In a Metal Mood

SPEAKER_09: Pushkin. SPEAKER_22: The one thing we can never get more of is time. Or can we? This is Watson X Orchestrate. AI designed to multiply productivity by automating tasks. When you Watson X your business, you can build digital skills to help human resources spend less time generating offer letters, writing job recs and managing schedules, and spend more time on humans. Let's create more time for your business with Watson X Orchestrate. Learn more at ibm.com slash orchestrate. IBM. Let's create. SPEAKER_28: You can find inspiring stories almost anywhere. For instance, check out the co-founders of Girls Who Do Interiors. This Miami-based design company was started by three friends when they were still in school. And right from the start, they turned to Chase for Business for everything from banking and payment acceptance to credit cards. And they handled them all in one place with the Chase mobile app. It's so important to have that kind of help when you're just starting out. Learn more at chaseforbusiness.com. Make more of what's yours. Chase mobile app is available for select mobile devices. Message and data rates may apply. JP Morgan Chase Bank and a member FDIC. SPEAKER_07: From Pushkin Industries and Ruby Studio at iHeartMedia, Incubation is a new show about humanity's struggle against the world's tiniest villains, viruses. I'm Jacob Goldstein. And on this show, you'll hear how viruses attack us, how we fight back and what we've learned in the course of those fights. Listen to Incubation on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. SPEAKER_28: This episode contains explicit language. SPEAKER_09: You're listening to the smooth stylings of Patrick Charles Eugene Pat Boone, pop star of the 1950s, host of the Pat Boone Chevy Showroom, maybe the whitest, squarist rock musician of all time. In 1997, Pat Boone put out an album covering, among others, Judas Priest, Metallica, Ozzy Osbourne, Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple. SPEAKER_25: On the front of the album, Pat Boone looks out maniacally, or at least as maniacally SPEAKER_09: as he can, wearing only a black leather vest. SPEAKER_09: You can find the whole thing on YouTube. In a metal mood, no more Mr. Nice Guy. SPEAKER_10: I mean, all great songs that he's chosen and peckle. There's smoke on the water, a fire in the sky. SPEAKER_09: There's smoke on the water... Pat Boone performed an act of cultural appropriation, outrageous cultural appropriation. A square white guy, a middle-aged crooner walked in and shamelessly appropriated the heavy metal cannon. Here's my question. What should we make of that fact? How should we feel about in a metal mood? So I asked my friend Dave Hill. Dave is a metal aficionado, lead guitarist for Valley Lodge and Witch Taint, maybe the most metal band name ever. If you root around the internet, you can find some videos we've done together over the years. Which have literally hundreds of likes. We go to the same coffee shop. Say hello to Dave. SPEAKER_10: Well, The Devil's Interval is the beginning of metal, basically. It's the flat at fifth. SPEAKER_09: I assigned Dave in a metal mood as homework. Listen to it, break it down, report back to me. That's how this whole thing began. At the time he puts this out, he's 63. He's been a crooner. He's an evangelical Christian. He's been a crooner for 40 years. He's best known for sporting v-neck sweaters and khakis and topsiders. Not even topsiders, those shoes, those white bucks. That's what he does. I like a nice white buck. You couldn't have imagined a less metal pedigree than Pat Boone? SPEAKER_10: No, he's pretty not metal. But it depends how you define metal. SPEAKER_10: Musically no, but very metal in many other ways. Tell me what you mean by that. As far as committing to being a crooner, pretty metal. SPEAKER_09: Did you catch that? Pat Boone, pretty metal. My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. This episode is the official launch of my campaign to get Pat Boone into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. You're climbing aboard the Pat Boone train. Why? Because if there is ever a cultural figure who has been misunderstood and overlooked, who fits the literal definition of the Revisionist History mandate, it is Pat Boone. You think I'm joking. I'm so not joking. What follows is an argument in two parts. Part one, Pat Boone, no longer Mr. Nice Guy. Part two, Taco Bell. SPEAKER_23: It's very secure. This is like top secret. Rob's badge. Top secret. SPEAKER_09: Taco Bell is so important to my defense of Pat Boone that I traveled clear across the country to Irvine, California, to the international headquarters of Taco Bell and talked my way into their inner sanctum through double sets of security doors, all sorts of scanning of IDs. I feel like I'm in the CIA. Do you have retinal scan? Exactly. SPEAKER_23: For tacos. SPEAKER_09: They sit me down. They ply me with one delicious bit of fast food after another, including most memorably one of Taco Bell's top selling concoctions, the Naked Chicken Chalupa. Have you had this? SPEAKER_09: I have not. SPEAKER_32: Nobody was asking