Ongoing History of New Music

Hey, it's Alan Cross.

For the next few weeks of the Podcast, we’re diving deep into the Ongoing History of New Music Archives with a series called “The Top 100 Moments in New Rock”.

In this ten-part series, we’re going to look at the 100 most significant events in new rock history...some are obvious–you know, the big stuff that made the news...you can’t ignore those.

But we’re also going to look at the small things that are at the root of some of the big things...it’s a fascinating way to look at history and society and art.

This originally aired 20 years ago in the spring of 2004…and we thought it might be fun to hear where we’ve been, how things used to be, and how much everything has changed since. 

This is Part 8 in the series.

We hope you enjoy this look back.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, it's Alan Cross.

For the next few weeks of the Podcast, we’re diving deep into the Ongoing History of New Music Archives with a series called “The Top 100 Moments in New Rock”.

In this ten-part series, we’re going to look at the 100 most significant events in new rock history...some are obvious–you know, the big stuff that made the news...you can’t ignore those.

But we’re also going to look at the small things that are at the root of some of the big things...it’s a fascinating way to look at history and society and art.

This originally aired 20 years ago in the spring of 2004…and we thought it might be fun to hear where we’ve been, how things used to be, and how much everything has changed since. 

This is Part 7 in the series.

We hope you enjoy this look back.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, it's Alan Cross.

For the next few weeks of the Podcast, we’re diving deep into the Ongoing History of New Music Archives with a series called “The Top 100 Moments in New Rock”.

In this ten-part series, we’re going to look at the 100 most significant events in new rock history...some are obvious–you know, the big stuff that made the news...you can’t ignore those.

But we’re also going to look at the small things that are at the root of some of the big things...it’s a fascinating way to look at history and society and art.

This originally aired 20 years ago in the spring of 2004…and we thought it might be fun to hear where we’ve been, how things used to be, and how much everything has changed since. 

This is Part 6 in the series.

We hope you enjoy this look back.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, it's Alan Cross.

For the next few weeks of the Podcast, we’re diving deep into the Ongoing History of New Music Archives with a series called “The Top 100 Moments in New Rock”.

In this ten-part series, we’re going to look at the 100 most significant events in new rock history...some are obvious–you know, the big stuff that made the news...you can’t ignore those.

But we’re also going to look at the small things that are at the root of some of the big things...it’s a fascinating way to look at history and society and art.

This originally aired 20 years ago in the spring of 2004…and we thought it might be fun to hear where we’ve been, how things used to be, and how much everything has changed since. 

This is Part 5 in the series.

We hope you enjoy this look back.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, it's Alan Cross.

For the next few weeks of the Podcast, we’re diving deep into the Ongoing History of New Music Archives with a series called “The Top 100 Moments in New Rock”.

In this ten-part series, we’re going to look at the 100 most significant events in new rock history...some are obvious–you know, the big stuff that made the news...you can’t ignore those.

But we’re also going to look at the small things that are at the root of some of the big things...it’s a fascinating way to look at history and society and art.

This originally aired 20 years ago in the spring of 2004…and we thought it might be fun to hear where we’ve been, how things used to be, and how much everything has changed since. 

This is Part 4 in the series.

We hope you enjoy this look back.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 1931, a larger than life prospector, in search of Slumach’s legendary lost gold mine goes missing in the wilderness of British Columbia.

In this episode, we retrace the epic search and rescue efforts that went into looking for the missing prospector as well potential clues left behind at his campsite, that point to an even bigger mystery of what happened to Volcanic Brown?

Host: 

Kru Williams

Guest:

Adam Palmer

Facebook - @HISTORYCanada 

Instagram - @deadmanscurse

Instagram - @Historyca

Instagram - @kru_williams

Twitter - @HistoryTVCanada 

Curiouscast website: https://curiouscast.ca/

Great Pacific Media Website: https://greatpacifictv.com/

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, it's Alan Cross.

For the next few weeks of the Podcast, we’re diving deep into the Ongoing History of New Music Archives with a series called “The Top 100 Moments in New Rock”.

In this ten-part series, we’re going to look at the 100 most significant events in new rock history...some are obvious–you know, the big stuff that made the news...you can’t ignore those.

But we’re also going to look at the small things that are at the root of some of the big things...it’s a fascinating way to look at history and society and art.

This originally aired 20 years ago in the spring of 2004…and we thought it might be fun to hear where we’ve been, how things used to be, and how much everything has changed since. 

This is Part 3 in the series.

We hope you enjoy this look back.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, it's Alan Cross.

For the next few weeks of the Podcast, we’re diving deep into the Ongoing History of New Music Archives with a series called “The Top 100 Moments in New Rock”.

In this ten-part series, we’re going to look at the 100 most significant events in new rock history...some are obvious–you know, the big stuff that made the news...you can’t ignore those.

But we’re also going to look at the small things that are at the root of some of the big things...it’s a fascinating way to look at history and society and art.

This originally aired 20 years ago in the spring of 2004…and we thought it might be fun to hear where we’ve been, how things used to be, and how much everything has changed since. 

