Can you walk me through the process of realizing that you wanted to make Pop Pantheon—that you wanted to start a podcast—and figuring out what it would be about?
I worked as a professional DJ my entire adult life starting from when I was 21, and I had done freelance music criticism. I wasn’t particularly prolific, but it was something I was always interested in, and I consumed a lot of music criticism. When the pandemic hit, my DJ career collapsed completely. I lost all my work, and my whole career basically vaporized.
I had the thought of, “Should I start a podcast,” but who hasn’t had that thought? I would spend some time daily poking around in the New York Times Popcast’s Facebook group, and I’d had this idea of a system of tiers. It was just something I like to debate with my friends: “If there’s tiers of pop stardom, who’s in that top tier?” One day in the Facebook group, I posted that. It sparked a huge debate that went on for days, and it got hundreds of comments, and I realized there was something there that people really liked talking about.
I can’t remember exactly how I went from that to, “Let me actually turn this into a podcast,” but it just connected, and pretty soon afterward, I decided to start the show. It was a combination of stumbling into a conceit that had an angle and a construct to it and me just stumbling around, feeling really lost, looking for what the next thing would be, and knowing that music was my passion. I wanted to find something to turn my knowledge and fascination with talking about music into something creative.
I’ve always been someone who really enjoys consuming music podcasts. This is corny, but I wanted to make the podcast that I wanted to hear. What I was looking for was really high-level, smart, fun, lighthearted debates about pop stars. I felt like there were podcasts that hit on that in varying degrees, but I had a vision of what that would look like as a fan of pop music and pop podcasts. I had a concept for what the podcast would be that I would be the most interested in hearing as a fan.
What skills did you have to learn to start being able to podcast? What did you already know?
Without knowing it, for years, I had been preparing myself for this because I listened to a lot of podcasts, and I really knew what I liked, what I didn’t like, what I was looking for in terms of how professional I wanted it to sound, and how structured I wanted the interviews to be. But I had to learn a lot of technical things.
For the first year of the show and maybe even longer, I did every aspect of it completely on my own, from conceptualization to reaching out and booking guests, preparing myself, preparing them, conducting and recording the interview, and editing and releasing the show. I had to learn everything from how to speak into a microphone correctly to—editing was one of the biggest technical learning curves. I still edit numerous episodes of the show, so it’s a skill that really helped me become my own podcasting studio. I didn’t have any money to do this. I didn’t have capital to spend on anybody helping me, so it had to be a one-man show. I learned how to edit, and then, of course, the skill of interviewing people.
When I first started I was like, “I finally have this place where I can say everything I want to say.” I sometimes go back and remember those early episodes, and I’ll just cringe and want to die, because I’ll think about how much I would cut the other person off or be looking for vehicles to talk. One thing that’s really shifted in my approach is, I’m there to facilitate a conversation, let the other person express their ideas, learn from what they’re speaking about, and really let them cook.
A big skill of mine was learning how to interface with the people I’m speaking with. Sharing my ideas, but also giving guests a platform to share theirs, and to learn from them. The craft of interviewing, especially over longform, has been a long-gestating skill for me. When I’m conducting interviews, especially for our main episodes—which are very, very long, and both people come in with a lot to say and a lot of research—you want to get to everything, but you also want to keep everything moving and get it all done in a reasonable amount of time.
At what point did you have the realization, “I shouldn’t be doing this all myself. I need help from Russ [Martin, producer]”? Was Russ someone you knew or someone you found?
It happened about a year into making the show. I was feeling completely overwhelmed. The process of making Pop Pantheon is incredibly involved. It’s a high-wire act because it’s not just the podcast—it’s two people sitting down to catch up. There’s a lot of planning and research, and the episodes are very diligently edited because they’re so long. I was very concerned with making sure this is compelling content and not boring to people. I was drowning.
