PODCAST · arts
Sub Titles
by Matthew Burchanoski
Substituting each entry on Spin and AFI "Best of" lists.
Episodes
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Episode 66 Part 2: Annie Hall
We have to talk about Woody Allen now which also means we need to talk about romance in the city. New York City, that is. Tim guides through different eras figuring out what makes love in the Big Apple a trope all its own. Annie Hall prompts us, of course, then Tim introduces The Age of Innocence...
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Episode 66 Part 1: Fishscale
Drugs and music go together like this podcast and hating on The Magnetic Fields. We as millennials remember well the lessons of D.A.R.E. (and are also very boring) but others have a more open attitude to a life of drugs. Ghostface Killah's Fishscale covers the highs and lows of drug peddling,...
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Episode 65 Part 2: The Bridge on the River Kwai
The episode Tim and Matt were made for, explaining movies via Dril tweets. If you don't know Dril, go open Twitter and have yourself a reading session. We rattle off a bunch of favorites, and Tim relays how this David Lean classic is really just a Dril gem, as are The Insider and The King of...
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Episode 65 Part 1: If You're Feeling Sinister
Belle and Sebastian produced a truly marvelous set of mournful yet sweet songs on If You're Feeling Sinister, a niche that they still loom over 30 years later. You might call it earnest, or even (and Matt might fight you) twee, but we call in New Sincerity. Matt and Tim talk the David Foster...
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Episode 64 Part 2: The Beast Years of Our Lives
The movie title announces but Tim questions, are these really The Best Years of Our Lives? What makes the years best or even meaningful? How do we live out our lives as best we can? It's freshmen philosophy time, baby, but with two unrelenting cynics who, nevertheless, believe in the power of...
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Episode 64 Part 1: Dig Your Own Hole
Another one of those episodes where Matt pretends to know anything about electronic music. Some fun ones here though, all classics of that late-90s shooting star genre Big Beat, which is blessedly straightforward in name. Chemical Brothers make it on the Spin list with Dig Your Own Hole, and Matt...
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Episode 63 Part 2: The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
At their cores, the guys (particularly Tim) exude Dad Energy. That's surely been evident this entire podcast, but it's heightened here when they get to talk about early 19th century American history, specifically the Monroe Doctrine. See how the West was metaphorically won, or vaguely claimed, in...
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Episode 63 Part 1: Take Care
Actually okay timing here with Drake having just released a new album. Matt won't "get" that one just like he doesn't "get" Take Care...or Lana Del Ray's Ultraviolence or Father John Misty's Pure Comedy. Decade defining artists of the 2010s all, and unequivocally absent from any of Matt's…
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Episode 62 Part 2: Dr. Strangelove
Dr. Strangelove is as much a movie of incredible sight gags and one-liners as it is profound political commentary. Tim and Matt share their favorites, naturally, before Tim frames the film as the more successful Twin to a similar, proximate movie. He then considers William Wyler’s Jezebel and Wes...
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Episode 62 Part 1: Paid in Full
A whole host of albums on the docket in this one! Matt gives Tim the choice of two sets to be considered alongside Eric B. and Rakim’s stone-cold classic Paid in Full. (If you haven’t heard Eric B. and, especially, Rakim directly, you’ve heard them in other artists.) Tim chooses the DMX and Busta...
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Episode 61 Part 2: The Sound of Music
The famous addition to the movie version of Sound of Music, "Something Good" speaks to that (realized) hope of doing something, anything helpful for others. Tim tracks that theme of I Must Have Done Something Good through Crossing Delancey (Joan Micklin Silver) and Manhunter (Michael Mann) and…
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Episode 61 Part 1: Dummy
We love a good genre episode and here’s a big one from the 90s, which has influenced everything from Bjork to the theme song of House. Portishead’s Dummy sets the stage for the forlorn, downtempo, psychedelic mix of jazz, dub, and soul that is Trip-Hop. Neither Massive Attack nor Lamb has the...
