The Bryant Park Project, Sigur Ros and Jancee Dunn
This is a collision of three things that I like:
- The Bryant Park Project is a new NPR morning show out of NYC with the explicit mandate not to be so freaking dull. I like a lot of NPR, but it says something about their culture that they have to have a special project not to be boring. So far, I think the BPP (which I listen to via podcast) is a lot less pleased with itself than the overly Slate-flavored Day to Day, a midday project from NPR in Los Angeles with a similar mandate.
- Sigur Ros is a very odd, but very cool Icelandic band I enjoy that plays this sort of spare pop music, not necessarily using a real language. When BPP interviewed the band, they weren’t really feeling it, gave a pretty crappy interview, and the very multimedia BPP then posted the raw video of the interview on the Web. (The raw footage of any interview will look less than perfect, even with a good interview, so this was a brave move.) Sigur Ros fans were unkind about the BPP interviewer’s interviewing skills, to put it mildly.
- Jancee Dunn, arguably the best music writer working for Rolling Stone, and someone whom I’ve been a fan of for many years, was called in to go through what BPP did wrong and what they did right, and to talk about the pain of interviewing musicians in general. To me, the scene in Almost Famous where the interviewer gets shut out in the hall, the hotel room door slammed in his face, is probably the single most accurate depiction of journalism on film, and Jancee, although not in so many words, seems to agree.
Anyway, worth a listen.
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