At the beginning, just from the skills I was learning, I was dedicated to building it, and that got me through, but I hit a wall. When I first was looking for somebody, I didn’t have any money. The show didn’t make a red cent until we launched our Patreon about a year and a half ago. I said on air that I wanted to pay someone. I had a couple hundred dollars to spend a month and I was like, “Can somebody come in for a grand total of five hours a month to just take a few little things off of my plate?” Just so that instead of fully drowning, I was slightly head above water keeping this thing on track.
I didn’t know Russ, but the first time Pop Pantheon ever got mentioned on another podcast was on a show called DUNZO!. [Russ] had heard Pop Pantheon and recommended it to [Troy McEady, DUNZO! host], who’s been on Pop Pantheon now numerous times. [Russ] emailed me like, “I mentioned you on DUNZO!. I’m a big fan.” His tenacity and thoroughness, from the beginning…he wrote me this email with all these thoughts and ideas about how the show could grow, how much he wanted to be part of that, and how passionate he was.
We clicked instantaneously. It is the easiest relationship I have ever had in any area of my life. We are yin and yang. We’re similar in all the right ways, we’re different in all the right ways. Our value systems are very similar, so we work seamlessly. I needed Russ more than I even knew, and he just appeared. Literally, I would die for him. I’m not kidding. The show would not be where it is today without him. That is a solid fact.
Are your guests for the podcast friends, or are they strangers whom it feels intimidating to reach out to? How do you get through any anxiety around that?
One of my close friends is Lindsey Weber, the host of Who? Weekly, which is a large show, and she’s very ingratiated in the world of New York media, so through her, I knew a few people. Lindsay was a great mentor in terms of starting the show. She appeared on the show in the third episode or so, and once she got on the show, that opened a lot of doors because people would see she had been on the show. Soon after, I reached out to Jia Tolentino, who I didn’t know personally, but I was in one degree of separation from [her] in a lot of circles. She was completely gracious. Maybe one episode had come out, and she agreed to be on it.
I’m good at putting myself out there. I had spent six or seven years developing a television series about my life as a DJ prior to the pandemic, and I had shot a pilot and raised all the money for it by myself. I learned a lot through that process about what it takes to make a creative project happen and how much you have to just get over it and go for it. I remember when I was raising money, my therapist said something like, “When you ask somebody to do something, you don’t have to take responsibility for their answer. They’re all grownups who can say yes or no. You’re not walking up to anybody with a gun to their head and saying, ‘You need to be on my podcast.’”
By the time I started Pop Pantheon, I was like, “I’m going to go for it.” We still take that approach, and we still get ghosted and turned down by people all the time, but you miss all the shots you don’t take. Because I didn’t shy away from it, I caught some good breaks early on. Once Lindsey, Jia, and Lindsay Zoladz had done it early on, I think other people in the media sphere, which is a very tight-knit community, saw that other credible people had done it and were also open to doing it.
How did you learn how to create a TV show?
I’m the type of person that just goes for stuff. Even when I’m terrified, and I often am, I just do it anyway. In my twenties, one project I did for a while was this semi-fictionalized short story series called Trapped In The Booth. I was pulling the curtain back on DJing and nightlife and telling stories that dissuaded people from the idea that DJing was this glamorous, rockstar lifestyle and exposing some of the embarrassing aspects of being a working-class local DJ.
I got it in my head that it should be a TV show. I was studying acting a bit at the time. I wanted to find a way to grow the project and express myself in new ways. I spent a long time developing the show, a pilot script, and a series bible, and I got it in my head that I had to do a lot on my own if I wanted to get attention as a non-celebrity trying to get a TV show together. I decided to do the most I possibly could to prove myself. That spiraled into, “I’m going to make this pilot by myself, and I’m not going to do it in a shitty way. I’m going to try to pull together something amazing.” I learned how to do it just by having the insane chutzpah to try.
