Is media try­ing to brain­wash us into being ALL THE SAME? Are the excess­es of the mob scar­ing us into con­for­mi­ty? And does this in turn keep us from being actu­al­ly cre­ative, with healthy rela­tion­ships?

Mark Lin­sen­may­er, Eri­ca Spyres, and Bri­an Hirt muse on cul­tur­al homog­e­niza­tion and a few sci-fi takes on forced same­ness and then bring out our first celebri­ty guest, beloved come­di­an and now psy­chol­o­gy Ph.D. Yakov Smirnoff, who tells us about grow­ing up in a repres­sive soci­ety and his fears that polit­i­cal cor­rect­ness and a lack of appre­ci­a­tion for the “rec­i­p­ro­cal oppo­sites” nec­es­sary for authen­tic com­mu­ni­ca­tion is lead­ing us in that direc­tion. We con­clude with a bit of host-ful response.

We touch on Cat’s Cra­dle, Aladdin, Rosanne Barr, The Twi­light Zone, Bri­an’s wear­ing a Cubs hat in Mis­souri, and per­form­ing com­e­dy in the U.S.S.R. as well as var­i­ous sen­si­tive audi­ences here. Will you not join us and dress as Devo every day?

Here’s that arti­cle that comes up on Kurt Von­negut Jr.‘s terms “karass” (vol­un­tary, organ­ic group­ing) and “gran­fal­loon” (inher­it­ed, basi­cal­ly mean­ing­less group­ing).

No, we are not a pol­i­tics pod­cast, but some­times when we reflect on the dynam­ics involved with our being enter­tained,  pol­i­tics is hard to avoid! You may enjoy lis­ten­ing to The Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life (Mark’s phi­los­o­phy pod­cast) dis­cuss Adorno on the Cul­ture Indus­try, or per­haps their dis­cus­sion of the world of tech­no­log­i­cal unem­ploy­ment.

Get more at prettymuchpop.com. Sub­scribe on Apple Pod­casts, Stitch­er, or Google Play. Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast is pro­duced by the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life Pod­cast Net­work.

Fol­low Yakov:  @Yakov_Smirnoff. Not enough Yakov? Well, of course there are scads of YouTube clips and oth­er pod­cast appear­ances that he’s done that you can check out with a mere web search, but if you want to hear EVERY SINGLE WORD he said to us, we did post an entire­ly unedit­ed ver­sion of the inter­view for $5 sup­port­ers at patreon.com/prettymuchpop.

This post con­tin­ues Open Cul­ture’s cura­tion of a new pod­cast series about pop­u­lar media and how (and why) we con­sume it. You may wish to lis­ten to the intro­duc­to­ry episode first.

What counts as binge watch­ing? Why do we do it? Is it bad for us?

Mark, Eri­ca, and Bri­an reveal their watch­ing habits (grow­ing up and now) and mar­vel at crazy-high stats about how much peo­ple watch. We think about what peo­ple get out of this activ­i­ty, what shows work do and don’t taste good in bulk, and whether watch­ing is best done in soli­tary despair or as a bond­ing expe­ri­ence as you waste the pre­cious hours of your life sit­ting next to anoth­er per­son.

We touch on many shows includ­ing The Office, Game of Thrones, Bat­tlestar Galac­ti­ca (by way of Port­landia), Jane the Vir­gin, Pret­ty Lit­tle Liars, Arrow, CSI, and Cher­nobyl (which we’ll devote the whole of Ep. 5 to).

Arti­cles we bring up:

• “Infre­quent­ly Asked Ques­tions: why do we binge-watch?” by Bran­don Bak­er
• “A Crit­i­cal The­o­ry of Binge Watch­ing” by Jake Pitre
• “These are the real caus­es and effects of binge-watch­ing, says sci­ence” by Ken­di Banks

“I like to watch, Eri­ca. I like to watch.”

This episode includes BONUS CONTENT that you can only get by becom­ing a $1+ sup­port­er at patreon.com/prettymuchpop. Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast is pro­duced by the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life Pod­cast Net­work.

What is pop cul­ture? Does it make sense to dis­tin­guish it from high cul­ture, or can some­thing be both?

Open Cul­ture is pleased to curate a new pod­cast cov­er­ing all things enter­tain­ment: TV, movies, music, nov­els, video games, comics, nov­els, com­e­dy, the­ater, pod­casts, and more. Pret­ty Much Pop is the inven­tion of Mark Lin­sen­may­er (aka musi­cian Mark Lint), cre­ator of The Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life Phi­los­o­phy Pod­cast and Naked­ly Exam­ined Music. Mark is joined by co-hosts Eri­ca Spyres, an actor and musi­cian who’s appeared on Broad­way and plays clas­si­cal and blue­grass vio­lin, and Bri­an Hirt, a sci­ence-fic­tion writer/linguistics major who col­lab­o­rates with his broth­er on the Con­stel­lary Tales mag­a­zine and pod­cast. For this intro­duc­to­ry dis­cus­sion touch­ing on opera, The Bea­t­les, Fort­nite, 50 Shades of Grey, real­i­ty TV, and more, our hosts are joined by the pod­cast’s audio edi­tor Tyler His­lop, aka Sac­ri­fice MC.

Some of the arti­cles brought in the dis­cus­sion are:

“The Long War Between High­brow and Low­brow” by Noah Berlatsky from the Pacif­ic Stan­dard (2017)

“Pop Cul­ture’s Progress Toward Tragedy” by Titus Techera from the Nation­al Review (2019)

Read more about the 1895 silent film that fea­tured a train com­ing right out of the screen, send­ing peo­ple scream­ing in ter­ror. Here’s more about the open­ing of Stravin­sky’s “Rite of Spring” at which spec­ta­tors riot­ed. You may also enjoy episode 137 of The Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life about the tastes of social class­es that ana­lyzes Pierre Bour­dieu. Also see episode 193 on lib­er­al edu­ca­tion and the idea of a “canon” of essen­tial, high-cul­ture works. The open­ing music is by Mark (gui­tars, cel­los, djem­be) and Eri­ca (vio­lins). The pod­cast logo is by Ken Ger­ber.

The end­ing song was writ­ten by Mark just for this episode. It’s called “High Rollin’ Cult,” and fea­tures Eri­ca on vio­lin and har­monies.

For more infor­ma­tion on the pod­cast, vis­it prettymuchpop.com or look for the pod­cast soon on Apple Pod­casts. To sup­port this effort (and imme­di­ate­ly get access to four episodes plus bonus con­tent), make a small, recur­ring dona­tion at patreon.com/prettymuchpop.