Pushing

Hello, hello everyone, Gather round.

Malcolm Gladwell here.

If you're a fan of my show, Revisionist History, then you know my deep and abiding obsession

with American higher education.

How it's broken, how it can be fixed.

Over our next couple of episodes, we dive into this topic again.

And as you will hear, one story makes me really angry.

And the other gives me hope.

Listen to Revisionist History, wherever you get your podcasts,

and you can always get our shows early and at-free by subscribing to Pushkin Plus.

Billy Holiday's Strange Fruit was on there, so was Bob Marley's Get Up Stand Up.

And also more unusual choices like Murl Haggard's Oki from Ascoke,

which if you've ever heard it, is a song not protesting for change, but against change.

It's the song for testing protest songs, even to say, we loved all this of Broken Record.

And we love David Byrne going all the way back to his days to the talking heads

and his brilliant book, How Music Works, and the million other genius things he's done over the years.

So Rick Rubin and I asked David to sit with us in New York.

Rick Skyptin from Hawaii and the three of us had a chat about David's list,

the earliest protest songs he remembers, and what it takes to write a song or protest.

Here we are, Rick Rubin, me in conversation with David Byrne.

I'm Malcolm Gladwell. This is Broken Record.

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