These days, with Caramanica as anchor, the Popcast is a leaner and more targeted weekly operation, routinely delivering smart conversations about a slice of whatever’s happening in the music world at any given moment - which, speaking as a person who’s growing in age myself, can feel so aggressively difficult to get a handle on. Popcast has been around for eons, stemming from a premodern Times audio era back when it was called The New York Times Music Popcast and featured a roundtable of music critics doing the Gabfest thing. What if I told you that the best New York Times podcast wasn’t The Daily, but actually a show in which the critic Jon Caramanica grapples with the ever-changing youth cultures of the pop-music world despite his own climbing age? Listen, it’s true. In other words, to become a narrative podcast that ingests the metabolism of radio on its own terms. All of it is fascinating as creative work in and of itself, but Search Engine is further intriguing as an example of how narrative shows can adapt to the calcifying shape of the contemporary podcast industry: by shifting from a seasonal to the “always-on” model, more systematically layering resource-intensive stories together with lighter-lift episodes. The scope is intentionally broad, setting the show up as a vessel for the long haul where it may evolve along the production’s shifting interests. Each episode sees Vogt and his team attending to a different wafty question - is airplane coffee safe to drink? How are uncool olds supposed to find new music? - that adheres to the old Reply All–ean tradition of big-small adventures: a seemingly banal inquiry that’s actually plugged into a deeper curiosity on how to exist. Last year’s Crypto Island turned out to be a mix of a soft launch and staging ground for Search Engine, a brand-new weekly show marking former Reply All co-creator PJ Vogt’s full return to podcast feeds everywhere. Hilarious in a “so smart at being dumb that it’s brilliant” kind of way, Murder on Sex Island is the bloodstained love letter to reality-dating television I’ve wanted for years. The catch? She has to solve the case while appearing on the show, because the fate of the deceased cast member has been hidden from the public to prevent the production from shutting down. Murder on Sex Island follows a divorced ex–social worker who’s trying to lead a double life as a glamorous private investigator as she’s contracted by a hit reality show called Sex Island to solve a murder of one of its cast members. The book itself will be published online in the near future, but right now, Firestone has distributed a read-aloud version in the form of a weekly podcast - and it’s great. Gameshow, wrote over the past few months while, shall we say, in between jobs. Murder on Sex Island is a murder-mystery novel that Jo Firestone, a comedian and host of Dr. While Peter and the Acid King has its flaws, the series functions best as a collective memory of a volatile and influential scene, one that vibrated within the tension between punk and New Wave. Said to be very much of and ahead of its time, the show would be remembered for Ivers’s bizarro sensibilities and how it spotlighted then-emerging punk acts like Bad Religion and the Dead Kennedys before coming to a screeching end after Ivers was found murdered in his apartment in 1983. A musician and artist, Ivers was an influential underground figure renowned for his curatorial tastes, which he bottled up in a public access show called New Wave Theater. And while the team - which includes the screenwriter Kaitlin Fontana, Hollywood producer Alan Sacks, and the director Penelope Spheeris, who hosts the series - is indeed interested in the mystery, what they mostly want to do is celebrate the life of the titular Peter Ivers and the early-’80s Los Angeles punk scene from which he emerged. But the podcast recognizes its utilitarian hook and seems to express some ambivalence about having to tangle with the true-crimeyness of its premise. Yes, there’s an unsolved murder at the center of Peter and the Acid King.
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