Murdofleur gets retrospective this issue, as Daniel Marrone and Barney Samson join me to talk about what makes kids’ media kids’ media and reflect on some of the formative texts that helped turn them into the urbane and engaging podcast guests they are today.
While kids’ entertainment (and “edutainment”) is big business these days, it wasn’t really until the Nineteenth-century (and the spread of Rousseauvian/Romantic myths of clear-sighted infant innocence) that publishers began courting the kiddie demographic. The decision has had consequences for all areas of culture; Walter Kendrick and Lee Edelman are just two critics who’ve recently questioned the manner in which the figure of the vulnerable and corruptible child is exploited to serve some pretty suspect sociocultural ends.
It’s with this in mind that we talk about nostalgia, fundamentalist antipathy to Harry Potter, Oz’s infamous Rupert bear/Robert Crumb/rape controv and the pleasures of long childhood car trips spent misunderstanding parental cassette collections’ lyrics (my sister hearing “human beings” as “fuming beans” in an angsty Elton John ballad remains a favourite). Annoyingly, Tower Hamlets’ powers-that-be had deemed our estate’s grass needed cut during recording, so you might have to pretend you’re on your own car trip (in a droptop on a coastal freeway on a gusty day) at points. Please accept by way of apology this link to the ridiculous/ridiculously great video for the Francoise Hardy song we play.
PODCAST
Besides Francoise, our playlist features some modern acts ambivalently aping her era’s sonic tropes, an educational song about the visible spectrum, screechy mantras from Sonic Youth and Gang Gang Dance, and Ghostface telling us – with all the lucidity of a nursery rhyme – why the sun definitely isn’t a pussy.
PLAYLIST
- Boards of Canada – ROYGBIV
- They Might Be Giants – Roy G. Biv
- Sonic Youth – Protect Me You
- Gang Gang Dance – First Communion
- Francoise Hardy – La Maison Ou J’ai Grandi
- Ancient Crux – In Teen Dreams
- Ariel Pink – Good Kids Make Bad Adults
- Slick Rick/J-Love – The Sun feat. Ghostface Killah, Raekwon, RZA
- Scott Walker – Boy Child
