Perfect Song: "House of Jealous Lovers" by The Rapture With Jason Stewart

Jason Stewart (How Long Gone) joins Yasi to talk about “House of Jealous Lovers,” the Rapture’s cowbell-powered anthem that fused punk and dance and helped define the electroclash era. They discuss the band’s early days on Sub Pop, the song taking shape in the hands of James Murphy and DFA, the band’s move to a major label, and the fallout that followed. Plus, a look back at Cinespace Tuesdays in Hollywood, DJing across the globe, and an important question: Why was will.i.am everywhere all the time? Subscribe on YouTube CREDITS: Host: Yasi Salek @yasisalek Guest: Jason Stewart @themjeans Producer: Rob Sundermann Editor: Adrian Bridges Additional Production Supervision: Justin Sayles Theme Song: Bethany Cosentino Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

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• 0:35Speaker 01

  What's with this band anyway? I don't get it. Can you please explain? Wait, like, Bandplain? Never heard this band in my life. Oh, you haven't? I'd love that. Really? Why? Yeah, I love this song. Oh, I don't know that one. Bandplain, Bandplain, Bandplain. I really hate this band! Whatever. I'm their biggest fan. Bandplain, Bandplain, Bandplain, Bandplain.

• 1:15Yasi Salek?

  Hello and welcome to Bandplain. I am your host, Yasi Salek. This is usually a show where I invite an expert guest on to help me explain a cult band or iconic artist. Today's episode is a little different. Today's episode is about one perfect song: The Rapture's House of Jealous Lovers. My guest today, you guys, my longtime pal, co-host of the How Long Gone podcast, and famous disc jockey under the name Them Jeans, Mr. Jason Stewart. Welcome to the program, Jason.

• 1:46Speaker 03

  Thank you for having me, Yasi. How are you?

• 1:48Yasi Salek?

  I've been trying to make this happen for years.

• 1:51Speaker 03

  Didn't really try that hard. I think this is the first time you've asked me.

• 1:53Yasi Salek?

  That's not true. That's not true. Let's clear the air and the record. I asked you, and you were kind of like, "I don't really listen to guitar rock music," I believe was kind of what you said. Which was fair. You were kind of like, "I don't know what I would do that would make sense."

• 2:08Speaker 03

  Well, I still feel a little bit of that because I feel like this show is for real music knowers, journalists, encyclopedic people. And I, as a DJ, I know a little bit about a lot of music. And less of it was honed in on one certain thing. But I also know that, you know, it's a three-hour podcast, and we're here to be entertained. So that's okay. If you are in the Rapture, I'm sorry.

• 2:34Yasi Salek?

  I think you're the perfect guest for this podcast, and I'm gonna tell you why. Number one, "House of Jealous Lovers" by The Rapture is a great... As you might know, we're in the midst of Bandplain's indie sleaze arc, if you will.

• 2:49Speaker 03

  Balls deep.

• 2:50Yasi Salek?

  Balls deep.

• 2:51Speaker 03

  Coming hot off the "Yeah, Yeah, Yeah" episode.

• 2:53Yasi Salek?

  Hot off the "Yeah, Yeah, Yeah" episode, straight into "House of Jealous Lovers." That wasn't the exact scheduling, but we had a little snafu. Don't worry about it. But I was like, "Oh, this is a great opportunity," because there is this whole other sect of indie sleaze that we're not gonna get too much into in our arc, but that is sort of the electronica, electro clash version that the DFA Records, sort of the space LCD occupies. And The Rapture's House of Jealous Lovers was kind of like the first thing, right? Would you agree?

• 3:22Speaker 03

  I think so, yeah.

• 3:24Yasi Salek?

  And as you have a storied history as a disc jockey that we talked about, and that you and I actually have a shared past coming up in the...

• 3:35Speaker 03

  Non-sexual.

• 3:36Yasi Salek?

  Non-sexual. In the trenches of Star Shoes to CineSpace to Beauty Bar.

• 3:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:44Yasi Salek?

  The route.

• 3:46Speaker 03

  You were there. I was there.

• 3:47Yasi Salek?

  You were definitely there. You were a purveyor. You were involved heavily. You were a creator. What was it? Okay, let's paint the picture. This episode is brought to you by Sierra Nevada Hazy Little Thing. If you saw the band when they played at the bar, or stopped mid-festival to look at the stars, then you're ready to embrace the haze with Hazy Little Thing. Citrusy-smooth and easy to drink, it pairs with nights that don't need a script. Brewed with the purest ingredients for finest quality, there's a reason it's America's best-selling hazy IPA. Embrace the haze with Sierra Nevada Hazy Little Thing. Enjoy responsibly.

• 4:29Yasi Salek?

  What was that night called at CineSpace that you guys did?

• 4:34Speaker 03

  When it first started, it was called CineSpace Tuesdays.

• 4:37Yasi Salek?

  Yes, CineSpace Tuesdays. And when was that?

• 4:39Speaker 03

  Maybe like 2004-ish?

• 4:42Yasi Salek?

  Okay.

• 4:43Speaker 03

  I think 2003, 2004, because it was a shaky beginning at first before it turned into the final iteration. Before the Aoki affication of it all. But it was like 2003 to 2004.

• 4:56Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, because I can't for the life of remember. I definitely somehow have a memory of 2003, but I might be wrong. Maybe it was...

• 5:03Speaker 03

  When it first started, I mean, who knows?

• 5:05Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 5:05Speaker 03

  Like I said, when we were doing it, it was a little bar club night, so it wasn't like my first... You know, we weren't journaling.

• 5:12Yasi Salek?

  You weren't live journaling.

• 5:14Speaker 03

  We were trying to get free cigarettes by giving our driver's license to somebody.

• 5:18Yasi Salek?

  My god. Some of you will never know how many times you would hand over your personal details via your driver's license to some representative in a bar or club just so they would give you free Lucky Strikes or whatever. I feel like there's always Lucky Strikes.

• 5:34Speaker 03

  I would get a lot. It was Lucky Strikes, and then Camel, Turkish...

• 5:39Yasi Salek?

  Golds.

• 5:40Speaker 03

  Turkish Golds. And then the Camel Crush. Because we were so... We were lousy with Camels. I had cases of them in my house. So you'd be like, "Yeah, let me get some Camel Crush, and let me get the Wintergreen Blast." You don't even smoke it, but it was just funny, you know?

• 5:55Yasi Salek?

  I did. I used to fucking...

• 5:57Speaker 03

  You crushed. I mean, we all crushed. When you're doing just like beer and shots, that's Turkish time.

• 6:04Yasi Salek?

  Totally.

• 6:05Speaker 03

  But then when you're doing powder drugs...

• 6:07Yasi Salek?

  When you're involved in some other activities that we don't talk about here.

• 6:11Speaker 03

  We crush. And then like, you judge somebody, how early into the cig do you crush?

• 6:15Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 6:15Speaker 03

  Do you do one last, one crush at the end for dessert? Or do you get greedy and crush too soon?

• 6:21Yasi Salek?

  I think I was like a crush from jump person.

• 6:23Speaker 03

  So at that point, why not just smoke menthols, you know? But that's a whole other podcast.

• 6:27Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. So you are from Orange County. You made it up to the big city. And you were like, "We, me and my homies, we're gonna start a club night." And was there like a theme? Or like a musical tenor that you were like, "Oh, we're playing this kind of music?"

• 6:49Speaker 03

  It was less musical theme-based and more like, "Who can we get to DJ?"

• 6:53Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 6:53Speaker 03

  And when it very, very first started, so I started working there. I'll do it quick, but there was...

• 6:59Yasi Salek?

  No take your time.

• 7:00Speaker 03

  Burning Man was going on, and CineSpace, the club, it was going... It was like a place you can go see a movie, have dinner. And then there'd be some nightclubs afterwards, like DJ M would play there. There'd be some like Entourage-style, clubby club going on there. They'd have like an Asian night. They would have like...

• 7:17Yasi Salek?

  The thing that people used to do is an Asian night. We don't do that anymore.

• 7:20Speaker 03

  It was a simpler time. But there were like, you know, there's a girl named Rachel who I became friends with. They had other nights where I would go and like get free drinks from 10 to 11 kind of thing as a broke person in LA. And then they're like, "Hey, our guy who's in the reception office, he's gonna go to Burning Man. Can you cover for a week? Like answer phones, receive mail, whatever." And then, after he came back from Burning Man, they're like, "Look, we like you here." And then they gave me a job being like the assistant events person. And then we would look at the calendar, and like you said, Star Shoes, Beauty Bar, they're all in the same corridor. And like one, you'd be like, "You go here on Wednesdays, you go here on Thursdays."

• 8:05Speaker 03

  And there wasn't really much on a Tuesday at that time. So, and then I would look on the calendar, and there'd always be screenings and clubs and stuff, but nothing on a Tuesday. So we said, "Let's invite people to come and hang out." And it was still a little early days, so like 50 people would come at the most. But like, Aerial Pink and like half of Brian Jonestown Massacre would be the DJs. And then like Interpol, like one day, like, nobody came except Interpol. So it was just like seven people. Five of them were Interpol. And we were just like, "Let's just..."

• 8:43Yasi Salek?

  Keep it going.

• 8:43Speaker 03

  "Let's just hang, like, this is just our house" kind of thing.

• 8:46Yasi Salek?

  Was it you and already, was it Frankie?

• 8:49Speaker 03

  No, it was just me and Rachel who were doing it. And then she left CineSpace and went to Beauty Bar. And then she started doing a night there, and I stayed at CineSpace and stayed doing the Tuesdays. And then I reached out to Steve and Frankie and said, "Do you guys wanna DJ?" "Oh, I have 300 bucks," or something like that, you know? And then... From there, it just kinda took off. But it was the, the, the very first iteration, it was the coolest. It would be like, like I said, you know, just Interpol hanging out.

• 9:21Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 9:21Speaker 03

  And like two models and I'd be like, this is so cool. We're losing money and this is not sustainable, but I'm feeling pretty cool. And I had no DJ aspirations, no club promoter aspirations. I was just like, let's fill the calendar and be funky.

• 9:35Yasi Salek?

  Totally. And let's have fun. Let's crush.

• 9:38Speaker 03

  Let's crush. I just wanna crush.

• 9:40Yasi Salek?

  I just wanna crush. I be, I think it's just the passage of time and also youth, but like I, in my memory, that was fucking Studio 54. Do you know what I mean? Like, like I remember walking in there and being like, oh my God. Like in my mind, it was huge. It was not huge. It was small. But I remember being like, all the people are dark and like, it was like, I was so young, you know?

• 10:01Speaker 03

  You go up the stairs.

• 10:02Yasi Salek?

  Are we about the same age? You're a little bit older than me.

• 10:04Speaker 03

  I'm maybe a couple of years older than you.

• 10:06Yasi Salek?

  So like, yeah, I would go up the stairs. You were often at the door.

• 10:09Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm. When we first started.

• 10:11Yasi Salek?

  When you first started. Yeah. So I know, I feel like, cause remember I would always be like, you were the door guy at CineSpace. You were like, it was my night or whatever.

• 10:16Speaker 03

  People think I'm, I was the security guard there and not.

• 10:18Yasi Salek?

  So it was very early, cause I was, I went to college in Santa Barbara. So I was like constantly coming back and forth. And also there was like a time, like anyways, and then I was in San Francisco, but I was always in LA back and forth between San Francisco and Santa Barbara. And my best friend Rachel, at the time, also named Rachel, we would put on our best fucking AMAP, babe. We would slap on those.

• 10:40Speaker 03

  AMAP, meaning American Apparel.

• 10:41Yasi Salek?

  You know it.

• 10:42Speaker 03

  How many times during Indie Sleaze Month are we, have we discussed AMAP?

• 10:46Yasi Salek?

  Hasn't come up as much as you think it would have, but I think it will start coming up a lot more.

• 10:51Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 10:51Yasi Salek?

  Um, I remember the day that I got asked to model for them.

• 10:55Speaker 03

  That's huge.

• 10:56Yasi Salek?

  Huge.

• 10:57Speaker 03

  They're like, you gotta show your pussy though.

• 10:58Yasi Salek?

  But like literally, basically they were like, it pays 50 bucks. And I was like, mm, I don't really need my dad to like turn to the back of the TV guide and see me like spread eagle with like,

• 11:09Speaker 03

  TV guide.

• 11:09Yasi Salek?

  Cause they have those ads in everything, you know? With like thigh high, you know, striped socks and like a unitard on or whatever. I was like, you can keep your $50.

• 11:20Speaker 03

  Preach. You made the right decision in the long run, but I'm sure at the time.

