Bonus: Old Rockstars With No F*cks Left To Give

DISGRACELAND

In this bonus episode of Disgraceland, the host reflects on the evolution of writing and podcasting following a Signal Award nomination. The

Key takeaways

• Quincy Jones revolutionized motion picture scoring by introducing R&B elements to reflect American reality rather than just aspirational orchestral sounds.
• The host argues that storytelling is more vital to podcasting success than the technical mechanics of writing or grammar.

Main topics

• Writing and Podcasting Evolution
• Quincy Jones' Film Scoring Legacy

Notable quotes

The best history is the history that gets buried.

Conclusion

A deep dive into the intersection of musical legends and the gritty tr

Transcript preview

Speaker 3 (0:01) This is exactly Speaker 1 (0:02) right. Speaker 1 (0:10) Double Elvis. Speaker 3 (0:15) Hey, Discos, need Speaker 1 (0:16) a little more Disgraceland in your life? Just a touch to get you through? Yeah, me too. This is the podcast that comes after the podcast. Welcome to Disgraceland, the after party. Speaker 1 (0:41) Welcome to the Disgraceland bonus episode, a little thing we like to call the after party. This is the show after the show, the party after the party, the bridge to get you from one full episode of Disgraceland to the other, the backyard to dig into the dirt. Our mission to uncover the truth, to confront the myth, to reclaim the story. On this bonus episode, we're talking about writers and the weird shit they have to do to be writers. Quincy Jones is loose lips and what other bombshells that may or may not be dropped by aging legends with nothing to lose. We're going to get into your takes on Q's claims, plus your favorite. producers, with your emails, comments, DMs, and as always, a whole lot of Rosie. This is the podcast for the musically obsessed, the outsiders, the independent thinkers who know that the best history is the history that gets buried. Disgraceland is where I tell the stories you'll end up telling to someone else. All right, discos, let's get into it. Speaker 1 (1:36) I found out today that I got nominated for a Signal Award for writing the Patti Smith episode of Disgraceland. And it got me thinking about something that I don't really talk about very much, which is writing and how fucking weird it is that this is what I do for a living. In order to become a writer, I had to become a podcaster. And now, increasingly, in order to maintain my living as a podcaster and grow my business, my podcast business, I have to become some sort of videographer, which is fine. It's neither good nor bad. It's just weird. Things evolve and I get it. And I'm down for the challenge. But if you asked my high school friends what I would be when I got older, they would have told you I would have been a writer, which is interesting to me because that's not what I became after high school. I became a musician. And I didn't realize it at the time, but being a musician taught me how to write. And I don't mean just writing songs. That absolutely helped. But it was more about traveling the country, traveling to Europe, and just being around so many different people and seeing different people and seeing how they act, seeing how they think, or getting a glimpse into how they think. And I really found myself. becoming, you know, not in a creepy way, but just like watching people constantly. I still do it. Even to this day, I was traveling yesterday. I was at Logan airport and, and I'm just, I actually had this thought. I'm like, dude, you have to stop staring at people, people watching because they're going to, they're going to think you're fucking weird. I'm constantly, constantly looking at people trying to figure out what they're thinking, where they're going, where they're coming from. And obviously that's a very writerly. thing to do. And I never, I don't think to do it. I never thought to do it. I just do it. And I think I was thinking, you know, if after this award was announced, I was like, you know, I never took any writing classes. I never took any, I never took one creative writing class in my life. And if I could go back to school, I wouldn't, I think if I, if I could go back to school, I'd probably major in psychology because I'd want to, I'd want to better understand how people think. so that I could become a better writer and do it that way. I don't really think about writing. I think about writing all the time, but I never really think about writing mechanics. I don't think about sentence structure. I don't think about words. I don't think about grammar. I do think a lot about story because story is, to me, the most important thing. You can be the greatest writer on the planet, technically, and if you can't tell a story, well... Who cares? Music taught me this. It's like you can be the most proficient, technically astute drummer on the planet, but if you have no feel, it doesn't matter. I don't know. For what I do, podcasting for this delivery vessel especially, stories are just so much more important than the mechanics of what ends up on the page because there is no page. I'm not writing essays for Esquire magazine. Norman Mailer. The Saturday Evening Post is not paying me to write Sludging Towards Bethlehem because the Saturday Evening Post no longer exists. And if Joan Didion or Norman Mailer were alive today, they'd be writing in some form of new media or they'd be unemployed. And their writing would definitely be different. It would suit whatever medium they were writing for. And we don't know if their writing would be better or worse. That's impossible to say. But I do strongly believe that it would be different. And I guess what I am saying is that I'm grateful for this new media. Without it, I'm sure I wouldn't have gotten through the gatekeepers and been able to turn myself into a writer. And who knows whether or not I would have ever found an audience, even if I somehow did turn myself into a writer, and whether or not you guys would have found me. We no longer have the Saturday Evening Post. We don't even really have Esquire magazine or any of the other great literary outlets that could help writers make their livings. But we do have podcasting. And I'm super grateful for that. Obviously, again, it helped us find each other. It gave me a living, which is unbelievable when I think about it. And now we have things like the Signal Awards. recognize the work we're doing in this evolving medium in whatever it becomes. Podcasting, we all know it's all turned into video somehow, gone from audio to video. I guess it's going to be both things, which is fine. But again, it's just cool that we have this sort of our own mechanics in this industry, our own infrastructure, things like the Signal Awards that are. recognizing the work that we're doing because it further cements this profession as being a real one. The unfortunate thing though about being nominated for anything, it's a double-edged sword. Like Ernest Hemingway, another dude who cashed those fat Esquire checks, I can't stand to lose any competition. So I'm going to ask you guys shamelessly to vote for Disgraceland, the Signal Awards. You can grab the link. Matt will have it in the show notes. I'll have it on Instagram. I'm going to do a little post about this. You'll be able to find it there. And give us a vote so that we can keep making podcasts, keep writing, keep coming at you weekly. Here in disgrace land, here in this fucking weird, strange little community we've carved out on the internet. It's amazing when I really think about it, when I take myself out of the action of doing this and I think about what I do for a living, it's fucking bizarre. Music and true crime in a whole community of listeners out there, you guys, the discos, who are here for it every single week. It blows my mind. I'm incredibly, incredibly grateful. Thank you so much. So I was talking earlier about Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer and Joan Didion and having to have these sort of alternate careers in order to make a living as a writer. Not necessarily side hustle, but kind of side hustley. Anyway, there are fascinating anecdotes about writers and what some of them have had to do for a living. This is kind of apropos right now because of Tony, the film about Anthony Bourdain. Bourdain had to become a chef, essentially, to become a writer. And then he had to become a TV host to continue being a writer. So this fascinates me for all the reasons you just heard. Anyways, Zeth pulled some examples of some truly revealing anecdotes from literary history of authors and their side hustles, what they had to do to become writers. We're going to get into that in the exclusive section of this after party coming up. Go to disgracesandpod.com, sign up to become an all access member and you can. gain access to that conversation and more exclusive content just like that, plus ad-free listening. Okay, again, Quincy Jones in the feed this week, our latest full episode