Reaching Your Audience

Description: Kurt Andersen discusses reaching your audience. He talks about trying to give the audience the unexpected.

Transcript:

I remember . . . it wasn’t even an interview I was doing. It was a ________ run on the show. And it was about the . . . the connections between heavy metal music and . . . and sort of German music of the 19th Century. And there was a . . . And so of course we talked about Wagner. And so there was this moment. . . the way the piece was cut it went directly . . . it was cut directly from a piece of Wagner to a German heavy metal band . . . heavy metal band called Lonstein. And I just loved the idea of hundreds of thousands of public radio listeners all over America suddenly jumping out of their chairs when Wagner became heavy metal.

I like to think that the, you know, tens of thousands of people who are reading this . . . this novel that I’ve written about the middle of the 19th Century will actually have their . . . their brains permanently re-wired to think about the middle of the 19th Century in a different way as a result of having read this book. So that’s, you know . . . to the degree that that’s true . . . that’s a hugely gratifying, albeit small, impact.