• 11:24Yasi Salek?

  Right decisions, but that was one, yeah. Can you imagine?

• 11:27Speaker 03

  Just imagine having that in your back pocket and you're like, oh yeah, that's me.

• 11:30Yasi Salek?

  It would probably be kinda cool now, I guess.

• 11:31Speaker 03

  Hyperion. I mean, now that you're, you know, you probably have a healthy relationship with yourself and your family and it's okay now. But at the time.

• 11:39Yasi Salek?

  I don't think it would have been the vibe.

• 11:40Speaker 03

  I wouldn't want my, my 21 year old daughter.

• 11:43Yasi Salek?

  No.

• 11:43Speaker 03

  Doing American Apparel ad things.

• 11:45Yasi Salek?

  No.

• 11:46Speaker 03

  Especially for 50 bucks.

• 11:47Yasi Salek?

  For 50 bucks? That was the rate.

• 11:49Speaker 03

  I bet it was.

• 11:50Yasi Salek?

  And they were just like, you should be honored. And.

• 11:52Speaker 03

  You should.

• 11:53Yasi Salek?

  Fair enough, you know? One of my favorite tidbits of information that I like to tell people every time that clip of Edward Sharp and the Magnetic Zeros goes viral is that that girl, the shaved head girl, was an American Apparel model. Prior to that, she was full in our world.

• 12:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 12:12Yasi Salek?

  Jade. And I remember her from that.

• 12:14Speaker 03

  Damn. It was a, it was a platform. It was a springboard to success. It's usually porn, but sometimes it's that song.

• 12:23Yasi Salek?

  It's that song. Anyways, I just wanted to establish your bona fides. Cause I, you know, I do feel you were, I was trying to explain to someone, like, we had our version of what was happening in New York and it was very much kind of centered around CineSpace, Beauty Bar Star, she was Continental? Was that a place?

• 12:44Speaker 03

  Um, yeah, I think so. But I guess with the, it was a few years behind New York. But, but during that time in LA, there were some other things going on, like, like Spaceland Mondays.

• 12:58Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 12:59Speaker 03

  Which would sort of go into the like early Electro Clash, kinda Fisher Spooner-y kinda thing.

• 13:05Yasi Salek?

  I also remember like Auto Lux used to play at the Echo all the time.

• 13:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, Auto Lux.

• 13:09Yasi Salek?

  People don't talk a lot about Auto Lux, but that was kind of in that world, you know? Am I off on timing? That's about right.

• 13:14Speaker 03

  No, I think that sounds about right, yeah. So we were doing our own thing, but then, yeah, when, when this sound came out, the early, was those 2002-ish, I guess?

• 13:22Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 13:23Speaker 03

  Like right after the Strokes changed everything, then everyone did a little bit of that. And then, you know, then it went, cause I, I feel like the Fisher Spooner, like early Electro Clash, like Peaches kinda thing. That was happening like right around 2000, 2001.

• 13:40Yasi Salek?

  That's right.

• 13:40Speaker 03

  Where it was like the, and then like DJs who play like rock and roll nights are starting to play a little, a few electronic songs here and there, a little, you know, Ladytron, Adults, that kinda crossover thing. So then that was, to me in my life, that was when the lines were first dance music meets rock music. You know, like guitars and beats.

• 14:04Yasi Salek?

  Was.

• 14:04Speaker 03

  And how's it gonna work?

• 14:05Yasi Salek?

  Was your guys' original night a rock focused night?

• 14:08Speaker 03

  Kind of, yeah.

• 14:09Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 14:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was just like indie rock and then the club bangers that would, that would like cross over. So.

• 14:16Yasi Salek?

  Like Black Eyed Peas?

• 14:18Speaker 03

  A little bit, yeah. It was, there would always be like 20% of like bullshit kinda things like that. I remember, you know, like Outkast, Hey Ya and.

• 14:27Yasi Salek?

  Maybe like Hot in Here?

• 14:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, for sure. But also like Don't Stop Believin', Journey, kind of like, you know, it's, it's 1:48 AM, everyone's blacked out and we're gonna, you know, all the, all the cheesy ballad anthems.

• 14:41Yasi Salek?

  You know what's nuts is, I don't, I don't know if you know this about me, but I don't get out to many parties anymore, but like.

• 14:46Speaker 03

  Hey, same, girl.

• 14:47Yasi Salek?

  Occasionally when I will be at a young, a party populated by young people, I'll see that their, like their version of that Journey song is like Misery Business by Paramore. Or like, it's something so.

• 15:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's that.

• 15:02Yasi Salek?

  Even later than our time.

• 15:03Speaker 03

  My chemical romance, the used.

• 15:05Yasi Salek?

  Exactly.

• 15:06Speaker 03

  Panic at the Disco. Those are all of their.

• 15:08Yasi Salek?

  That's their like Journey moment.

• 15:09Speaker 03

  Those are their ballad bangers.

• 15:11Yasi Salek?

  Wow, so.

• 15:12Speaker 03

  I mean, and now all of that, all that sort of the end of Indie Sleaze, the LMFAOs and, and things like that, the Black Eyed Peas, when they started coming to CineSpace.

• 15:23Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 15:24Speaker 03

  And being like, what are?

• 15:25Yasi Salek?

  I don't think you guys understand that Will.i.am was out here in these streets. Pretty much you couldn't go anywhere.

• 15:30Speaker 03

  Will.i.am, Will.i.am were like decent friends at one time.

• 15:34Yasi Salek?

  Totally.

• 15:35Speaker 03

  We would be like, what up? And we would hang out and stuff.

• 15:37Yasi Salek?

  Do you remember when, oh my God, this, I feel like you were definitely there because you were friends with Steve. Was Steve involved? Do you remember when they opened the Korean restaurant?

• 15:48Yasi Salek?

  On like, I think it was on Highland. They opened like a Korean, like a fancy Korean barbecue restaurant.

• 15:53Speaker 03

  I remember that.

• 15:55Yasi Salek?

  And the opening night, and it was like, I, I feel like Gerard Butler was like bartending. It was like the most insane version of that era of like Us Weekly celebrities and absolutely Apple the app. And Will.i.am were up in the building. And I was just like.

• 16:09Speaker 03

  I remember, I think I DJed like a Latin VMA Awards after party there. And I remember seeing.

• 16:16Yasi Salek?

  I don't remember what it was called.

• 16:17Speaker 03

  Alessandro Ambrosia.

• 16:19Yasi Salek?

  Absolutely up in that bitch.

• 16:20Speaker 03

  And I was like.

• 16:20Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 16:21Speaker 03

  This is the first time I've seen a, a true baddie in person. I was like, I finally made it.

• 16:26Yasi Salek?

  I think her boyfriend did like Wild Fox.

• 16:28Speaker 03

  Wild?

• 16:29Yasi Salek?

  This is like such an, this is such this time. Everything we're saying is such specifically rooted in this time.

• 16:34Speaker 03

  True that. And then of course there was, I think Forbidden City. Which was maybe a, a Danny Masterson aligned sushi eatery slash Ultra Lounge.

• 16:47Yasi Salek?

  Yes, totally. There was also a place called like, um, Garden of Eden. I went to an herb party there and met the RZA.

• 16:59Yasi Salek?

  We had a time.

• 17:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 17:00Yasi Salek?

  My time was had, honey.

• 17:01Speaker 03

  We can do a whole other side quest about like early 2000s Ultra Lounge culture.

• 17:07Yasi Salek?

  Totally.

• 17:08Speaker 03

  I would love a, I would love a retrospective on that.

• 17:10Yasi Salek?

  Absolutely. Well, anyways, okay. Well, I wanted to ask you about is like, at first you guys were playing, so you're doing indie rock, like you said, like, and you know, Interpol is coming around. You're, the Strokes changed everything, so you're playing Strokes songs. And was the crowd kind of more or less rocker types?

• 17:29Speaker 03

  I think it was a little bit of everything.

• 17:31Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 17:31Speaker 03

  That was at the time when everyone listened to everything. Like when we were discussing on the last episode, like while all this was going on, like 50 Cent in the club was like just.

• 17:41Yasi Salek?

  Absolutely.

• 17:42Speaker 03

  You know, that was, that was the, the songbook of the world.

• 17:45Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 17:45Speaker 03

  It was unescapable. Everyone loved it. So there was all of that happening in the background. Like whenever I, when I first started DJing, I would play on like one side vinyl and one side an iPod. And it would be like, so I'd have all my vinyl, you know, my DFA vinyl or whatever it is, my cool songs. And then whatever Nelly or Ludacris or whatever song that was popping at that time. Play it on the iPad and, or iPod, I should say.

• 18:15Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 18:16Speaker 03

  And then Kelly Duitt would hand me a, a frosty Stella.

• 18:21Yasi Salek?

  You're so right. It was all one thing. Like you brought up DJ Ayam or May he rest in peace. But like, there was also like LAX right around that time too. And you would go and, and like the streetwear part of Indie Sleaze was very strong. It was very like kind of interconnected, you know?

• 18:38Speaker 03

  It was.

• 18:38Yasi Salek?

  I had my friend Crystal Mazel send me a message the other day after the IAS episode came out. She was like, me and you were in a different, we were like in a different subsect. We were in streetwear Indie Sleaze.

• 18:46Speaker 03

  You were.

• 18:47Yasi Salek?

  Damn, dragged my ass straight to fucking hell.

• 18:48Speaker 03

  Look, I was.

• 18:49Yasi Salek?

  You kinda were too.

• 18:50Speaker 03

  I was definitely, look.

• 18:51Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 18:51Speaker 03

  If you're, if you're in your mid, early twenties and Supreme is like, here's free clothes, you feel bitter than God.

• 19:01Yasi Salek?

  Thought I was the cool, I thought I was the coolest person on earth. The fact that I could.

• 19:05Speaker 03

  I'm gonna wear my Supreme in the club.

• 19:06Yasi Salek?

  Straight to the front of the line in New York when Supreme had like.

• 19:10Speaker 03

  Step aside, Rob.

• 19:11Yasi Salek?

  A blazer drop. And I could be like, hey Pookie. And he'd be like, come on in, girl. And I would get my like $200, you know, whatever Supreme blazers.

• 19:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, man. It was a special time. And then you could do a lot of brand crossing.

• 19:25Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 19:26Speaker 03

  And switch over. You could, you know, you would get the baddie with the Supreme mixed with the Indie Sleaze ratty shit.

• 19:31Yasi Salek?

  That's, that's exactly how I dress.

• 19:33Speaker 03

  And that's still.

• 19:34Yasi Salek?

  Beat up Converse with my Nondaguer hoodie and my Ucode bangs. My gold, you know, bamboo earrings. You couldn't tell me shit.

• 19:43Speaker 03

  Got the opening ceremony, baby purple hoodie, jumpsuit, mixed with like the Supreme, has like a golden dollar sign embroidered onto it.

• 19:52Yasi Salek?

  God. I know that it's kinda coming back around, but I have such a visceral reaction to it. I find it so ugly, even though like I wore it, but I'm just like, when I see it, a shiver goes down my spine.

• 20:03Speaker 03

  It's called shame.

• 20:05Yasi Salek?

  My haircuts. I was like, why did I cut my hair like that?

• 20:08Speaker 03

  It's good. It's good that we're feeling this. It means that we have sort of, we have blossomed into the person that we deserve to be.

• 20:16Yasi Salek?

  Do podcasters?

• 20:18Speaker 03

  Little did we know, we were, this is all anthropological research for our upcoming podcast careers.

• 20:24Yasi Salek?

  For our careers as podcasters.

• 20:27Yasi Salek?

  This episode of Bandplain is presented by Sierra Nevada. Life's about embracing the haze. What does that mean? Living in the moment, seeing where the night takes you, being up for the adventure. And there's no better way to embrace it than with Hazy Little Thing by Sierra Nevada. Hazy, citrusy, smooth, juicy, but not sweet, hoppy, but not bitter. America's best-selling hazy IPA for good reason. Hazy Little Thing, enjoy responsibly.

• 21:00Yasi Salek?

  Okay, so do you, do you kind of remember? I guess you were starting to talk about it with the Peaches and Ladytron stuff. So was it always kind of there? Or do you remember there being a bit of like a shift towards what we now? I don't even know, did we call it electro clash then? I don't remember, but like what we now would term electro clash.

• 21:21Speaker 03

  I guess, I mean, it was like very gnarly at first. And then it started getting into other smaller subsets that were like a little more kind of Detroit.

• 21:32Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 21:32Speaker 03

  Um, like ghostly, compacty kind of thing, like minimal bleepy.

