounds like ghetto. I know, I love it.
• 1:15:05
  Propter: Do not check that man's hard drive. So anyway, so, so pulling usa.
• 1:15:12
  Lowtax: I don't want to check anyone's hard drive in Idaho, I'm not gonna lie.
• 1:15:16
  Propter: Pulling usa, who is, who is one of the, the aggregators and sort of race classifiers. They sort of do what like Cook Report does, but I would say at a somewhat less prestigious level has now moved that from solid Republican to lean Republican, which I think is over aggressive. They have similarly moved Kansas. They also have South Carolina I believe, down to likely Republican. We are getting to the point here where, particularly if gas keeps going up, the scenario where the bottom just completely drops out for Republicans is becoming more realistic. Apparently we just hit I guess $6.50 average diesel. Is that the right number? So you know, that's up 50 cents from about a week ago. So if that continues and it's not entirely clear to me what would turn that around. You're on mute, George.
• 1:16:26
  George: That's the interesting thing with diesel is that it's not really an oil story. Right, Brent? Last week in spot markets traded up to the mid low one teens, which is high, but not, not particularly high. We got way higher than we got into the 150s briefly in March. So this is not like, oh, Hormuz is closed and the oil can't get out and the Houthis are hitting the Red Sea pipeline and the east west pipeline and the Red Sea is shut and yada yada, yada. No, it's not that. It's more about the war in Ukraine than anything else. Basically Europe is really bad at making middle distillates, which is diesel and Russia's refining capacity has gone substantially away.
• 1:17:10
  Ed: So wonder how that happened.
• 1:17:12
  George: Yeah, very unfortunate for them. So yeah, I mean really, if you're going to blame any single geopolitical conflict for diesel right now, it would be, it would be Russia, Ukraine. Like diesel is so expensive right now relative to oil that if you take a barrel of diesel, less than half of that is oil. Most of it is, most of the price is the refining margin which is insane. Like crack spreads for diesel are at record levels. Just unbelievable. So yeah, I mean, I mean even if like forget, forget Iran, like just assume whatever outcome you want for Iran, like diesel still probably wouldn't drop that much. Might drop a bit, but not a ton. And oh by the way, we're headed into the seasonal time when diesel demand is highest because of heating in the, in the Northern hemisphere. The US Northeast is going to have a very rough winter in that respect and also that's when refiners tend to shut down in the US for seasonal maintenance. So we've sort of hit peak refining throughput for the year already and that's going to start dropping and diesel inventories are very low relative to history. So. Yeah.
• 1:18:19
  Lowtax: Are we also heading into harvest season and isn't diesel pretty important?
• 1:18:25
  George: Yeah, it's definitely relevant for that as well. Heating is bigger but yes, you do see a lot more diesel usage in the planes during harvest season. The other thing is all those, we've also started a trade war with the country that is responsible for delivering the crude that is used to produce the diesel for the entire middle of the country. So yeah, good, good times. Anyhow, to your point Reid, diesel prices, I don't think they're going to go down dramatically from here. It's just really hard to see a scenario where that happens because it's so multi causal why they've gone up.
• 1:19:00
  Propter: So I, am I correct? Ironically, bringing on new, bringing new refinery capacity online is basically not an option.
• 1:19:08
  George: Yeah, before the midterms.
• 1:19:10
  Propter: No, I mean like, like, come on, what's, what's headway like on that? Like I mean are we talking, are we talking about six months? Are we talking about 12 months? Are we talking about five years? How long does it take to either convert refining capacity or spin up new refining capacity?
• 1:19:27
  George: Convert is an interesting question because you can do all sorts of stuff to reduce overall yields but shift your balance towards for instance, middle distillates from lighter fuels. Like gasoline. There may be room there to shift mix a little bit, both in Europe and the us, Possibly Asia. It's playing at the margins, though. We talked about this a lot back in the spring. But refineries are giant chemistry sets and you can't. There are physical reasons that they produce. They have the inputs that they have and that they have the outputs that they have. And you can tweak some of those physical attributes by changing your inputs, by changing your processes, like, for instance, temperatures throughput, et cetera, changing the layout a little bit. But it kind of is what it is. You need X to come in and you get Y out. And the ratio of X and Y is pretty stable.
• 1:20:21
  Lowtax: So what you're saying is the crack spreads are here to stay?
• 1:20:26
  George: Kind of, Yeah. I mean, like, it's longer term in terms of adding capacity. Like, yeah, you can build refineries. There's. I mean, it's, it's. Nobody wants to build them, though.
• 1:20:39
  Lowtax: I really just wanted to say crack spreads and bother ed.
• 1:20:43
  George: I said it. So it's fair game. If you're going to plot like, like a refinery is such a huge capital investment, you have to have an enormous amount of confidence that there's going to be demand for what it's putting out for a very long time to come. Now, you can subsidize that in a bunch of different ways. You can make it easier to build, cheaper to build, subsidize the cost of capital, whatever. But at the end of the day, like, if a company doesn't think like, okay, this is going to run for 30 years at roughly nameplate capacity, then they're not gonna build it. And maybe there's a little bit of extra capacity that could come online in the US but it's not a lot.
• 1:21:25
  Ed: I have a full tank and heat pumps. I'm good.