for this because it wasn't even, people didn't even comprehend this idea. That's really good. It's really good. It's really good. Yeah. SPEAKER_08: But it is one of those things you could never sit with consumers and they would say, you know what, I'd like you to make me this, right? SPEAKER_09: Where do we know what, so do we know where the idea for this came from? I mean, it's the bananas idea. Yes. We do. It's us. That bananas idea came from Taco Bell. Oh, and it was good. SPEAKER_09: Hold that thought. We're coming back to Taco Bell, but first Dave Hill and I have some work to do. SPEAKER_10: I skipped right ahead to Holy Diver by Dio and I was really impressed because that song, the original version, there's a minute and 20 seconds of just kind of ominous, like middle earth sounds. SPEAKER_09: Holy Diver might be the quintessential metal song. Dave Hill considers it Ronnie James Dio's masterpiece. SPEAKER_10: So, yeah, but even just the pure balls to be like, I'm going to make everyone wait a minute and 20 seconds before I even smack you around with one of the greatest metal songs of all time. And then I was like, well, Pat Boone doesn't have the balls to commit to that, but sure enough, he did. So right there, huge fan. SPEAKER_09: Track number eight on In a Metal Mood, right after Pat Boone's cover of Enter Sandman by Metallica. SPEAKER_16: Epic. SPEAKER_09: Simply epic. SPEAKER_09: This concern with Pat Boone's legacy did not start with me or Dave Hill. It started with another friend of mine, Bruce Hedlund, my oldest friend in the world. We met on the first day of first grade. Bruce, the producer, Rick Rubin and I are now partners on the Broken Record Music podcast, another epic Pushkin Industries production, which you should be listening to. Anyway, Bruce always had a bee in his bonnet about Pat Boone. I went to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, which I'd never been to. SPEAKER_04: And I went downstairs where it all kind of starts and you see these, you see exhibits like the precursors to Rock and Roll. And then you walk into what is probably the biggest part of the Rock and Roll Hall of SPEAKER_04: Fame and the most famous part, which is the Elvis section, how Elvis basically founded Rock and Roll. And I was kind of amazed. I went through it. I looked at all these exhibits. All I could think of was where is Pat Boone? SPEAKER_04: Now why would I be, why would I think where is Pat Boone? Well, Pat Boone had an amazing career before Elvis. And in fact, Pat Boone did a lot of the things Elvis did before Elvis did it. I mean, just by raw numbers alone. He was, Pat Boone was on the top 100 chart, the hot 100, I guess it's called, for I think 220 consecutive weeks. That record stood for I think close to 50 years. The only people who've been on longer were Lil Wayne and Drake. Lil Wayne, Drake. SPEAKER_09: And Pat Boone. And Pat Boone. That's our top three. The nominating committee for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is made up of rock music insiders, serious music people. They meet every September and have a day long debate about the 10 or 20 names that should be on the ballot for the upcoming year. The whole thing is secret, intense. There's lobbying, campaigning. I asked Terry Stewart about the process. He ran the Hall of Fame for 14 years. SPEAKER_05: I had some people that weren't very nice. People would back you against the wall in the corner. You motherfucker. You know, this sort of, all that sort of stuff. So it would go a lot, it could go dark, but you know, I understand that it meant a lot to these artists and I try to explain that there was a very methodical process. SPEAKER_09: So then I asked him, did things ever get dark over Pat Boone? There wasn't a lot of discussion about Pat Boone. Has he, we say, has he never even made the ballot? No. He's never made it out of that ballot that comes out of the room. Yeah. Now, if you know anything about popular music, you'll know why Pat Boone is persona non grata in Cleveland. It's because he made his name during the 1950s covering black R&B songs. A handsome young white guy just graduated from Columbia University and his record company has him doing these whitewashed versions of songs by people like Little Richard and Fats Domino. For music aficionados, the idea of Pat Boone as a serious musician is offensive. SPEAKER_05: But it took a lot of chutzpah to really even bring it up because of that feeling that he had stolen this music. The majority of the people involved always felt fairly strongly that it wasn't appropriate to have Pat Boone in the Hall of Fame. But that's the way it all, that's why he never made the ballot. It was discussed, but never made the ballot. And that's just the nature of the beast. SPEAKER_09: In other words, Pat Boone's album In a Metal Mood is not some weird one-off. It's what he does. He wanders into someone else's world and he takes their music. And that does not pass the smell test at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. But are they right? That's what Dave Hill and I were trying to figure out, which is why we sat in the studio together