Chapo Trap House and the rise of the dirtbag left

Good liberals need to force themselves to sit through the painfully unfunny new Daily Show

Hmmm, "Their actual intentions" vs 'What once Reddit guy says," who should I trust?

― sic And Mordy’s worst fans don’t deserve sic And Mordy (Whiney G. Weingarten), Thursday, October 12, 2017 2:59 PM (one minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Their intentions don't exist in a vacuum, they have a power & influence beyond a typical podcast, and to occlude or brush off that power is disingenuous.

ok jeet

Yeah we talked about the differences upthread, but I think the key ones are (1) legitimate political/philosophical differences and (2) Chapo does seem to actually push people toward organizing in a way that the Daily Show did not. But yeah there's going to be some crossover, Naomi Klein has gone on Colbert, there are certain Trump idiocies that would be fodder for both shows, etc.

also Whiney we've been through this upthread, it's not just one guy. the show has exposed a lot of people to leftist ideas & actual activism & participation, moreso than the Daily Show ever did.

If Chapo is filling any void, btw, it's the one left by Gawker

hey i like jeet but again you're brushing off something important, seemingly.. just for the lols. & yeah i agree absence of Gawker helped them

Josh Androsky was terrible on the DSA live show too, he might be the one real Berniebro cliche in the wild.

i mean I can't even begin to peel back all of their layers of irony to get at what the word "libs" is supposed to be signifying there, especially next to "statue"

However tone deaf it may be, this is pretty clearly them role-playing the angry right-wing Twitter/Facebook poster.

I probably mentioned this before but what always helped explain the Chapo (continual) fuckups is that, yeah, they were on the right place at the right time, but they were sure as fuck not ready yet.

It’s like your band’s first release going multi-platinum, or a baby comic with like 3-5 mins of good material getting their own sitcom/movie deal. Sid Eudy was a promising rookie pro-wrestler who got elevated to Main Eventer Status as “Sid Justice”(Vicious) and stopped learning or listening because he felt he didn’t need to anymore.

It reminds me of something Michael Stipe mentioned a long time ago, that he was glad that REM’s success was as (relatively) slow as it was, b/c had they hit their 90s peak in 1982, it would have destroyed them.

The live shows(and attempts at pre-scripted material) reveal this weakness; they were well-practiced and good at riffing, providing historical context, or leftist theory(in Matt/Amber’s case). Most podcasts that blew up were from folks who had already developed an act or practiced in other contexts; Comedy BangBang was a show either live on on the radio for a long time. The CT guys have been stand-ups for several years. Adomian has been a live performer for a decade. These folks weren’t.

None of them had a background in performance or college radio or anything like that. Brendan keeps recording shows straight to his laptop instead of a proper recorder and has lost multiple episodes because of crashes. Matt never ever learned to speak into his mic properly. They belatedly put out a website and never have done anything with it.

The failson thing is a joke and yet it isn’t. How long do you keep up the Replacements-type “ain’t it funny how we self-sabotage” before the joke gets old?

And yet it’s still a massively successful show making a million dollars a year and they got a book deal. So there’s no reason to change or learn(for a while).

sid vicious as cautionary tale is a first for me, but I get it =D

Yeah, the Cosby thing would have just been a "rethink this" moment on weird twitter soon forgotten but now they are the reified archetype of the bernie bro or whatever, and I agree they're not quite ready for that role.

the show has gotten gradually slicker and more streamlined over time but they (obviously) have a lot of room to improve still, on several fronts

However tone deaf it may be, this is pretty clearly them role-playing the angry right-wing Twitter/Facebook poster.

Agreed. Of course, when intense irony is the only weapon you got handy, you gotta wield it deftly, esp when there’s an army of people chomping at the bit to willfully misinterpret it.

sid vicious as cautionary tale is a first for me, but I get it =D

My history is obviously mainly informed(warped?) by Scott Keith and a lot of internet wrestling bloggers from ‘99-01 or so.

But yeah, you get the idea. There’s a necessary period built-in where you need to learn your craft, and leapfrogging that has consequences.

One of the amusing bits is when you get criticism from folks who have barely, if ever, actually heard the show.

You get aggro bro/jock accusations tossed at a group who freaked(and were rightly mocked) out on the air when their absent co-host’s cat relieved itself on the floor during an episode, or who have recorded a several hour session trying to work their own refs into a Call of Cthulhu game.

The entire (and CONSTANT on this thread) "these clowns aren't ready for primetime" argument really hinges on having to believe "podcasting" is some kind of art, which **huge fuckin jerkoff motion**

wow I can't believe these guys aren't better at a ten-year-old form called – can you believe it's fucking called this "podcasting" – whose Sgt Peppers is Marc Maron being sad to Louis CK. for two hours

There are two different issues - podcasting in itself and being a public figure. They're excellent at the former, despite technical ineptitude, while being terrible at the latter.

As to the "art" of podcasting, pretty sure you raised a question months ago about starting from the beginning - which is more similar to one's response to TV/books than a radio show, so...

"excellent" is a bit of a stretch

So which of these dudes is gonna turn out to be a serial abuser?

That's all I think about about this show. I've never listened to it.

So which of these dudes is gonna turn out to be a serial abuser?