• 1:21:28
  George: Yeah, heat pumps are a major key.
• 1:21:30
  Ed: I mean, like, unironically, one of the things that folks up here should be doing but aren't is more and more window units actually have reasonably low temperature heat pumps these days. We have a lot of them and they're not that expensive, so you should check Lowe's before they go away.
• 1:21:49
  Propter: Yeah.
• 1:21:49
  George: Easy to install too.
• 1:21:50
  Ed: Yeah.
• 1:21:51
  George: Relative unit. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:21:54
  Ed: No, like I've. I have been delaying doing mini splits throughout the house now for like four years because these things are just cheap and work. The house is very well insulated and the windows are bad, so I don't touch them. But they run all year long. And I think relative to get to like, heating Oil prices before this nonsense because we do have really cheap electric. We have muni. It was like 60 to 70% cheaper. And they're like just. They're just window units. They're just a box hanging out there. So if you can find them. I heartily endorse.
• 1:22:35
  George: It will become a problem at some point that the Northeast is going to electrify heating. That's. That's going to become a problem for PJM and for NISO and problem for
• 1:22:48
  Ed: New England first, because. Yeah, you don't know what's in those houses.
• 1:22:52
  Musicology Duck: Right.
• 1:22:53
  George: But right now it's. It's not. There's plenty. I mean, grid scale. Like, there's still enough headroom on the winter grid. Like, you know, if you look at places that have done a lot of heat pump uptake, like, it's. It's fine.
• 1:23:03
  Ed: Yeah.
• 1:23:04
  George: It's not. The big problem is my daughter is still in my lap. The big problem is, is winter or, sorry, summer peaks, not winter peaks.
• 1:23:14
  Ed: Yep. For now. I mean, this is a good problem to have. We should have more of this problem. Let's have more of this problem, please.
• 1:23:24
  George: All right. Anything else on midterms? I mean, generic ballot, too, is worth. Worth pointing out. We had multiple low teens generic ballot polls this past week, I think, if memory serves. Certainly multiple double digit.
• 1:23:36
  Propter: Yeah, we talked about this a few weeks ago that we were kind of skeptical. I was kind of skeptical of the plus 11 numbers. I'm no longer skeptical of the plus 11 numbers. I think those are pretty plausible right now. We had some polling in Nebraska that I would say that on. On the aggregate right now. You got to think. You got to think that the Nebraska is looking like a toss up. I don't think you can have Dan Osborn ahead back by a compelling margin, but I don't think you could have him behind by a compelling margin either.
• 1:24:11
  George: All right, well, before we head out, musicology doc, do you have any midterms predictions?
• 1:24:17
  Musicology Duck: I just think there's gonna be, like, one completely out of nowhere. I don't know what it is. Maybe Louisiana. There's gonna be something like no one saw coming.
• 1:24:27
  George: Yeah. Yeah. I don't think it'll be South Carolina, but it'll be something like that.
• 1:24:32
  Propter: Mississippi.
• 1:24:33
  Musicology Duck: It's just one. Totally. That would be fun. But yeah, that's the only prediction. I don't know what it's gonna be. If I have a premonition, I'll lay it down on blue skies. The. It's there for posterity. But yeah, I just think they'll be
• 1:24:47
  George: one thing that everybody's like, what the Mississippi, Arkansas, Idaho. What else is in South Carolina, Kentucky. Do they have a Senate? Yeah, they do.
• 1:24:57
  Propter: Yeah, they do.
• 1:24:58
  Lowtax: I know which, I know which one it's going to be. It's going to be Florida. Because I sat here and told you all that it's not going to be Florida 500,000 times.
• 1:25:07
  George: I got to say. I don't think it's going to be Florida, but some of the news out of Florida this week was real bad. If you're trying to get reelected to the Senate in that state, it might not be Senate.
• 1:25:17
  Musicology Duck: It could be like some really wild house that, like, I don't know, just. It's going to be something.
• 1:25:24
  Propter: It's some bad news for, for Lauren Boebert this, this week also, which I'm sure we'll talk about in more detail next week.
• 1:25:37
  George: Yeah. Okay. Well, that's our show for this week. If you liked listening to some musicology, if you liked listening to my Bad Running playlist, if you liked listening to Trump's much, much worse work playlist, give us a share, give us a rate,
• 1:25:53
  Propter: give us a review.
• 1:25:54
  George: All that fun stuff that every podcast that you listen to asks you to do. Musicology doc. Thank you for joining us and becoming our second, second time guest.
• 1:26:01
  Musicology Duck: But I want to be the first third time guest though, so keep that in mind.
• 1:26:05
  George: We will not have the fight on again until you're, until you've come on again.
• 1:26:09
  Musicology Duck: Okay, perfect.
• 1:26:10
  Ed: What's next week look like?
• 1:26:15
  George: All right, well, from Charlotte, I am an extremely sore and ready for my day off and cutback week. George.
• 1:26:23
  Propter: In DC, I'm Propter.
• 1:26:26
  Lowtax: In Outer Florida, I am Lowtax Speedrun Enjoyer.
• 1:26:29
  Ed: And in Boston, I'm Ed. Stay normal, y'all.
• 1:26:32
  Musicology Duck: All.