deconstructing Pat Boone's cover of Holy Diver. See, right away, when Dio sings about the tiger, you're like, that's a scary tiger. SPEAKER_10: Pat Boone is like, I'm not afraid of that tiger. Get over here, tiger. SPEAKER_09: So what's he doing here with this song? SPEAKER_10: I don't know. Like immediately you hear it and you're like, hey, has anyone seen the guy with the chicken skewers? I wanted to get some of those. Do you know what I mean? Like it's sort of an early cocktail party, corporate fundraiser scenario. SPEAKER_09: Pat Boone is the poster child for cultural appropriation. Now why does this make me think of Taco Bell? Because Taco Bell is the same thing for food. The bell in Taco Bell is not some reference to the classic bell towers in Spanish colonial architecture, el campanario. No, the bell in Taco Bell refers to Glen Bell of the Iowa Bells, a white guy who in the mid 1950s decided to open a fast food restaurant in San Bernardino, California. Glen Bell's Tacos, Taco Bell, it became a chain. Whenever he opened a new restaurant, Glen Bell would hire a mariachi band. On the cover of his biography, Taco Titan, Glen Bell of the Iowa Bells is wearing a sombrero. Glen Bell is Pat Boone, two white guys in the mid 1950s appropriating someone else's culture. So if we have a Pat Boone problem, we should also have a Taco Bell problem, which I'm not happy about, by the way, because I love Taco Bell. That was my moral quandary. Okay. So Laverne, we're going to start with Laverne Baker. I'm sitting around my dining room table with Bruce, Jacob Smith, my producer, and Justin Richmond, the producer of Broken Record. We decided to convene a cultural appropriation summit to figure out who is the appropriate appropriator. Bruce, a wasp from rural southwestern Ontario. Jacob, a half Jewish, half Catholic millennial from Long Island. Justin, a mixed race hipster from Long Beach, California. And me, Jamaica, Canada, England, whatever. I felt we needed to cover as many bases as we could. We're listening to Laverne Baker, an early R&B legend, perform Tweedle Dee in 1955. I'm as happy as can be. SPEAKER_00: Still good. Yeah. Very good. All right. SPEAKER_09: What's the other one? Georgia Gibbs. Which, by the way, if you do the search, comes up right underneath it. SPEAKER_09: Georgia Gibbs, by the way, Georgia Gibbs, his real name is Frida Lipschitz? Something like that. Frida Lipschitz from, I'm assuming, Brooklyn. Several years after Laverne Baker does the black version of Tweedle Dee, Georgia slash Frida does the white version. SPEAKER_00: Tweedle Dee, Tweedle Dee, Tweedle Dee Dee. I'm as happy as can be. Jiminy Crick, it's Jiminy Jack. You make my heart go clickety-clack. SPEAKER_19: Tweedle Dee, Tweedle Dee, Tweedle Dee Dee. SPEAKER_09: All right. What's the, compare those two versions. SPEAKER_04: Do I like the first one better? Yes. Are they almost identical? Yes. Did she lift the arrangements? Yeah, of course. SPEAKER_13: Second one's not so bad, actually. I can't, you know. SPEAKER_04: No, but it's precisely like the first one. It is. Laverne Baker actually famously had to take out flight insurance once she was on tour, and she named Georgia Gibbs as her beneficiary because she said, if the plane goes down, her career is over too. Amazing. That is, okay, so, are we agreed though that is, if you want a definition of cultural appropriation, SPEAKER_09: that's it. Next, we turn to Elvis. Everyone loves Elvis, right? Remember the last episode of season three of Revisionist History where I put Elvis on the couch and everything ended in tears? I love Elvis. Well, in his early years, a lot of Elvis's songs were written by a man named Otis Blackwell. He's black. SPEAKER_04: He was a songwriter. He wrote, probably his most famous song is Fever, which was a Peggy Lee song, later Madonna song, but he wrote Don't Be Cruel, All Shook Up, Paralyzed, Return to Sender. Here we are, yeah, yeah. SPEAKER_09: Great Balls of Fire, he wrote Great Balls of Fire? Yes, he did. Oh my God, the guy's a genius. Otis Blackwell writes the songs, then records a demo, gives the demo to Elvis. Ready? This is Elvis doing his version of Don't Be Cruel. SPEAKER_20: Okay, that's Elvis. SPEAKER_09: Now, this is Blackwell doing his version, the version that came first. He's performing it on an old episode of Late Night with David Letterman. SPEAKER_21: Oh my God. SPEAKER_09: It's the same song. As we're listening, Justin puts his head in his hands. I'm sorry, that's brutal. SPEAKER_13: I forget how bad it is every time I hear it. This is just Elvis. This is the king of rock and roll, the singer with his own vast dedicated room at the Hall of Fame. SPEAKER_09: Now, imagine how Otis Blackwell or any of the other black songwriters of that era felt about what Elvis did. They'd been asked to write a song for someone much more famous than they were. Fine. But what hurts is when a so-called genius takes the song that you wrote and that came out of your cultural community and doesn't change a lick of it. One Broken Heart for Sale, a hit song written by Otis Blackwell for Elvis in 1962. SPEAKER_29: Is that Otis? SPEAKER_09: That might