rant · moment 13 of 24
Reading the Room and America's Rotic Accent History
from Kurt Metzger · #135
Audio-only archive episode — no video to seek.
4 minKurt explains the skill of reading a crowd before pushing new material, then they veer into a tangent about how American accents preserved older rhotic pronunciation while British aristocracy drifted into a new posh accent that trickled down.
- 34:26Tim describes bombing a fourth show after three great headlining sets because he gets cocky and loses the audience's trust.
- 35:10Bobby Collins advised him to be in the moment and let the audience come to him rather than going at them too hard.
- 35:43Crowds at Governor's in Long Island, where Tim grew up, are demanding retired cops who won't give him the benefit of the doubt.
- 36:21The country feels fractured and politically crazy now, but the political tension is boring compared to how it used to feel interesting.
- 36:38Everyone online talks about heading toward civil war, but Tim points out it'll only ever be online because millennials can't actually do anything.
- 36:57In real life, nobody cares about the political division unless you live in coastal cities like LA or New York.
- 37:13Coastal elites create the new cool trends that trickle down through the entire food chain of culture.
- 37:24Tim explains that during Revolutionary times, Americans spoke with a "Rotic" accent, pronouncing Rs clearly, which was closer to American than British.
- 37:44British royals and the upper class started adopting a more regal accent with sounds like Castilian Spanish that eventually became the standard.
- 38:07Americans didn't lose a British accent—the British lost their American accent by adopting a different trend, which is why modern royal accents split off.
Bobby CollinsLong Island