The Captain’s Log entry: Week of March 18 & 25, the year of our Lord 2024 🎵
Cats, culture and content creation + some updates!
Well hello!! Binky, Snuggles and I thank you for your understanding on the slightly erratic schedule as of late - let’s call it cat time.
Firstly/belatedly - our first huge shout out to our current pledged or paying supporters!
Emily B.
Holly O.
Deanna S.
Kim S.
Rebecca R.
…and you? Pledge or donate today! (We are working on a Ko-fi or Patreon!)
We are working on a Ko-fi or Patreon and will announce our new ways to support shortly!!
Secondly - did you see?
We were named a top 10 pet podcast by LifeHacker!
AND!
Check out this amazing review of our pod by excellent podcast reviewer Keelin of Mentally? A Magpie! An excerpt below -
Here we have the sort of creativity at work that holds a sense of childlike wonder without losing the poise of respectable research and a mature creative joy. Few podcasts can manage this without feeling overly simple or downright ridiculous.
The way that Six Degrees of Cats has managed to reflect society’s feelings on the animal in this podcast is somewhat breathtaking when thought is put into it.
🥹🥹🥹🥹🥹
As well as a few continued shout outs from the wonderful podcast reviewer Frank Racioppi of EarWorthy, who named us a 2023 indie top 10 (🙏 thank you again! 🙏)
Please visit those pages to see for yourself!! They are what help combat the corporatization of content - which has become this SEO-hacked grab bag monoculture. Weird and quirky are the way! Ways, ways. What a way to wrap up season 2.
Yep. That’s right. Wrap up!
We are fast approaching the ninth and final episode of the season - our season finale, if you will!
As we shared in our TikTok transmission, we had a slight line production delay (these things come up last minute, despite all efforts to prevent) but - provided the spinning wheel of death on this ol’ Mac doesn’t thwart us further - the drop will be THIS WEEK!
We’ve had to take a little extra time for this one. Why? Well. We know you’d prefer a solid episode over an ok episode that’s on time - but leaky or creaky in the content or research, if you know what I mean.
As always, we’ll announce when it’s out. We appreciate you.
AT OUR LAST PORT OF DISEMBARKATION
In which the editorial director of this newsletter, Captain Kitty reports on our past destinations.
Last month, history was made - in that, global pop star Beyoncé - she of Destiny’s Child fame who needs no further introduction for you readers - became the first Black female artist to top country & western charts with ridiculously catchy single, “Texas Hold ‘Em”.
So…talk about amazing timing for our latest drop, Season 2 Episode 8: “Banjos, violins and shamisens: Untangling strings and cats!”.
We clearly were connecting to the zeitgeist by exploring the rumor that stringed instruments were made of cat gut. Which, [spoiler alert] …
…
_..---...,""-._ ,/}/)
.'' , ``..'(/-<
/ _ { ) \
; _ `. `. < a(
,' ( \ ) `. \ __.._ .: y
( <\_-) )'-.____...\ `._ //-'
`. `-' /-._))) `-._)))
`...' hjw…
They are not. It’s goats. This is the #cat-goat-connection we’re talking about.
But I digress.
At first blush, one might wonder what the heck Beyoncé and, well, the banjo have to do with each other, let alone cats. (I mean, Beyoncé is a fierce Leo - we’ll be talkin’ about them in a future season, don't’ you know it! - but she doesn’t have a cat, she has a dog. We know it’s just a matter of time before she sees the kitty light and her shih tzu gains a feline friend, but for now, that seems to be the case.)
I digress again, sorry.
So to continue - it could be said that all pop music is rooted in the Blues (which we discussed in Season 2 Episode 7, Cool Cat: How Cats Are the Soul of Rock 'n' Roll).
The Blues, as we know, was created by and for people who were forcibly trafficked to the American-side of the hemisphere and enslaved by land and business owners of Dutch, Portuguese, British and other Western European backgrounds and companies. From the creators of those spirituals sung by these enslaved laborers in their homes and in the fields, songs to sublimate the unspeakably inhuman labor conditions they endured - descended the cool cats of blues and jazz, which birthed “cool culture” featuring these “cool cats” - an aesthetic, lifestyle and branding which now informs almost every angle of marketing and pop culture in this modern, globalized culture.
As journalist Holly George-Warren helped us understand, this genre of music empowered and was led by Black - and often, queer and/or femme musicians. From Ma Rainey - a huge influence on Janis Joplin - to Big Mama Thornton (Elvis’ muse) - to Sister Rosetta Tharpe (as our guest, blues rocker Malina Moye named, a creator of rock ‘n’ roll) - these folks joined luminaries Chuck Berry, Little Richard and paved the way for the mostly white, mostly male musicians who appropriated the style, looks and sound of the music catalyzed through the guitar - which took over from brass instruments’ role in jazz and big band to drive the melody for this dance-based music.
We hope you had a chance to check out the YouTube playlist of those artists that we curated around the musicians we name checked. (Note: all the music in the episode was mixed and composed by yours truly, as we lacked resources to license the actual songs for the pod. Yes, fair use but also, it’s a lot trickier than you might imagine.)
Now, in our follow-up episode - Season 2 Episode 8’s “Banjos, violins and shamisens: Untangling strings and cats!” - we spun off on an instrument that tells a similar story, but somehow was left out of the “cool” culture.