Eventually, as with all creative projects, collaboration came into play. When it really got magical is when I realized the real juice is not just me and my little egotistical vision of this. It’s what can come out of the collective. It was way bigger than I could have ever imagined. It was a life lesson. What came out of that was so much grander, and it was so beyond what I could have envisioned because it ended up not being just my thing. The experience of making it was the best thing I’ve ever done and prepared me for things I didn’t know it was even preparing me for in terms of how to make creative projects.
You mentioned collaboration a decent amount. I don’t immediately see DJing, writing, or music criticism as collaborative, and I say that as somebody who was previously a music critic. I’m curious to hear about any collaboration or lack thereof in those realms and how that’s shaped your creativity.
DJing was very non-collaborative. I spent a lot of my twenties viewing myself as a lone wolf. I was very much a loner, and DJing lent itself to that. I didn’t have a day job. A lot of people around me had opposite schedules and lifestyles from me. I also didn’t get into DJing because I loved to party. I was like, “I love music, and I’ve got to find a way to use that to make money,” so that was how I got into it.
Being in the DJ booth was an interesting experience of being both among a lot of people and separate from everybody, which, at the time, I really liked. I don’t think I went out to a nightclub of my own volition more than a dozen times throughout my entire twenties, even though I worked in them four nights a week. My life was very solitary and non-collaborative, and I started to burn out on that. I started to feel super lonely and stuck in that loneliness, and that my career and creative endeavors were hindered by how walled-off my life was.
I remember hitting a phase where I wanted other people in my life, and I didn’t know how to do that. Making Trapped In The Booth, the TV show, was truly a transformative exercise in what can come when you let your guard down, let your walls out, and let other people in. Magic can happen that’s greater than every individual person when you come together. Once I had that experience, I was like, “Collaboration is kind of my shit now.” Every major project in my life right now could not be happening without everybody else that’s involved in it.
It seems like you haven’t been doing as much writing and music criticism. I was curious why that is.
Frankly, it’s that I do not have a free fucking second in my entire life. My life is incredibly busy. Making Pop Pantheon is an absolute full-time job. It requires so much work. Add on top of that DJing, traveling for DJing, which I do sometimes multiple times a month…I have such a busy schedule that my time has become incredibly precious and valuable to me, and I don’t have the time to be pitching.
I have an entire platform where I can speak about music. I don’t have anything left to say about any of it. I’m talking all the time about my opinions on music. I’m not needing writing as an outlet at the moment.
That’s everything I wanted to chat with you about today, but if you had anything else you wanted to say, I’ll give you the floor.
The number-one thing I have always needed to hear that has been really helpful to me in starting your own projects—because starting projects is really, really hard—is that what separates people who have their own creative projects and make it happen and people that don’t is literally just the act of doing it. I always try to encourage anybody who is starting something, embarking on something—it’s scary creating something out of nothing. And the impostor syndrome—I’ve experienced all those things all the time. The only thing that has gotten me through it, and the only reason I have my projects and I’ve stumbled into some that are doing well, is because I’ve done it anyway.
I really encourage people to start something. I’ve experienced this myself in terms of fear that I’m not the one, I’m not talented enough, I don’t have the right connections…Find a way to do it anyway and get over that stuff as much as you can. Nobody starts as an expert in anything. I go back and listen to early episodes of Pop Pantheon now, and I’m like, I can’t even believe it, but I’m so happy I started somewhere.
I really encourage anybody that has the idea, and they have that spark of excitement around a project and they feel the passion for it—just go for it. You can make crazy shit happen if you just keep going. That’s been a big lesson in my life. That’s been my main thing with creativity.
DJ Louie XIV Recommends:
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“Countdown”
“Formation”
“Upgrade U”
“Heated”
“Crazy in Love”
This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Max Freedman.
Max Freedman | Radio Free (2024-11-26T08:00:00+00:00) Podcaster, DJ, and writer DJ Louie XIV on going for it (even if you’re terrified). Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2024/11/26/podcaster-dj-and-writer-dj-louie-xiv-on-going-for-it-even-if-youre-terrified/
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