I enjoy podcasts. If I am in the mood, I sometimes listen to them in the kitchen when I am cooking. I don’t listen to them every day but most occasions when I go on a road trip I will go on a podcast bender and listen to as many podcasts as my driving time will allow. There are some podcasts that are favorites and I will download every time, like Radiolab and Planet Money but sometimes I try new things. Today, I am reviewing the podcast Invisibilia. It is a podcast I listened to maybe three times before I set out to listen to the newest season, the 3rd season. I am familiar with it but not overly familiar.
I began listening to the 3rd season of Invisibilia in early June a few days it was released. I finished listening to the seven episodes that make up the third season around the middle of July. Most of my listening took place during a road trip to central Virginia and a road trip to Rhode Island. I also listened to two episodes while working on some household chores.
Invisibilia describes itself as the show that explores the “intangible forces that shape our human behavior-things like ideas, beliefs, assumptions, and emotions.” I think of Invisibilia as a psychology show told through stories. It is Latin for “invisible things”. Like many of the podcasts I listen to it is a product of NPR. The third season was released totally within the month of June and each episode is about 60, minutes long and is hosted by Alix Spiegel and Hanna Rosin.
The Meat of the Review:
Criticism #1: What is a Concept Album and why do the hosts mention it roughly seven billion times over the course of the season?
Season 3 bill’s itself as Invisibilia’s “Concept Album”. If you listen to this season, this fact is hard to forget as the hosts say this at least once in every episode though it is probably closer to seven billion times. I am of two minds about this. My first response was to gag a little every time they said this. I gagged because I could not really remember what a concept album was. I eventually consulted Wikipedia for the definition of “Concept Album” and found out that some really great records are concept albums like the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds and the Pink Floyd’s The Wall so that made me gag a little less. However, the aspect of “Concept Album” that I liked was that all the stories in season three were supposedly linked or tired together on some level.
I think I should mention here that in preparing to write this post I listened to the first two episodes, which set the stage for the 3rd Season, at least three times each (at around 60 minutes per episode) before I really understood what the hosts were referring to by “Concept Album”. Some parts of these episodes I re-listened to over and over because I really was struggling with understand why this season is called their “Concept Album.”
Like a fool, after extensive research and re-listening, I realized a Season 3 preview/ trailer was available on i-Tunes. The trailer spelled it all out. Host Hanna Rosin said this season “is a concept album, but way nerdier. . . it is a concept album about concepts”. Makes perfect sense right? I didn’t/ don’t completely understand either.
What concepts you might ask? Some of the topics include: emotions, nature of reality, racism, discrimination, dreams and our inner life, and the the true nature of our personalities. Are you confused about how all these things fit into one category? So am I. That is why I was been puzzling over how to write this post for so long.
What I believe the hosts are trying to say is that life is often different than we perceive it and that two people in the same situation might perceive a situation differently and react differently.
What is most confusing for me about season 3 of Invisibilia is that I feel like I am always on the verge of understanding what season is about but then my phone rings or my son wakes up and I have to put my notes away and I forget. I feel like I almost have an answer for “what does it mean to have a podcast about concepts in the form of a concept album” but then as soon as I stop thinking about it, I lose it.
I am going to move on now, but this topic of “what is a concept album about concepts” has become a rabbit hole for me that I can’t find my way out of.
Criticism #2: Episode 3: The Culture Inside or The Episode Where White People Solve Racism
It should be noted that my husband and I listened to this episode while driving through a congested section of I-95 through Connecticut at night with a crying toddler in the backseat so that might have influenced why we both hated this episode so much. What bothered me most about this episode was vignette about a white news anchor and father of an black preteen daughter who recounted the time he exhibited implicit bias of a black man while walking the down the street at night. The man cried while recounting his story. He worried that his daughter would be judged in the same why he unconsciously judged this man. I thought this story seemed emotionally exploitative of the man and his emotions. It felt cloying. I also felt like the producers and hosts throughout the episode took on an attitude of “white people sometimes are biased without knowing it but we educated New York radio hosts are going to show you, who are not as learned and sensitive, how to be better, non-racist people. I think a better, though more intense, podcast episode about implicit bias, police shootings, and communication breakdowns that lead to violence is Radiolab’s Shots Fired: Part 1 and 2.
Criticism #3: Bubble Hopping or The Story Where the Hosts Should Stop Talking and Let Their Interviewee Talk
I enjoyed the story of Max, an engineer at Google, living in San Francisco who felt trapped by the bubble he was living in. He felt like he mostly knew people like himself, young and educated and that they were all having the same types of conversations over and over again. Using the Facebook Graph Search function he built himself an app that would allow him to randomly select from all of the public events that were listed on Facebook. He used it as much as possible and attended all sorts of events all over San Francisco. He even ended up spending Christmas with some very nice people he never met before in Fresno because this is where his app sent him. Max did this for two years.
I was eager to learn if this changed who Max spends time with now, if he has kept in touch with anyone he met during his bubble hopping, if he has new friends, what he learned from the entire experience. I didn’t get to learn these things because the crew decided to follow Max to Iowa, while he was visiting his hometown. They spent a day with him going to random events decided upon with the app. Then the radio crew followed the app to a noisy bar on the industrial side of Des Moines. A man yelled an expletive at the radio producer and one of the hosts and they decided to go down to other end of the bar and talk to him. After a number of minutes it seemed like the yelling man and his wife/ girlfriend warmed up to the radio crew and the story ended. The thing that annoyed me about this story is I felt like the radio producers and host inserted themselves into someone else’s story and in doing so made it less interesting. Max and his experiences were the most interesting part of the story, not the bubble hopping that the producer and host dipped their toes into.
This ends the part where I complain about the show …
What I liked about Season 3:
- I liked the story about the anthropologist whose discovery of a new emotion, while studying headhunters, helped him learn to deal with the grief caused by his wife’s death.
- The Episode entitled Reality about a town where people feed bears in Northern Minnesota. Some people in the town feared the bears and some befriended the bears. Eventually, it all came to a head and someone died. Interesting story but I have the same complaint as Bubble Hopping :I hated it when one of the hosts gets in on the bear feeding at the end of the episode.
- I liked the episode True You which was about how our personalities can change and sometimes our inner life is very different from our outer life.
- I also liked the story about the high school principle who hypnotized his students to help them to achieve their goals. Sometimes this was good, but two times the situation when very badly. See episode: Future Self
In summation, I enjoyed 3/4 of the stories across the seven episodes of the Season Three. I found them to be mostly enlightening and enjoyable. I have a few criticisms of individual stories but by in large I thought they were interesting and well-done. However, I do not have the best auditory recall and I have a theory that most other listeners are with me on this. While enjoyable and enlightening, Season 3 of Invisibilia went a little too high concept with its concept album. I give it 3 out of 5 stars. It was a little high and mighty at times but ultimately enjoyable.
