Show Notes
Country? Rap? Lil Nas X’s chart-topping “Old Town Road” revived a long debate about borders and boundaries in American popular music. To sort out this strange history, Hari heads down to the foothills of Virginia, where a legendary collection of blues records holds the key to understanding the insidious separation of “Black” and “white” culture.
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More from Into the Zone
Life’s final border might not be so final after all. From tardigrades to viruses, some things are both dead and alive. Or neither. How do we draw the line between the living and the dead? And how does that line blur in places like in a time capsule buried in ice, or a library on the moon?
Cyborgs, cyberspace, mind-melting techno. In the mid-’90s, the future had arrived. To find out what happened to it, Hari pays a visit to philosopher Manuel DeLanda, and to the legendary artist ORLAN, who he first encountered at an academic conference like no other.
At the dawn of the digital era, a group of engineers tasked with audio compression had to decide what information to keep, and what to leave behind. What was signal, and what was noise? Fast forward two decades, to our much noisier world. Hari finds a writer and a musician who’ve discovered their own ways to find a voice within the static.
East Berlin, 1983. A teenage punk rocker finds himself in a Stasi interrogation cell. The choice is simple: inform on his friends, or go to prison. Hari travels to Berlin to meet the punks and spies whose cat and mouse game in the last years of the GDR predicted the privacy wars of today.
Look on the bright side! In a country obsessed with positivity, Hari traces the path of exiled German intellectual Theodor Adorno to sunny California, where he gets stuck in traffic with the British writer Geoff Dyer. How this positivity relates to church and state? Turns out there’s a lot to complain about.