Making Real Music for a Fake Band

Few inspirational phrases are quoted more often than Mahatma Gandhi’s “Be the change you want to see in the world.” It shows up on t-shirts, bumper stickers, even tattooed on people’s bodies. Life coaches, leadership trainers, and American presidents constantly cite it. There is ...  Show more

One of the many perks of subscribing to Decoder Ring Plus is access to every episode of Decoder Rings Back, our member-exclusive series where host Willa Paskin calls up a listener to answer their question about a cultural mystery directly. This week we’re offering a taste of the ...  Show more

Pop culture is full of fictional bands singing songs purpose-made to capture a moment, a sound. This music doesn’t organically emerge from a scene or genre, hoping to find an audience. Instead it fulfills an assignment: it needs to be 1960s folk music, 1970s guitar rock, 80s hair ...  Show more

Stereophonic is a play about the creative process, power dynamics and fraught personal relationships of a 1970s rock band. It won a Tony and many other awards on Broadway. Now Stereophonic has come to the West End. Playwright David Adjmi and Will Butler, sometime of Arcade Fire, ...  Show more

From Daisy Jones and the Six to the Oneders, we look at the best songs by fictional artists, with Alan Sepinwall joining host Brian Hiatt Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices 

To kick off the first half of our final series for this season, we're taking a deep dive into the worlds of performative and synth punk with the formation of one of the most influential yet unusual bands to grace the LA Punk scene, The Screamers.Taking us out: The Freakees - Sell ...  Show more