RacketCast – Details, episodes & analysis

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 advertise@racketmn.com.

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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 advertise@racketmn.com. Special thanks to local band Van Stee for supplying our podcast music!

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Depending on who ask, St. Paul educator/social media star Mandi Jung is either "the fun teacher" who cares deeply for her middle school students (that's according to HBO's John Oliver). Or she's the "anti-capitalist teacher [who] promotes anarchy" (that's according to Fox News).

We absolutely loved chatting with Jung, who regularly shares her funny and heartfelt insights into education, politics, and culture with her 158K TikTok followers.

"I'm like the queen of freak teacher TikTok," Jung says with her infectious laugh.

Wanna advertise on RacketCast? Email us at advertise@racketmn.com. Special thanks to local band Van Stee for supplying our podcast music!

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

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 advertise@racketmn.com. 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 advertise@racketmn.com. 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 advertise@racketmn.com. Special thanks to local band Van Stee for supplying our podcast music!

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

In this edition of RacketCast, get to know Racket’s first-ever Picked to Click winner: Papa Mbye!

A terrific new album, Parcelles 16, helped vault the Senegal-born, Minneapolis-based musician to the top of the poll, and deservedly so. The music he makes—drawing from rap, electronic music, and indie rock—would have been unthinkable when the original P2C launched in 1991, and he’s only getting started. But now, as a Picked to Click winner, 25-year-old Mbye is already an indelible part of Minnesota music history.

Speaking of that history, Keith and Jay begin the episode with a "Remember Some Guys?" speed round of past Picked to Click winners, spanning back to when the best-new-band poll first appeared in City Pages.

And, at the very end of the pod, enjoy the Parcelles track "SENEGAMBIA."

Wanna advertise on RacketCast? Email us at advertise@racketmn.com. Special thanks to local band Van Stee for supplying our podcast music!

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What were the biggest, strangest, buzziest, most important, least important, and/or riffiest Minneapolis politics stories of 2024?

Glad you asked! Because that's more or less what we posed to John Edwards, Taylor Dahlin, and Jason Garcia of Wedge Live!, a collection of folks who pay as close attention to such matters as anyone in town. They teed up eight topics, and we knocked 'em all down together as a roundtable of townie pundits. If you like what you hear, be sure to check out the guest-packed Wedge Live! podcast, which drops weekly via your preferred pod app.

Oh, and here are the two Racket articles referenced by Jay: "Bob Kroll Is a Professional Burger Boy Now" and "‘I Don’t Get Off On It’: Meet Will Stancil, the MN Man Caught In a Perpetual Twitter Fight."

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

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

Did you that co-owner/editor Keith Harris is the only regularly published movie critic in all of Minnesota? Sounds wild, but we believe it to be true! As such, movies are a big part of the equation over here, though we've never addressed them via the podcast medium. To remedy that, we enlisted a silver-screen freak you know and love: Racket super-commenter Taco Mike!

Enjoy over an hour of Keith, Em, and Taco Mike discussing, debating, and, when it comes to the contested value of Kevin Costner, dueling throughout this year-end ep. There's agreement (Argylle stinks), there's disagreement (Joker: Folie à Deux... doesn't stink?), there's plenty of chatter devoted to whether movies are sexy enough these days.

Be sure to check out Taco Mike's movie podcast, I Can't Believe You Made Me Watch That. And here are links to the stories riffed on at the top of the episode: Park Point Break: Cargill vs. Duluth; Keith & the Train; Gun Bingo!

Subscribe to RacketCast wherever you get your podcasts—Spotify, Apple Music, Pocket Casts, etc. Wanna advertise on RacketCast? Email us at advertise@racketmn.com. 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.

Happy Lizz Winstead Day!

Minnesota comedy great Lizz Winstead is a legend of lefty media, having co-created Comedy Central's Daily Show as well as Air America Radio. Every holiday season, Winstead returns home for a show that recaps the year that was. And folks? Good god... what a year we've had in 2024. "Lizz Winstead’s Project 2024: This Super Weird Year In Review" will hit the Parkway Theater in south Minneapolis for two nights—Dec. 28 and Dec. 31—and before that Winstead was kind enough to drop by RacketCast to riff on Trump 2.0, the so-called manosphere, and her career in showbiz.

Learn more about Winstead's group, Abortion Access Front, here; buy tickets to her year-end Parkway shows right here.

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

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