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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Remember the three R's? Reading, writing, and arithmetic? Well, we aren't really doing that second one anymore.
On average, teachers report spending as little as 10 minutes a week on teaching handwriting explicitly in kindergarten classrooms.
This week on Explain It To Me, handwriting's recession and renaissance. Find new episodes Sundays wherever you get your podcasts.
Welcome to Switched On Pop. I'm producer Rihanna Cruz. I'm musicologist Nate Sloan. And I'm songwriter Charlie Harding. Charlie, Nate, I'm here to talk to you guys today about a new sound coming up in pop music right now.
Let's go.
Some could call it digipop. Others could call it post-hyperpop. But it's a sound that I think is going to take over the charts in the next few years. And I've personally come to label it feral pop. Feral pop. Feral pop. And the thing is, feral pop can sound like many things. It could sound like this. But it could also sound like this.
And the wild thing is, it could also sound like this. Come here. What's making you feel feral?
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Chapter 2: What is feral pop and how is it defined?
The lyrics are sort of thrown out as if someone just like, here I am on the microphone. I got to come up with some words. It sounds like a laptop. I'm writing an FL Studio. It's very off the cuff. And as you could hear, it speaks to one of the main tenants of feral pop, a devotion of technology and the embrace of digital aesthetic. Yeah, she mentions Fruity Loops or FL Studio.
She mentions her computer. She mentions an iPod touch in a yellow Pikachu case. As you could tell from the album title, I Love My Computer and the lyrics of this song, there is a fetishizing of technology here and specifically technology from previous eras. My quick Google search, iPod Touchline, introduced in 2007. This is a core like Web 1.0, a better time, an easier time.
Yeah, this song speaks fondly of that Web 1.0 realness. You know, the computer here is an object of affection rather than a piece of machinery. And our coming apocalyptic destruction, according to all of the, you know, AI company CEOs. A utopic era is where we find ourselves in this track. You know, it's evocative.
The core metaphor of the song is that Nina Jirachi hears a song on her iPod Touch that reminds her of all these childhood memories. She sings, it sounds like first day, starting year eight. It sounds like beach day. You know, she's recalling all of these things that are brought to her because of an iPod.
And the way her voice floats in as she coos about the titular iPod Touch yellow Pikachu case, it's a very familiar image and it feels very comforting. Is that like a Pikachu saying, it sounds? What was that? Say that again, Charlie. Sorry, I didn't catch it. It sounds. Well, Pikachu famously can only say Pikachu. Pikachu. But like in a really high voice. This is an evolved Pikachu.
This is the next one. Is that like Raichu? Come on. Damn, that was cold, Rihanna. You didn't have to do him like that. One of us here grew up watching Pokemon and it's not the other two people I'm on the call with. I appreciate this song sounding like it should be about a romantic relationship with another person. Yeah. Except it's about a laptop. That's very compelling to me. And I get it.
I mean, it reminds me of something actually I heard the artist Holly Herndon say, which is that, you know, your computer is kind of everything. It's where you make music. It's where you FaceTime and talk to your friends. It's where you watch shows. It's where you look at memes. It's like, what a crazy relationship.
How many people do you have that kind of deep relationship with, especially in the 21st century? I'm surprised we don't have more odes to the laptop.
I think about the book Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky, which was published in 2009, which is sort of about the promise of the Internet's going to make a place where we can all communicate and belong and tear down the old gatekeepers, which effectively comes true in the decades since.
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Chapter 3: Which artists are leading the feral pop movement?
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The U.S. and Iran say they've agreed on terms to end the war and reopen the Strait of Hormuz.
You already see oil prices from a high of $126 a barrel down to about $80 a barrel today. That's a lot of progress.
The war, of course, drove up the price of gas and other essentials and has led to some ugly polling for President Trump. 61% of adults polled by NPR, PBS and Marist disapprove of his handling of the economy. His handling, in a certain light, makes sense. His priority was preventing Iran from getting nukes. But Trump's messaging was unusual, unusual for a president.
