The Almost Unbearable Weirdness of NPR's Terry Gross

It's that whole stink of precious class consciousness...and now we can hear nothing else.

The traffic in California will kill you if you’re not careful. You’ve listened to all of the best 10,368 songs of your life courtesy of Shuffle, the Spotify algorithm is wearing thin, and so: public radio. It keeps the mind engaged, while warding off various road rages.

And while it’s easy to not pay attention to Fresh Air — the shows are an hour long and unless your commute’s an hour long, you’re never all in — there’s that kind of church cool that Terry Gross brings to it that…well there’s a reason she’s been doing it as long as she has.

So you listen. Especially, as it so happens, if you’re also in the business of interviewing people.

Not for tips or tricks. But how many interviewers does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Ten. One to do it and nine to stand around and say “I coulda done it better.”

So, yeah: that.

I’m just mystified about the times when she’s bad and wonder how she could be so very, very bad…still.

She gets braced by KISS’s Gene Simmons. Score one for her. Victory from the jaws of defeat. She gets slapped back by Lou Reed who tells her in response to some question that was an attempt at being clever, “hey Terry…I’m just trying to make the rent.” Let’s call that a tie. Her clear antipathy when interviewing Natalie Portman? Excusable: Portman’s perfect enough to knock anybody off of their game. So: No Contest.

Leaving us with…the losses. Losses that start to weigh heavily on any listener of note. Which I hadn’t been until I had a reason to be.

The year was 2007. Harper Collins had just published my book Fight: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Ass Kicking But Were Afraid You’d Get Your Ass Kicked for Asking. Gilda Squire, head of PR at Harper at the time, had convinced me that radio converted insofar as book sales were concerned. I figure I was a fit for Fresh Air and started listening with an ear toward an eventual spot.

That’s when I heard it.

And I don’t know, even now, how to fully describe what I heard. But it was a vocal twist that reminds me of a line from Tom Segura’s stand-up bit when he talks about the curious condescension that kicks in when we deal with disabled people. Shifting to a characterization of a guy in a wheelchair who’s responding to a somewhat stilted but patronizing “heeeelllooo…” from a passerby, “Yeah, hi. You know I’m not a child, right? I just can’t fucking stand up!”

It’s that. And in the case of Terry Gross it only kicks in…sometimes.

Like: Loretta Lynn. Or any African American over a certain age. Or clearly out of her class convoy. The othering inquiry that makes it clear to all with ears to hear that Jane is going to do her best to communicate with Tarzan and bring back the good news to all and sundry in the civilized world.

It’s maddening and once you hear it, you can’t stop hearing it.

“What did this song mean to you when you sang it?” She queried Aretha Franklin about the song “Respect”.

“I mean, really part of the backdrop of this song — it was a hit during the civil rights movement. And I think, you know, respect had a lot of meanings in this song for your listeners. One was, you know, just the respect you wanted from a man and a relationship. But it also had, I think, a larger resonance with the civil rights movement — you know, a kind of larger, social, cultural sense of respect.”

Thank you Dr. Gross.

Class is tonality. Class is timbre. Class is a word choice and a pronunciation of that chosen word that sends a message in Richters…

In Ferris Bueller’s Day Off when Matthew Broderick takes his car to a parking garage and he runs into the parking garage attendant played by the underrated Richard Edson (fun fact: former drummer for Sonic Youth) he asks Edson if he speaks “ENGLISH”.

Edson responds, “What country do you think you’re IN?”

And that’s it.

While they’re trying to call it “code switching” now what it really might be is speaking as you’re being spoken to and it’s a skill, but not an especially hard one, and one that completely fails if done from a vantage point of your reasonable surety that you wouldn’t be understood because whoever you’re talking to lacks the discernment to do so. And also wouldn’t get that you’ve done so.

Like when it’s assumed that someone Asian might not speak english. Or someone Latino. And if they do speak it they do so as a second language. Or…how about this: how men sometimes talk to women?

So…“heeeelllooo…”

In the end I never get on Fresh Air with my Fight book. I do, however, get on Farai Chideya’s News & Notes on NPR with my Fight book.

As I remember it, she spent the entire 11 minutes sort of trying to make fun of me for having written it, and then when it became clear that our senses of humor differed, spent the rest of the time trying to deride fighting, or self-defense, as the purview of the intellectually stunted.

It’s NPR, so I get it. However at no point did I feel moved to ask Chideya what country did she think she was in.

Chideya eventually lost her show. But Gross soldiers on. Mostly because when she’s good, she’s very, very good.

But I’m just mystified about the times when she’s bad and wonder how she could be so very, very bad…still.

I think it has everything to do with America’s inability to be honest about class. We’re both aggressively honest and aggressively dishonest about race in America but we lie like rugs about class (see: The Trump Presidency).

Class is tonality. Class is timbre. Class is a word choice and a pronunciation of that chosen word that sends a message in Richters: we might live next door to each other but we’ll never be in the same neighborhood.

So, ok.

Every now and again if I’m stuck in traffic I’ll move the needle down to Fresh Air. And every now and again Terry Gross will still hit it. But I now know when she won’t and when she doesn’t, I can’t listen any more. Tone deafness does that to me, and probably just about anybody else with pitch perfect enough to make these kind of misses painful to hear.

Yeah, so, how many interviewers does it take to interview Ta-Nehisi Coates again?

Still: 10.

One to do it right and nine to stand around and say “I coulda done it better.”