New PBS show delves into unique music stories

Most people don’t seek to deeply analyze the music they listen to and many more don’t watch PBS, but when a former Dateline NBC producer teams up with some culture-hungry broadcast reporters, the result might force us to do both.

Sound Tracks — an hour-long television newsmagazine which aired its pilot episode on the nonprofit network last night—lives up to its “music without borders” tagline by travelling the world and investigating some of the most interesting musical situations out there.

In its inaugural showing, a political themed show took the Sound Tracks’ crews to Russia (where they discovered the almost comical creation of Putin’s Euro-trance propaganda song), Nigeria (where they hung out with the son of afrobeat creator and political activist Fela Kuti) and Kazakhstan (where they filmed the nation’s philharmonic performing a piece written by the same man who had written the fake national anthem for Borat).

Through these travels, Sound Tracks brings you stories otherwise left untold and gives new perspectives to these culturally significant occurances. Nobody on television (or in documentaries, for that matter) has gone in depth like this before.

With the pilot episode of Sound Tracks airing last night on the nonprofit network, PBS is also hoping to attract a younger, more hip audience. Since its geriatric viewership is about to turn, the show is the first in a string of youthful programming coming to the station. And if the stories mentioned above don’t lure in the college crowd, maybe the Vampire Weekend theme song will.

The entire first episode of Sound Tracks can be streamed on their homepage: pbs.org/soundtracks

(Tell them how much you like it so PBS will give them money to make more episodes!)