There's an important story here, about landless workers in Brazil, but after putting an ear to it for three-quarters of an hour, it remains a mumble on the other side of the planet. This "Interview with MST activist Vanderly Scarabeli" plays like research notes a producer might consult, and excerpt from, for a 4-8 minute feature. In the event, we're shoved in without context and offered nothing structurally compelling to catch us up thereafter.

The interpreter is challenging to comprehend clearly on the radio, especially in a moving car, and her voicings are often right on top of a too-hot original-language track, which makes things difficult to sort out in any culture.

And though it's good technique to give interview subjects some free rein, after a perfunctory intro, we don't hear our (never introduced) interlocutor again until nearly the 7:00 mark. That makes this airtime veer past freedom into a downpour of verbiage without shelter.

Listen, there's a difference between art and the artist, and between content and form. The end of the 20th Century was all about devaluing hierarchies, where a logic of good, better, best was trumped by a sentiment of "But that's how I feel." A corollary of that triumph of emotion was an uncritical elevation of works based upon a preconception of the subject matter, rather than on how the subject was rendered by the author. "It doesn't matter how you tell it, it's about what you're talking about."

Now we know. It matters how you tell it.