Very Bad Wizards · Tamler Sommers & David Pizarro

Episode 319: The Shadow of the Object (Freud's "Mourning and Melancholia")

October 28, 2025·1 hr 35 min·5 clips

The Jay-Z versus Nas debate turns on 'Ether,' 'Where I'm From,' and who outraps whom.

1. Very Bad Wizards episode 319, 'The Shadow of the Object,' opens with Tamler Summers and Dave Pizarro talking about Taylor Swift's new album. 2. Tamler mentions his daughter, the assistant editor, while Dave calls himself the show's resident Swifty. 3. The Swift exchange turns on the line that 'everybody's talking about it' and whether sales can outrun criticism. 4. Dave compares the reaction to Messi having a bad game and asks whether one bad album changes a superstar's standing. 5. Tamler and Dave then set up a blind-ranking game with 10 rappers, where each name arrives without warning. 6. Dave immediately puts Ice Cube at 7 and calls 'No Vaseline' one of the greatest battle songs of all time. 7. Eminem lands at 6, and Dave praises his wordplay while saying he is less interested in some of the subject matter and the later 'rappity rap' style. 8. Nas gets number 1 because Dave still thinks Illmatic is the best rap album ever made. 9. Tupac takes number 2, and Dave says the emotion in his voice matters even when he is not the cleanest technical rapper. 10. Snoop lands at 5, with Doggystyle and 'Gin and Juice' used as the main evidence for his place. 11. Jay-Z goes to number 4, and Dave says people underrate how much cleverness and wordplay he packs into songs like 'Where I'm From.' 12. The Jay-Z versus Nas beef comes back through 'Ether,' which Dave calls one of the greatest diss tracks even though he thinks the beat sucks. 13. Biggie appears as the last reveal, and Dave describes his flow as bouncing off the drums like an instrument. 14. Tamler brings in Scarface for Houston, and Dave points to 'On My Block' as a classroom staple. 15. The rappers segment also touches 50 Cent, Lil Wayne, Andre 3000, Most Def, and Ludacris as omitted or near-miss picks. 16. After the rap draft, the hosts pivot to Freud's 'Mourning and Melancholia,' which Dave says is about loss, grief, and depression. 17. Dave connects Freud's paper to Carl Jung, the breakup with a prized student, and the deaths around World War I. 18. He says the essay feeds later work like 'The Ego and the Id' and Freud's broader theory of psychosexual development. 19. The first half plays like an inside-baseball rap draft, with Tamler and Dave trading memories and rankings. 20. The Freud half turns slower and more analytic, with Dave unpacking loss, grief, and the paper's dense psychic-process vocabulary.

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