This is Part 2 in the series.

We hope you enjoy this look back.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, it's Alan Cross.

For the next few weeks of the Podcast, we’re diving deep into the Ongoing History of New Music Archives with a series called “The Top 100 Moments in New Rock”.

This originally aired 20 years ago in the spring of 2004…and we thought it might be fun to hear where we’ve been, how things used to be, and how much everything has changed since. 

We hope you enjoy this look-back…

When a lot of people look at history, they only look at the big stuff...you know, the wars, the plagues, the disasters–you know what I mean?

All those things are important, but they don’t even begin to tell half the story. To understand history, any kind of history is to also look at the little moments

You know what I’m talking about...tiny, boring events and decisions that seemed completely innocuous and unimportant–or even meaningless–when they happened, yet eventually the consequences proved to be unbelievably huge.

That’s what this ten-part series will be like...we’re going to look at the 100 most significant events in new rock history...some are obvious–you know, the big stuff that made the news...you can’t ignore those...

But we’re also going to look at the small things that are at the root of some of the big things...it’s a fascinating way to look at history and society and art.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You would think that being a musician would be a very safe existence…I mean, your job is to write and perform music…yeah, you might get into the odd altercation and fight, but it’s not like you’re going to war, right?...yet every once in a while, we hear about a musician being murdered…

The earliest example I can find is Alessandro Stradella, an Italian composer of classical music…back in his day—which was the mid-1600s—he was quite the star and was very influential with his six operas, 170 cantatas, and a long list of instrumental compositions…

But then on February 25, 1682, he was found stabbed to death in a public square in Genoa…no one was ever convicted although the story is that he was murdered by one of three brothers who accused Stradella of seducing their sister…

The first musician I know of who got shot was Pinetop Smith, a boogie-woogie piano player from Chicago…in 1929, just as he was about to go into a recording session, he was shot during a fight at a dance hall…he might not have been the intended victim, but he died all the same…

And the first musician of the rock’n’roll era to be murdered was probably Sam Cooke on December 11, 1964…fantastic soul singer…he took a gunshot wound to the chest when Bertha Franklin, the manager of the Hacienda Motel in South Central L.A.…she said it was in self-defence but even today, there are a lot of questions about the case…How many other rock musicians have been murdered since then?...fortunately, not a lot…but there is a tragic list…let’s go through it…

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Next to music and my dogs, my biggest obsession is cars…I’ve always been a car nut…i’m one of those people with a list of cars I’ll buy when I win the lottery…

I’ll start with production sports cars…a Porsche 911 Turbo 4 will be my daily driver, although there will be a Lamborghini Uris SUV for those times I need to haul people and stuff…for those summer days, I think a McLaren 750s Spider would be cool…

I’ll need a car for track days, of course…no one else in the neighbourhood would have a Koenigsegg…I’d probably order the Jekso Absolute…1600 horsepower sounds about right…

And just to show everyone that I’m not out to completely destroy the planet, there will be at least one EV…right now, that would be a Rimac Nevera…

That’s what? Four million dollars worth of vehicles?...not including insurance and maintenance, of course…I’m never going to win that kind of lottery, but it’s nice to dream…

For other people, though, this is the kind of machinery sitting in their air-conditioned, highly secure underground garages…that includes a lot of rock stars…

Eric Clapton is so well-known at Ferrari that the company built him a custom one-of-a-kind model that probably cost him upwards of five million…Neil Peart had a selection of very collectible sports cars from the 1960s, all in silver…

Brian Johnson of AC/DC has a bunch of Bentleys, Ferraris, and some classic race cars…same with Nick Mason of Pink Floyd…he’s even written a book about this collection…

Then there’s everything we use in the car to listen to music…radio, car audio, satellite radio, infotainment systems and all that…

All this got me thinking about the relationship between cars and rock…the two things go hand-in-hand…I think we should look at this history, don’t you?

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Every once in a long while, a new genre of popular music emerges, evolves a little bit and then stays almost exactly the same with only the slightest of variations…not that there’s anything wrong with that…a formula is discovered…it seems to work…so why change it?...

Old-school 12-bar blues is an example…it features one of the most common chord progressions in Western music…the style of lyrics, phrasing, structure, and duration have been pretty much standard since the days of gospel and spirituals and African-based oral traditions…an Alabama musician named W.C. Handy was the first to codify 12-bar blues playing around 1905…

Ska might be an example…it has many different flavours, but there are common components under the hood, rooted in playing on the off-beat—the “one” and “three” instead of the “two” and “four”…

You might say the same about Reggae and its foundations in the debow beat, although you’ll probably get a little pushback from fans…

Lemme throw this into the mix: garage rock…two or three chords played on guitar, bass, and drums with a loose, rebellious vibe…nothing too complicated…it’s just gotta feel good…

And here’s one more that might not spring to mind right away: surf music…it, too, can come in different forms…as a type of garage rock…it can be punky…it can be hardcore…it’s great for skateboarding or snowboarding…and yes, it’s also about the beach, the boards, and the swells…

But it’s also more than that…it’s about guitars, amps, pedals, amps, cars, girls, beer, and parties…it can feature vocals but it might be best experienced as instrumentals….