• 21:37Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 21:37Speaker 03

  You know, like I said before, like adults or something like that, where it's a little more electronic based and a little less like.

• 21:44Yasi Salek?

  Disco punk or whatever.

• 21:45Speaker 03

  Disco punk, like live instrumentation being sampled and stuff like that. So that was my first, when I noticed things kind of switching over. And then in the mainstream, it was like the Bravery was copying The Killers and The Killers were.

• 22:00Yasi Salek?

  The way my best friend's roommate was the singer of The Bravery when I lived in New York. And would, I would just go over and there he was sitting on the couch. Can't remember his name, I'm sure he was a nice man. And I laugh about it all the time with my, my.

• 22:10Speaker 03

  He's watching it right now, shout out to you.

• 22:12Yasi Salek?

  Shut, I think his name was Sam? That sounds right.

• 22:15Speaker 03

  Honest mistake.

• 22:16Yasi Salek?

  Also Rans.

• 22:17Speaker 03

  Good video.

• 22:17Yasi Salek?

  Kind of a good band, honestly.

• 22:19Speaker 03

  They didn't get, I only know that song, but I remember it being a good, I was like, damn, they got a lot of MTV plays as well.

• 22:24Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 22:26Speaker 03

  But, but now, I mean, I referenced it on How Long Gone, maybe a month ago. Like when The Killers came out with, somebody told me, and then you'd be like rocking and it's all good. And then like right before the last chorus, it has a little mini corg where it's like. And everyone's like, wait, that's like a bleep bloop sound mixed with a this sound on, I'm hearing the bleep bloop on K-Rock or whatever your local rock station is.

• 22:51Yasi Salek?

  You know, mine was K-Rock.

• 22:52Speaker 03

  And then people started being, uh, that was like the first time where the, the two piss streams began to cross for a lot of people in the mainstream, you know?

• 23:09Yasi Salek?

  Okay, The Rapture formed in 1997. They're actually from San Diego.

• 23:13Speaker 03

  I didn't know that.

• 23:15Yasi Salek?

  Well, you're gonna love this because this is kind of up your street. So drummer Vito Roccofort and the guitarist vocalist Luke Jenner, uh, were in the hardcore scene there. They came out of that, the Gravity Records, Heroin, Antioch Arrow, Unwound, obviously maybe most famously. I fucking love Unwound. So they were kind of like in that world. Vito moved to San Francisco to go to college. Uh, Luke Jenner followed him and then they made this band called The Rapture. And they put a single out called The Chair That Squeaks, whatever, 97, 98. And then they put their first mini album out on Gravity Records in 1999. And it's kind of way more like just straight indie rock.

• 23:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 23:55Yasi Salek?

  A little heavy. I guess their bass player at the time, uh, this guy Gabriel Andrewsy, his house was burned down by drug dealers. Um, and so he was like San Francisco in the late 90s, but it was a different place.

• 24:09Speaker 03

  It was the best place in the world in the late 90s.

• 24:11Yasi Salek?

  Kind of, I didn't get there till 2003 and it was still kind of cool then, I gotta say.

• 24:16Speaker 03

  Damn, you're, so I am good for this episode, even though I'm not as aware of all the tidbits, but it is sort of the, the story of my life.

• 24:24Yasi Salek?

  So I'm saying it's very mirroring the Jason Stewart story.

• 24:27Speaker 03

  Damn, narcissism of small differences, as they say on Spotify.

• 24:31Yasi Salek?

  On Spotify, as they often say on Spotify. Um, so the bass player was like, we should move to Seattle to make it. Cause again, it's still, it's still the 90s, you know? We're not that far out from the explosion of grunge and stuff.

• 24:44Speaker 03

  Mud honey's still on the brain.

• 24:46Yasi Salek?

  Mud honey's certainly still kicking. Um, and Luke Jenner was like, okay, moving to Seattle was going to be our big ambitious move. We were going to make it on an indie rock level because K Records and Kill Rock stars were up there. So these were their grand aspirations. K wasn't interested and Sub Pop at the time was really uncool, bloated with coffee table music and rock, like the helicopters. But they wanted to sign us, help us buy a van, so I took the money from Sub Pop. So basically he takes the money from Sub Pop and he's like, okay, but Seattle's so over, we're, we're moving to New York. So they took that van and they drove it to New York, which is kind of an interesting thing because at that time, I guess New York wasn't, also wasn't really popping per se musically.

• 25:28Speaker 03

  Maybe not, no.

• 25:28Yasi Salek?

  No, I mean, you had like, we talked about it on the IAs episode, but you had like the tail end of kind of John Spencer Blues explosion and stuff, but like.

• 25:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I guess they, they had, because of Vice, they had the culture there, but maybe they didn't have.

• 25:44Yasi Salek?

  Till 2000.

• 25:47Speaker 03

  When Vice started in 1996.

• 25:49Yasi Salek?

  The right, yeah, the 90s, no, I don't mind being wrong.

• 25:52Speaker 03

  So, um, um, so I feel like there was, like, we all knew that New York was the center of everything.

• 26:00Yasi Salek?

  Because of Vice Magazine.

• 26:01Speaker 03

  Magazine, so that's why everyone wanted to go there, I guess, because like it's cool that Sub Pop and K Records are over here. But you don't just like go to Seattle and then like an indie rock party is happening like. But when you go to New York, you feel as if you're gonna go to Brooklyn on the train and get off and like, let's do an indie rock party here.

• 26:23Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 26:23Speaker 03

  And, and it was happening.

• 26:25Yasi Salek?

  I guess like I didn't, I wasn't thinking about New York until the early 2000s. Like when I, when I was like, I still thought San Francisco was going to be really cool. And then it was when I got into like hip hop, like on like backpack rap that I was like, I want to go to New York because.

• 26:43Speaker 03

  Cause that's where J-Roo the Damaja is.

• 26:45Yasi Salek?

  Literally that's where J-Roo the Damaja, the Sun Toucher is.

• 26:50Speaker 03

  Look, we all had our underground hip hop phase, but also that was sort of Vice adjacent as well. Like I would, I remember I would go to New York and like, there's a Vice party at a warehouse in the middle of nowhere. Let's go there, like why, what's going on there? And like, oh, the streets is gonna perform.

• 27:06Yasi Salek?

  Or like, it was like, or Def Ducks, you know, it'd be like A-Sop Rock is gonna perform, you know? LP is gonna be there, like, that's like, I was like, oh, there's all this cool stuff happening. Um, Fat Beats, you know, this is like, anyways, this is separate, but regardless of why you and I wanted to go there, let's say they read Vice. I don't know, The Rapture was like, let's go to, let's go to New York.

• 27:26Speaker 03

  And they have the presence of mind to know.

• 27:28Yasi Salek?

  Correct. And they get there and they're like, they meet the DFA guys. We're gonna do a quick DFA sidebar. We will eventually do an LCD full episode, I promise. It's not gonna be in this arc, so it might be next year, but just know that's coming. Anyways, Tyler Brody meets James Murphy at the Bar Brownies. James was in an indie rock band called Pony. Tyler Brody comes from a very wealthy family and his dad bought him a building, which they called Plantain. And he made it kind of like a movie studio. He wanted to make a record label, he built studios in it. And he basically was like, he told James, you can have a.

• 28:05Speaker 03

  CineSpace.

• 28:06Yasi Salek?

  He basically built a CineSpace. He was like, you can have a studio in Plantain or whatever. Cause he, and he's like, you just produce what I bring to you. James Murphy was like, fuck yeah. And then.

• 28:16Speaker 03

  Startup mentality, I like that. I'll give you a desk if you crank out code for you, bro.

• 28:20Yasi Salek?

  Early Girlboss, you know? Tyler Brody.

• 28:24Speaker 03

  And like, but the code is I'm gonna reverse some high hats on an old sampler.

• 28:28Yasi Salek?

  The code is I'm inventing electro clash. In 1999, Tim Goldsworthy comes over. You're familiar with him and you're.

• 28:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, Tim. I mean, I'm not friends with him, but him and I know that him.

• 28:40Yasi Salek?

  James Lovell.

• 28:41Speaker 03

  And, and James Murphy were, were the DFA guys. And Tim did a lot of the production mixing stuff.

• 28:47Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, and before that he was an uncle with James Lovell. He was like the early.

• 28:50Speaker 03

  I didn't know that.

• 28:51Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, it was him, him and James Lovell. Before they, before Uncle came into my life, when DJ Shadow.

• 28:58Speaker 03

  At home.

• 28:58Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. Um, when DJ Shadow joined the.

• 29:02Speaker 03

  I didn't know that.

• 29:03Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 29:03Speaker 03

  That's cool. Um, okay, Timmy.

• 29:05Yasi Salek?

  All right, Timmy. And so they meet, they hit it off, they start throwing parties at Plant, I think all around actually, calling them DFA. And DFA stood for Death From Above. James Murphy was the, a sound guy for Juan McLean's band, which was called Six Finger Satellite. And he.

• 29:21Speaker 03

  So sick.

• 29:22Yasi Salek?

  So sick. And Death From Above was what he called his sound system. To like.

• 29:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, his booming system, his dub, his dub system.

• 29:30Yasi Salek?

  That he would take to West Indian Day.

• 29:32Speaker 03

  Shout out to Juan McLean, who's now a great, um, kind of fourth world ambient artist.

• 29:37Yasi Salek?

  Totally.

• 29:38Speaker 03

  Who does like steel drum shit.

• 29:39Yasi Salek?

  He, Juan McLean, I think had this has the second ever release on DFA after the Rapture. So the label comes out of that. And then at this time in New York, there is this like, you mentioned Fisher Spooner. They were kind of first, right? The first to put out a single that was kind of hitting. This guy Larry T was throwing these parties. They were called Lux. Yeah, Berliniumsberg, which is like really funny because they were in Williamsburg in Berlin.

• 30:02Speaker 03

  That's good.

• 30:03Yasi Salek?

  The Scissor Sisters.

• 30:04Speaker 03

  Good shit, Larry.

• 30:04Yasi Salek?

  Very good.

• 30:05Speaker 03

  Oh, yes, Scissor Sisters.

• 30:07Yasi Salek?

  But anyways, that's all happening. Back to the Rapture. Luke Jenner said, coming to New York and going to proper dance music clubs, that was pivotal. I was hearing dance music over a big system and realizing it has the same energy as a hardcore show. The idea that a kick drum can be so powerful, so tough sounding in a song like Don't Stop Till You Get Enough by Michael Jackson on the right system.

• 30:26Speaker 03

  Period.

• 30:27Yasi Salek?

  It's really, that was like, I thought was kind of astute. I think also just the raw power of dancing and the kind of communal aspect that could be created, like the same thing that sprouts up around punk rock hits. It could be the same with dance music. Someone said something really good. I actually didn't write it down, but it was like, basically that like when straight culture and gay culture come together into one thing, it booms into this huge thing. And it's like, kind of what happened with this, this vibe of music, because obviously like, so much of it comes from that, those gay culture.

• 30:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 30:58Yasi Salek?

  Larry T, Fisher Spooner, Scissor Sisters parties, and then you get the straight kids coming in. And like, then it just blows up into this whole other thing because like, it's almost everyone, you know?

• 31:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, they, they taught each other how to dance, how to be in a club, but in a, in, but not in like a bro-y, masculine-y, straight way.

• 31:17Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 31:17Speaker 03

  But it's, but without having to go to a gay specific club as a straight, where you might be like, that's not a place for me. Then Indie Dance says, what if there's a place for all of us?

• 31:27Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. And, and I, I think that is like, not to be like Ernest Goes to Camp, but that really is hardcore mentality too. Like, oh, we're all here in community, you know? And we're like, moving our bodies together and like sharing.

• 31:40Speaker 03

  This is an Ernest Goes to Camp reference.

• 31:42Yasi Salek?

  I always love an Ernest Goes to Camp reference.

• 31:45Speaker 03

  I'm learning here on BandSplain.

• 31:46Yasi Salek?

  That's right, Ben. Uh, but yeah, and you're at a shitty warehouse, you know, like it's a lot, lot of overlaps with DIY and hardcore.

• 31:53Speaker 03

  Absolutely. But I feel like it really boils down to the Death From Above sound system.

• 31:59Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 31:59Speaker 03

  Because you would literally create a club with his booming system that brings you Death From Above by bass speakers.

• 32:06Yasi Salek?

  Totally.

• 32:07Speaker 03

  But you're able to play this music in any place. So you, you, because you couldn't just go to a dance club.

• 32:13Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 32:14Speaker 03

  And be like, move out of the way. We're gonna play some.