be Elvis demoing the Otis demo. SPEAKER_09: That's Otis Blackwell. Did you guys think it was Elvis? Yeah. SPEAKER_13: I think that's Elvis demoing the... SPEAKER_13: Oh my God, that's Otis Blackwell. Wait, this is the perfect illustration of what we're talking about. SPEAKER_09: We're listening to a song on YouTube that's supposed to be by Otis Blackwell, and we have no idea whether it's Otis Blackwell or Elvis because Elvis has completely... Yeah. He's completely stolen this guy's sound. Maybe this is why not everyone out there likes Elvis as much as the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame does. People like Justin, a purist. On some level, he feels like it's his music that's being violated here. And immediately, Justin brings up Public Enemy and their front man Chuck D. Because I feel like Chuck D is the reason Elvis is so hated. SPEAKER_13: Yeah. In black America. Because Elvis was a hero to most, but he never meant shit to me because he's straight out racist, a sucker with simple and plain motherfucking men, John Wayne. Elvis was a hero to most. Elvis was a hero to most. Elvis was a hero to most, but he never meant shit to me. SPEAKER_13: I'm proud. Most of my heroes don't appear on no stamp. SPEAKER_09: Oh, Elvis. Let's take a break, and when we come back, we're going to eat some more Taco Bell. SPEAKER_22: The one thing we can never get more of is time. Or can we? This is Watson X Orchestrate. AI designed to multiply productivity by automating tasks. When you Watson X your business, you can build digital skills to help human resources spend less time generating offer letters, writing job recs, and managing schedules, and spend more time on humans. Let's create more time for your business with Watson X Orchestrate. Learn more at IBM.com slash orchestrate. IBM. Let's create. SPEAKER_09: This episode is brought to you by Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Choiceology is a show all about the psychology and economics behind our decisions. Each episode shares the latest research in behavioral science and dives into questions like, can we learn to make smarter decisions? Or what is the power of negative thinking? The show is hosted by Katie Milkman. She's an award winning behavioral scientist, professor at the Wharton School, and author of the best selling book, How to Change. Katie talks to authors, athletes, Nobel laureates, and more about why we make irrational choices and how we can make better ones. Choiceology is out now. Listen and subscribe at Schwab.com slash podcast or find it wherever you listen. SPEAKER_07: From Pushkin Industries and Ruby Studio at I Heart Media, Incubation is a new podcast about the viruses that shape our lives. It's a show about how viruses attack us and how we fight back. I'm Jacob Goldstein. And on incubation, we'll hear how scientists have pioneered new techniques in the fight against viruses. There was just something about the way the virus was shaped. SPEAKER_23: It always felt like there was no hope for creating a vaccine. SPEAKER_12: Until now. SPEAKER_07: Until now. We'll celebrate the victories, like the incredible story of how smallpox was wiped off the face of the earth. SPEAKER_27: Eradication means you have to get to whatever disease you're targeting everywhere, wherever it exists. SPEAKER_07: Listen to Incubation on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. SPEAKER_09: Glenn Bell was born in 1923, grew up in the Depression, was a hobo for a while, riding the rails, living by his wits. During the war, he was a steward for a Marine Corps general. And when the war was over, he came back to San Bernardino, California, and decided to open a hamburger stand. At first, tacos were just something that he added to the menu. He'd eaten them in the Mexican restaurants of Southern California and thought they were the perfect fast food. Easy to make and eat. Super cheap. Then he added refried beans. Then he dropped the burgers and fries altogether, and after a decade of stops and starts, he opened Taco Bell. Tacos, tostadas, frijoles, burritos, all for 19 cents each. By the late 1960s, Taco Bells are everywhere, with a standardized look. Slump stone brick, which looks a bit like adobe, red clay tiles on the roof, bell tower. Mexican food in a building straight out of Mexico. Taco Bell is as bad as Elvis. Except, have you ever been to a Taco Bell? Where are the carnitas? They don't have carnitas. Don't spill the beans. Way, way, way off the menu. So if you peek in, this is our um... SPEAKER_03: When I was in the test kitchen at Taco Bell's headquarters, the question of carnitas came up. SPEAKER_09: And they said that, for whatever reason, shredded meat doesn't work for them. Or mole. If you were ripping off Mexican food, if you wanted to be Elvis of Mexican food, you would have mole. But there's no mole at Taco Bell. Our brand is Mexican inspired, and it's just not familiar enough. SPEAKER_31: And if it's not familiar enough, again, in 30 seconds, we can't make it familiar to you. This is Rene Pechate. SPEAKER_09: We just can't, as much as we'd love to. What's hard about mole sauce, for example? Mole sauce. So