☎️ Ring ring🥇magic ball ⚽️ mystery band 🎸mystery date 💖
🍭 👂that is enough sports for me 🌈 🤸♀️
Hello, Allegra.
Today is Monday, July 1. In case this newsletter is too long…you haven’t listened to anything like this before, there is a moment in this series that will stay with me forever, this interview was so emotional I felt like I was going to burst into tears with the guest.
xoxo lp
👋q & a & q & a & q & a👋
Jesse Lou Lawson & Holly Casio
Jesse Lou Lawson (they/them) is a radio producer and youth worker born the year Streets of Philadelphia came out. They perform drag as @butchspringsteen_drag. jesselawson.me
Holly Casio (they/she) makes queer zines and diy comics about mental health, pop culture, and Bruce Springsteen. Their zine series Me and Bruce charts their lifelong obsession with The Boss, and their debut graphic memoir Looking for Bruce documents their spiritual pilgrimage to New Jersey in order to somehow find the real Bruce Springsteen. They do not know how to like things a normal amount @hollycasio coolschmool.com
They are both the co-hosts of Because the Boss Belongs to Us.
Describe Because the Boss Belongs to Us in 10 words or less.
JLL: Important, serious, scientific mission getting Bruce Springsteen Queer Icon Credentials.
Can you explain the mission of the show a little more?
HC: We just know, deep in our souls that Bruce Springsteen *IS* a queer icon but in order to prove it to the world we embark on a thorough journalistic investigation. We speak with leading experts: queer artists, writers, activists, and fans in this deeply scientific exploration of Bruce Springsteen as a queer icon; discussing his fashion, his camp appeal, his lyrics, and the deep lore surrounding him.
Holly, how are you and Jesse similar and how are you different?
HC: I sometimes feel out of place in Springsteen fandom; as we mention in the show it’s predominantly a white cis straight male fan culture which can be frustrating. But to meet Jesse and feel on the same page about politics and activism and queer solidarity and not have to compartmentalise these things when talking about Bruce was just an absolute dream!
I also know absolutely nothing about making podcasts and the world of audio so I feel so grateful to be guided by Jesse: a total expert and legend who doesn’t believe in gatekeeping and wants to share all the skills and knowledge.
Jesse, how are you and Holly similar and how are you different?
Something that I have been so thankful throughout working together is Holly and I are very aligned in our politics - and I mean that in the broadest sense: our core values, our attitudes to work, our views on Palestinian liberation, the world we are fighting to build, the ways we do friendship etc. And so it’s meant we have a kind of shorthand that makes working together much easier - I really trust their opinions and admire the way they are in the world, and that’s just been a joy!
A very challenging difference when we started working together was that I am a big fan of Springsteen’s country album Western Stars, which Holly was very skeptical about. High tension situation. But, I came to respect our differences. And, ultimately, Holly went on their own journey with it, and now might even be a bigger fan of the album than me! They have a whole theory about Bruce Springsteen being a Horse Girlie that deserves its own PHD.
What Bruce lyric is the most essential to your theory that Bruce Springsteen is a queer icon?
HC: ‘I wanna change my clothes, my hair, my face’ from Dancing in the Dark is an iconic line that resonates with so many queer and trans Bruce fans about being visible and seen and recognised and authentic.
But recently the line we keep coming back to is from a song called Badlands:
For the ones who had a notion
A notion deep inside
That it ain't no sin to be glad you're alive
I wanna find one face
That ain't looking through me
I wanna find one place
I wanna spit in the face of these badlands.
Tell me this isn’t an anthem of queer rage and queer solidarity and queer survival and the pursuit of queer joy!
Fill in the blank: You will like Because the Boss Belongs to Us if you like _______.
JLL: You’ll like our show if you like that feeling of being so completely obsessed with something that you totally lose track of what it is, and what you’ve turned it into in your head.
How would you feel if this podcast got to Bruce and he wanted to talk to you about it? Do you want it to get to him? Is that the goal?
HC: I want to live in a world where Bruce Springsteen doesn’t know what podcasts are. Including the one he did with Obama. It simply doesn’t exist.
JLL: J’agree. We go into this a bit more in Episode 4 of the show, but we’re not sure how politically aligned we are with Bruce Sprignsteen? A centrist dad podcast is not really our vibe. Eeek don’t hate us Bruce!
