New four-episode season of OUTSIDE THE LYRICS dives into the vast subcultures of Los Angeles, including basketball at Venice Beach, Japanese-inspired listening bars and graffiti art. Watch to see how music, fashion, culture and identity all weave together to distinguish this dynamic city.
New episodes will roll out weekly on PBS SoCal’s YouTube channel starting with today's premiere and will be available to stream for free on the PBS app and on pbssocal.org.
PBS SoCal’s OUTSIDE THE LYRICS Explores
LA’s Subcultures Bridging Music and Creativity
Premieres on YouTube Channel March 17
Season Two Spotlights Conversations with Artist Patrick Martinez,
Stones Throw Records Co-Founder DJ Peanut Butter Wolf and more
OUTSIDE THE LYRICS hosts, Robeson Taj Frazier, PhD and Perry B. Johnson, PhD.
https://www.pbssocal.org/shows/outside-the-lyrics
Select programming will also be available to stream on PBS.org and the free PBS App.
Members of PBS SoCal get extended access with PBS Passport.
Los Angeles, Calif. – March 17, 2026 – PBS SoCal, Southern California’s flagship PBS organization, announced today the second season of OUTSIDE THE LYRICS. Hosted by Robeson Taj Frazier, PhD, writer, multimedia producer and professor of media arts and culture at University of Southern California (USC), and Perry B. Johnson, PhD, music scholar, cultural historian and lecturer at USC.
The series is presented in association with USC Annenberg's Institute for Difference and Empowerment in the Arts (IDEA), which explores the redemptive and transformational capacities of media, the arts and culture.
The second season explores Los Angeles’ rich subcultures and their intersection with music through the people who shape them. In four locally produced episodes, they explore the history of basketball at Venice Beach, LA's listening bars and spaces inspired by Japanese kissaten culture, graffiti and visual art, and the powerful intersection of fashion, music and identity. New episodes will roll out weekly on PBS SoCal’s YouTube channel starting today on Tues., March 17 and will be available to stream for free on the PBS app and on pbssocal.org.
Visual Arts – Tues., March 17 – “Off the Wall”
Artist Patrick Martinez sits down with Robeson Taj Frazier to discuss how his origins as a graffiti writer in East LA continue to shape his artistic vision of Los Angeles. Explore how the bold aesthetics, techniques, materials and perspectives of hip hop and graffiti inform Martinez's now internationally-acclaimed artwork, offering a unique lens on the city's diverse communities and landscapes.
Basketball – Tues., March 24 – “Hooper’s Paradise”
Perry B. Johnson joins Nick Ansom, founder of Veniceball, Venice Basketball League and Hoopbus, to explore the intersection of basketball and music. She uncovers how the courts are a crossroad for athleticism, creativity and community. From streetball’s rhythms to the beats that soundtrack the game, discover how Venice Beach has fostered a unique cultural ecosystem where sports and music collide.
Fashion – Tues., March 31 – “Change Clothes”
Robeson Taj Frazier and Perry B. Johnson examine the relationship between fashion and music with two LA innovators. Designer/stylist Brea Stinson discusses working with popular artists, while GRAY founder Brandon Gray reveals how his upbringing in South Los Angeles influences his custom designs for celebrities. Discover how personal history and identity merge in the city's fashion-music dialogue.
Listening Communities – Tues., April 7 – “Deep Listening”
Robeson Taj Frazier and Perry B. Johnson explore the rise of listening spaces in Los Angeles, tracing their roots to Japanese kissaten culture. At Gold Line, Stones Throw Records founder, DJ Peanut Butter Wolf shares his vision for bars that bring people together through sound. At the Japanese American Cultural & Community Center, an evening with In Sheep’s Clothing and Temporal Drift reveals the power of collective music appreciation and the cultural traditions that inspire LA's contemporary listening spaces.
For more information, follow us on social at @pbssocal
About PBS SoCal
PBS SoCal uses the power of public media for good, strengthening the civic fabric of Southern California and providing our community with an essential connection to a wider world. As a local, donor/member-supported non-profit organization, PBS SoCal is available to stream on the PBS app and the PBS Kids App and reaches nearly 22M viewers across 7 Broadcast channels — including 2 primary channels, PBS SoCal and PBS SoCal Plus and 5 digital subchannels. With a commitment to make content available anytime and anywhere for free, PBS SoCal offers programming that reflects the diversity of Southern California and showcases the full schedule of beloved and trusted PBS content spanning Education, News, Environment and Arts & Culture. PBS SoCal also sparks the sharing of ideas at in-person cultural events and community conversations as well as prepares children for kindergarten and beyond by bringing bilingual, hands-on learning experiences to the community for free.
About IDEA
IDEA explores the redemptive and transformation capacities of media, the arts, and culture, with specific attention to what they illuminate about identity, difference, and power. We organize and facilitate media, critical theory, and art-based interdisciplinary education, research, and programming. Learn more about us at: https://annenberg.usc.edu/research/idea
About Perry B. Johnson
Perry B. Johnson, Ph.D., is a music scholar, cultural historian and producer of several public-facing music and humanities projects. Her primary research and practice focus on music, popular culture and American cultural histories, with an emphasis on archives, public scholarship, power, identity and belonging. Johnson is at work on the manuscript for her first solo monograph, a cultural history of sexual misconduct in America’s popular music industries.