There’s a lot more to surf music than you might think…and its importance and influence and legacy goes far beyond the beach...…here…let me show you.

Show contact info:

X (formerly Twitter): @AlanCross

Website: curiouscast.ca

Email: [email protected]

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I want you to take a deep breath…

It’s only when we focus on our breathing that we realize how important it is that 21% of our atmosphere is made up of oxygen…that is the ideal amount…

Drop too, say 15%, and it would cause all sorts of mental and physical impairment…if the oxygen levels were to increase suddenly, we’d suffer “oxygen toxicity,” meaning that our cells would oxidize, leading to exhaustion and death…

Meanwhile, spiders, roaches, and other crawly things would grow bigger and bigger because of their biology… if you think we have a wildfire problem now, imagine if those fires had more oxygen as fuel…

So, unless you’re hoping for a burning planet covered in spiders the size of a compact car, 21% it is…

Music is such an integral of our lives that we have no idea how important it is…I can even tell you…a study by Deezer, the French streaming service, says that to maintain a healthy lifestyle, we should listen to 78 minutes of music per day…

The study broke things down even further…that 78 minutes should be portioned this way for maximum benefit…

·      14 minutes of uplifting music to exercise your happiness.

·      16 minutes of calming music

·      16 minutes of music that counteracts sadness.

·      15 minutes of motivational music to help with concentration.

·      And 17 minutes of music that will help you deal with anger.

A few suggestions come with the study, too. Abba’s “Dancing Queen” is an example of the sort of happy music we should appreciate…when it comes to anger management, AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell” is about perfect, although certain tracks from Rammstein and Metallica are good, too—and Mozart for some reason…

This stuff fascinates me…and whenever I run across a study or some research that connects music and the brain and our overall mental and physical help, I bookmark it…and I’ve bookmarked so much that we can now do a full program on it…

This is another instalment of “The Medical Mysteries of Music”

Show contact info:

X (formerly Twitter): @AlanCross

Website: curiouscast.ca

Email: [email protected]

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

One of the most attractive things about rock is that it’s often dangerous…from the very beginning, rock has been about rebellion, a disregard for the rules, and thumbing its nose at the status quo…rage against the machine summed it up nicely with their song “killing in the name… f-you, I won’t do what you tell me…

There’s an edginess to rock that’s addictive…most of us live pretty normal lives, so there’s something cathartic seeing rock stars live out our wildest, most reckless impulses and fantasies…rock stars get to do what we wish we could…

When we go to a show, there’s always that hope we’re going to see and experience something a little unhinged, unpredictable, and primal…between gigs, we like to soak up the gossip and stories of bad behaviour from books, biopics, and social media…

The music is fine…but we also want spectacle on and off stage…

It’s all in good fun—until it’s not…there are limits to what we think is okay…legal lines can be crossed…and there are aesthetic, ethical, and moral areas that are just off limits…

But here’s the thing about some artists…they don’t care…they live in their own reality where the normal rules of society just don’t hold…we might see behaviours that are thoughtless, selfish, overly audacious, negligent, self-destructive, incredibly violent, and downright criminal…

For some, this is a lifestyle…for others, their dangerousness relates to illness, out-of-control passions, and, in some cases negligence and misadventure…

In short, there’s a subset of rock stars who are genuinely dangerous, not to themselves but others…and once we start seeking out these people and examining their actions, what we find can be terrifying on a series of different levels.

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The 1990s was a golden era for Gen X music fans…classic and heritage artists were still a thing, but it was clear that a new generation of rock artists was in control and was releasing music that captured the hopes, dreams, wishes, anger, and aggression of young people…we hadn’t seen that kind of thing since the 70s during the punk, post-punk, and new wave times…and for a little while, pop was not dominant…it was a time for rock-with-a-capital-R…

 Things really got into gear in 1991…momentum carried over to 1992 and 1993…and by the time we got to 1994, we were living in an alt-rock world…was it the greatest year for alternative ever?...maybe…let’s explore that…

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Usually, the whole idea of being famous is to be, well, famous…you’re known by everyone…your face is everywhere…you’re a celebrity…and you get invited to the best parties, you get endorsements, you get free stuff…

Sure, there’s a trade-off…your right to privacy is greatly diminished…your every move is scrutinized…it might become harder to maintain meaningful relationships…and then there’s the constant pressure to live up to this thing you’ve become…this is emotionally draining…

After a while, you may start to resent this fame thing…the challenges and pitfalls can overshadow all the perks…

But you can also be famous and not famous at the same time…you just have to be very, very careful about revealing who you are…

There’s the story of Comte de Saint-German…he was some kind of adventurer in the 1700s who popped up throughout Europe…he spoke almost every language on the continent, knew a lot about chemistry, and was quite the musician….he was so mysterious and amazing that he acquired the nickname “the wonderman”…

Remember tank man?... He’s the guy who held up that row of tanks during the crackdown on Tiananmen square in China…no clue who this dude is…