first off, I think there's so many different types. SPEAKER_08: And this is Liz Matthews, head chef. SPEAKER_09: I think mole in general, especially a red mole, it's rich and earthy. SPEAKER_08: And I don't think that's something that people are familiar with, are ready. Another thing. We're the soft corn tortillas. SPEAKER_09: Nothing is more quintessentially Mexican than the traditional soft corn tortilla. There are no soft corn tortillas at Taco Bell. They tried it once. Mexican street tacos. What happened? We were getting a lot of calls from customers that they got a taco, but the shell was raw. SPEAKER_31: The shell was uncooked. They had no reference for a corn tortilla that wasn't deep fried. They had no idea what a soft, fresh corn tortilla was all about. It was a crisis. These were calls from Indiana. I just remember they started streaming in. I'm like, oh my god, people are worried that we're serving them uncooked food. There was no reference for it whatsoever. SPEAKER_09: Now, the Taco Bell guys weren't upset by that reaction. Their attitude isn't, oh, our customers have to get more sophisticated. No, to them it's just a reminder that they aren't in the business of making real Mexican food. That's not why people go to Taco Bell. I don't think people want to see authentic from us either. SPEAKER_08: They want the variations and different, I don't know, that's just not us. That's not who we are. We're inspired by it, but that's not what we're driven by. Taco Bell is an interpretation of Mexican food, a riff on Mexican food for people who don't necessarily think of themselves as people who eat Mexican food. SPEAKER_09: That's a very different game, and a harder game, by the way, because you have to find the familiar part of the unfamiliar and somehow make it seem new. If you were the Elvis of Mexican food, you wouldn't need a test kitchen, would you? If you're stealing something, why would you need to test it? You test what you invent. Case in point, the naked chicken chalupa. The inspiration came from Taco Bell's Heather Mottaschaw, one of the food scientists I was meeting with. I remember Heather said something like, Steve, what do you think if we made a taco shell out of chicken? SPEAKER_32: And I'm like, well, what are you talking about? And it was sort of like, well, you know, like chicken Milanese. So in my mind, I'm thinking like, literally like chicken Milanese pounded out chicken breast in that flavor profile. Thinking like, you're crazy, Heather, but what really comes out is, you know, she's probably onto something. SPEAKER_09: They ended up with a white meat chicken breast, deep fried in batter, molded into the shape of a taco and filled with lettuce, cheese, tomatoes and avocado ranch sauce. Did you have difficulty kind of convincing people? Absolutely. SPEAKER_08: We couldn't even describe it to each other at first. So how do you actually get that message across to consumers? So they're like, oh, I want to go in and try that. I mean, that was a pretty, a pretty big feat. SPEAKER_24: But that was part of the conundrum because we originally were talking about this as a crispy chicken taco. And when you called it a crispy chicken taco, people were expecting a taco shell, regular taco shell with a piece of crispy chicken inside. This is Heather of Naked Chicken Chalupa fame. SPEAKER_09: So it wasn't until we then converted and started to call it a chalupa, which is a more premium taco, SPEAKER_24: where consumers were like, oh, OK, I get it. SPEAKER_09: But even here, they're making things up. In Mexican cuisine, a chalupa is a deep fried masa dough pancake shaped to resemble a flat fishing boat. That's why it's called a chalupa. Chalupas are Basque whaling boats, small, wide bottomed, shallow sided. But in the Taco Bell universe, a chalupa is not a shallow boat anymore. It's a taco, a high sided boat. And it's naked? You're calling it a naked. What's the meaning of the word naked in that context? SPEAKER_08: It didn't have the shell. It's the protein, so it's naked. SPEAKER_09: OK. So I was wondering, like, where are you guys going with this? We just call everything naked. So what's interesting about this is that it's really conceptually a step outside of the traditional Mexican food. This is, we're no longer, this looks like a taco. It's not a taco. It's something else. SPEAKER_09: This is not the same as Elvis and Otis Blackwell, is it? Elvis appropriated the song Don't Be Cruel and also everything else. Otis Blackwell style, vocal tics, Elvis stole the song Soul. Taco Bell appropriated the taco, but not the taco's soul. They turned it into something that is about as far from a taco as humanly possible. By the way, I haven't even mentioned the craziest thing in the Taco Bell lab. It's for the Indian market, but they cooked one up for us. It's an Indian spiced potato latke in the shape of a taco filled with all kinds of delicious flavors. It's really spicy. SPEAKER_32: This spice is a little bit of a delay, so you might take a few bites, be like it's not spicy, and then it's going to catch up to you. I have many questions about spice. SPEAKER_09: Justin, do you want