HC: I often think I want to be best friends with Bruce but I think that the real Bruce Springsteen will never live up to the imagined queer icon Bruce Springsteen which lives in our collective imaginations.
JLL: Yeah we’ve done so much talking about this throughout the series. How much of fan culture - especially queer fan culture - is about the actual person you’re stanning, versus the perfect personality you’ve made up in your head?
The sound and style of this show is really beautiful, personal, it feels homemade in the best way. How would you describe it?
JLL: Ahh thanks I love that description. Holly makes extremely sick zines, and I wanted to kind of nod to that DIY, scratchy, up front aesthetic in sound. I’m a fan of using lots of different textures + creating little scenes, and being quite light touch mixing wise - like not trying to clean up all audio so it sounds like it’s from a studio. Huge huge huge props to Talk Bazaar - who wrote all the incredible music in the series, and to Michelle Macklem our mixer - who’s work I admire so much.
What’s one podcast you love that everyone already knows about?
HC: My 2 all time favourite podcasts are Sagittarian Matters by Nicole J Georges, and also Poor Lass by Seleena Daye and Em Ledger. As a big diy zinester it’s no surprise that my 2 fave podcasts are by other zine makers and sound super diy and lo-fi and fun to make. But maybe a more well known podcast is Bad Gays which I love so dearly and has taught me so much.
What’s one podcast you love that not enough people know about?
JLL: I’ve just started listening to Resurrection by Dane Stewart, I would 200% recommend to a friend! My other all time favourite show is The View From Somewhere by Lewis Raven Wallace - a hard recommend for everyone, but especially people working in journalism and the audio industry.
What should I have asked you that I did not?
HC: What is my favourite all-time butch dyke look from Bruce Springsteen? Hard to pick just one, but give me soft butch Tunnel of Love era Bruce anyday
JLL: YES great question Holly! And for me, a trans fag, I have to point everyone towards this ultimate twink era Bruce photo - it fills me with pure joy. Look at that jacket. Look at that pout. Perfection.
🚨If u only have time for 1 thing🚨
Even If It Kills Me is a new narrative documentary podcast about the band that almost was. You hear the guys in the band, they’re journey, and how they almost make it. It’s a true story. But you won’t hear what this band sounds like. You won’t even learn their name. But you know this band, even if you don’t. This show chronicles the stories of Jon, Mac, Ryan, and Pete on their quest to make it as rock stars in the ‘00s, it truly pulses with adventure vibes. It’s written and narrated by the band’s steadfast companion Aaron Joy, and uses contemporary interviews and archival recordings to paint a full picture of how the band rose and fell and rose again and fell (I think it happens a few more times in there) and every heated, nuanced, cinematic moment that happens between. You haven’t listened anything quite like this before, and that kind of podcast is my favorite kind of podcast. It really will break you out of what you’re used to listening to and both surprise / delight your brain.
hell yeah
✨Arielle Nissenblatt spotlighted Pull the Thread: The Wild Life in her newsletter and podcast.
✨Tickets are now available for RESONATE Podcast Festival, happening this October 25th and 26th at the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University. Buy here.
✨Read The new pitch: "I don't know what I'm doing" [via Podcast Marketing Magic]
✨My next Radio Bootcamp Podcast Marketing 101 class is scheduled for July 15. Please come! I promise I’ll make it fun and helpful. Sign up here.
✨The 3rd Annual BPA Summer Social For Podcast & Content Creators is Sunday, July 28 at 4 - 9pm at AUX Karaoke Box in Brooklyn. Please come, I’ll be there! Corey created a 20% off promo code for you: TINK2024. Or just go here for an immediate discount, or to learn more.
✨Here’s a Reddit thread about essential podcasts.
~sponsored~
Serving Kult: A podcast series dedicated to Queer Rave and Hyperpop. The series will explore and platform the music, creatives and community behind the growing scene, with a particular focus on Female and LGBTQ+ voices.
We're exploring the perspectives of artists, performers, influential voices and the passion of those cultivating the scene, contrasting this with some of the challenges the culture faces.
