Facts, fiction, and podcasts as a new cultural form

Can a fact dispel the lies of fiction? How may this be so? - Well, a story for example may be able to solicit our sympathy in a way in which statistics simply could not hope to do. A voice in pain may be able to call to our sense of proprioceptive wellbeing in a way that a newsreader on television usually does not speak to. Nevertheless, can we today, as rational and reasonable citizens permit for such factors to determine what the overriding narrative is, in disregard for a patient and reasoned scholarship that may be able to trace tendencies far stronger and which exceed the emotionally charged moment of a duration ? This is a question which our media does have to face up to as we are often spellbound within the confines of a sensationalism that is simply easier to sell, whether this be in the form of horrific crime, drug deals that were busted or simply the latest singer that has broke through the charts on radio. To use a literary metaphor - when Odysseus  was sailing across the sea he instructed his seamen not to be ensnared by the calls of the sirens for in them they would go mad and loose sight of their port. 

Yet there may be another way in which this appeal to our own situation solicits our gaze while compromising our faculties - and that is by treating us as troubled children. That is by disregarding the form in which we choose to present ourselves in; which in light of any genuinely new experience is often as important as the message itself. I mean would rap music be what it is without the rhythm and beats? There is something about how an experience is conveyed which is not merely reducible to affectation. I mean that there is something in the style that actually represents what is and was happening in that experience. And so the perennial troubadour asking the guy with a lisp not to stutter clarifies the point, thereby missing the message; at least inasmuch as any of us still give a fuck about somebody. 

And really is this stutterer any different from lets say a sub-editor with a newspaper who has to clean up loads of crabbily written sentences, distilling the message, the big picture etc. ? I mean in a sense it is inasmuch as the newspaper’s business depends on it. The story is what matters, not the cracky landlady that the messenger has to put up with as he collates bullet points from a press release whose jottings he hastily scribbled at the event. But like with life, there are layers to this - everywhere. 

I guess what we end up arriving at here is the opposite of the hypothesis we began with ie. is there a truth to our fictions, and indeed as the philosopher Slavoj Zizek reminds us - is there a bravery, indeed a discipline that is required to be able to articulate and seize that truth. 

The political (or generic, if they are the same thing here) question is whose truth is this, whose style, who is our subject, ie. what is worth representing. And it is on these lines that I believe we do have to today unashamedly avow what lies at the root of so much of our critical tradition - that is a marked commitment to a notion of the canon, even if this body by necessity requires to be reinvented according to the prevalence of every new cultural phenomenon that changes the landscape of our symbolic imaginaries.

Harry Potter was this for me. It is what got me into reading. Like an illicit drug that pre-teens such as myself indulged in our wee hours away from school work and discussed like the plot of an alien land we had to unravel, unsupervised, by ourselves, and often when we were supposed to be paying attention to lessons. 

But the beacon of a cultural phenomena comes in many frequencies. Our antennas have tuned into the literature that came out of the Beat Generation in the past, perhaps just as America evolves into a kind of freedom which can no longer celebrate the literary Odyssey of travel and human connection in its untangled mutations of language that Kerouac celebrates.

Perhaps the podcast of today offers a different kind of frequency, a new harmony, a recomposition of what constitutes, music, or art ie. a redefinition of culture for new ears and hands, just as they take up an old language and punctuate it with the force of a voice which radio unleashed, the silver screen set on sails and the music industry revolutionised: and what was lost in this maelstrom of melody was indeed the Apollonian counterpart to this Dionysian principle, narrative - and the need felt to tell one’s own story.

Now telling one’s own story is what we have always been doing, even if it is done at a distance, so to speak - a distance which some may describe as critical, others lyrical, but always (I hope) reflective. And the ability to see and indeed exhibit this is undoubtedly one of the great liberations of the podcast. The ability to ceaselessly mix comedy, anecdote, interview and speculation: this bubbling cauldron of knee-jerk reflection operates at a business cycle too fast for the average national daily, RSS feed or even weekly newscast to quite grasp adequately and reveals as it were, its own rhythm, alive and pulsating; skipping just beyond the cynics and criticism that can no longer anchor onto the bud of a determinacy that it can then use to pin down a position into a straw man to exhibit at its latest kangaroo court or show trial; and I use these terms with utter respect for the fourth estate and the independence of a rational and reasonable judiciary. 

Indeed the freedom of human expression will always be a bastion and perhaps the greatest gift democracy can give her citizens, past, present and future. And even if the explicit emphasis of such a medium for it seems to be morphing the limits of what we considered a form to be, is not on expose journalism per se - its courage to put a voice out there, amidst the irony, poking fun at it, and making an art out of how it curls beyond the grasp of pincers that would seek to beat down a person is to some perhaps nothing less that a genuine generational revisioning of the American dream. Nothing short of what rock music was in the 70’s and the action movie was in the 90’s. It is precisely such a revisioning for which we owe our debt off gratitude to what artists such as Joe Rogan have given us, via the tele communicative access that platforms such as Spotify facilitate today.