• 32:16Yasi Salek?

  Take it over or whatever.

• 32:17Speaker 03

  I'm gonna play some makeup seven inches.

• 32:18Yasi Salek?

  Butter or whatever.

• 32:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, you're not gonna go to butter and put on some, you know, some weird indie dance shit, you know? You're not gonna play a Passion Pit.

• 32:27Yasi Salek?

  No.

• 32:27Speaker 03

  At Butter.

• 32:28Yasi Salek?

  No.

• 32:28Speaker 03

  But, so that didn't exist until they're like, hey, I have a crazy booming sound system that we can play dance music and have fun to.

• 32:34Yasi Salek?

  Totally.

• 32:35Speaker 03

  The way we want to.

• 32:36Yasi Salek?

  Also, I think we talked about it a bit in the Yaya's episode, but like, this is also around the time that all these people were taking over these huge like industrial spaces in Brooklyn and like both living there and throwing parties there. So to your point, bringing this sound system.

• 32:50Speaker 03

  Episodes of the girl, of girls there.

• 32:52Yasi Salek?

  Those are a little bit later, but yes. Okay. So they're playing shows. I mean, the Rapture are still a live band and, you know, remain to this day. And James Murphy was like, oh my God. What he actually said, he didn't say OMG, he said, "The Rapture were the catalyst for everything next for DFA. It was like, we're gonna make that record for you. A record that's like Ayers Moon Safari or Radiohead's OK Computer. The record you need to own to feel like you knew what was happening." High praise. Like he was like, I see the vision in this band. Like we can.

• 33:22Speaker 03

  They got an OK computer in them. That is high praise.

• 33:24Yasi Salek?

  That is high praise. Yeah. And so I guess like sub pop, DFA goes to sub pop and is like, we will make the Rapture's record for free. If you just let us put out the 12 inches. Cause they want to put out dance singles, you know, as DJs, right? 12 inches are the sort of.

• 33:43Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 33:44Yasi Salek?

  Lingua franca of.

• 33:46Speaker 03

  That is our currency.

• 33:47Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 33:47Speaker 03

  That's our coin.

• 33:49Yasi Salek?

  They also like, I think were kind of homeless. So like, they like half lived at the Plantain Studios, like they got them jobs. They really kind of like nurtured these wayward youths. Luke Jenner worked at a place called Plant Bar. Did you ever go there?

• 34:01Speaker 03

  No, but I've heard of it.

• 34:02Yasi Salek?

  I've heard of it too. I never went there, but James Murphy had designed the whole sound system and all these like cool people hung out there, Yaya's, Interpol. Luke later said that James Murphy was like, a touch maybe too controlling while they were making, um, the record. Maybe just as, you know, geniuses are, but he was like, he would be like, this is the kind of bass guitar everyone plays. This is how you mic a drum. And Luke was like, James was terrifying to me because I was the alpha male in most situations, but not with him. We had an alpha off.

• 34:33Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 34:34Yasi Salek?

  Are you familiar, have this happened to you in your life, an alpha off?

• 34:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, definitely.

• 34:38Yasi Salek?

  Between you and Chris, Chris Black, your co-host of How Long Gone?

• 34:41Speaker 03

  I don't know. I feel like we're pretty, our alphaisms, we try to keep them pretty balanced.

• 34:46Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, I think you guys have like a really nice yin and yang situation.

• 34:48Speaker 03

  We try.

• 34:49Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 34:49Speaker 03

  We.

• 34:50Yasi Salek?

  That's why it works.

• 34:50Speaker 03

  The things where I'm not alpha, I will, I will cuck for him and vice versa. I will bait it for him and he will bait it for me. You know?

• 34:58Yasi Salek?

  You'll bottom.

• 35:00Speaker 03

  Proverbably.

• 35:01Yasi Salek?

  proverbially, correct, correct. So they make, I think they made a couple of songs, but maybe one of the first ones is House of Jealous Lovers. And the, the song just sat on a shelf for a year because the band was like, I don't know about this. Like, this is like weird, you know, like it's.

• 35:20Speaker 03

  We're, we're, we're a San Diego.

• 35:22Yasi Salek?

  We're a rock band.

• 35:23Speaker 03

  Hardcore band.

• 35:24Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 35:24Speaker 03

  That has some dancy elements.

• 35:26Yasi Salek?

  And he was like, and then we're trying to make a house record with a live band and we just weren't sure. And then James Murphy was like, come on, like leave the nest, leave Gravity Records, leave indie rock. Like, let's go compete with Radiohead and Blur. I really believe in them.

• 35:42Speaker 03

  That is sweet. That's what, he's doing what a good producer does.

• 35:45Yasi Salek?

  Totally. He said, "Most people now have no memory of how absolutely sacrilegious it was at the time. We wanted to make a rock track that could compete with dance music. We obsessed over it. When we mastered it and cut the record, we brought in all this techno for comparison to make sure the low end could compete and everything was slamming hard enough." Can you explain that?

• 36:02Speaker 03

  Yeah. So that means, um, I guess maybe using like a reference track.

• 36:08Yasi Salek?

  Mm-hmm.

• 36:09Speaker 03

  So people will do that when they're like mixing and mixing and mastering music. They're like, okay, this song, I want it to really boom like a Daft Punk song or a Justice song or, or, uh, Dr. Dre song or whatever. And you'll, you'll have the two songs sort of.

• 36:25Yasi Salek?

  Is the low end like the bass?

• 36:27Speaker 03

  The low end is the bass. Yeah. So basically what they're saying is they're making this dance rock, which has existed already, but it sounds like people playing normal musical instruments that is dancy. Like, you know, I want to hold your hand by the Beatles or something like that.

• 36:40Yasi Salek?

  Or even like ESG. I mean, we can go back.

• 36:42Speaker 03

  Or even ESG or liquid, you know, whatever, all the stuff.

• 36:45Yasi Salek?

  Totally.

• 36:46Speaker 03

  But so it was a band playing music you could dance to, and they were saying, when we go to the club and hear these crazy booming sound systems with techno records.

• 36:54Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 36:55Speaker 03

  With these 808s and 909 drum samples, it's creating a bass sound that is way more powerful than my little kick drum.

• 37:02Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 37:03Speaker 03

  Even if we, you know, juice it up with effects and, and stuff. So they're saying, we want it to be rockin' and, and funky and all that stuff. But also when you play it in a club after, you know, a techno song, it's not gonna sound flat.

• 37:18Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. You don't want it to like come on and it's like something so out of place.

• 37:21Speaker 03

  Yeah. So like when you're looking at like a graphic equalizer and you could see the kick and it's going boom, boom, boom on the 50 Cent in the club. And then your little gay ass song is going. You're like, okay, we need to start turning some knobs. So in the club and my dance rock song are both booming in the same frequencies. And then the big one being like the sub frequencies, meaning bass sounds that you can really only feel.

• 37:47Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 37:47Speaker 03

  Versus hear, like the human ear can't really hear.

• 37:50Yasi Salek?

  It's more like a reverberation, like through your body.

• 37:52Speaker 03

  So if you're, if you're on E and you're in the subwoofer.

• 37:56Yasi Salek?

  Ecstasy. If you're on a Mitsubishi.

• 37:58Speaker 03

  So you're feeling it.

• 37:59Yasi Salek?

  Which was still around back then.

• 38:00Speaker 03

  You know, so like when you're watching a rock and roll band on a giant sound system, it you, you know.

• 38:07Yasi Salek?

  Do you know, I hadn't, I hadn't written this into my doc and I hadn't thought about it till just now, but how much do you think the sort of like prevalence of ecstasy at this time? I'm being kind of serious because I was like, I wasn't, I wasn't a big into raves, you know? Because it's just not, that wasn't really my kind of music, but we were all really into ecstasy. You know, like, that was like so around, like my whole late high school and all of college. Like, that was like the drug of choice for so many people.

• 38:38Speaker 03

  Of course.

• 38:38Yasi Salek?

  And, and in these like warehouse spaces and stuff. And I wonder how big of a part that played into bringing around this kind of music, you know?

• 38:49Speaker 03

  Like, we wanna, we wanna.

• 38:51Yasi Salek?

  Well, I mean, think about the.

• 38:52Speaker 03

  I wanna hear that thump.

• 38:53Yasi Salek?

  Think about the first iteration of like, I'm thinking back to like the hacienda and the Happy Mondays and this like, this type of music that came about and was directly tied to the introduction of ecstasy into Manchester, England. Like, I.

• 39:10Speaker 03

  Acid house and ecstasy together at the same time is a lovely combo.

• 39:15Yasi Salek?

  I think, I think one.

• 39:16Speaker 03

  Like chips and mayonnaise.

• 39:17Yasi Salek?

  I think one really made the other happen, you know, like, I mean, you guys can go back. Honestly, one of the episodes I'm the most proud of, we have a two parter on the Happy Mondays and Stone Roses together, but we really get into that. And I like tracked back like where the first ecstasy like came from into England. But anyways, like, I do think, I wonder if it's, because it, it kind of died down for a second. If I remember, because I don't, and then it kind of like popped back up in the like late 90s.

• 39:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, it definitely popped back up. I think the indie sleaze sound where both of those things combining, it was a little, it was, it was a little ecstasy. I think it was a good amount of cocaine. And also, like the, the rage aspect of us first discovering Sparks and Four Loko.

• 40:05Yasi Salek?

  Honey.

• 40:06Speaker 03

  Which is sort of, you know, that is the, the acid house to ecstasy comparison. Like Four Loko and Sparks, that was what activated, that was the fertilizer on the plants to let it grow.

• 40:20Yasi Salek?

  I'm so sorry that I'm gonna bring this up a hundred times during this arc, but I have to just say a shout out to my good friend Scott Tapper and him and I absolutely inventing Sparks from first principles before Sparks even existed. Because we would sit before we went out, because we didn't have any money, we would buy two 40s and we would buy Red Bulls and we would pour them into each other. And that's what we would drink before we went out.

• 40:44Speaker 03

  So it was like a, a bit of a brass monkey variation with Red Bull.

• 40:49Yasi Salek?

  Basically what Sparks was, right? It's like.

• 40:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, Sparks was like a malt beverage that sort of tastes like Red Bull.

• 40:54Yasi Salek?

  Because it was caffeinated. It was like heavily caffeinated.

• 40:57Speaker 03

  But it had that one, it was like a three part system. You had both of the parts and you needed one more, which is like.

• 41:03Yasi Salek?

  The orange flavor.

• 41:05Speaker 03

  It's like a third element that we don't discuss. It's like a mineral from a different planet.

• 41:10Yasi Salek?

  It's like what's in Celsius now, where I'm like Celsius needs to be regulated by the government because it's like meth juice. But if it's like if Celsius has had alcohol in it, that's really what Sparks was.

• 41:19Speaker 03

  Celsius had just a drop of GHB or something like that. Where like, I'm gonna go crazy, I could run a half marathon and I'm about to fall asleep. And I just fell asleep underneath the car.

• 41:31Yasi Salek?

  We would, I was just gonna say, we would slam like two Sparks and the next thing I knew, it's fully snowing and I'm making snow angels on a car. It's like four in the morning. You don't feel cold. Like, there's a reason that they banned both those drinks. They don't exist anymore. You know what? That's the Quaaludes of our time. Like the way like people reminisce misty eyed about Quaaludes of, of the 70s or whatever. Ours is Sparks and Four Loko.

• 41:55Speaker 03

  Well, now that they are re-synthesizing.

• 41:58Yasi Salek?

  I heard, I heard, I heard Quaaludes are back on the market.

• 42:01Speaker 03

  Young people are enjoying Quaaludes now. I would like to get my hands on one if anyone, you know, if you want to send them over to the house, but.

• 42:07Yasi Salek?

  [email protected] if you'd like to get some Quaaludes into their jeanses hands.

• 42:11Speaker 03

  There are plenty of people who have Four Loko cans forever on their shelf or in the fridge or whatever. Dead stock, just as like a, you know, a more, they're not trying to resell it or whatever on discogs of, of drinks, but it's just.

• 42:26Yasi Salek?

  Why not just drink it and keep the can?

• 42:27Speaker 03

  It's, it's far, far expired. It's like, it's like a.

• 42:30Yasi Salek?

  Probably got better. It's like wine. It's, it's, it's fermented.

• 42:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, yeah, 2037, it'll finally, it'll finally be ready to open up. But there's gonna be, or they have the presence of mind to know that one day this would be taken away from us by our awful government and then we're gonna have to take this to a lab and like somebody with a, a suit and the gloves is gonna pierce the can and inject it and, and reverse engineer Four Loko from first principles.