me to feed you? Justin. Justin Richmond. From the Cultural Appropriations Summit. Elvis doesn't mean shit to me. I brought him along as my sound tech, but he was holding microphones with both hands so he couldn't eat. And all this food was passing right under his nose, and we were getting concerned about his state of mind, especially the Taco Bell people. This was their professional responsibility, and they felt they were failing him. Do you want us to cut things up for you? SPEAKER_08: I'll just stash it, don't worry. You want me to hold the microphone? And now, I kind of have to take a foray into the Doritos Locos taco. SPEAKER_09: Taco Bell's taco where the shell is made out of a Dorito, which turns out to be this fantastically complicated engineering feat, because you have to simultaneously please the universe of hardcore Doritos fans and the universe of hardcore Taco Bell lovers. Did the lawyers have to get involved? There's like all this IP going on between Frito-Lay and Taco Bell. SPEAKER_08: I think I can tell the story, but I mean, the story really is, is there was a handshake. Yeah. SPEAKER_09: The CEO of Frito-Lay and the CEO of Taco Bell worked it out one on one. Taco Bell, born of San Bernardino, meets Doritos inspired by authentic Mexican tortilla chips, but actually created in its current form, as you may know, at a restaurant in Disneyland. SPEAKER_08: They did a handshake because they knew if we got everybody involved, we would never get this idea out the door, and we knew we had this magical thing, and we knew that that would not happen. There was like a summit? Did they meet in some secret location? SPEAKER_09: All the lawyers were like, what did you guys do? I mean, yeah. SPEAKER_08: It's probably on a golf course, let's be honest. SPEAKER_09: Maybe. SPEAKER_09: Taco Bell is not Elvis. Elvis could never have pulled off the Doritos Locos taco. SPEAKER_22: This episode is brought to you by Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. SPEAKER_09: Choiceology is a show all about the psychology and economics behind our decisions. Each episode shares the latest research in behavioral science and dives into questions like, can we learn to make smarter decisions, or what is the power of negative thinking? The show is hosted by Katie Milkman. She's an award-winning behavioral scientist, professor at the Wharton School, and author of the bestselling book, How to Change. Katie talks to authors, athletes, Nobel laureates, and more about why we make irrational choices and how we can make better ones. Choiceology is out now. Listen and subscribe at schwab.com slash podcast, or find it wherever you listen. SPEAKER_07: From Pushkin Industries and Ruby Studio at iHeartMedia, Incubation is a new podcast about the viruses that shape our lives. It's a show about how viruses attack us and how we fight back. I'm Jacob Goldstein. And on Incubation, we'll hear how scientists have pioneered new techniques in the fight against viruses. There was just something about the way the virus was shaped. It always felt like there was no hope for creating a vaccine. SPEAKER_12: Until now. Until now. We'll celebrate the victories, like the incredible story of how smallpox was wiped off the face of the earth. SPEAKER_27: Eradication means you have to get to whatever disease you're targeting everywhere, wherever it exists. Listen to Incubation on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. SPEAKER_07: I can't go on without one more moment from our Cultural Appropriations Summit, when we finally got to the matter at hand. SPEAKER_09: What's the best Pat Boone... Tutti Frutti. Let's do the two Tutti Fruttis. Yeah. So we'll start with Little Richard's Tutti Frutti. But the best Tutti Frutti fact I learned recently was that it's originally Tutti Frutti Good Booty. Good Booty. So funny. SPEAKER_21: Tutti Frutti. SPEAKER_09: Pat Boone comes along, the boy wonder, and should we do the live version of him? Oh boy. Let's go the live version. Just for fun. It's an old performance on Canadian television from the 1950s. Pat Boone looks like he flew in straight from a Boy Scout Jamboree. The video begins with a title card. So the caption, like pouring cream into coffee. Oh this is so good. Pat Boone lightened and sweetened R&B. And he made a smoothie out of Tutti Frutti. SPEAKER_21: Alright. Here's a gal that I love best. Tutti, Tutti Frutti. SPEAKER_09: He's completely on the beat. He doesn't go behind the beat. That's really the difference. SPEAKER_32: That's what all of them have done by the way. All the white versions have simplified the beat. SPEAKER_13: Like the beat feels a little more dense, a little more complex in the black versions. And the white version, it's like this is the one, two, three, four. You can't miss it. SPEAKER_09: Pat Boone did not copy Tutti Frutti. He made a smoothie out of Tutti Frutti. Years later, Little Richard did an interview with the music journalist Joe Smith. He wasn't happy. What he would do, he would take over the pop stations and they would kill me crossing over. SPEAKER_29: See, they would kill me crossing over. He would kill me because the white station