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Deci's Midnight Runners #6: Butt Rock and the MGM Story
Tim is here doing serious things and giving some love to the old studio model of movie making along with the peak and power of MGM. Meanwhile, Matt is being a nudnik and subjecting Tim and everyone else to a ranking of Butt Rock songs. Where else can you hear about Naughty Marietta, Breaking...
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Episode 60 Part 2: King Kong
“It was beauty killed the beast.” So ends King Kong (1933), whom Matt and Tim love very much. A memorable last line goes a long way in establishing a film’s legacy, especially when it encapsulates the spirit of the film so perfectly. Tim looks at Back to the Future and I Am a Fugitive from a…
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Episode 60 Part 1: Modern Vampires of the City
Matt is feeling his oats in this one and ready to confront you all with the legacies of Mumford and Sons and Nickelback. Vampire Weekend feel like a Matt band, but they aren't. What they undoubtedly are is a King of 21st Century Rock, emblematic of a larger genre movement. So, too, were Mumford…
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Episode 59 Part 2: Bonnie and Clyde
Though I would have appreciated the bit of running La La Land into this for no reason, Tim has standards. He's looking at the classic crime film as a Three Decade Period Piece. In other words, the movie released roughly three decades after the bit of history it covers. We're going to small town...
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Episode 59 Part 1: College Dropout
We're back after a long but necessary hiatus. And what better way to return than with....oh no. Welp, Kanye is back on the podcast, and even more treacherous than last we talked about him. Which is a shame, because College Dropout is a genuinely fun, and funny, album. With a clear potshot at Ye's...
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Episode 58 Part 2: Midnight Cowboy
Tim loves a good chance to slag the AFI for choosing not actually American movies but we have a bit of nuance on that theme this episode. Tim looks at John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy as a prime example of a non-American director bringing some foreign style to American cinema. Consideration of...
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Episode 58 Part 1: The Woods
Matt keeps the rock theme going and checks in on life after the extinction (read: reunion tours) of the dinosaurs. Sleater-Kinney lambast and reinvigorate rock all at once in The Woods, a totemic and virile nearly-closing statement from the band. Rock is always on the verge of death in the...
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Episode 57 Part 2: The Philadelphia Story
The Philadelphia Story, in addition to being an interesting early rom-com, reflects well on one of the great mid-century movie titans, MGM. Tim tracks the story - the rise and fall, the palace intrigue, the style and viewpoint - of MGM through the momentous The Philadelphia Story and two smaller...
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Episode 57 Part 1: Appetite for Destruction
I don't know that grunge killed Guns N' Roses so much as Guns N' Roses killed Guns N' Roses but, regardless, Appetite for Destruction lives on in radio waves and arenas everywhere. "Welcome to the Jungle," "Paradise City," and "Sweet Child of Mine" are pretty close to unkillable. They're also...
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Episode 56 Part 2: Shane
We’re all trying to hold back the darkness these days, but the folks in these movies especially so. Tim takes quick stock of the most annoying child actors, then talks the dark circumstances surrounding the protagonists of Shane, Bringing Out the Dead, and Maria Full of Grace. A mysterious…
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Episode 56 Part 1: Tha Carter III
The 2009 Grammys were weird as hell. Matt and Tim cover that weirdness in great depth before digging into the especially weird Best Album category. Robert Plant and Allison Krauss won that year, and Ne-Yo was there too. But Lil Wayne’s Tha Carter III gets the Spin nod here and man is he as odd as...
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Episode 55 Part 2: It Happened One Night
Anything that gets Tim and Matt close to Beefsquatch is dangerous, and Tim’s just not even trying to avert it here. Come for the Beefcake chants, stay for the measured and considered analysis of masculinity and gender performativity. Gaze upon the beefy males of It Happened One Night, The…
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Episode 55 Part 1: Psychocandy
For all the Shoegaze lovers out there - and apparently you’re a sizeable contingency of our audience - here are three albums that are, at most, a stone’s throw from stuff featured in the My Blood Valentine and Shoegaze Decile episodes. Scottish alt-rockers The Jesus and Mary Chain debuted with...
