TOKiMONSTA & Carly Rae Jepsen on 'Music' episode of Netflix/Vox's 'Explained'

Earlier this year, Vox launched its new show Explained on Netflix. There’s a new episode every Wednesday, and each one is a mini documentary on a given topic, which in Season One ranged from astrology to tattoos to weed to K-Pop to cryptocurrency to the exclamation point to the female orgasm and more. If you haven’t watched the show, it’s worth checking out — even when it’s a topic you don’t think you’re interested in, you end up getting hooked. Each episode also has a different narrator and interviews with experts on the topic. The exclamation point episode was narrated by Nick Kroll. The cryptocurrency episode was narrated by Mr. Robot himself, Christian Slater. The weed episode featured interviews with Tommy Chong.

The season finale premiered last night (9/19), and the topic for this episode is music. The narrator is Carly Rae Jepsen, and it features both interviews and live footage with LA producer/DJ TOKiMONSTA, who discussed recovering from the rare brain disease Moyamoya, which caused her to lose her ability to comprehend music. “I couldn’t tell that there was a melody. It just sounded like white noise,” she said on the show. The episode also features footage of her performing with Anderson .Paak. The episode gets into the science of how something goes from being “sound” to being “music,” how our brains interpret music, the few other animals besides humans who can keep a beat, and more.

If you haven’t seen the episode, watch it at Netflix and check out some clips below. You can also see a trailer for the full series below.

For more background on Explained in Vox’s own words:

Explained is a project we’ve been working toward for a long time. When we launched Vox a bit over four years ago, we did so with a few beliefs. One was that important, slow-changing topics were often neglected in favor of fast-breaking stories. As the old journalism adage goes, the first three letters of “news” spell “new.” But we believed there was a need for more deep reporting on the questions, forces, and ideas that rarely find themselves in the bright light of the daily news cycle.

[…] We began dreaming of this project in 2015. What if we did a show for a streaming platform, where the editorial process would be thinking about persistence from the outset, where we would take only as much of the viewer’s time as we needed and not a second more, where we could bring all our visual and reportorial tools to bear on the questions that obsessed us, where we could focus on the big topics that would help us make sense of a world that seems to go by faster and faster?

Last year, we pitched the idea to Netflix, and to our great excitement, they agreed. The result is Explained. We’re thrilled to finally be able to show it to you. And we’d love to hear the topics you’re interested in for future episodes — email us at [email protected].

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