Who is Satoshi Nakamoto?...is he the creator of bitcoin?...he disappeared from the internet around 2014 and stayed hidden…there are theories but nothing concrete…

Let’s riff on that a little bit more…can you be a famous musician and still be able to walk through the mall without anyone knowing you are?...yes…it’s difficult and comes with its own tradeoffs, but it can be done…plus you have to work very hard to maintain the art of hiding in plain site…

This is the history of anonymous artists from the world of rock…

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When something bad happens, we want to know why…the weirder and badder the event, the more we need to know…

It can’t possibly be random…someone needs to be responsible and held accountable…someone needs to be blamed…and there had better not be any loose ends…

Certain segments of the population have always been suspicious of the official story…forget the simplest of most logical explanation…these awful events or phenomenon’s are the work of some kind of secret cabal or organization pulling the strings of life on earth…it was a conspiracy…

For example, the most famous murder of modern times was the assassination of JFK on November 22, 1963…more than sixty years later, it seems like no one believes that lee Harvey Oswald was the lone gunman…

To be fair, they might be right…there’s been a lot of investigation into the JFK case over the decades…i’m one of those nuts who reads, watches, and listens to everything involved with the assassination…and I gotta tell you that i’m convinced this was the result of a loose need-to-know operation involving the CIA, the deep stage, Cuban exiles, and American mobsters…

There’s also something called “Occam’s razor” which dates back to the 14th century…this Monk—William of Occam—was annoyed at how people blamed supernatural forces when even the simplest thing went wrong…his answer to that was “look, the simplest and most obvious explanation is usually the correct one”…

But try that approach with people who believe the earth is flat and that we never went to the moon…Covid-19 was engineered by the media…and the Illuminati live beneath the Denver airport…

The world of conspiracy theories is a bottomless pit of weirdness…and when it comes to music, one of the deepest and strangest of these theories has to do with what happened above a greenhouse in Seattle on April 5, 1994…

Boy, have I got stories—multiple stories, in fact—about this one…in fact, it might be the most compressive study you’ve ever heard on the subject…this is uncharted: music and mayhem in the music industry, episode 12: it’s the ever-popular Kurt-Cobain-was-murdered theory…

Show contact info:

X (formerly Twitter): @AlanCross

Website: curiouscast.ca

Email: [email protected]

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Historians love to investigate causes and effects…it’s possible for a teeny-tiny seemingly inconsequential thing to set off a cascading series of events…and before you know it, the universe has changed forever…

Let me give you an example…a bunch of inept anarchists in Sarajevo were out to make a statement about the liberation of Bosnia and Herzegovina under occupation of the Austro-Hungarian empire…

When the Archduke Franz Ferdinand visited Sarajevo on June 28, 1914…two guys were set to toss a bomb at his six-vehicle motorcade, but they chickened out…then a guy named Nedeljko Cabrinovic threw a second bomb, but it bounced off the back of one of the cars…

The archduke, his wife, and the governor of Bosnia sped off—although the governor suggested that they take a slightly different route…the driver—Leopold Lojka—got confused and turned right instead of left into a very narrow street… 

When he tried to back up, the car stalled—and it stalled right in front of another member of the anarchist group named Gavril Princip…up until that second, he’d been discouraged that the assassination plot had failed and had allegedly slinked off to schiller’s delicatessen to get a sandwich and sulk about the afternoon’s failures…

(that’s not true, by the way…it just makes for a better story)…

Anyway, Princip’s target sitting directly in front of him, trapped…he pulled out his pistol and fired two shots…one hit the Archduke’s wife, killing her instantly…the other hit Ferdinand in the jugular…he died within half an hour…

This created a series of crises involving a web of alliances across Europe and within a few months, the great war had begun, resulting in the deaths of 20 million people and injured 21 million more…it led to the Treaty of Versailles , the humiliation of Germany, the rise of Adolf Hitler, the carnage of World War Two, the spread of Communism, the arms race, the cold war, and the world order as we know it…

If Leopold hadn’t hung a right instead of a left—or if you like the myth of Princip going for a sandwich—how would the 20th century have been different?...

Why am I recounting this?...because there are ways we can make connections like this in the world of rock….here…let me show you…

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For the first 60 years of the recorded music industry, things sounded awful…the quality of the recordings people had to put up with were terrible…the old 78 rpm records played on gramophones were no match when it came to hearing music live…we just didn’t have the technology to capture audio so that when we listened back, it sounded real…

That began to change in the late 1940s with the introduction of vinyl records: the 33 1/3 rpm vinyl album and the 7-inch 45 rpm single…it changed further with the switch to magnetic recording tape in the early 1950s…

New microphones, better tape machines, and further understanding of acoustics when it came to building recording studios…then came better turntables, amplifiers, and speakers…recorded audio started to sound more and more like the real thing…

In the middle 50s, people started to hear about something called “high-fidelity”…it was a marketing term invented by the audio industry to describe equipment capable of producing music properly…

Once stereo recordings came along in the late 50s, music fans went wild and started buying hi-fi gear for their homes…then their cars…and then for going mobile…