With this project, Johnson interrogates the framing of incidents of misconduct to track how the sector’s historically grim collage of abuse is structurally, institutionally and ideologically produced and sustained by traditional and social media.
At USC, Johnson teaches in the Annenberg School of Communication. Her courses for the Spring 2026 term include COMM 384: Interpreting Popular Culture and COMM 360: Los Angeles: Communication and Culture. Johnson is also the producer of Arts Talk, the official podcast of the USC Arts Now initiative.
Johnson is the associate producer and co-host of the second season of Outside the Lyrics, an award-winning, Emmy-nominated documentary series from PBS that explores Los Angeles’ rich subcultures and their intersection with music through the people who shape them.
In her collaborative work, Johnson is co-founder and co-director of The Sound of Victory (SOV) (with Dr. Courtney M. Cox, University of Oregon), an interdisciplinary initiative dedicated to exploring the historic relationship between music/sound and sport. SOV examines how identity, political economy and cultural mythology operate across the intertwined fields of sport and music/sound and analyzes the connected histories of these global spheres of entertainment through multimedia projects, original scholarship and public programming.
As part of this work, Johnson is co-editor of the forthcoming volume, The Sound of Victory: Music, Sport, and Society (September 2026, NYU Press), an interdisciplinary collection that joins international scholars, journalists and practitioners to critically examine the relationship between music/sound and sport through engagement with key moments, movements, figures and events. Together, Johnson and Cox are also working on their second book project, a nuanced cultural history of the NFL’s Super Bowl halftime show, which explores this ritualized entertainment spectacle as a distinctive American production.
Currently, Johnson is co-curating Playing Beyond the Field, a three-part SOV series taking place spring 2026 at the National Museum of African American Music in Nashville with the support of the Vanderbilt Sports & Society Initiative. Playing Beyond the Field explores the dynamic relationship between music and sport, with a particular focus on Nashville’s robust African American musical and sporting legacies.
Johnson also co-hosts and produces the Sounding Off podcast, an SOV audio series that highlights the voices of athletes, artists, DJs and public intellectuals working at the intersection of music/sound and sport. Episodes highlight conversations with such interlocutors as writer/poet, cultural critic and MacArthur Fellow Hanif Abdurraqib; baseball historian and sportswriter Shakeia Taylor; Los Angeles Dodgers’ DJ Severe; WNBA player Sydney Colson; and NFL Super Bowl XLVI champion Spencer Paysinger, filmmaker and director Walter Thompson-Hernández, among many others.
In her production work, Johnson has produced and organized events at The Getty Center, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Hammer Museum, La Brea Tar Pits, The Ebell of Los Angeles, Los Angeles Public Library, Los Angeles’ historic Palace Theatre, Regent Theater, and more.
Johnson received her Ph.D. in communication from USC Annenberg, where she had a graduate affiliation in the Department of Gender & Sexuality Studies and was a research fellow with The Popular Music Project at USC Annenberg's Norman Lear Center. Prior to returning to USC Annenberg, Johnson was a postdoctoral fellow and instructor at the University of Pennsylvania, with a joint appointment at the Annenberg School for Communication’s Center for Media at Risk and the Annenberg Center for Collaborative Communication.
About Robeson Taj Frazier
About Robeson Taj Frazier
Robeson Taj Frazier is a USC professor of communication, arts and humanities curator, and Emmy-nominated producer of docuseries and documentary film. His intellectual, research, and creative practice explore American and Afrodiasporic political and expressive cultures, with a specific focus on intellectual histories and contemporary examples of political activism, media arts, subcultural and vernacular traditions, and cross-cultural contact in local and global contexts.
Robeson Taj Frazier is a USC professor of communication, arts and humanities curator, and Emmy-nominated producer of docuseries and documentary film. His intellectual, research, and creative practice explore American and Afrodiasporic political and expressive cultures, with a specific focus on intellectual histories and contemporary examples of political activism, media arts, subcultural and vernacular traditions, and cross-cultural contact in local and global contexts.
He is the author (w/ Ben Caldwell) of the award-winning book, KAOS Theory: The Afrokosmic Ark of Ben Caldwell (Angel City Press, 2023), and The East is Black: Cold War China in the Black Radical Imagination (Duke University Press, 2014). He is the host and executive producer of the award-winning PBS productions, Hip Hop and the Metaverse, and Outside the Lyrics, and producer of the documentary film, It’s Yours: A Story About Hip Hop and the Internet (dir. Marguerite de Bourgoing, 2019). He is also the executive director of IDEA (USC’s Institute for Difference and Empowerment in the Arts), an arts and culture-driven center that facilitates interdisciplinary education, research, programming, and cultural/media productions.
Where to Watch: “Episodes are available on PBS SoCal’s YouTube channel and to stream for free on the PBS app and on pbssocal.org/outsidethelyrics.”
Where to Watch: “Episodes are available on PBS SoCal’s YouTube channel and to stream for free on the PBS app and on pbssocal.org/outsidethelyrics.”