💎BTW💎
🎙️Greg Hess of Mega (an improvised satire from the staff of a fictional mega church that is so batshit crazy that evangelicals actually think it’s real) started a new improvised podcast with Brendan Jennings and Mark Raterman, Get It To the Dutch. In attempt to write the next Hollywood blockbuster, the three (they met in a car accident and are currently in litigation) gather to take turns reading from a new, original screenplay one of them has written, with one goal in mind: to get the best script to the legendary producer Dutch Huxley. The scripts are hysterical. (In the first script, Thorgar Halfman, an unlikely, Hobbit-like hero, sets out on an adventure to Belanora but first must spend 15 pages going back and forth checking to make sure his stove is off. Thorgar, he’s just like us!) And the GUESTS oh my god, Tim Robinson, Weird Al Yankovic, and more. If you like Comedy Bang Bang you’ll like this. Listen here.
🎙️New Hampshire Public Radio, the team behind Bear Brook and The 13th Step, just released a three-part series (The Youth Development Center) about one of the largest youth detention abuse scandals in American history, a place New Hampshire has been sending its most troubled kids to for more than a century. In the past four years, more than a thousand New Hampshirians have come forward to expose abuse that happened inside to these kids, by adults who were supposed to be protecting them. It’s not just kids who were harmed—a story about a staff member named Karen will haunt my dreams—partially because it’s terrifying, partially because it’s so well told. Karen was making cookies with some kids and one of them looked her in the eye and said, “Karen, they are going to rape you.” The image of Karen having to wander the halls alone later that day gave me (and yes confirmed, still gives me!) chills. Listen here.
🎙️Bowen Yang and Matt Rogers started a podcast about the Olympics—Two Guys, Five Rings “for people who watched Challengers and thought, that is enough sports for me.” I am not sure who gave them the keys to this show, they know almost nothing about sports. Although! We do learn that Matt Rogers’ mile PR time is 4:36. I listen to a lot of Matt content and didn’t know that, so I’m not just impressed with the time but his ability to not mention it every five minutes. So this isn’t going to be technical, although there are technical writers behind the scenes. Matt and Bowen are your funny Olympics-whisperers if you want to hear about the twisties, sand, and sexual activity at the Olympic Village (three things discussed in episode one—actually that last one, I’m not sure. That might have been what I’m thinking about.) I didn’t even know the Olympic games were upon us, which makes me a target listener of this show. Listen here.
🎙️Aminatou Sow (formerly Call Your Girlfriend) is back in our ears for Pop Culture Debate Club, which is exactly what it sounds like. Two guests come on to try to convince Aminatou that their opinion about TV, movies, and music, is right. Aminatou names a winner. This is a show you can tune into for the picks or the guests or both, and for the first episode (Carl Tart squaring off with Lamar Woods to determine the best sports movie—Space Jam or D2: The Mighty Ducks,) I was there for both. Carl Tart is our National treasure, and so is Space Jam. And oh will you look at that, Ronald Young Jr (Weight for It) and Candice Lim (ICYMI) debating the best TV cast hang in episode two! Love the podcast representation so far. Those are MY celebrities. Listen here.
🎙️Heroes & Humans of Football, hosted by Simon Kuper and Mehreen Khan, is usually about football and humans, but a recent episode was about a whole dang football team—Afghanistan's women's national football team. A team, which I just learned, is not recognized by FIFA since the Taliban banned women’s football when they took control of Afghanistan in 2021. The team had to flee the country for their lives, but even in exile, is not recognized. Mehreen and Simon talk to Khalida Popal, the woman who defied the country's misogynistic norms to set up the national team, becoming the first female captain, coach, and executive in Afghanistan's history. Khalida is incredible and speaks with such emotion, I felt like we are all going to burst into tears together. I’m serious. She tells a story of a group of men discovering her teammates playing football, then taking a knife to their soccer ball, their “magic ball,” the thing that made them so happy and represented freedom. This story proves what sports can really do, oh my god. I thought I knew. Football isn’t a game in this case, it’s a movement. Listen here.
🎙️If you liked season one of Rachel Maddow’s Ultra, you’re going to love season two. I actually got hit with deja vu listening. The tone and structure is similar. And the story line is eerily similar, too. Season one opened with the curious death of U.S. Senator Ernest Lundeen (plane crash,) season two opened with the curious suicide (?) of Lester Hunt, a popular Senator from Wyoming. Both deaths open up a pandora’s box that reveals powerful forces coming from inside the US government fighting to end American democracy, and how delicate democracy is. Rachel Maddow is, no duh, a great storyteller and this is the kind of story that makes you raise your eyebrows and makes you feel unsettled. Our political leaders who have dabbled in fascism don’t disappear, they go underground. And this show is about what happens when anti democratic forces get let back in. And that’s why I anticipate seasons three, four, five, six, seven, etc. Rachel, I’m scared. Listen here.