It was an endless pursuit for perfect sound, music that was loud, clean, clear, and accurate…meanwhile, recording studios were constantly in a state of retrofitting and refurbishment because artists demanded the best for their music…

That was the 1970s…in the 1980s, there was a reaction, a backlash, an artistic regression, after the introduction of the compact disc…for some, this music was too perfect, too shiny, too unreal…

They felt it contained none of the imperfections that made it human…beauty, they thought, was in the mistakes…that’s what made music authentic…audio quality mattered less than being able to listen to music that obviously came from the heart…

These music fans even had a name for this approach…if the best-sounding audio was high-fidelity, then what they wanted was the opposite: low-fidelity…and that aesthetic continues today…this is the history of Lo-Fi music…

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In the summer of 2006, a young Calgary woman was on top of the world. She had a supportive family, amazing friends and a great job. But life as she knew it came to an abrupt stop in the middle of the night on August 6, 2006. In this episode, Global News senior crime reporter Nancy Hixt shares details of a violent attack- a story that’s every woman’s worst fear.

www.calgarycrimestoppers.org - reference case # 06274598

https://newsroom.calgary.ca/sexual-assault-case-from-2006-has-new-lead/

Contact:

Instagram: @nancy.hixt

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/NancyHixtCrimeBeat/

Email: [email protected]

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Streaming is a very cool way to access tens of millions of songs with a few pokes on your phone…the idea of being able to listen to virtually any song from any era of human history with such ease is something akin to magic…

The downside of streaming is that it doesn’t provide any context to what we’re hearing…a continuous stream of music tells us nothing about the artist or the song…it’s just music, standing alone with nothing to anchor it to anything…

It was different in the old days…if you bought an album, dammit, that was an investment…you paid money for it, which created a fiscal relationship with the artist…that meant you were more likely to stick with an album and get deeper into the artist and the songs…otherwise, you had this nagging feeling you had wasted your money…

Context means so much to the enjoyment of music—which is probably a reason you’re listening to me right now…you want more than the notes that make up a song…

Yeah, sometimes a song is just a song…you know, it’s got a good beat, you can dance to it and maybe sing along…it doesn’t really mean anything more than that…

But some songs are very deep…they actually form some part of a historical record…they tell the story of real people, real events and the things that came after…

That’s where we’re going with this show: everything we’re about to hear is based on fact, on history, on actual events…and you may be shocked by the truth beyond songs that you’ve been digging all your life…this isn’t anything you’re gonna get from a stream…trust me…

Songs in this episode:

The Clash - White Riot

Boomtown Rats - I Don't Like Monday's

U2 - Sunday Bloody Sunday

REM - What's the Frequency Kenneth?

Pearl Jam - Jeremy

Nirvana - Polly

The Tragically Hip - Wheat Kings

Filter - Hey Man, Nice Shot!

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A band is like a plant…stay with me on this…like a plant, a band grows from seeds to maturity, bursts for with new seeds and then eventually withers and dies…it’s the cycle of life, you know?...

But like plants (or animals or any other living thing), the lifespan of bands varies greatly…you could last as long as rehearsal—kinda like, what, a dandelion?…or you might find yourself on some kind of 50-year-anniversary tour—the equivalent of a bristlecone pine tree that can live as long as 5,000 years…

Okay, I think we’ve tortured this metaphor long enough…

Then we have bands that form, rise to a peak, hit something of a downhill slope, and break-up, only to reform again for—well, there could be any number of reasons…and this leads into completely new second act…and thus things begin again—and maybe even under better circumstances than anyone thought possible…

Let’s do a case study…let’s have a specific band deconstruct their journey from formation to breakup to reunion…this is the history of Alexisonfire—in their own words…

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A boy cannot become a man in the Satere-Mawe tribe of the Amazon Rain Forest until he can stand being stung by a swarm of Bullet ants…they’re called that because it’s said their sting is as painful as being hit by an actual bullet…if the kid can handle it without shedding a single tear, then he is officially a man…I can’t explain it…and I’ll bet that no one in this tribe can, either…it’s just always been their thing, something that has always been done…

Let’s try something more modern…have you ever noticed that any depiction of an iPhone or iPad, the time on the device used to be 9:42 am?...now, it’s 9:41…why?...

We need to go back to when Steve Jobs’ unveiled the iPhone in 2007… the first image of the iPhone appeared behind jobs at 9:42 am…and for a while, that was the time shown in all ads…but when the iPad came out, the reveal happed at 9:41 am…from then on, it became a rule that time displayed must be at 9:41…

The Apple Watch is an exception…the standard advertisement display time is 10:09 am…not one is sure why, although that’s the old Timex watch commercials always had the time as 1:51…10:09 is the mirror image of that…

Now think about your car on the driver’s side…if your car is a standard, the pedals from left to right go clutch, brake and accelerator…if it’s an automatic, it’s brake then the accelerator…and that’s the way it is in every car made in the world today…doesn’t matter which side the steering wheel is on…the pedals are always laid out the same from left to right….

