RacketCast

There's no disputing it: This is the spookiest episode in RacketCast history.

First up, we've got Dan Suitor, winner of last year's skyway-themed flash-fiction horror contest, doing a bone-chilling reading of his spooktacular winning story, Skyway Hungers.

Then Em and Jay chitchat about their gun bingo and bigfoot conference stories (what a website!) before our seasonally appropriate guest arrives: Dawn McClain, leader of and investigator with the Twin Cities Paranormal Society.

Happy Halloween!

Wanna advertise on RacketCast? Email us at [email protected]. Special thanks to local band Van Stee for supplying our podcast music!

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A sincere and gratitude-stuffed "gobble, gobble" to all our RacketCast listeners ahead of this, the final episode before Thanksgiving.

As such, we're talkin' turkey—local folks deserving of our unenviable "Biggest MN Turkeys of 2024" designation, that is. (How did we possibly come up with this idea?) Em, Keith, and Jay go around the horn, picking the biggest fools, phonies, and/or foes of '24 and then riffing on 'em accordingly. If you're sensitive to overuse of gobbling sound effects, you may want to skip this ep!

Then, to honor our final turkey, we hear a dramatic reading from friend of the pod Scotty Gunderson, a Minneapolis-based artist and creative director making the world weirder and more mesmerizing through his storytelling studio Matter Level.

Honorable Mention Biggest MN Turkeys of 2024...

• The Pohlad family
• AI
• The death of winter
• Pete Hegseth
• Hyperloop grifting
• Epoch Times billboards
• The traffic-clogged revamp of northbound I-35W
• Kitty Cop Klub

Subscribe to RacketCast wherever you get your podcasts—Spotify, Apple Music, Pocket Casts, etc. Wanna advertise on RacketCast? Email us at [email protected]. Special thanks to local band Van Stee for supplying our podcast music!

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A special bonus episode of our biweekly RacketCast? Believe it!

When Minnesota Public Radio's Cathy Wurzer reached out about the new TPT documentary she's co-executive producing, Broadcast Wars, we figured: hey, nice opportunity to run a Q&A about the doc, which explores the pioneering and often cutthroat world of Twin Cities TV news from the 1950s through the '80s. Hell, we could even plug the premiere event, which is set for 6 p.m. Thursday at the Riverview Theater in Minneapolis (details here).

But then we got to thinking: The podcast gear is right over there, waiting and ready, would it be nuts to... put a celebrated local radio professional on our humble pod?

And that's exactly what we did. Enjoy our chat with Cathy!

Subscribe to RacketCast wherever you get your podcasts—Spotify, Apple Music, Pocket Casts, etc. Wanna advertise on RacketCast? Email us at [email protected]. Special thanks to local band Van Stee for supplying our podcast music!

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Exactly 20 years ago, Twin Cities hip-hop greats Heiruspecs got their shot at the big time with A Tiger Dancer. On this episode of RacketCast, MC Chris "Felix" Wilbourn and bassist Sean "Twinkie Jiggles" McPherson reflect with us about the highs (giant shows, Harold & Kumar soundtrack) and lows (label expectations, snubbed Euro tour) that coincided with the release of their breakout 2004 LP.

This isn't the group's first reflection on that pivotal era—McPherson wrote with great candor about it in 2016 for City Pages—but it is the first via the audio format, the favored medium of such luminaries as Abbott & Costello, Terry Gross, and Bubba the Love Sponge. Our conversation is part Behind the Music, a whole lotta remember-some-guys, and a fitting anniversary victory lap for one of the best hip-hop acts to ever come outta Minnesota. (Cheap Trick emerges as a surprising/amusing enemy.)

"This record is a really proud document for me and that moment. Only one of us was even 25 when we started meeting folks from [record label] Razor & Tie in their office in New York, and it was an amazing feeling," McPherson wrote in '16. "Probably the hardest part was that, on the level of folks we considered our competitors, we were doing pretty good. I don't have SoundScan access, but I believe Tiger [sold] about 13,000 by 2007 and over 10,000 in 2005. In the indie-rap world you were desperate to hit 10K, that was a big sign."

Ultimately, Heiruspecs never broke into the mainstream. Instead, they've settled into the enviable role of local music institution, rallying together each year for an annual concert that expanded in 2023 to the outdoor Heiruspecs Summer Classic mini-fest. The St. Paul crew is still doing pretty good, as you'll hear on this episode.

"It did feel like we had lightning in a bottle," Felix told us last week. "Maybe not the giant lightning strike that makes you as big as, fucking Journey or something, I don't know... But it really did feel like we had something that needed to get out, and we got it out there."

Wanna advertise on RacketCast? Email us at [email protected]. Special thanks to local band Van Stee for supplying our podcast music!

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

It's the first-ever episode of RacketCast, the new podcast experiment from Twin Cities news/arts/culture website Racket.

In this installment, we recap the week that was at our reader-funded publication, debate whether failing restaurants should seek crowdfunding life support, tease what we're working on next, and ask you, the gracious reader-turned-listener, for pointers about... what RacketCast should sound like in the future!

Special thanks to local band Van Stee for supplying our intro/transition/outro music!

Want to advertise on RacketCast? Email us at [email protected].

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.