Podcast Corner: Prince and Joy Division feature among the best music offerings
Prince's estate has just released a podcast series on his album Sign O' The Times.
It may be the time for best-of-the-year lists and Spotify Wrapped, but there are plenty of new music podcasts to discover. Here are some of our favourites.
This is as much true crime as it is about music. From NPR, it looks at the link between rap music and incarceration in the US. The first episode, 'The Conspiracy Against Hip-Hop', works as a standalone episode, telling the strange story of a rumoured letter sent by record execs that would confirm bias against black rappers. Over the rest of the series, hosts Rodney Carmichael and Sidney Madden take their time discussing scandals like that of the 'Camouflage Assassin', Mac Phipps, a southern rapper who had his words turned against him in court, and who's still serving time for a crime to which somebody else confessed. It's shocking.
The 'definitive' story of Joy Division has already been told by Jon Savage in his comprehensive oral history on the band, This Searing Light, the Sun and Everything Else. But the story never gets old and this Spotify exclusive podcast, narrated by Maxine Peake, does a nice job of not overcomplicating things. Sprinkled with interviews by Bernard Sumner and Peter Hook, we hear how they met, how they created those still startlingly good albums, and, last week, how the Hacienda almost took down Factory Records. Bono pops up on the second episode, explaining the influence of Unknown Pleasures on his band, U2. "Unknown territory, that's what it felt like to me. I felt like I was just getting lost in a place... and I was so happy to be lost."
This started a year ago with a four-parter on 1999. Then came two parts on One Nite Alone/Up All Nite, and now, eight episodes on Sign O' The Times. Can you see the link? Yes, they're all released, via the Prince Estate, in time for big reissues of the albums. But the stories are great, the music still astounds - and well, you can never have enough Prince in your life.
Is it possible to do a timely music podcast in 2020? That's the goal of this new weekly show, again exclusive to Spotify. The first episode could have been a series in its own right, inside the making of Kanye West's My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. While the conversations so far between presenters Charles Holmes and Grace Spelman still seem stilted, it'll be interesting to see how the show develops.