We’re talking about the banjo - borne of those enslaved originals, itself parented by a West African instrument whose structure and make were remembered and reproduced.
Which is a damn shame!
The banjo is both an incredible instrument AND cultural artifact.
As we explored in this episode, this round, relatively light stringed instrument about as long as your wingspan from fingertip to fingertip, tells a story both of its makers and the songs (blues, folk) - and the very story of America itself.
Through the actual build of the banjo we learned via Hannah Mayree and their colleagues at the Black Banjo Reclamation Project about the makers’ journey from West Africa, and appreciated the ingenuity and resourcefulness of those makers.
Makers who managed to recreate an instrument of resonance (pun intended, banjoists among ye!) that honored an instrument of their home country - without blueprints, raw materials or tools. One that they could reproduce from generation to generation. And one that is quite a technical instrument! As a guitarist, I’d have to up both my right and left hand skills to approach the dexterity, deftness and lightness required to coax a cogent tone out of a banjo. I feel like if you play violin, you may be better positioned to pick up the banjo faster. In fact, this is off the top of my head but I think the violin and one version of the banjo have similarities in the stringing. (Someone else fact check that and get back to me - I’m knee deep in other research right now. Let’s call it an “audience engagement campaign”.)
So anyway. The banjo rocks. And when we hear the banjo in “Texas Hold ‘Em” - not only is it rightfully played by a Black banjoist - the multi-instrumentalist and folk luminary Rhiannon Giddens - it’s more true to the spirit and historical roots of country & western than many, if not most, of the works on those charts.
But again - why does it lack the pastiche of the guitar? Or the “class” of the violin?
Class is the watchword, folks.
Our episode posited some theories as to how the banjo went from - as banjo historian Tony Thomas had written, Queen Victoria’s favorite instrument - to an instrument coded with poor white people in Appalachia and all the unfortunate and inaccurate stereotypes. Poor people who would supposedly resort to using an animal as absurd as a domesticated cat as raw material. (The stigma of which…as much as we dislike personally that concept, is relative and culturally coded. It’s complicated. We talked about that a bit…so much nuance, gah!)
And this cat connection coincides with another folk instrument that traveled and evolved on the other side of the world.
That would be the shamisen. Another instrument made of a skin with strings. The shamisen, like the banjo, is rooted in another continent, whose makers stopped off at a tropical island en route to its current iteration - in this sentence, from China via the Ryukyu Kingdom (contemporaneously, Okinawa). And as with the banjo, it carries a kind of cat-gut related stigma for reasons related as well to class. Specifically, caste. We will make a transcript available shortly as we know several Japanese words may not have been accurately transcribed by some of the players, but we wanted to clarify that the term you heard a lot to describe this caste is “buraku-min”. Note: If you research this caste and the history, you will surface another antiquated phrase you may surface if you research this caste, but we have chosen to refrain from publishing or reporting on it as it’s both horribly offensive and should not be used to describe members of this caste.
So again - cats?
Well, cat gut did come into play a bit for the shamisen (which we expand upon thanks to Dr. Keisuke Yamada’s great insight) but how did it even become a thing? You’ll have to listen in on the great chat with Joenne Dumitrascu, professional instrumentalist and composer, to learn about the origins of that word ;) Now it’s got me wondering why and how the violin dodged the stigma…I wonder if you, dear listener/reader, probably have the same hypothesis as I do about that! And Dr. Yamada’s specific research on the shamisen flagged that which we overlook - as in, the people impacted on the other side of a story, or a problem, on which we focus.
Again, we at 6 Degrees of Cats feel real pain when we think of cats in any state beyond happy, active life. And yet - by bravely going there to investigate the origin of “cat gut” and its connection to three seemingly disparate instruments - we found the knowledge connecting to so many themes and patterns of culture and history that we’ve explored in past episodes.
There was a LOT to pack into that episode. And write out here! But we hope this helps process the zoom out and then zoom in that we did in the past two episodes. We know that our rather extensive research has a lot of tangents that are so worthy of their own dedicated episodes - seasons - series - heck, careers! - and there are!
Because as y’all know by now - everything is connected.
CALLS TO PASSENGERS
…that’s you!
If you love what you’re listening to and want to make sure we stay afloat:
Sharing is caring! Send a text or post to you community about us using pod.link/6degreesofcats - easy to memorize! 🥰 Your cat / culture & history buff friends will thank you! If they don’t, that’s rude. You should always thank people for things. Anyway.
Click on the button on this note to pledge, once we get our business in order 🙂
Submit a glowing review of 6 Degrees of Cats on the platform on which you listen 😻
Email or DM a podcast critic or pop culture newsletter shouting us out 🤩
Post about us (downloadable social media visual here!) on your platform of choice 🥹
CAPTAIN’S BOOTY
When I have sponsors, they’ll be named here too with special links. For now:
We are trying Catalyst Pet Litter which is clumping but naturally pine scented - because apparently, you’re basically fossilizing cat poo and pee if you use clay litter and we can all do our part to minimize our ecological impact. Who am I kidding - it’s the fossil fuel industry. But whatever, anything to get rid of the dusty and gross perfume-y smell. As I was saying - here is an affiliate link that you can use to give me $20 and you a 55% discount!
Spring is upon us! It’s kitten season…join the effort to curb cat teen moms!
Thanks again y’all. MORE SOON!
🐾 Captain Kitty, Binky and Snuggles