But in the early days of the automobile, it wasn’t always this way…sometimes the accelerator was in the middle…sometimes it was on the left…sometimes it was on the steering wheel…

The first car with the pedal layout we have today was probably a 1912 Cadillac…that spread throughout the company and then on through Chevrolet and other gm cars…from there, everyone eventually adopted that arrangement….

And since we’re in the car, let me explain your automatic transmission lever…it goes park, reverse, neutral, drive, and low…R,R,N,D,L…that order was laid out in “U.S. department of transportation standard no. 102” which stated the order of gears on automatic transmissions must always be park-reverse-neutral-drive-low…and since America called the shots with the auto industry back then, this law became our universal standard…

There are so many things in this world that we just accept without bothering to look for an explanation…they’re there, it’s everywhere, it’s a simple truth of life…but why?...

The world of music is filled with things, too… for example, why do we call a certain genre of music “heavy metal?”…who came up with the idea for paying to see a concert?...why would anyone use a toilet plunger together with a trumpet or a beer bottle on a guitar?...why is there music on the phone when we’re put on hold?...

Let’s figure this all out…welcome to another edition of “the rock explainer”…

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The biggest tech story of recent years has been the rise of artificial intelligence…the subject of ai is everywhere… it’s been “AI this” and “AI that”…

The Wikipedia article on ChatGPT, the company that really got things rolling in this area, was the most popular Wikipedia article in all of 2023…50 million visits…

That made it more popular than even Christian Ronaldo, the world’s most famous athlete…that’s more than “Barbie” or “Oppenheimer” put together…

This tech is being adopted everywhere, mostly for good…just look at the medical field….

Ai is being used to sort through chains of molecules to come up with the next generation of breakthrough drugs, including those that will work on antibiotic-resistant bacteria and the misfolded proteins behind Alzheimer’s…ai is being trained to quickly find things in scans and x-rays that a human technician might miss…

AI can be used to make better decisions in real time…for example, it can learn traffic and pedestrian patterns and synchronize lights for more efficient movement of everyone…

AI should even have an impact on fighting climate change by creating better models…and when it comes to world hunger, ai can analyze zillions of data points to help determine what crops, seeds, fertilizers, soil, and so on for maximum efficiency in any area of the world…

AI is growing at an exponential rate…it’s predicted that the industry will grow by 250% over the next five years… by 2031, the market for generative ai will be at least one trillion U.S. dollars…

But yes, AI can also be used for evil…deep fakes and fake news, copyright infringement and forgery, cybersecurity breaches, manipulation of financial markets… AI is inevitably going to replace humans in a lot of different jobs…there’s a lot to be concerned about…

If you’re listening to me, you’ve probably wondered about artificial intelligence and music…that’s good because there’s going to be an impact…best we know where this intersection of music and tech came from so that we can maybe figure out where it’s going….

This is the history and future of AI in music…

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Once upon a time, I was deep into collecting bootleg recordings of my favourite bands…and this obsession came from a really good place…at least I thought so…

I’d already bought all the albums and singles, collected a bunch of memorabilia, snapped up the t-shirts, and gone to all the shows…but I wanted more…the only place let to go was unofficial—read: illegal—releases…

Almost everything I accurate was on cd…some were burned discs that I traded for with other hardcore fans…I might go to eBay once in a while…there were a few stores I knew that stocked these discs for special customers…and whenever I went overseas to certain countries were copyright laws were lax—Russia, Indonesia, a few places in the Caribbean—I’d be sure to visit the market stalls to see what they had…I honestly wasn’t trying to rip off or hurt anyone…I just loved these bands so much that I needed to own a copy of everything they did…once, when I talked about my bootlegs on the radio—probably not a smart idea—I got a letter from the head of a recorded industry organization calling me “morally reprehensible” …

But over the years, these hardcopy bootlegs became harder and harder to find, thanks to crackdowns on illegal exploitation of intellectual property, the disappearance of these record stores, and, most importantly, the rise of online file-sharing…by 2008 or so, the physical bootleg market had all but collapsed…I haven’t acquired anything new for my collection for almost a couple of decades now…

But I’ve never lost my fascination for this recordings…where did they come from?...how were they made?...who distributed them?...did they really hurt artists and the industry?...and what kind of legacy did old-school bootlegs leave behind?...

I’ve found some answers to those questions and more…this is another look at bootlegging, part 2…

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Hey It's Alan...and I want to introduce you to my brand new, one-of-a-kind true crime podcast called Uncharted: Crime and Mayhem in the Music Industry. 

On this podcast I take you inside unbelievable stories of murder, plane crashes, court battles, and even run-ins with the mob! In this podcast you'll hear all about the dark side of world of music.

We're releasing new episodes every two weeks, so search for and follow Uncharted: Crime and Mayhem in the Music Industry wherever you get your podcasts. 

I hope you enjoy this sneak peak of Episode 9 "The Disappearance of Richey Edwards"

Episode Link:

https://megaphone.link/CORU6081355392

Show contact info:

X (formerly Twitter): @AlanCross

Website: curiouscast.ca

Email: [email protected]

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On December 24, 1877, Thomas Edison filed a patent for a new invention he referred to as a “talking machine”…for the first time ever, audio could be captured, played back, stored, shared, and analyzed…

When asked what the point of his machine was, Edison listed some future possibilities….