• 42:57Yasi Salek?

  This is my dream around, while we're really fucking putting my, myself on Front Street here, but this is my dream around, um, 2CB, the original 2CB, which like doesn't exist anymore. It was just so perfect. It was just such a beautiful thing and it's gone and I really need.

• 43:12Speaker 03

  Maybe for the better.

• 43:14Yasi Salek?

  I don't know, honey. We had a good time.

• 43:16Speaker 03

  But then, I mean, you, you probably wouldn't even be alive if it was still pumping, you know what I mean?

• 43:21Yasi Salek?

  It was that kind of drug. That's the, that was the beauty of it. It was just like.

• 43:24Speaker 03

  That's your Quaalude.

• 43:25Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, it was like, that was like, just like, like LOL's town. It was like just fun times. We used to call it funny drugs.

• 43:32Speaker 03

  Funny drugs. All the ways that we minimize our addictions, am I right?

• 43:36Yasi Salek?

  There's like fentanyl on the streets every day right now. I think funny drugs is probably better than fentanyl.

• 43:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. I agree. I agree.

• 43:42Yasi Salek?

  Anyways, don't do drugs, you guys. It's bad for you. I think I was making a good point though. And I think you helped make the point that the, the combo of like ecstasy, which is absolutely a dance drug. Like no matter what, when you take ecstasy, you're gonna fucking dance. Like that's what it makes you do.

• 43:56Speaker 03

  Bad music sound good and good, good music sound great.

• 43:58Yasi Salek?

  That's why raves existed.

• 43:59Speaker 03

  I would go to a rave on ecstasy and be like, because they would have the hip hop areas and the drum and bass. So you'd be like, oh, I'm gonna go to this dumbass rave. And, but in the side room, outcasts and, you know, just like the craziest hip hop lineup you've ever seen. And then after a while, you'd be like, okay, I've heard enough of the, you know, whatever that is. I've heard enough Wu Tang's Triumph. I'm gonna go wander out and then, you know, Tiesto's DJing for 80,000 people. And you're like, this is amazing. I get trance now and you start feeling it, you know?

• 44:32Yasi Salek?

  I think the closest I ever came to touching God's cheek was on a bit, a bit of ecstasy at Coachella. I want to say 2002, in the tent, listening to Groove Armada.

• 44:45Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 44:46Yasi Salek?

  Honey.

• 44:47Speaker 03

  Grooving to Groove Armada.

• 44:49Yasi Salek?

  Untopable, unbeatable for me.

• 44:51Speaker 03

  Slamming that, playing on vinyl, I'm sure.

• 44:53Yasi Salek?

  I was like, I'm super styling, babe. I had my fucking Puma wristband on.

• 44:58Speaker 03

  Well, that reminds me, the grooving of it all reminded me of when you were talking about, um, James Murphy trying to convince Luke to like switch over to the dark side or whatever, as you said it.

• 45:12Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, to like, you know, leave behind the indie world.

• 45:14Speaker 03

  I feel like what that, the differential was after going back and listening to House of Jealous Lovers, a song that I've heard so many times in the club that, you know, my brain doesn't even process it anymore.

• 45:26Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, tell the truth. You said you were not that into it because Frankie Chan ruined it for you because he played it too many times.

• 45:30Speaker 03

  Not ruined it, but like I have a problem, not with just, not just with that song, but many songs. If I've heard them just, a sheer amount of like, just an, just an insane amount of times, even if it's a song that I love or loved at one point.

• 45:44Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, it gets watered down.

• 45:45Speaker 03

  Like it literally, it, it becomes like painful for me, for whatever reason. I don't know. Songs have an expiration date and, or like a, a odometer and, and House of Jealous Lovers is in the 4 to 500,000 miles range.

• 45:59Yasi Salek?

  Don't you think it resets? Like, I feel like if I haven't, like a certain amount of time, yeah.

• 46:04Speaker 03

  I went back and listened.

• 46:05Yasi Salek?

  I bet you put it on and you were like, you know what, bitch?

• 46:08Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. No, I, I went back because like the, in my memory, I was like, you know, it was around and I liked it. I'll play it. You know, I, I played, you know, that song and Echoes and How Deep Is Your Love? And, you know, there are other songs and we DJed with them and Maddie.

• 46:24Yasi Salek?

  That whole album was great.

• 46:26Speaker 03

  We had, yeah. So like, I was definitely in that zone, but I wasn't, I didn't feel myself identifying as a Rapture fan as much for whatever reason. And I think maybe some similarities between, you know, making that switch from a hardcore, like.

• 46:41Speaker 03

  Bizarre, esoteric, irreverent, you know, post something, something, something band. The differential that is, or like the fence that's hard to climb over, the, the mountain that's hard to summit is, is just funkiness.

• 46:57Yasi Salek?

  I'm only building it from my memory, but like, I worked in a record store when this single came out, you know, like, I was pretty hyper aware of what was going on with like, music and bands, like, they didn't, they were like, sort of illegible because of this, right? Like, you couldn't place them, like, you didn't, they didn't have a really strong identity, because you were like, what, okay, are you, whereas like, you look at the Strokes and you're like, yep, Five Guys, Dirty Hair, Converse, rock band, Rolling Stones, you know, like, you can place them immediately.

• 47:28Speaker 03

  Each one more fuckable than the last.

• 47:29Yasi Salek?

  Exactly, whatever, like, the boy band, like, yeah, you put them, like, they're so easy to place, because they're basically in the exact lineage of a hundred other bands that they're in the image of. The Rapture was like, blurry, you know, like, you were like, I don't know, I don't know what this band is.

• 47:46Speaker 03

  I mean, to borrow a Hollywood term, a tweener in many ways.

• 47:49Yasi Salek?

  Tweener, yeah.

• 47:50Speaker 03

  And they always say, you know, you never want to be a tweener, because, you know, people are never gonna figure out what category to put you into.

• 47:57Yasi Salek?

  For his House of Jealous Lovers.

• 47:59Speaker 03

  But, you know, I, I think, but I think it really is the funkiness of like, making the switch, because like, if you're a certain type of person, who's not funky, like, to get that person to switch into funkiness, is, it's like a life altering, you have to change everything about your existence. You have to be like, I'm a person who's like, comes from like, a political, kind of grungy hardcore background, into...

• 48:28Yasi Salek?

  It's very, it's very red hot.

• 48:30Speaker 03

  Play that funky music white boy.

• 48:31Yasi Salek?

  Chili Peppers, honestly.

• 48:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, Chili Peppers, they...

• 48:33Yasi Salek?

  Jane's Addiction, they, they kind of mastered that, come from punk and hardcore, but also incorporate funk, you know?

• 48:39Speaker 03

  The funk, and the funk, it's like, it's so, it's, there's so many pitfalls with funk, it's such a dangerous minefield to go down to.

• 48:47Yasi Salek?

  It can go really, it can go really wrong really fast.

• 48:49Speaker 03

  Especially as a white man.

• 48:50Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, play that funky music white boy.

• 48:52Speaker 03

  It's so, you have to be, you have to get so lucky and have, and have so clear what you're gonna do and what the direction is, because otherwise, everyone's, I, I was thinking, you know, like, um, on the films Old School and The Hangover, there's the band that does like, the, the R-rated covers of the songs.

• 49:13Yasi Salek?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 49:14Speaker 03

  Where it's like, Total Eclipse of Your Heart, but he's like, I'm gonna lick your fucking nuts, like, that kind of shit, like, it's so easy to get into that cringe zone, where like, are we like, a comedy thing, or are we serious, are we trying to like, get the girls, or are we trying to create like, an inclusive dance jam, like, Dan Deacon kind of thing, you know?

• 49:35Yasi Salek?

  Oh my god, Dan Deacon.

• 49:36Speaker 03

  There's a lot of ways to go, but because of the funkiness of it all.

• 49:40Yasi Salek?

  Not my chair, not my problem.

• 49:40Speaker 03

  Oh, we were talking about the Liquid Liquids, the ESGs, the, the four, four people of this sound.

• 49:47Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 49:48Speaker 03

  And I was also thinking like, maybe a little Beck, early Beck.

• 49:51Yasi Salek?

  That was really good of you to ungender that, I'm really proud of you. Look at how quickly your mind did that.

• 49:56Speaker 03

  Quickly?

• 49:57Yasi Salek?

  Four people, the four people, because you were like, in your mind, I saw it, I was like, ESG is women, I can't say four, four fathers.

• 50:04Speaker 03

  Four folks.

• 50:05Yasi Salek?

  The four folks, X.

• 50:06Speaker 03

  The four folks.

• 50:07Yasi Salek?

  Um, wait, what, what artist did you just mention?

• 50:10Speaker 03

  Beck.

• 50:10Yasi Salek?

  Oh.

• 50:11Speaker 03

  The early, like, the first Beck.

• 50:12Yasi Salek?

  The Dust Brothers.

• 50:14Speaker 03

  Were sampling dance stuff, were...

• 50:16Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, that's true.

• 50:17Speaker 03

  It's irreverent, weird, funky sounds, and...

• 50:20Yasi Salek?

  I feel like the Beck live was so nineties, in, in its like, was kind of ironic, in its stance. It was great, it was amazing, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not discounting, I'm just sort of like...

• 50:32Speaker 03

  It stood in a lane of its own.

• 50:34Yasi Salek?

  It stood in a lane, and, but, and I will say, like, this, the House of Jealous Lovers, it's not the House, it's not...

• 50:39Speaker 03

  And I don't think The Rapture was like, sucking Beck's dick, but, you know, maybe subconsciously, the funkiness.

• 50:46Yasi Salek?

  They're in, but, I, I think House of Jealous Lovers cracked it, it's perfect, like, that's why I put it here in a perfect song, like, it's, it is like, in, in stance, very punk, like, when you hear it, you feel how punk it is, but it's also so aggressively danceable, and you can't put it on without being like, you know, like, throw an ass, you have to throw ass.

• 51:07Speaker 03

  You have to throw ass, because it's a song that is like, very cowbell.

• 51:11Yasi Salek?

  So much cowbell.

• 51:12Speaker 03

  Reliant, and that is such, you have to cowbell with confidence, because that can take a song into a, a bad funky zone, and they're like, it, it's very like, surfing, like, that wave is too big, and you're like, I got it, and everyone's like, holy shit, they did it.

• 51:28Yasi Salek?

  They, they did a really interesting thing, which, sorry, I'm getting all over the place, but I want to say it before I forget, like, the, the 12-inch version and the album version are slightly different, do you remember this?

• 51:38Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, for sure.

• 51:39Yasi Salek?

  And actually, the album version's a bit better to me, because they added that screaming at the beginning.

• 51:44Speaker 03

  Right, right, right.

• 51:53Yasi Salek?

  That little bit also just add, because you already know what you're getting into, because when you hear the single version, it's just like, at first, just kind of like a dance song, and you're like, what's this, you know?

• 52:01Speaker 03

  Well, as a, to, to be the DJ, and the duo, in the, in the conversation, they built it in with a, an instrumental intro, to allow yourself, since we're all mixing vinyl back in the day, so, you know, songs had intros and outros that were oftentimes, you know, you, you would maybe hear two minutes of a song before a vocal came in.

• 52:23Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 52:23Speaker 03

  So, they, they created that version, I'm assuming.

• 52:26Yasi Salek?

  For the club.

• 52:27Speaker 03

  With the DJ in mind of mixing it in.

• 52:29Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 52:29Speaker 03

  But, you know, no one's gonna want to sit through a minute of just, I mean, it sounds good.

• 52:34Yasi Salek?

  It's great, it's great, this is that fucking, fucking amazing bassline.

• 52:37Speaker 03

  It makes it very easy to DJ that song in and out of, so, as a DJ, it's good, but, you know, you want to really, don't bore us, get to the chorus, as, as they say, you know?

• 52:47Yasi Salek?

  You're full of, full of sayings, babe, I love it.

• 52:51Speaker 03

  That's what a podcast is for.

• 52:52Yasi Salek?

  Needle point those, okay, so, Sub Pop, here's what they've been working on, because remember, this is the album supposed to come out.

• 52:59Speaker 03

  Still come, the album is coming out on Sub Pop, and then DFA is gonna do the dance 12 inches.

• 53:03Yasi Salek?

  Exactly.

• 53:04Speaker 03

  What a great deal.

• 53:05Yasi Salek?

