The best podcast in the history of the world ever (right now, according to me, your mileage might vary) is the declaratively titled A History of Jazz. Its informal subtitle - One Record At A Time - hints at its genius. This podcast is not in a hurry. It exploits a quality of the internet that we’ve forgotten about recently - extraordinary, obsessive depth.
A History of Jazz is on episode ten and has only reached 1919. We’ve only just got to the point where there’s a thing that’s generally understood as ‘jazz’. This microscopic focus lets it zoom in on fascinating details – like the fact that patrons of Ziegfeld’s Midnight Frolic were issued tiny “applause hammers” so they could mark their approval by hammering on the tables. Or that jazz pioneers James Reese Europe and Ford T. Dabney were so prolific that their publisher sometimes issued their music as being written by Eporue and Yenbad to mix things up a bit.
You get a similar rush of enthusiastic focus from the History of Philosophy without any gaps. (Almost 300 episodes. Has not yet got to the 15th century.) You have to hand it to these people – their titles hit you over the head with clarity. You are now leaving the internet of short attention spans and listicles.
Or there’s The Allusionist (a podcast about language) which seems less anally completist but is equally determined to explore a vast topic with extraordinary precision and extreme magnification. The latest episode is called Triumph/Trumpet/Top/Fart. Guess which single word and current President of the United States they’re discussing.
Read more: 45 of the best podcasts for curious minds
Podcasts like these remind me of the the days when a well researched collection of links was a marvellous novelty and the Museum of Online Museums would offer up gems such as The Archive of Repurposed Joysticks or Steven Hill’s Museum of Movie Title Screens (last updated 7th November 2011). That’s the web I want; a place with spare corners where un-monetisable enthusiasms can be preserved, even if they’ve not been updated for seven years.
My favourite current equivalent is the Twitter feed for a stationery shop: @presentcorrect. It regularly brings us delights like The Andre Vicente Goncalves Archive of Windows from Around the World or a tumblr full of adverts from the former GDR.
We should be cheered that these deep pools of detail are emerging in podcasting. It’s been around since 2004, after all, maybe this exploration of qualities other than surface and scale is what happens in a mature digital medium. I’m looking forward to Deep Twitter and The Decline and Fall of The Roman Empire on Snapchat.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