would play him and they wouldn't play me. And so when you go in the record shop, you could find his, you couldn't find mine. SPEAKER_09: But Little Richard says that later, he changed his mind. SPEAKER_29: But really, it would be true when I looked back over, there was a blessing and a lesson because he opened doors for us. He made the white kids more aware of me because they want my version. That's what he says when I've been in here. He says, look, I opened some doors. He opened a whole lot of doors. Oh, he's a beautiful person. SPEAKER_09: When it works, cultural appropriation serves as the basis for something new. But it also widens the audience for the real thing. It's the way the original authentic idea moves into the mainstream. That's what my friend Bruce has been trying to tell us. The contrast here is with Elvis. I'm not blaming Elvis directly. SPEAKER_04: But he did a version of Hound Dog. Big Mama Thornton didn't then crash the pop charts afterwards with her version of Hound Dog or... Because there was no room for it. Because he'd already, he did it so well, there was no reason to go back and do the original. SPEAKER_09: Yes, and that's essentially the distinction I'm making. SPEAKER_04: Which is, if Elvis Presley is the Columbus, Pat Boone is the guy who landed in the New World and then went back to Europe and said, we should make friends with these guys. They've got great tobacco. He didn't show up and say, I'm taking over the contest. He's John the Baptist. Whereas Elvis pretends to be Jesus. SPEAKER_09: Elvis says, I'm the risen Lord. Pat Boone's not pretending to be the risen Lord. He's like, I'm just the guy preparing the way for the risen Lord. He is John the Baptist. SPEAKER_03: He's John the Baptist. And Taco Bell at the same time. Pat Boone, John the Baptist. SPEAKER_09: His handsome, wholesome, he's really handsome, he's a wholesome, he's a really nice guy. SPEAKER_02: There he is running to his mark right now. I think he's a nice guy. Ladies and gentlemen, Pat Boone. SPEAKER_09: In 1997, at the height of his metal period, Pat Boone went on the Easter Seal telethon. I got a bad reputation. You are a teenage sensation. And I don't know why. Apple on my eye. SPEAKER_15: I brush my hair, I brush my teeth, I go to church. Go to church. Man, I'm a really nice guy. SPEAKER_09: You're trying to tell me he doesn't belong in the Hall of Fame? SPEAKER_06: I used to be such a sweet, sweet thing till they got a hold of me. SPEAKER_09: Let's make this happen, people. Let's get Pat Boone on the ballot. Info at rockhall.org. That's info at rockhall.org. Then crank up a little inner metal mood on your phone. Order a naked chicken chalupa at the nearest Taco Bell. And ask yourself if the world is in a better place with the right kind of cultural appropriation. SPEAKER_09: Revisionist History is produced by Mia Labelle and Jacob Smith with Camille Baptista. Our editor is Julia Barton. Flawn Williams is our engineer. Fact checking by Beth Johnson. Original music by Luis Guerra. Special thanks to Carleen Migliori, Hedda Fain, Maggie Taylor, Maya Koenig, Jason Gambrell and Jacob Weisberg. Oh, and Justin Richman, who turned down Taco Bell in the service of his duty. And Bruce Hadlam, the brains behind this particular operation. Revisionist History is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. I'm Malcolm Gladwell. SPEAKER_09: What I saw coming back to Pat Boone. So he takes an absolutely iconic song and he does this jazz lounge. Can you give us a, can you try a little bit of a jazz lounge-y? SPEAKER_10: See, now, you know, as I attempt to do it, I'm also showing you what's great about Pat Boone. Because I can't emulate just the swagger and, you know, that. You can tell, like, he's got a bit of a tan. You can hear it in his voice. SPEAKER_11: See, I've just gone, taken it, you know, now we're at a coffee house on some strip mall. SPEAKER_10: Yeah, he's gone. So, this is interesting. What he's done is not, it's not a trivial accomplishment. SPEAKER_09: No. There's some, there's a degree of difficulty in what he's done here. Oh, yeah. No one can, you can't walk in off the street and do Pat Boone. No, no. You'd be a fool. You know, as much as you'd be a fool to think you could do a D.O., you'd be as, as, maybe as much of a fool to think you could do Pat Boone. SPEAKER_09: Malcolm Gladwell here. Let's re-examine employee benefits. With the Hartford Insurance Group Benefits Insurance, you'll get it right the first time. Keep your business competitive by looking out for your employees' needs with quality benefits from the Hartford. The Hartford Group Benefits team makes managing benefits and absences a breeze while providing your employees with a streamlined, world-class customer experience that treats them like people, not policies. Keep your workforce moving forward with group benefits from the Hartford. The Bucks got your back. Learn more at theheartford.com slash benefits. If the Caribbean is calling but your wallet is keeping you from answering, here's some great news. SPEAKER_26: Now you can get more sand for your dollar on your next all-inclusive beach vacation with the