  And Sub Pop hears it and is like, we're not putting that out, and so they're like, listen, we'll take four of these demos, we will put it on an EP, and then actually, you're out of your contract, we'll drop you. This is supposed to be two albums, so they put out four songs, the most indie rocky songs, on the EP, out of The Races and Onto the Tracks, which came out in 2001. James was actually really mad, because he wanted, uh, that title track, Out of the Races and Onto the Tracks, to be this next 12 inches.

• 53:31Speaker 03

  What a DFA sounding song, right?

• 53:32Yasi Salek?

  Right, 100%.

• 53:33Speaker 03

  I get it.

• 53:34Yasi Salek?

  So then they're like, okay, well, whatever, we're dropping Sub Pop, that's fine, we didn't really want to be there anyways, they still are working on the album, yeah, with, with DFA. During the time that they're making this album, James kind of starts LCD, I think maybe, it seems like maybe producing this album, and like, everything that transpired was like, I, I should be doing this, kind of, you know?

• 54:00Speaker 03

  I get it, that's why I started DJing. I'll go to the club and be like, these fucking people suck at DJing, and I'm paying them $300.

• 54:08Yasi Salek?

  Right, and you're like, this is my party, and I want the party to be good, I can make the party better.

• 54:12Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 54:14Yasi Salek?

  Hell yeah, brother.

• 54:15Speaker 03

  I have the same agency as, as DFA Records in general.

• 54:20Yasi Salek?

  Do you?

• 54:21Speaker 03

  No, I, I don't mean like, talent agency, I mean like...

• 54:23Yasi Salek?

  Oh, the agent, like, you're, you have agency.

• 54:25Speaker 03

  Possessing the agency.

• 54:27Yasi Salek?

  Um, and I'll tell you guys what, TJ over here, wonderful DJ, really good.

• 54:32Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 54:33Yasi Salek?

  You're welcome. The, the 12-inch finally comes out in spring of 2002, um, it's quite late, like, they've been playing it live in shows for like, two years. Already, Fisher Spooner had come out, you mentioned Peaches, the Fuck the Pain and Away song has come out, um, Losing My Edge, which is the LCD song, doesn't come out until the fall of that year, um, and so does Lady Trons Light and Magic, which has 17 on that one of the, another fucking perfect song.

• 55:01Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 55:02Yasi Salek?

  Um, and I thought this was interesting, and maybe you could speak to it just briefly, if you have any thoughts on it, but, still, to get buy-in from, like, the DJ community, the B-side of the 12-inch was a remix by this guy Morgan Geist, who was one half of Metro Area, which was like, a pretty legit New York house music duo, right?

• 55:21Speaker 03

  Yes, yes.

• 55:23Yasi Salek?

  And was that just to be like, hey, DJs, I know you haven't heard of The Rapture, but you know who Morgan Geist is, like, maybe you'll be into this?

• 55:31Speaker 03

  I think that probably played a lot of it into it, but then all, yeah, legitimizing it as, you know, its place in the dance music world.

• 55:39Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 55:39Speaker 03

  But, you know, Metro Area, they have a song, it's called Miura, I think, M-I-R-U-A. It's a great song, I played it a bunch of times, but it, it has a little crossover of that.

• 55:51Yasi Salek?

  A little of the DNA of, of House of Jealous Lovers?

• 55:54Speaker 03

  No, no, no, not at all, not at all, just of the, of like, a DJ making electronic music that may have just a little bit more of a different sort of irreverent indie-ish kind of sound.

• 56:05Yasi Salek?

  Okay.

• 56:06Speaker 03

  So, I, I'll, I'll say indie-ish at the most.

• 56:08Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 56:09Speaker 03

  Nothing to do with House of Jealous Lovers at all.

• 56:11Yasi Salek?

  Just like a little indie, a little different than what a regular house music track would be.

• 56:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, so, yeah, like...

• 56:16Yasi Salek?

  So they were indie curious.

• 56:17Speaker 03

  They found somebody in New York who plays music that's electronic bleep, bloop, whatever shit, but they're one of the cool, interesting ones.

• 56:24Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, okay, love that.

• 56:35Yasi Salek?

  The regular song is like, kind of, I can't even imagine someone making it better with a remix. I mean, James Murphy made it, you know what I mean? And Tim Golders, like, how are you gonna make it better?

• 56:44Speaker 03

  Outside of a A-Track Heads Roll Roll style remix version of it, I don't really see anyone touching it, you know?

• 56:50Yasi Salek?

  Fucking go. Let's fucking go. There's also like many Diplo remix, or at least one Diplo remix of Yay, as like maybe Gold Lion that was really good.

• 57:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, there was lots of remixes of that. There was a good Maps, Daft Punk mashup that I would play all the time.

• 57:09Yasi Salek?

  We really lived in a time.

• 57:11Speaker 03

  Knocking that one down at La Cita.

• 57:13Yasi Salek?

  Do you think now that we have done this together, you might reconsider slipping House of Jealous Lovers into a future DJ song?

• 57:23Speaker 03

  I think so.

• 57:23Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, I think it'll, I think it'll fucking hit.

• 57:26Speaker 03

  No, I mean, I, I play, I do play that song, like I have that song on my USB. I don't reach for it as much, but there's some, some, like, I'm, I'm more into the Rapture than LCD Sound System, I would say. And also Chris, my co-host on How Long Gone, famously is not a fan of electronic dance music whatsoever. He's like, the Rapture is a cool band that I do like and listen to and enjoy. Like, when we went to Just Like Heaven, the music festival.

• 57:52Yasi Salek?

  Oh, yeah, they played this recent one, right?

• 57:53Speaker 03

  Our, our trailers were across from each other and he was like, I wanna make sure, you know, I get there in time to see the Rapture 'cause they're like one of the only bands like that where I like.

• 58:04Yasi Salek?

  That's cool.

• 58:04Speaker 03

  And I said, that is cool, I like.

• 58:06Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, I like it too. You're like, this is why we're BFFs.

• 58:09Speaker 03

  I guess so, yeah, a lot of through lines.

• 58:11Yasi Salek?

  A lot of through lines. I just had, you unlocked a memory of an FYF.

• 58:17Yasi Salek?

  Pre Exposition Park, when it was still at the Chinatown Park. What was that place called?

• 58:22Speaker 03

  Well, there, it was at like the Echo and the Echo Plex.

• 58:24Yasi Salek?

  Passed, they moved from the Echo Plex to that other park in Chinatown before they went like crazy big into Exposition Park. So it was in that Chi, I don't remember what it's called.

• 58:32Speaker 03

  It was in the smaller park in Chinatown.

• 58:34Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, and Rapture played and it was one of the greatest things I've ever seen. I had the best time, like, all the songs hit from Echoes, but definitely when House of Jealous Lovers came on, once again.

• 58:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, it's good music to party to, you know? Jump up and down and rage.

• 58:50Yasi Salek?

  And there's just like a familiarity, we're gonna do probably, hopefully, knock on wood, I'm gonna try and make it happen, one last perfect song in this arc, which is, I think in the lineage, 'cause like, we get into a whole other world of like Justice and Uffie and stuff, but I wanna do Bump by Spank Rock. Because another kind of perfect, insane, throw ass dance song, that I also remember hearing quite a bit, but at the tail end of sort of, I guess, what we would consider, 'cause that song came out in like 2006 or something.

• 59:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, that was when the Bmore influence began taking over.

• 59:24Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 59:24Speaker 03

  Duck Club.

• 59:25Yasi Salek?

  And, I mean, Hallertronics was quite a bit earlier than 2006. When was, when was the Never Scared?

• 59:31Speaker 03

  I don't know if it was quite a bit, but yeah.

• 59:33Yasi Salek?

  No, maybe it was 2004, not, not too much.

• 59:35Speaker 03

  Something around there, something around there. 2002, 3-4.

• 59:40Yasi Salek?

  One of my most listened to.

• 59:43Speaker 03

  Of course.

• 59:43Yasi Salek?

  Things in the entire world, was that Never Scared, I had a burned CD of it. Too many, so I got iodine, I got iodine poisoning.

• 59:52Speaker 03

  Hallertronics was a big reason why I started DJing.

• 59:55Yasi Salek?

  Incredible. And got to see it live a couple times, like DJ Live, Diplo, and the budget.

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• 1:02:05Yasi Salek?

  Tell me about the song in general, like, what do you like about it? Why, now that you like it again, now that we brought you back.

• 1:02:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, and to be clear, I never disliked it.

• 1:02:13Yasi Salek?

  I know, I know, you were just sick of it.

• 1:02:13Speaker 03

  I was just overexposed to it and I had to remove it from my bot, you know, just like certain movies, they come on and you're like, oh, I can't do it again, you know what I mean?

• 1:02:20Yasi Salek?

  Sometimes I feel like I'm doing that with Instagram to other people. And they're like, fucking here come this bitch again with another fucking clip from her podcast talking about some guitar rock.

• 1:02:28Speaker 03

  That's the beauty of social media.

• 1:02:29Yasi Salek?

  You could just mute me.

• 1:02:30Speaker 03

  There's never enough clips.

• 1:02:31Yasi Salek?

  You guys could just mute me.

• 1:02:32Speaker 03

  It's never, 'cause you watch it, you only watch it once. But you know, like, you're watching, say, one of your favorite TV shows that you've, you've watched it, you know, you're watching Mad Men for the 19th time, or The Office, or Seinfeld. There's some Seinfeld episodes where it comes on, you're just like, I can't do it. I know, I've seen it too many times, I'm just too close to it. That's sort of how I feel about it, but what I like about the song is, I mean, mainly just like the frantic energy that captures that, like.

• 1:03:01Yasi Salek?

  Frantic is such a good word.

• 1:03:02Speaker 03

  That's sort of, 'cause that, you know, listening to hardcore from that era, like, late 90s, mid 90s hardcore, like, especially from San Diego, bands like The Locust, Unbroken. It's very spastic and frantic and screaming and up and down and forwards and backwards.

• 1:03:21Yasi Salek?

  The Locust is almost like, the like, Wario of the Rapture in a way, don't you feel? You know what I mean?

• 1:03:27Speaker 03

  The evil twin.

• 1:03:28Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, like, the like, less consumer-friendly, less like, major label possible version.

• 1:03:36Speaker 03

  We're here to diarrhea on whatever you're up to, is the kind of, which is, which is cool.

• 1:03:40Yasi Salek?

  And it was cool, yeah.

• 1:03:42Speaker 03

  So it had, it's, it's, they were able to synthesize that energy, but then set it to a danceable beat. And I think a lot of the, a lot of it comes to, or it's, it's that beat being played by a human being, but then also affected and altered with analog technology is what creates like.

• 1:04:04Yasi Salek?

  Digital technology.

• 1:04:05Speaker 03

  Well, basically, like, the gear that, that James was, James and Tim were using, it's, they're not.

• 1:04:12Yasi Salek?

  It was like actually a drum.

• 1:04:13Speaker 03

  It's both, it's both, but like, they, they're like gear junkies who are using like older effects and like, things that were not necessarily like, they weren't like on Ableton Live on their laptop, like tweaking the stuff on their computer, like, they're getting vintage synths and effects and pedals and reverbs and all this collector's gear. So it's like stuff from, you know, maybe the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, but it wasn't like cutting edge, we're gonna make this sound good. So it was taking some of those effects that were not being used for rock and frantic weird music, and making it sound, making those drums sound like a dancy drum, so like adding a lot of compression to it. You know, when you're listening to like a Juicy song, or whatever, you know, Sebastian or whatever.

• 1:04:57Yasi Salek?

  We love Justice.

• 1:04:58Speaker 03

  And you hear the drums and it's just like a kick drum and a snare and a hi-hat, but it has like the suction to it. Where it like, it feels like the, the air in the room is being like.

• 1:05:08Yasi Salek?

  Honestly, even The Strokes has a little bit of that because of the way they miked and recorded the drums, 'cause Julian wanted it to sound like a drum machine.

• 1:05:15Speaker 03

  Yeah?

• 1:05:16Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. That's interesting, it's kind of like a hallmark of this time.

• 1:05:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, and having, having that sort of, the back and forth, that four on the floor beat, the average brain is like, okay, I can latch on to this, but since it's being played by a human, there's imperfections, it's not perfectly synced. So it just, your brain is always like, what's the next kick gonna sound like? What's the next snare, is it gonna be early, is it gonna be late?

• 1:05:41Yasi Salek?

  More engagement.

• 1:05:43Speaker 03

  It, it forces you to engage, and then, yeah, just like a disco bassline and a drum and the bassline, you're like, what is gonna happen? Because you don't really know. When you, when the song is building and you, you, when you hear the song being played and you're like, okay, I get it, the drums, the bass, the guitar, the vocals, they're sitting the way you want them to go. But when you just, when you pull everything away, you're like, what? It's confusing. And, and dance music songs used to do that a lot, where it'd just be a kick and then like the bassline or whatever. And, and you would think, you would, you would invent the rhythm in your head, and then the rest of the song would come in and be a whole different thing. It's like a, does that make sense to you?