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Episode 54 Part 2: A Streetcar Named Desire
A regular concern for Tim and Matt is the art of translating the stage into film, which so often goes awry. We’ve talked other instances of this in previous episodes, but Tim builds the whole ship out of Pulitzer Prize adaptations this time. Transforming the intimacy of the playhouse into the...
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Episode 54 Part 1: Janet Jackson's Rhythm Nation 1814
“Get the point? Good, let’s dance.” Such is the ethos of Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation 1814, a massive and eminently funky album which, along with Jackson’s Control, helped define and kick off New Jack Swing. Teddy Riley, who was instrumental to the New Jack Swing sound, describes the genre as “a...
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Episode 53 Part 2: Rear Window
We joke about how when the Podcat looks out the window he’s watching TV and, well, that’s more or less what’s happening in Rear Window! Hitchcock really knew how to wrestle profundity out of a kind of silly concept. After Matt and Tim investigate and learn some interesting Manhattan geography…
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Episode 53 Part 1: Rid of Me
After a good conversation about P.J. Harvey and her cattle experience, Matt and Tim talk the blunt force marvel that is Rid of Me. 30 years in, Harvey remains a titan with an immense shadow of influence, which sets up the somewhat cheeky theme of Canon Fodder. Matt looks at two other artists he...
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Episode 52 Part 2: Intolerance
Part 1 is an album to illegal to stream. Part 2 has a movie with a director too tarnished to love. Intolerance serves as the D.W. Griffith cut-out on the AFI list given The Birth of a Nation is more trouble than it’s worth at this point. As it’s poster says, Intolerance is “colossal spectacle,”…
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Episode 52 Part 1: 3 Feet High and Rising
Welcome to the episode with the hardest album to find! De La Soul’s seminal 3 Feet High and Rising is, notoriously, not streaming given the legal mess of its remarkable amount of samples. Matt’s fully in his bag here talking the construction of music and interrogating what music entails. We…
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Episode 51 Part 2: Fellowship of the Ring
It’s a good question! The AFI will have to deal with the 21st century more at some point; Fellowship of the Ring certainly has a case, though. Tim and Matt talk the trilogy in general, then Tim makes the big case for Fellowship, Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master, and Terrence Malick’s The Tree of...
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Episode 51 Part 1: New Day Rising
One of the earliest albums on the Spin list (January 1985), Husker Du’s New Day Rising proves a fun favorite for both Matt and Tim. We talk the band’s place in the Our Band Could Be Your Life of it all (i.e. 80s punk and early hardcore) and their sonic take on the line “it aggravates and it...
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Deci's Midnight Runners #5: 9/11 Albums and Remakes
Been 10 episodes, which means it’s time for another bonus pod. In this decile, Matt takes inspiration from the discussion of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot as an album given particular significance from it’s proximity to 9/11. Rather than looking at the “most” 9/11 albums, though, he instead ranks the…
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Episode 50 Part 2: West Side Story
Topical! Recorded before Spielberg dropped his but nonetheless weary of the impending discourse. After necessary, and sadly topical, love for Stephen Sondheim and quick rankings from Tim and Matt both, Tim clamors down the fire escape away from the usual West Side Story talking points to talk…
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Episode 50 Part 1: The Marshall Mathers LP
You know him, you could just as easily love or hate him, and you have to respect his technique. (Technique I say! Not content.) As a bonafide Suburban White Boy Matt has a lot of Eminem thoughts and love. He traipses through how hard it is to like Eminem, why he probably shouldn’t, and then…
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Episode 49 Part 2: Taxi Driver
Tim is getting technical today, looking at vibrant (and lurid) weaponizations of Color Cinematography. Taxi Driver might be gritty in general, but it along with The Hunt for Red October and Niagra show us a different way from the dull, brown, arid cinematography of modern blockbusters.
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Episode 49 Part 1: Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
After awhile of hand-wringing about the importance of Wilco’s magnum opus, Matt settles in on the deconstructive and experimental bent of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. (He’s also sorely tempted by the 9/11 significance of it all, but stay tuned for more on that!) Bonny Light Horseman’s updated folk...
