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July 4, 2010

Dangerous Minds: the candy-coated bullet of the political screeds and other garbage from the mind of Richard Metzger


Dangerous Minds: the candy-coated bullet of the political screeds and other garbage from the mind of Richard Metzger


Over the next week or so, I’ll be posting about people or sites or algorithms that are making me intermittently optimistic about 2012. Today, it’s the archival site, Dangerous Minds, which I found in late 2010. (The site débuted in May of 2009.)

Anyone who grew up in record stores knows the cast: the guy who stood next to the register and talked, without surcease, to whoever was stuck behind the counter. The army-jacketed loafs who kept trying to shoplift the same album.

The girl who would walk in every day, ask for a single and then walk out, disgusted, until the record arrived. And the guy, sometimes older, who would walk up quietly during a pause in the not-very-active action and say “Have you ever heard…?” Invariably, whatever he was asking about was the most obscure thing you’d encountered that day.

Much better, some of these things were worth tracking down and learning from:

Sun Ra’s “Disco 3000,” the full-length version of Television’s “Little Johnny Jewel,” or Siouxsie and the Banshees’ cover of Ben E. King’s “Supernatural Thing.”


You’ll notice that the original 1975 seven-minute-plus version of “Little Johnny Jewel” isn’t on YouTube, and neither is the 1981 B-side version of Siouxsie’s “Supernatural Thing.”

(Both are on Spotify, though, and I’ve put them on this list, which will change throughout the year and attempt to hold your attention.)

But if they did show up on the Web, Dangerous Minds would find it before you.

Footage of Morrissey appearing on “Pop Quiz” in 1984, and knowing more about Billy Fury than any American would? Gone.

Deborah Harry playing trumpet with Blondie on German TV in 1977? Gone.

The site leans towards pop detritus from the seventies and eighties but also dips into political commentary and cultural zingers such as this fantastic video about a beauty product called “Fotoshop, by Adobé.” GONE.

What follows is an e-mail exchange with the site’s founder, Richard Metzger, edited and shortened for charity.

Who puts Dangerous Minds together, and what is everyone’s current (or previous) day gig?

I was the co-owner of a left-leaning book publishing and DVD distribution company called Disinformation (which I left in 2005). We released “OutFoxed” and documentaries like that. I hosted an underground culture show for Britain’s Channel 4 for a couple of years. I’d interview people like Robert Anton Wilson, Douglas Rushkoff, Grant Morrison, and Genesis P-Orridge and then do a mock “60 Minutes” type of piece where I’d investigate a conspiracy theory.

The segments played like documentaries directed by Christopher Guest but they were real, just about people who believed crackpot things. I was an advertising executive and then I worked at the Los Angeles Times on their ill-fated, now defunct competitor to the LA Weekly, Brand X.

Tara McGinley was a fashion stylist and Hollywood costumer from about 1997 to 2005, dressing people like Mila Kunis and rock groups like The Strokes.


Marc Campbell had a hit in the eighties with a song called “88 Lines About 44 Women” and owned some video-rental stores in Taos.

Paul Gallagher, who lives in Scotland, was a comics publisher and a stand-up comedian who now produces pop-culture documentaries for the BBC.

Niall Connolly, who is also based in the U.K., runs a record label, DJs, and is in a drag queen Joy Division tribute act called “Joyce Division.”

Brad Laner is a musician and producer who has worked with people ranging from Van Dyke Parks to Brian Eno. He used to have a band called Medicine in the nineties, whose back catalog is about to be rereleased.

Tara and I are married, and I know Brad Laner, but the rest of us have never met in person.

Is there an editorial mission for DM? How would you describe what you’re interested in?

Marc, Paul, and I write about pop culture that “men of a certain age” would know about, but for many younger readers, it’s stuff they’ve never been exposed to before.

One day Tara was talking to these two young guys we know—both of them as smart as you can possibly be, real otaku-types—and they were excitedly asking her how we heard about that totally amazing band, Devo, which they pronounced like “Da-voe”!

Tara has a particular knack for finding loopy stuff and viral videos before they go viral. Niall writes about new music and electronic music in particular. He contacted us one day and said, “What about covering the music you don’t read about in Mojo? I’m your man.” And so he was.

I can’t write about dance music. I don’t know the first thing about it. It takes a younger person than me to do that convincingly. We also don’t post about cyberpunk and techie stuff because it’s covered better elsewhere. We’re aware that our audience is largely a subset of Boing Boing’s vast readership, and we’re all friends, so we try not to “me too” them.

Being a “guest blogger” at Boing Boing, though, was a big impetus in starting Dangerous Minds.

I posted some ridiculous videos of Obama’s 2008 stump speeches played backwards, “exposing” supposed satanic messages. That night, Rachel Maddow ran a story about it, attributing it to Boing Boing, and the following morning, the Maddow clip was on Huffington Post. Tara and I were shocked to see how easily the news cycle could be influenced by an unshaven stoner in his pajamas who hadn’t left the house for a few days.

If there is a mission—for me at least, the others may feel differently—it’s to inject a Marxist/socialist political viewpoint in between the purely cultural stuff. It’s an editorial mix with vaguely defined parameters, but for me it’s all about the candy-coated bullet of the political screeds.

Big traffic comes from posts like the one about Sherman Hemsley (who played George Jefferson on “The Jeffersons”) and how he’s a big fan of the freaky prog-rock group Gong, but once readers arrive, they start to click around and read other things they might not get exposed to in their information diet otherwise.


What are your goals for Dangerous Minds?

I have always wanted to have a late-night television network for heads, like Adult Swim, but different. Do you remember “Night Flight” in the early eighties? Something like that.

It occurred to me when YouTube launched that it would be possible to launch a television “network” on the Web, with almost zero start-up costs, by simply curating it. You aren’t obliged to license anything: you can just link to it. I wanted to make the blog media rich—nearly every post has a video clip, you’ll notice—because I wanted to position us to be consumed easily by someone sitting on a couch with an iPad connected to a flat screen TV.

If you think of Dangerous Minds as a guide to a certain kind of culture, you can read the blog post for some context or to gauge if it’s something that would interest you. If you opt to play the clip, the site goes from being an active consumption of information to a passive one with one click.

The expert curating and spelunking that we do can be monetized within that emerging entertainment-consumption paradigm. We can sell banner ads against that content without actually licensing it. I’ve been working in the commercialized Internet since 1994 and YouTube (or something like it) was the missing piece of that equation. It’s only been around for five years, but it’s hard to remember what the Internet was like before it.

Before 2005, a Web site like Dangerous Minds would not have been possible.