Last month, a reporter asked Trump, to what extent was he thinking about Americans' finances when he negotiated with Iran?
I don't think about Americans' financial situation. I don't think about anybody.
What's he doing? Coming up on Today Explained from Vox.
Hasan Piker has blown up in recent years. After the 2024 election, the popular leftist Twitch streamer became a go-to voice for the Democratic Party, but Piker's glow-up has angered a section of Democrats who are growing louder in voice. Hasan Piker is anti-American, he is bigoted, he's anti-Semitic, and he is deeply misogynistic.
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Chapter 4: What influences can be found in the sound of feral pop?
Where dance punk music fused rock and electronic together. We hear that in this opening bass situation.
Very LCD sound system.
It's dirty. It's grimy. In regards to the attention to aesthetic that is in a lot of feral pop, I see it evoking the aesthetic of indie sleaze. Brooklyn, millennial, 2000s era, you know, Williamsburg before bankers lived there. Gen Z has fetishized this aesthetic, this era, this music over the years. So it makes sense that we hear it here.
But also taking what we heard in F My Computer and applying it here, the guitar also sounds like a chopped up printer noise or something. Like it's dark, it's digital, it's mechanical.
Do you want to listen to it? I have never been to London.
You know when you're printing something and it's like super in color and so it's taking a million years and you just hear the printer going back and forth again. It's like you put that into a song. It's genius. I really enjoy this style of writing because it's where you have to kind of write a song and then resample and chop that song up. So the song is the remix of the thing that you recorded.
That bass is a bass line someone recorded down and then reversed, pitched around, made that printer sound. We hear the same thing with her vocal. I've Never Been to London is not like one straight sung through vocal. It keeps getting chopped and stuttered.
Girl, I've never been to London, London, London, London, London. It's almost like the computer and the human merged together.
In this era of music, Daft Punk was doing a lot of microchopping, where they were taking little pieces, resampling them, giving you those stutters. So I'm not surprised that we're hearing them alongside the sort of electro clash kind of bass sound as well. Yeah.
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Chapter 5: How does Ninajirachi embody the feral pop ethos?
It's like, what if you turned the line-occupied noise on a phone? I don't know. What do you call that? The, like, beep, beep, beep when your call is blocked or something? Like, what if you made that into a beat drop? We call that a busy signal. Thank you. As you can tell, I don't call people. I call it stress by Justice. The most stressful song ever made.
Another song that sounds like a fax machine. Yes. Fax machine pop would be another approach we could go here. But no, I think that feral pop feels very appropriate. It is bringing out something that is unrestrained. It's unguarded. It's very messy.
Although, funny enough, making this music, you know, all those little microtime chops and drops, like it's actually highly thought out, even though its job is to just make us feel like. Yeah, it's really technically sound.
Maybe part of why it's connecting largely is because it feels like as we've been talking about the utopic version of human and machine joining hands rather than the dystopian future of AI and computer generated music. To be feral is to be human.
To fax is divine.
So Nina, for all these reasons, is the quintessential feral pop artist. Her music has a lot going on. It contains all the aspects of feral pop encapsulated in this one record, I Love My Computer. We have the EDM dubsteppy influence. We have a meta and winking lyrical slant. There's a whirlpool of genres all in even a single song.
And more than anything on this album, there's the devotion to technology and the fetish of computer culture. And people are really connecting with it. You know, anecdotally, I saw her at Coachella this year. She was performing in the Sonora tent, which is the smallest stage at the festival. There's a line that you need to wait in to get in.
I was waiting in the longest line I had ever seen for that tent. I waited for like 40 minutes to get in to see Nina Jirachi perform.
hundreds of people biding their time just to get a taste a little hint of what it's like to see her perform i get in it's so sweaty i'm standing shoulder to shoulder with people that were just going nuts it's awesome stuff it's super cool i could see her really blowing up in the next few years based on everything we've heard today i would not be surprised
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Chapter 6: What role does technology play in feral pop music?
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