― .oO (silby), Thursday, October 12, 2017 7:01 PM (two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i have been thinking about this too

Ugh the live ep is painful, I can't even make it to Adomian.

thx for the contribution silby

we've already established that the most problematic leftbro is taibbi

kingfish post is so OTM

Whiney: Thousands of people listen to this show every week. They have 20,000+ premium subscribers. The free episodes regularly get 80 - 100,000+ listens. Anderson Cooper averaged 425k viewers in the first quarter of 2017. Chris Hayes had 325k. They're not shouting into a void or a choir of weird twitter people. Besides, incompetence is not a virtue. it's not endearing, it's fucking stupid & annoying and like kingfish said, pretty much every podcast at their level has their shit figured out technically. It's not hard. As far as the importance or "artistic value" of podcasts, I think you're missing the point. Many, many millions more people listen to Joe Rogan and Marc Maron than most cable news hosts now.

holding the attention of a headphone listening audience for an hour of "informal chit chat" is a craft just like doing standup is a craft. Which is why they bomb live. They are not performers.

If only these guys could have the quality of what JOE ROGAN does for a living.

you sound like comic book guy

I'm of two minds about the professionalism question:

Yeah, these guys are not trained comics, but there are 50,000 podcasts made by comedians and UCB people and they for the most part are as boring as hell. I can't listen to Comedy Bang Bang anymore but I can deal with amateur stuff like Chapo and Uhh Yeah Dude.

On the other hand, when you're pulling in as much money as they are, the tech situation is embarrassing.

for less than $3K they could all have Shure SM7Bs, a Focusrite interface with enough mic pre's running into their Macbook and have basically commercial FM radio quality audio instead of whatever bullshit Blue Snowball sounding shit they are using now

even when Christman was remote they could have done a dedicated IDSN line for the money they are making

yeah, I don't even really care about the audio quality so much I just don't want them to lose whole episodes. I don't need it to sound slick, it might lose some of its charm.

i don't really think shitty quality mics is "charming" or any reason that i like the podcast

but yeah losing stuff, recording tech isnt exactly rocket science these days

I bring up the stand-up thing from something Felix or Will mentioned last year when describing folks like them who inhabit that weird crossroads of Weird Left Twitter; they mentioned “frustrated stand-ups” or something like that and that image stuck in my head. They know endless stand-ups, they room with stand-ups, they’re media industry folks living in NYC for chrissakes. They record the show the exact same way a panel of stand-ups sit on stage; 3-5 people sitting side-by-side all holding SM58s that they bring up to their mouths to speak into.

https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/1*MYcQ6eG5-L4LfzApO6naPw.jpeg

And yeah, the live bits seem like the work of open mic’ers

On the professionalism tip, it’s not that they need to be overly produced NPR style, just that they need a basic competency. Fuck, _I_ have a SM7b and that’s just cuz i didn’t want to sound like another shitty Skype cast conducted thru 1st-gen Xbox headsets.

(And I found a good used one on CL)

Let’s change metaphors, then: At what point, if your band is paid to perform live, do you actually need to care if you’re in tune or have any idea what you’re doing or really care at all if you’re entertaining people? What is the level that a group needs to have their shit together to actually function as a group performing in their particular venue?

Also, is it worth connecting this thread convos on any number of other threads about both the limits of conversation on social platforms mixed with the shitloads of people eager (in bad faith or good) to willfully misinterpret anything posted?

Cuz there’s an aspect to the freakout from people neck deep in using Game of Thrones analogies to understand politics reacting to the “bend the knee” comment that is later echoed by the reactions to the announcement that Bernie was going to speak at the women’s convention in Detroit?

But that’s a whole’nother tangleball I can understand people not wanting to touch.

Last thought: even the Replacements (eventually) tuned their guitars

jesus who cares if some jokey socialists aren't using amazing mics

guy on the right needs to buy some new socks tho

didnt realize felix looks like ricky rubio

my gf had this to say about them: "Have a female guest on, talk over her the whole time. I can’t listen to it because it just feels like a college off campus apartment. Only girl, trapped in a room full of dudes, invisible until they wanna fuck you"

which is definitely the vibe on a lot of eps

Androsky resigned from the DSA-LA steering committee.

http://www.dsa-la.org/statements_from_josh_androsky_and_the_dsa_la_steering_committee

The right move.

They got better aboutnkt talking over female guests fwiw but I definitely remember that being a problem at least once or twice. Mostly Felix.

yeah the Klein episode and the international-left one were pretty notably free of that. I wish amber was on more regularly.

quite the commitment to dirtbag style

oh man I left a dump in the toilet the second before I left for the airport last week. it was sitting here 7 days. don't say it was my posts

— Partisan Gridlock (@ByYourLogic) October 13, 2017

"partisan gridlock" as a spooky halloween handle is a pretty good joke

accusations of assault against sam kriss... wonder if any other of these folks in this orbit were on that shitty media men list

yeah i heard about that list, how widely was it circulated? assuming it's not public

I just learned that I'm on a list of "shitty media men" that's being circulated. But I have no idea what I'm accused of. Sweet Jesus.

— Doug Henwood (@DougHenwood) October 16, 2017

xp

yeah, also I wonder if global tetrahedron was on it

wtf?

were on that shitty media men list

oh, is this the one Doug Henwood found out he was on? presumably for attacking H.R.C.

XXP