🎙️Oh my goodness, have you been listening to Hang Up? The first season, which took place in Richmond, Virginia, was one of my favorite things last year, and the second season, which took place in Albuquerque, was even better, and messier. (Trying to avoid spoilers, here.) Let me look at the notes I took this morning, during the final episode before the reunion, where we hear how the vacation with **** and ****** went: yikes. A lot of crazy shit (let’s just say Albuquerque is small) led up to a ghosting and a date that I didn’t see coming. Truly, this dating gameshow format has been done, but Hang Up is done better than anything like it. We really see how these decisions and actions impact the people involved. In this final episode alone I felt saltiness, unexpected empathy, hope, and optimism for humanity. Listen to that episode here but start at the beginning if you haven’t, ya silly goose!
🎙️Someone on Reddit once called Wikihole too chaotic, and that has been overly bothering me because I think it is the perfect amount of chaotic. I know the show set up is technically all over the place—D'Arcy Carden takes us down Wikipedia holes with trivia questions for her guests, but who cares. She is a magician in the hosting seat and the guests are always just soooo solid. I love any podcast that gets a comedian or famous people doing anything other than talking about their latest project, that is easy to find. What I really want is to learn about how many NYC neighborhoods John Early and Kate Berlant can name that are touched by Manhattan’s Eighth Avenue. I want to kiss every single one of these guests on the mouth, and in fact the show always ends with everyone on the show kissing their computer screens in a big group “muah!”, which I love. Listen here.
🎙️Here’s a friendly reminder that Femanism is still hilarious. Er, sorry. FeMANism. Hosts/male feminists Sam Martin and Jamie Hoggart put the man in feminism and make it less annoying at the same time. Years ago when I listened to the first episode I truly thought these were to guys being absolutely brilliant at playing characters, and it was quite awhile before I realized that Sam and Jamie are Sam Martin and Amy Hoggart, two women. Awkward! Now they have a very blunt reminder at the beginning. But that is how good this show is. Listeners get updates on their lives and continue to feel worse and worse for the women Sam and Jamie have married. In a recent episode we get an upate on Sam’s acting career but it doesn’t matter, listen to them all. Listen here.
🎙️Dani Shapiro has returned for a new season of Family Secrets and I just have to say…go, Dani go! This show has been quietly running with such high quality and consistency it’s crazy. Dani doesn’t get enough credit for her interviewing skills and I say this is happening "quietly” because I think this show is underrated, not because it doesn’t have like 10 million downloads, which it does. I listen to every single episode, talk about it with my mom, and I always send this to someone who is interesting in dabbling in podcast listening. Also there is a huge archive for you just waiting, for your vacations, long-summer binges. ANYWAY the first episode of the new season, I’ll just say, gave me and my mom a lot to talk about, like even more than usual. You will appreciate the second episode if you loved Lemonada’s Believe Her, the story of Nikki Addimando, because it’s an interview with Nikki’s sister and reveals some things you might not know. The third one is about a domestic violence survivor who kept on burning her husband’s house down, many times. More good stuff to come, I’m sure. Listen here.
🎙️I love you!
📦 From the Archives 📦
Too often true crime shows are heavy on the dramatics and light on the journalism. The Bellingcat Podcast is heavy on both. Offering series of international stories, Bellingcat uses open-source journalism and social media to get deeper into stories than we are used to, especially on podcasts, fighting harder for the truth. Season 1 examines the downing of MH17 (what I’m listening to now.) I dare you to listen to the first two minutes of episode one and not continue on the journey. It paints a horrifying picture of the crash’s carnage so detailed it’s almost as beautiful as it is deadly. (Would you have imagined that the bodies found on the ground would be naked, because at the speed at which they were falling, their clothes were ripped from their bodies?) The story moves on to solve the mystery of MH17 using facts from open-source material. The reporting feels like nothing you’ll find anywhere else.
As someone in a band, Even if it Kills Me is VERY intriguing to me. I just started episode one and I'm digging it a ton!
Thank you for consistently good (amazing!) podcast recommendations!