Can You Dig It? | Audible Originals
Blond Ambition: Growing Up With Madonna (BBC Radio 4) | BBC Sounds
The Lavender Scare | NPR
For Fitness Sake (BBC Local Radio) | BBC Sounds
Hip-hop turned 50 last week. In commemoration, Chuck D, the co-founder and frontman of Public Enemy, has narrated a deep-dive into the origins of the genre in a five-part docu-drama podcast series Can You Dig It? for Audible Originals. It blends “immersive reenactments, oral history and expert discussion”. The first two episodes explore the place in which the genre first emerged – the Bronx in the late 1960s and early 70s – and discuss the social and political landscape; the ways that poverty, racism, unfit housing, fires, unemployment and gang wars plagued the New York borough.
The focus IS primarily on the Ghetto Brothers, the gang who began dreaming up ways to bring peace to the Bronx. The scripted scenes help to give a voice to the gang and key member Benjamin Melendez, aka Yellow Benjy, who had big ambitions for a ceasefire among rival gangs following the death of his friend.
I have to admit, I was expecting a high-octane odyssey of rapping, DJing, turntablism, breakdancing and beatboxing, but this isn’t that at all. It’s the uncinematic but poignant prequel to hip-hop, about the foundational moments that led up to what is widely considered as the day hip-hop was born: DJ Kool Herc block party on 13 August 1973. Without the truce established by Yellow Benjy’s 1971 peace treaty, there would have been no “safe space” for the creativity, community and collaboration that allowed hip-hop to germinate.
There’s more music history to dig into with Blond Ambition: Growing Up with Madonna on BBC Sounds. US music critic and broadcaster Ann Powers deciphers Madonna’s success and her own admiration of the singer. “Madonna was Madonna from the beginning,” says Stephen Bray, co-writer of many of her hit singles including Into the Groove and Express Yourself. We hear about how she started out making Brit-inspired rock demos and hanging out in the underground nightclub Paradise Garage. It’s clear that her immersion in the New York gay scene, specifically the black and hispanic communities, shaped her identity and brand. Power rhapsodises about Madonna’s dazzling sexual self-confidence, but also about how, as an “ardent feminist”, she struggled with some of her messaging. As a 90s-born fan of 80s-era Madonna, I enjoyed discovering facts I had never thought to Google. Like how Nile Rodgers produced Like a Virgin – or that Papa Don’t Preach was once seen as pro-life propaganda.
Powers’ reverential approach can lack nuance. On the topic of whether the song Vogue appropriated ballroom culture, playwright Brian Mullin defensively chimes in: “It’s not as if she just came in and passed off that choreography as her own.” Case closed! Tings improve when Powers refers to the critic bell hooks’s 1994 polemic, Madonna: Plantation Mistress or Soul Sister?, which claimed Madonna “almost always imitates phallic black masculinity”. Power herself notes the parallels between “white exploration” and colonisation. These small nuggets of introspection in a largely gushing documentary confront the contorting nature of being a fan.
The latest episode of NPR’s “history reframing” documentary Throughline explores The Lavender Scare, a period of hysteria and moral panic in American history in the 1950s regarding homosexuals working for the US government. It begins with the story of a young economist, Madeleine Tress, who in 1958 was taken to a private room and questioned about her sexuality. She became one of thousands of LGBT people who lost their jobs because in this “purge” by the US government.
As host Ramtin Arablouei succinctly describes it: “The Lavender Scare happened at the same time as the Red Scare, the cold war period when thousands of Americans were accused of having ties with communism and the Soviet Union. But the Lavender Scare was also about domestic partisan politics. Publicly demonising gay and lesbian people was a way of trying to win votes to take power.”
The episode does a great job of combing through the existential paranoia around leftwing politics and socialism and the ways in which gay people were considered “security risks”. Republican senator Joseph McCarthy’s infamous 1950 list of supposed communists featured several names of people deemed easy blackmail targets for Soviet spies because they would rather commit treason than be “outed”. Shoddy correlations between mental health, homosexuality and communism began to proliferate too. It’s a dark tale about fear and power. Parallels can be drawn between the Lavender Scare and rhetoric of today that is deeply and obsessively suspicious of the LGBTQ community, particularly transgender people. An unsettling but important listen.
On a lighter note, the subject of the latest episode of For Fitness Sake is the heavyweight boxer Anthony Joshua, and features an exclusive interview with the man himself. It’s been a sticky few years for Joshua and his fans as he lost fights to Andy Ruiz and Oleksandr Usyk. There have even been calls for his retirement. But his knockout win against Robert Helenius earlier this month was a huge triumph. I know very little about what technically makes a good fight – but a KO is a KO!
The interview begins awkwardly, apparently recorded in a lift, with Joshua asking, “So what are we talking about?”. He soon warms up and although the questions are too general to beget any profound responses, Joshua is candid. His advice for his younger self is “live your life” and “chat to more girls”. With all the scepticism that has been clouding his fighting career, it’s nice to hear some positive words from the likes of promoter Eddie Hern and boxing champion David Haye. They remind us that, above all, Joshua is one of the biggest role models in British sport.