• 1:06:24Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, yeah, no, totally. Yeah, like, it, like, part of the thing that keeps your mind engaged is not knowing what's coming next. Like, then you kind of like, can vibe out, like, or like, stop paying attention a little bit, like.

• 1:06:36Speaker 03

  You're not like counting on the one.

• 1:06:38Yasi Salek?

  It can be mesmerizing almost, instead of you being like, like kind of jittery about it, you know?

• 1:06:44Speaker 03

  And also, like, when the guitars come in, they're, they sound, to me, they sound like, the notes are going up and down at the same time, almost, where they're, it's like,

• 1:07:00Speaker 03

  so like, when you, when you just hear the guitars, you're like, what is this? It doesn't, and maybe they're doing some weird effects where like, notes are being played high and low and dubbed at the same time, but, it just, it makes you, it's just like a giant mess going on, like the, the Pigpen Peanuts guy. There's a cloud of confusion going on, but underneath it, for the floor. So you have, you have the foundation, you have the bass for, for us to just like, do crazy shit and go off. And then, you know, so having that disco bassline is a hard, that was a big, that was another part of like, climbing Funk Mountain. Like, we're gonna switch from a normal bassline to like, a disco-inspired bassline.

• 1:07:45Speaker 03

  And when you do that as a bass player, you go from looking cool to being like, like, it, it changes things.

• 1:07:54Yasi Salek?

  It's a little different.

• 1:08:03Yasi Salek?

  Someone sort of likened his vocals to like Robert Smith Cure type vocals. That was kind of interesting.

• 1:08:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, I see that.

• 1:08:11Yasi Salek?

  It's a little shrieky to me, but I guess I get what they mean.

• 1:08:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, we mentioned the makeup earlier, like Ian, like his vocals were a lot like that. Just kind of like, and then like Mars Volta at the drive in. Like you hear the vocals on House of Jealous Lovers and you just imagine a really skinny guy rolling around on the floor.

• 1:08:33Yasi Salek?

  Totally. You can see the person in front of you.

• 1:08:36Speaker 03

  Just flopping around, maybe there's blood, maybe there's not. And it's just like that pure emotion coming out.

• 1:08:43Yasi Salek?

  It's also like very much to me in the lineage of like Public Image Limited, right? Like this, like, like there's a lot of like precursors for what's happening. It's just like, this was the newest version of it and it hit in a completely different way.

• 1:09:07Speaker 03

  And like all of those bands, when you would hear the song, you would, every time you heard it, you would feel like if you're watching them play live, you get the, you get the feeling that every time they play it, it's a different version. Like it's never like Coldplay is gonna do clocks and you know, it's all gonna sound the way it sounds on the album, right? Like every time they play that song, you're like, oh, like this time they played it, they threw the kick drum into the crowd, so there's no drum on this. Like, or this one, you know, just the bass player decided to play a completely different thing. And it all ended up working out well, kind of thing.

• 1:09:43Yasi Salek?

  Just love it. The thing is so special. Okay, well, the rest of the story here is it did really well. I think it sold something crazy, like off the bat, 20,000 copies, which was kind of a lot for a label that just started and this is the first thing they put out.

• 1:09:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's a lot for anyone nowadays.

• 1:09:59Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, totally. Luke Jenner said that he met Felix De Housecat.

• 1:10:05Speaker 03

  Felix De Housecat.

• 1:10:06Yasi Salek?

  I love Felix De Housecat. And he said to him, are you the kid who made House of Jealous Lovers? And he was like, yeah. And he was still working at the bar and he was like, you're never gonna have to work again. You're set for life. That song's awesome. Good job. I don't know if that ended up being true.

• 1:10:20Speaker 03

  And Luke said, oh, maybe not. I don't, I don't know. I mean, there's a good chance that he ended up making a good amount of money off of that song. And if he played his cards right, investment wise, he could be.

• 1:10:32Yasi Salek?

  Perhaps he was an early investor into Amazon or something, you know, who knows?

• 1:10:37Yasi Salek?

  This single did really well in the UK, of course, because they have better taste than us. Andy Weatherall, you guys might remember from our Primal Scream episode, incredible DJ who worked closely with Primal Scream, was really into it, played it early. Pitchfork ranked it number 16 in its top 500 tracks of the 2000s.

• 1:10:55Speaker 03

  That's big.

• 1:10:56Yasi Salek?

  Wedged right between two heartbeat songs, Annie's Heartbeat, a song I did not remember.

• 1:11:00Speaker 03

  Love that song.

• 1:11:02Yasi Salek?

  And the Knife's Heartbeats. I love that song.

• 1:11:04Speaker 03

  That's cool. Both great songs. I'm an Annie sympathizer. She fell through the cracks a little bit, but.

• 1:11:10Yasi Salek?

  I couldn't get into that song. I went and listened to it and I was like, that's not for me. But yeah, she does have a cult-like following. I learned when I was Googling. What also happened was that a bidding war started for this band because we were still a proper society where labels had money and wanted to sign bands.

• 1:11:28Speaker 03

  They were able to offer them more than $5,000.

• 1:11:32Yasi Salek?

  And they didn't have a contract with DFA.

• 1:11:35Speaker 03

  Handshake deal.

• 1:11:36Yasi Salek?

  And DFA was, I think it was never really like specified, but they assumed, I don't know, like, we made your album, you're not on Sub Pop anymore. I don't know, I wasn't there, but. And I guess DFA was having some problems like securing distribution. And they had a new manager, Asif Ahmed, who was the manager of the IAS and TV on the radio. He was really good at getting deals and he got them a deal with Universal for $1.8 million. And they said yes. And then I, but I guess DFA was like, James Murphy was big mad, like so bummed. He was like, they betrayed me, whatever, which I understand. I mean, he wanted, he really believed in them. He wanted to make them, you know, Radiohead of a computer. But also, I don't know the exact amount, but

• 1:12:20Yasi Salek?

  they had to buy out the masters from DFA and DFA made quite a bit of money too.

• 1:12:26Yasi Salek?

  We'll have two questions for you to wrap this up. Do you feel that we might have had a different Rapture arc of their career if they had stayed? Because they finished Echos with DFA, right? I don't really know any other of the Rapture's albums. I know they've made some. Do you feel like perhaps if they had stayed with DFA with the like input and the like, you know, I mean, DFA has an identity, right? And has like, it's a, it's a highly creative, but also highly specific. And as we learned from the quotes, James Murphy was, again, very specific about what he wanted.

• 1:13:07Yasi Salek?

  But you might have made something different going forward, whereas you're on a major label. I don't know.

• 1:13:14Speaker 03

  I feel like, how could it not make a difference? It's very much, you know, like when a restaurant chain expands and or like a brand of cereal that you love gets taken over by a venture capitalist fund.

• 1:13:29Yasi Salek?

  Particularly here because.

• 1:13:30Speaker 03

  Things just are never gonna, there's too much input from shitty guys who control the money.

• 1:13:37Yasi Salek?

  And I mean, I think particularly here, like if you're the White Stripes, probably not, right? I think Jack White knew exactly what he wanted to do from day one and it didn't matter what the fuck anyone told him, he was gonna do it. And I'm not saying that Luke Jenner wasn't as like driven, it's just like, we just told the story, like, it was sort of happenstance that like, they loved, they heard dance music, they loved it. And then they had James Murphy and Tim Goldworthy there to like shape and mold them into like, it was a collaborative sort of effort, like they were almost members of the band.

• 1:14:08Speaker 03

  Like a Skrillex where I can, or a Fred again, I'm a, I'm a one man band. It's not, or you know, I'm not a Tame Impala or a Moby where, you know, put me, if I'm on Virgin, I'm on Atlantic, I'm on Interscope, it don't fucking matter. Where, but I think, I think definitely 1,000% if they stayed with James and DFA, it would have been a different story. Maybe better, maybe worse, I don't know. You know, at that age, at that time, how do you say no to $1.8 million deal?

• 1:14:39Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, I mean, I don't, I don't begrudge them, obviously.

• 1:14:41Speaker 03

  And also, I don't know, do you know if they had James produce their next album?

• 1:14:46Yasi Salek?

  I think James was like, you're dead to me. Don't ever look at me or talk to me again.

• 1:14:49Speaker 03

  I mean, in hindsight, you know, I would have said like, hey, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, James, I'm gonna take this deal from, for $1.8 million because I'm, I need money and this is so much money and how do you say no to that? I'm going to tell them.

• 1:15:05Yasi Salek?

  Danger Mouse was involved in the production of the second album. Remember Danger Mouse?

• 1:15:08Speaker 03

  See, he fucked up putting Danger Mouse on that, y'all.

• 1:15:12Yasi Salek?

  Danger Mouse made some good stuff.

• 1:15:13Speaker 03

  Great guy. He's cool.

• 1:15:15Yasi Salek?

  I love the Danger Mouse and Gemini album. If you thought I didn't know about fucking backpack hip hop, then you were absolutely the fuck wrong, okay?

• 1:15:22Speaker 03

  That's the problem. He's too backpack for this.

• 1:15:25Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, that's, he's not the right energy.

• 1:15:27Speaker 03

  I would have said, hey, record label, give me the money and part of my contract is James Murphy produces the album and you're gonna give him whatever he asks for.

• 1:15:37Yasi Salek?

  Okay, it's 2005. Who would you say James Murphy is not available? Who do you pair the Rapture with to produce their second record?

• 1:15:45Speaker 03

  2005. That's a tough one. Cause you, I mean, who else is gonna do it like that?

• 1:15:51Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, kind of trying to bring a similar aura.

• 1:15:54Speaker 03

  Cause this is a little bit before we had the, the Dave Sittek.

• 1:15:59Yasi Salek?

  No, Dave Sittek was doing the IAS records.

• 1:16:02Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, I guess, I guess maybe him because you know, he was crossing over and doing that stuff or, you know. But also I would like to do a, you know, you know, Quincy Jones, why not? You know what I mean? Shoot for the stars, baby. 2005, we all had the hope and dreams in our minds, you know? Get Quincy on there.

• 1:16:24Yasi Salek?

  My last question is, when do you think electronic music got bad?

• 1:16:28Speaker 03

  When did electronic music get bad, got bad? Electronic music has always been bad from the beginning.

• 1:16:34Yasi Salek?

  No.

• 1:16:35Speaker 03

  It has. And this is somebody who has made a living playing electronic music. By and large, electronic music is a bad and cheesy genre and there are certain little niches and subsets of it that are just sound cool and good. And if you have an open mind, you can be like, this shitty song from 1993 is actually fucking amazing. And I don't know why.

• 1:16:58Yasi Salek?

  I love electronic music. I was just, I was just pushing your buttons, pushing everyone's buttons.

• 1:17:03Speaker 03

  Dance music has gotten worse and worse and better and better as time has progressed. Like the bad shit has gotten so much worse and people who are making good shit is.

• 1:17:13Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, all the industry, interesting, all the interesting stuff keeps getting like kind of cooler and more interesting.

• 1:17:20Speaker 03

  Boundaries are being pushed.

• 1:17:21Yasi Salek?

  I'm so pilled. I'm like, I'm always like, you know, yearning for the halcyon days of Portishead and like Massive Attack and stuff. Or like even Happy Mondays, like we talked about, like the sort of like.

• 1:17:30Speaker 03

  Primal Scream?

• 1:17:31Yasi Salek?

  Fucking, Scream and Delica, babe?

• 1:17:34Speaker 03

  Hey mom. I mean, you had me at Portishead.

• 1:17:36Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:37Speaker 03

  But you know.

• 1:17:37Yasi Salek?

  Jeff Barrow, what a king.

• 1:17:39Speaker 03

  I think, you know, as, as time passes, we're gonna realize that that kind of music made with those instruments and technology sounded different and better for a reason, because you had to make yourself more talented versus

• 1:17:58Speaker 03

  doing, buying something to make you sound better.

• 1:18:01Yasi Salek?

  It's almost even what you were saying about House of Jealous Lovers, right? There was a, there was a like need to, in order to find the sound you wanted to like, like hunt down old samplers, like you're saying, or whatever, like that these were things that you had to do. And now it's like, everything is just right in Ableton. I don't know, I don't make, I don't produce music. But I wonder if those like limitations created all of these like really cool and interesting. Like I remember when we did the Portishead episode being so blown away that Jeff Barrow would, couldn't find a sample he wanted. So then he would make it, record it onto a vinyl, then he would warp the vinyl because he wanted it to sound old.