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Episode 48 Part 2: The Deer Hunter
Two things of note here. First, our (somehow) first ever play-in Sub Title! Tim pits two versions of Father of the Bride against one another and Matt decides which gets to face The Birdcage. Second, I’m not sure there’s been a bigger tonal shift between entry and Sub Title options before. The...
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Episode 48 Part 1: The Downward Spiral
Korn famously (notoriously) insisted that their musical lineage starts with Red Hot Chili Peppers and Faith No More. More generally, their history begins in alt rock of the late 80s and early 90s, an era of experimentation, forceful expansion, and quite a bit of weirdness. The Chili Peppers…
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Episode 47 Part 2: M*A*S*H*
A disproportionate amount of this episode is Matt railing on Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, which features one of the worst people in his estimation. Tim keeps things fair and moving though in his analysis of M*A*S*H* as a movie about terrible people maybe sorta learning to be not as terrible before...
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Episode 47 Part 1: Sound of Silver
Remember the aughts when most indie music was dance-y? Good times? Good times. Innocuous times, if we believe the worry of one James Murphy who warns as much on the opening of LCD Soundsystem’s Sound of Silver. Matt looks at the legacy, longevity, and punchiness, or lack thereof, of Murphy’s…
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Episode 46 Part 2: North by Northwest
Tim and Matt have shown previous interest in naming the “Most” of various things - most 00’s, 90’s, and 80’s songs, for example. The things that best embody and symbolize an era or genre or concept. Tim returns that thought experiment here with three movies that are the Most their respective...
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Episode 46 Part 1: The Moon and Antarctica
Last week was Myth and History; this week is the Cosmos. The Moon and Antarctica, an album near and dear to Matt’s heart, tries to speak (with) God with layers of guitar in a Cosmos entirely of Modest Mouse’s design. Built to Spill, MM’s Pacific Northwest counterparts, and Hum, of Shoegaze Decile...
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Episode 45 Part 2: Jaws
Tim, as is his wont, is working with another AFI list here in 100 Years…100 Thrills, a list that he and Matt decide is truly bonkers but in a charming way. Jaws - which, hey, good film - lands number 2nd on that list. The Exorcist is 3rd, which is the first Sub option since Tim can actually watch...
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Episode 45 Part 1: Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City
Kendrick Lamar’s Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City is probably the most widely beloved and respected debut from 2010s hip-hop, and which Kendrick album is his best is a Discourse deserving of the capital letter. Matt doesn’t wade into that, rather he considers GK, MC for the autobiographical origin story...
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Episode 44 Part 2: Rocky
Y’all remember Rocky loses in the first one, right? Well Tim and Matt are here to remind you - and remind you why that’s a good thing - and Tim is being the depressing one this week when he talks about The Cincinnati Kid and Make Way for Tomorrow, two movies where loss looms large and some…
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Episode 44 Part 1: Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain
This is the first recorded episode after that summer break we took, so forgive any ring rust. No better way to get revved back up than with our favorite band to hate: Pavement. We say things about Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain (we like it more! I think! Kinda!). Then Matt introduces Tim to two bands...
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Episode 43 Part 2: The Gold Rush
The sweetness of Chaplin making dinner rolls dance shines in The Gold Rush, and gives Tim his jumping off point for this episode. Things escalate quite a bit as we move from dancing bread to two antagonists realizing a secret, anonymous letter writing love, to dinosaurs and the sins of science.…
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Episode 43 Part 1: In the Aeroplane Over the Sea
Few things get Matt more excited than concept records and jarring indie music. Put the two together and you have In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, Neutral Milk Hotel’s classic that’s beloved, hated on, called overrated, and beloved again in regular cycles. Anais Mitchell and Hurray for the Riff Raff...
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
Substituting each entry on Spin and AFI "Best of" lists.
HOSTED BY
Matthew Burchanoski
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Sub Titles currently has 139 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
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Substituting each entry on Spin and AFI "Best of" lists.
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Sub Titles publishes regularly with 139 episodes available. Check the episode list for the typical release schedule.
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