His phonograph (as he called it) would eventually be used as a method of preserving great speeches….it could also be used for making audio letters, giving dictation, a talking clock, a telephone answering machine, and remote learning…and way down the list was “reproduction of music”…

That original talking machine technology has evolved greatly over the years and the “capture and reproduction of music” has moved way up on Edison’s original list of uses…the recorded music industry is now worth tens and tens of billions of dollars…

But the phonograph also gave birth to a new type of music industry…when it first went on sale, copyright laws weren’t ready…they had been drafted and enforced with the printed word in mind, not with audio recordings…this meant that people began making recordings that weren’t exactly authorized in the proper ways…

This gave birth to another industry, one that worked in the shadows of record labels, music publishers, performing rights organizations, and all the rest of the legitimate record music industry…

What started with secretly recorded Edison phonograph cylinders progressed through reel-to-reel tape recordings, unauthorized vinyl records, cassettes, CDs, and digital files freely traded online…you may have some of these recordings in your collection—and you may not even know it…

The original name of such recordings is “bootlegs”…here are a few things about them that you might wanna know…

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We would not be sitting here talking about rock music if it weren’t for people of African descent…if you start in the present and begin to trace things backward to important innovations and accomplishments, nine times out of ten, you’ll end up exploring something from black culture…

And we can go way, way back—right to 1619 when the first slave ship arrived in north America at the British colony of Virginia carrying about 20 captives…

Over the centuries that followed, the people of Africa, consisting of many different communities, nations, tribes, and cultures, were brought to the west by force creating wounds that have yet to heal… 

But more than just bodies made the trip across the Atlantic…these were human beings with identities, history, traditions—and music…and these songs and rhythms helped sustain them during those brutal times…

There were work songs, protest songs, satirical songs, songs meant to be sung in the fields and streets, songs that were games in themselves…some had regular rhythms while other contained syncopated beats from traditional dance… 

Over the centuries, the music evolved, mutated, and spread…spirituals and gospel…blues and boogie-woogie…ragtime and jazz…rhythm and blues and bebop…and in the early 1950s, this music with its rich history and traditions was incorporated with country, western, hillbilly, r&b, and a few other ingredients to become what we call “rock and roll”…

Along the way, there were many musical firsts, and landmark contributions by black artists that changed everything…without them, what we call “rock” today and so much of its culture would simply not exist…

These people and their accomplishments need to be recognized; commemorated, and celebrated…this is an episode on rock firsts by black artists…

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I really, really want to believe…there are trillions of galaxies in the observable universe, each containing billions of stars…there’s gotta be something out there…we can’t be alone…

Organisms floating in the acid clouds of Venus…remains of bacteria in the Martian soil…creatures swimming in vast oceans below the ice of Europa…something lurking in the methane lakes of Titan…and that’s just the start…

Roswell…the “wow” signal…fast radio bursts…the possibility of a Dyson sphere around “Tabby’s Star”…hints of something on the hydrogen line frequency of 1.42 405 755 117 gigahertz…and now both nasa and the U.S. government have admitted that they don’t know what’s going on with those strange objects that have been buzzing the planet…

Our culture has absorbed these mysteries and possibilities…and our music reflects that…this is UFO, UAP’s, aliens, and rock…

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Hey It's Alan...and I want to introduce you to my brand new, one-of-a-kind true crime podcast called Uncharted: Crime and Mayhem in the Music Industry. 

On this podcast I take you inside unbelievable stories of murder, plane crashes, court battles, and even run-ins with the mob! In this podcast you'll hear all about the dark side of world of music.

We're releasing new episodes every two weeks, so search for and follow Uncharted: Crime and Mayhem in the Music Industry wherever you get your podcasts. 

I hope you enjoy this sneak peak of Episode 7 "The Linkin Park Cyberstalker"

Episode Link:

https://megaphone.link/CORU6081355392

Show contact info:

X (formerly Twitter): @AlanCross

Website: curiouscast.ca

Email: [email protected]

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Decades ago, I was the best man for my buddy Charlie and was in charge of driving the bridal car from the church to the reception…the happy couple were in the back seat…next to me up front was the bride’s sister-in-law…

When I started the car, “Welcome To The Jungle” started playing on the radio…the sister-in-law freaked out… “What is this garbage?...turn it off!”…I looked at Charlie…he looked at me and shrugged… no sense in making waves…I switched to a pop station…but the sister-in-law’s violent reaction to the gunners stayed with me…

Then not long ago, I was in the car with a friend when rage against the machine’s “Bulls On Parade” came on the radio…I instinctively turned it up…awesome song, right?

But my friend shrieked… “What is this [bleep]?” She said…”it’s awful!…you can’t possibly like this…”

I was slightly taken aback…we go back a couple of decades and she came from an alt-rock radio background, too…her life used to be filled with this kind of music…how could she not like Rage Against The Machine?...

