PODCAST // ONE SONG: Janet Jackson "Control" Album with Guest Jimmy Jam
One Song is a podcast co-hosted by Luxxury and Diallo Riddle. I found it via instagram - host Blake Robin (Luxxury) caught my eye as he was wearing a Chromatics shirt and I had mistaken him for Adam Miller (the brains behind Chromatics) and I thought it was bizarre that he was wearing his own shirt (Adam is a longtime friend of mine and I was getting ready to bust his balls).
After realizing my mistake, I stayed for the clip anyway and then soon found myself watching multiple clips. Like over an hour. Totally drawn in by clip after clip of conversations centered around the deconstruction of songs into stems, the art of sampling, interpolation, etc - all with a through line of how music is highly referential and in communication with itself, and how that is a thing of beauty.
One Song feels like it was workshopped to appeal to me, personally. I actually have no idea who Luxxury and Diallo are, but I feel like I could be friends with them (buzzword parasocial) or at least listen to them talk about music for most of the day. And that’s exactly what I have been doing lately.
For me the standout episode has been when they brought one of my heroes on the show to talk about an album that soundtracked my childhood: Jimmy Jam speaking on Janet Jackson’s Control.
I grew up in Minneapolis, so perhaps I am a bit biased, but it doesn’t get much better than Flyte Tyme. I got to meet Jimmy Jam as a teen in the early 90’s. Despite him being incredibly famous at the time, he was not above coming down to a Minneapolis public school and talking to my junior high school jazz band. This conversation with Jimmy Jam brought back some of those memories and was also a reminder that he’s just one of the nicest people out there - which he overtly states is how he likes to be remembered at the end of the show.
In Two Parts:
