You’re Wrong About looks back at Princess Di and her monumentally awful marriage
David Tennant Does A Podcast With…
Neil Gaiman
David Tennant is probably best-known for being the tenth actor to play The Doctor in the BBC’s Doctor Who. Neil Gaiman is probably best-known for building an expansive career as a storyteller. As the creator of the iconic comic series The Sandman, countless novels-turned-movies and television shows, and even an episode of Doctor Who, Gaiman is a legendary creative, and, it turns out, the perfect conversationalist to bounce off of Tennant (Gaiman was also a co-writer of the novel Good Omens and the TV adaptation, which Tennant starred in). The writer reflects on growing up with an interest in religion and mythology (as a child he was interested in crafting “custom religions” for people), and telling his career advisors that he wanted to write American comic books when he grew up. The episode provides insight into the creative process, but also into how one creator’s warmth and sense of wonder can make the stories they tell more affecting. [Jose Nateras]
Louder Than A Riot
The Conspiracy Against Hip-Hop
Listening to this newly launched podcast about the relationship between “rhyme and punishment”—from the usually Caucasian corridors of National Public Radio—took me back to my days as a hip-hop critic/journalist in the mid-to-late ’90s. MCs were often rapping about the same thing: being the deadliest, most blinged-out, most downright-disrespectful-to-women gangsta out there. In the first episode of Louder Than A Riot, NPR hip-hop writers Rodney Carmichael and Sidney Madden ponder how the rap industry turned into a (sorry) gangsta’s paradise, as the music and its most thugged-out performers became (sorry, again) Public Enemy No. 1. They mostly do this by investigating the authenticity of a notorious, anonymous letter, which details a supposed meeting in the ’90s between the titans of music and the prison-industrial complex and began circulating online in 2012. They also snap up interviews with Killer Mike, legendary Black-music critic Nelson George, and famed X-rated rapper Too $hort, who perfectly sums up how brainwashed we’ve become by hip-hop thuggery: “If you went into a civil-rights meeting and said, ‘Mr. Martin Luther King, I’m a thug from the trap!’ everybody in the damn church would try to save you.” [Craig D. Lindsey]
Race Chaser With Alaska & Willam
VERY THAT E4 “Compensation vs. Facilitation”
Taking the place of a typical installment of Race Chaser this time around is an episode of Very That. Hosted by Raja, winner of RuPaul’s Drag Race season three, and Delta Work, a co-competitor from the same season, Very That is a worthy substitution for Alaska and Willam’s regularly scheduled programming. After a discussion of the recent presidential debates, Raja and Delta offer some advice to a listener who’s written in seeking their thoughts about starting to perform in drag. The co-hosts have been friends for a long time, even before their 2011 season of RPDR, and it shows in how they converse with one another: addressing the listener’s questions, they weigh in on everything from maintaining professionalism to dancing around one’s bedroom in makeup. Their adventures on the road have provided them a plethora of anecdotes to pull from, and both Raja and Delta reflect on their early days as drag queens, sneaking into bars at 19. This isn’t the first time that an episode of Very That has subbed for Race Chaser, and luckily listeners can enjoy hearing from fan-favorite drag queens no matter which series shows up in their podcast feed. [Jose Nateras]
You’re Wrong About
Princess Diana Part 3: The Affairs
It’s exciting to see a podcast’s star rise in real time, and that’s what we’re witnessing with You’re Wrong About, the history podcast hosted by Michael Hobbes and Sarah Marshall. As previously discussed, it’s far from the typical debunking podcast in that it references copious primary sources, and actually cites those sources (a rarity in the Wild West of true-crime-adjacent programming). And the hosts’ chatter doesn’t sound like a script begging to be mistaken for extemporaneous conversation. (Rachel Syme recently lauded this fresh approach in a glowing writeup for the New Yorker.) Those strengths are on clear display in YWA’s latest series on the life of Princess Diana, a woman whose postmortem legacy has now outlasted her living one by several years. This episode, Hobbes tells Marshall about the drawn-out dissolution of Charles and Diana’s loveless, utterly perfunctory marriage, complicated by Diana’s keen understanding of how to maintain a sterling public image and Charles’ seeming unwillingness to even attempt to hide his affair with Camilla Parker Bowles. We all know where this is headed, but along the way, there’s plenty to learn about the institution of the Royal Family and the needless degree to which it can fuck with people’s lives. [Marnie Shure]