• 1:18:43Yasi Salek?

  And then sample off his, he made the sample, but it's like, you don't hear much about that.

• 1:18:48Speaker 03

  You're gonna go, whoop, whoop, whoop, whoop, whoop, whoop, whoop, whoop. It has to sound right. And back in the day, you had to do it by hand, the old fashioned way. That was the only way to do it. And because instead of saying like, oh, I wish this sounded like this.

• 1:19:03Speaker 03

  And then it makes it and you're like, it's not perfect, but it's good enough. And now I'm done.

• 1:19:07Yasi Salek?

  Claude, can you please create a beat?

• 1:19:12Speaker 03

  But James, James Murphy was like, we have this song and it needs a little something. It needs some atmosphere and texture and percussion. It already has so much going on. And then I, I think there's a part where like little bits of hi hats are reversed and kind of played in a way where like it'll be like a 32 bar loop, like a minute of song and it'll go up and down and but it's like in the background a little bit.

• 1:19:40Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:41Speaker 03

  And then it repeats again in 30 seconds or whatever. So your brain.

• 1:19:45Yasi Salek?

  Like you said earlier, like the thing that keeps you on your toes.

• 1:19:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:19:48Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:48Speaker 03

  And that's what, that's as a dance music producer or electronic music producer, you have to create that. Versus when you're in a band, it's already built in because it's all being made by humans. And so you're doing the opposite. I'm trying to sound like a drum machine and the drum machines have to have humans make them sound like humans. Or else it's like the uncanny valley in your mind. You're like, this sounds wrong. I don't know why.

• 1:20:13Yasi Salek?

  Totally.

• 1:20:20Yasi Salek?

  Well, thank God. Thank God for House of Jealous Lovers. Thank God for James Murphy and DFA. And also honestly, I think, thank God for this betrayal, betrayal. Because again, I don't want to put words into anyone's mouth, but all the things that dovetailed was this betrayal.

• 1:20:39Yasi Salek?

  James Murphy's lost both his parents in one year and then nine 11 happened. This is all in like the same, like six to eight month span.

• 1:20:47Speaker 03

  That's crazy.

• 1:20:47Yasi Salek?

  And that basically galvanized him to create LCD sound system and right losing my edge. And, you know, for the, the deep LCD sound system lovers out there. I saw, I saw the first LCD retirement tour.

• 1:21:06Speaker 03

  The first Eagles tour.

• 1:21:07Yasi Salek?

  The first of many retirement tours. And it was phenomenal. It was at the Hollywood Bowl. Hot Chip opened.

• 1:21:13Speaker 03

  That's cool.

• 1:21:14Yasi Salek?

  It was really great.

• 1:21:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, I've always been a big fan of James Murphy's DJ sets.

• 1:21:18Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. I mean, he's.

• 1:21:19Speaker 03

  When he's cooking, it just feels, cause it's all vinyl, there's imperfections, but he knows every song in and out. And you're like, it's just, he does it the old way, the, the right way, you know?

• 1:21:30Yasi Salek?

  I heard that vinyl DJing is very back and that like all the young kids DJ with vinyl now.

• 1:21:35Speaker 03

  Not all, but it is definitely back.

• 1:21:37Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. And that's cool. I'm gonna, I'm gonna come out of retirement then.

• 1:21:40Speaker 03

  I'm not.

• 1:21:42Yasi Salek?

  You're not. I only ever knew how to DJ. I don't know how to do anything else.

• 1:21:45Speaker 03

  Okay. Well, you should. I sold all my records.

• 1:21:48Yasi Salek?

  Even then I did Serato. Remember Serato?

• 1:21:51Speaker 03

  Of course.

• 1:21:51Yasi Salek?

  Which was, you guys, it's fake records that were read. That was the only, not that I know.

• 1:21:57Speaker 03

  And you have Serato face when you play it. Well, not you, but the DJ, you would have to be mindful of having Serato.

• 1:22:04Yasi Salek?

  What does it look like?

• 1:22:05Speaker 03

  Serato faces, you're, you have two turntables, a mixer and a crowd of people adoring you and you're doing this.

• 1:22:12Speaker 03

  You're looking at your laptop because you can see, you can see the beat instead of hearing it.

• 1:22:17Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:18Speaker 03

  So when everyone stopped using Serato, most everyone.

• 1:22:21Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:21Speaker 03

  And switched over to USB sticks. Then it went back to mixing by ear.

• 1:22:26Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 1:22:26Speaker 03

  Versus I.

• 1:22:28Yasi Salek?

  Got it.

• 1:22:28Speaker 03

  Even though now CDJs have the same thing and you can just stare at that.

• 1:22:32Yasi Salek?

  I don't know how to beat match. So that was never a problem for me. I was, I'm a real fade in, fade out girl.

• 1:22:37Speaker 03

  Look, I mean, for a lot of music. We came up in the, in the zone.

• 1:22:41Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:42Speaker 03

  Like you were saying, going to, you know, beat it and bang and.

• 1:22:45Yasi Salek?

  Oh my God. We were, I was just talking to someone about that. I'm sure it exists. If you guys know about this, I just want to know about it. Because when we were younger, there were so many, uh, were they 18 and over?

• 1:22:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, some, some, yeah.

• 1:22:57Yasi Salek?

  A lot of them were 18 and over.

• 1:22:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:22:59Yasi Salek?

  That teens could go to and like dance.

• 1:23:02Speaker 03

  In your area can go dance.

• 1:23:03Yasi Salek?

  But I don't hear about that anymore. Again, I'm not 18. So maybe it doesn't pass my inbox or whatever.

• 1:23:08Speaker 03

  But I think 18 and up clubbing has gone by the wayside because people just don't party and drink anymore.

• 1:23:14Yasi Salek?

  Beat it. And, and teen beat was one too?

• 1:23:17Speaker 03

  Music festivals have sort of, sort of taken over. So like.

• 1:23:19Yasi Salek?

  That was every week though. You would go every week. It was so fun.

• 1:23:22Speaker 03

  Religiously.

• 1:23:23Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:24Speaker 03

  But when that was my first taste of being in a club with a DJ and they were playing, you know, mostly 80s songs and indie rock dance songs that were not, it was, you couldn't really beat match them. And I still play a lot of songs like that today.

• 1:23:37Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:38Speaker 03

  So like if you're playing the cure or something like that, no.

• 1:23:40Yasi Salek?

  Fade in, fade out?

• 1:23:41Speaker 03

  You, it's, it's like, like at Morrissey night.

• 1:23:44Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:44Speaker 03

  Every song. Smith's night, Morrissey night, either one. The song is, is not to be messed with. You play it.

• 1:23:53Yasi Salek?

  Totally.

• 1:23:53Speaker 03

  Everyone wants to hear the entire song. You have to hear the end of Just Like Heaven.

• 1:23:59Yasi Salek?

  Of course.

• 1:23:59Speaker 03

  It has to go.

• 1:24:01Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:02Speaker 03

  And then, and then straight into Sunday Morning by No Doubt or whatever it is.

• 1:24:06Yasi Salek?

  This is, this is the kind of DJ I was really good at.

• 1:24:09Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:24:09Yasi Salek?

  It's involved no technical skill, only good taste.

• 1:24:13Speaker 03

  There is a lot of technical skill in there. It's just not beat matching.

• 1:24:16Yasi Salek?

  Um, I think there was a lot of technical skill for me, given that I was like borderline blackout wasted almost every time I DJed. And I was like, how did you even get the record out of the, find the thing, put it on, put the needle? I definitely, one time when I was DJing in Tokyo.

• 1:24:31Speaker 03

  Tokyo. Hold for applause.

• 1:24:33Yasi Salek?

  Honey, not, there's two DJs at this table. Okay. You thought it was just one disc jockey? There's two professional disc jockeys.

• 1:24:40Speaker 03

  Forgot about your tour in Kobe.

• 1:24:42Yasi Salek?

  It was Andre's club that was first in Paris, Le Baron.

• 1:24:46Speaker 03

  Le Baron.

• 1:24:46Yasi Salek?

  It was a Le Baron in Tokyo.

• 1:24:48Speaker 03

  CineSpace turned into Paul and Andres.

• 1:24:51Yasi Salek?

  Paul and Andres used to go there. I DJed there as well.

• 1:24:53Speaker 03

  I bet you did. You and Paul go way back. Okay?

• 1:24:56Yasi Salek?

  I actually don't really know him very well, but.

• 1:24:58Speaker 03

  Andre go way back.

• 1:24:59Yasi Salek?

  I definitely one night was, didn't eat that day and had a few too many oolong highs, real ones now.

• 1:25:06Speaker 03

  Love an oolong high.

• 1:25:06Yasi Salek?

  So good. And I definitely like, I think I fell onto the turntable. Like I like.

• 1:25:13Speaker 03

  I've almost done that so many times.

• 1:25:16Yasi Salek?

  Just one time.

• 1:25:16Speaker 03

  Where like I'm too tall and the DJ booth is too low and I'm like, yo, mix it. And then I'm like, oh God. And it's almost, I was almost like in a Tik Tok where it all crumbles, you know?

• 1:25:26Yasi Salek?

  Guess who showed up at one of my DJ nights? I had to DJ every night. It was a residency, but at Le Baron. I'm just gonna bring it all full circle.

• 1:25:34Speaker 03

  Share.

• 1:25:35Yasi Salek?

  Will I?

• 1:25:37Yasi Salek?

  I was like, not this bitch, not this bitch all the way across. He's like, can I get on? Yo, can I get on?

• 1:25:43Speaker 03

  That's my will.

• 1:25:44Yasi Salek?

  Jason, Them Jeans, TJ, this has been such a pleasure. I was, I really wanted it to happen. I'm glad it happened.

• 1:25:52Speaker 03

  Great.

• 1:25:53Yasi Salek?

  We're, you know, 25 years of.

• 1:25:56Speaker 03

  Being in the club.

• 1:25:58Yasi Salek?

  It is like 20, it's really like 25, whatever. Okay. 23, 23 ish years. And we're doing great.

• 1:26:04Speaker 03

  I was in the club on nine 11. So, you know, it has been 25 years.

• 1:26:08Yasi Salek?

  Wow.

• 1:26:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:26:11Yasi Salek?

  Wow. I was probably at the Pickle Patch or, or at least in the approximate, your, your friend Steve Aoki and I, college compatriots used to come into the record store I worked at.

• 1:26:22Speaker 03

  Shit, bro.

• 1:26:23Yasi Salek?

  I know.

• 1:26:24Speaker 03

  UCSB, bro.

• 1:26:26Yasi Salek?

  Gaucho's, go Gaucho's. All right. Well, thank you again. You were wonderful.

• 1:26:31Speaker 03

  My pleasure.

• 1:26:31Yasi Salek?

  Please come back next week for a new episode of Bandplain.

• 1:26:36Speaker 03

  And listen to How Long Gone.

• 1:26:37Yasi Salek?

  And listen to How Long Gone.

• 1:26:43Yasi Salek?

  If you liked what you heard today, subscribe for more episodes of Bandplain. Our guest today was Jason Stewart, AKA DJ Them Jeans. Go listen to How Long Gone. This episode was produced by Rob Sundermann, edited by Adrian Bridges with help from Justin Sales. Video production by Jacob Cornet. Executive producers for Bandplain are Gina Dalvak and me, Yasi Salek. Our gorgeous and catchy theme song was composed and performed by Bethany Cosentino and Jennifer Clavon. Graciously recorded by Carlos La Garza in Los Angeles, California. Special thanks to our producer emeritus, producer Dylan, AKA Dylan Tupper Rupper. And also Sean Fantasy and the television program Reacher. Come back every Thursday for a new episode of Bandplain on Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts.

• 1:27:41Speaker 06

  Want to be the one who's always in the know about the game, the scores, the plays? Here's a tip, the Apple Sports app. Just pick your favorite teams and get automatic live updates without even knowing their schedules. And when your team scores, it shows up right on your iPhone lock screen, making it easy to check in anytime. So rule the group chat and download Apple Sports for free on the App Store or find it on your new iPhone.

• 1:28:05Speaker 06

  Where some see heroes and others see egos. Bloomberg sees the era of billionaire athletes. A fad to some, the future of money to others. We see crypto's trillion dollar swings. The end of jobs or the end of human struggle. We see the endless funds fueling the AI hype. While others follow the noise, we follow the money.

• 1:28:32Speaker 06

  Learn more at Bloomberg.com.