cheap Caribbean dot com Budget Beach Finder. Just set your price range and the Budget Beach Finder will show you the best deals across tons of different beach destinations. Easily compare vacay packages in Mexico, Jamaica, Punta Cana and more to find exactly what you're looking for at the best price possible. This year, Hyundai features their all-electric Hyundai IONIQ lineup as a proud sponsor of the iHeartRadio Music Festival in Las Vegas with two high-tech models. SPEAKER_01: The IONIQ 5 can take you an EPA-estimated 303 miles on a single charge and has available two-way charging for electronic equipment inside and outside the car. The IONIQ 6 boasts a mind-blowing range of up to 360 miles and can deliver up to an 80% charge in just 18 minutes with its 800-volt DC ultra-fast charger. Check out Hyundai at the iHeartRadio Music Festival in Las Vegas as their all-star IONIQ lineup hits the stage like you've never seen before. Hyundai, it's your journey. Pat Moon's not pretending to be the risen lord. He's like, I'm just the guy preparing the way for the risen lord. SPEAKER_09: He is John the Baptist. SPEAKER_03: He's John the Baptist. And Taco Bell at the same time. Pat Moon, John the Baptist. SPEAKER_09: His handsome, wholesome, he's really handsome, he's a wholesome, he's a really nice guy, there he is running to his mark right now. I think he's a nice guy. Ladies and gentlemen, Pat Moon! SPEAKER_09: In 1997, at the height of his metal period, Pat Moon went on the Easter Seal telethon. SPEAKER_25: I got a bad reputation. You are a teenage sensation. And I don't know why. Apple of my eye. I brush my hair, I brush my teeth, I go to church. Go to church. Man, I'm a really nice guy. SPEAKER_09: You're trying to tell me he doesn't belong in the Hall of Fame? I used to be such a sweet, sweet thing till they got a hold of me. SPEAKER_09: Let's make this happen, people. Let's get Pat Moon on the ballot. Info at rockhall.org. That's info at rockhall.org. Then crank up a little inner metal mood on your phone. Order a naked chicken chalupa at the nearest Taco Bell. And ask yourself if the world is in a better place with the right kind of cultural appropriation. SPEAKER_09: Revisionist History is produced by Mia Labelle and Jacob Smith with Camille Baptista. Our editor is Julia Barton. Flawn Williams is our engineer. Fact checking by Beth Johnson. Original music by Luis Guerra. Special thanks to Carleen Migliori, Heather Fain, Maggie Taylor, Maya Koenig, Jason Gambrell and Jacob Weisberg. Oh, and Justin Richman, who turned down Taco Bell in the service of his duty. And Bruce Hedlam, the brains behind this particular operation. Revisionist History is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. I'm Malcolm Gladwell. SPEAKER_09: What? I'm coming back to Pat Moon. So he takes an absolutely iconic song and he does this jazz lounge. Can you give us a... can you try a little bit of a jazz lounge-y... Holy Diver, you've been down too... SPEAKER_10: See, now, you know, as I attempt to do it, I'm also showing you what's great about Pat Moon. Because I can't emulate just the swagger and, you know, that. You can tell, like, he's got a bit of a tan. You can hear it in his voice. Yeah, yeah. SPEAKER_11: Holy Diver, you've been down too long in that midnight sea. Oh, what's becoming of me? SPEAKER_10: See, I've just gone and taken it... you know, now we're at a coffee house on some strip mall. He's gone... so, this is interesting. What he's done is not... it's not a trivial accomplishment. SPEAKER_09: No. There's some... there's a degree of difficulty in what he's done here. Oh, yeah. No one can... you can't walk in off the street and do Pat Moon. SPEAKER_10: No, no. You'd be a fool. You know, as much as you'd be a fool to think you could do D.O., you'd be as... as maybe as much of a fool to think you could do Pat Moon. SPEAKER_09: This episode of Revisionist History is brought to you by T-Mobile for Business. I've been a journalist for 40 years. The other day, I did a whole interview on my phone walking down the street. New ways of working are disrupting traditional patterns. But do you know what those new ways need? A technology partner who you can rely on to keep you connected. With T-Mobile for Business and the nation's largest 5G network, inspiration can strike from virtually anywhere. Now is the time to business bravely and start building your future today. Go to tmobile.com now to learn more. Malcolm Gladwell here. Let's re-examine employee benefits. With the Hartford Insurance Group Benefits Insurance, you'll get it right the first time. Keep your business competitive by looking out for your employees' needs with quality benefits from the Hartford. The Hartford Group Benefits team makes managing benefits and absences a breeze while providing your employees with a streamlined, world-class customer experience that treats them like people, not policies. Keep your workforce moving forward with group benefits from the Hartford. The Bucks got you back. Learn more at theheartford.com slash benefits. SPEAKER_09: Do you hear it? The clock is ticking. 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