“I don’t know,” she said… “Maybe I’m just getting old…I prefer softer stuff these days”…

Ah…there it was again: an example of how someone’s musical tastes evolve with age… it’s just something that happens with most people… most of take that as a given…not me, though…this is something that’s always fascinated me…there has to be some science behind why we listen to different types and styles of music as we go through life…

So I tracked down this science and I have some answers…we’ll call this episode “what a drag it is getting old—musically”…

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A year ago, I began what will unfortunately be a regular series of these programs from now on…it’s an annual look back on the musicians we lost in the previous year…

Rock star deaths have been on our mind since late 2015 when Scott Weiland of the Stone Temple Pilots died, followed a few weeks later by Lemmy of Motorhead…then the floodgates opened in 2016: Bowie, Prince, Leonard Cohen, Glenn Frey of the eagles, both Keith Emerson and Greg Lake from Emerson Lake and Palmer, and George Michael—just to name a few…

And since then, it seems we hear about a rock star death every couple of weeks…Tom Petty, Chris Cornell, Chester Bennington, Gregg Allman, Walter Becker of Steely Dan, Chuck Mosley of Faith No More, Andy Fletcher of Depeche Mode, Mark E. Smith of The Fall, Charlie Watts The Rolling Stones…it’s been a lot to take in…

Some of these deaths have been of natural causes, disease, and old age…others have involved drugs, alcohol, years of hard living, misadventure, and suicide…

Here’s the hard truth: rock has been around for about seventy years…many of the people who have provided us with our favourite music and some of the greatest songs of all time are reaching the end of their lives…

No one is getting any younger...and over the next decade, we’re going to lose some of the personalities who have always been with there for us over the last 30, 40, 50, or even 60 years...

With that grim reality in mind, I think we need to continue with an annual retrospective at those whom we’ve lost in the last 12 months…they may be gone, but we need to recognize and celebrate their contributions to the world of music...this is 2023 in memoriam...

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I’m not gonna lie…I’m addicted to listicles…not the click-baity ones that have sub-headlines like “and you won’t believe #6!”…I’m only interested in the ones that offer interesting or weird facts…usually that means Buzzfeed, Bored Panda, Upworthy, Laughing Squid—you know the kind…“today I learned” and “I was today years old when I discovered”…that sort of thing…

Here's one…there is a species of moth that lives in the amazon jungle that drinks the tears of sleeping birds…it’ll sit on a bird’s neck, stick a long proboscis under the bird’s eyelid, and slurp away the tears…I know! Right?...

Here’s another: until the 1800s, polite people didn’t eat bananas because their shape made them an “immoral fruit”…importers had to hire women for ads showing them eating bananas to prove that there was nothing wrong with them…

Okay, okay…one more…and I’m sorry if this is going to trigger you…if you take public transit, approximately 15% of the air you breath contains human skin…all those floating specs you see in the sunlight?...skin…gross, but I love this stuff…

A big part of my job is searching for facts, although most of what I’m looking for involves music…I’ve heard that if you play hip-hop to a wheel of cheese as it’s maturing, the cheese will have a stronger flavor and aroma…as late as 1948, you could win an Olympic medal for music…and if you want to play music for you dog, choose Reggae…scientists have proven that that’s the music they like the most…

Over the course of the year of researching and writing this program, I run across all kinds of weird facts…most I can incorporate into various shows…others, not so much…

But these orphaned facts need a home…so once every 12 months, I devote a program to clearing out all this information from post-it notes, highlighted passages in books, pages torn from newspapers and magazines, and various files on my computer and throw them all into one program…what you do with this stuff is up to you…this is the annual show I call “60 mind-blowing facts about music in 60 minutes”…

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Hey It's Alan...and I want to introduce you to my brand new, one-of-a-kind true crime podcast called Uncharted: Crime and Mayhem in the Music Industry. 

On this podcast I take you inside unbelievable stories of murder, plane crashes, court battles, and even run-ins with the mob! In this podcast you'll hear all about the dark side of world of music.

We're releasing new episodes every two weeks, so search for and follow Uncharted: Crime and Mayhem in the Music Industry wherever you get your podcasts. 

I hope you enjoy this sneak peak of Episode 5 "The Satanic Panic"

Episode Link:

https://megaphone.link/CORU6081355392

Show contact info:

X (formerly Twitter): @AlanCross

Website: curiouscast.ca

Email: [email protected]

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It’s been a rough decade for the electric guitar…sales of new instruments have dropped by a third, from 1.5 million globally to around just one million…

Why?...generations brought up on electronics are opting out of creating music with traditional instruments like the guitar…instead, they use laptops, iPads, gear like Ableton Live an any number of programmable keyboard devices…

Most guitars are being bought and sold by older players…and there are fewer and fewer of them each year…

All this has hurt manufacturers like Gibson, who filed for bankruptcy in 2018…it’s hurt music stores, both big and small…it’s hurt music teachers who have fewer students…

Sounds dire, right?...maybe…but there’s one bright spot: there has been a steady rise in the number of young women taking up the electric guitar…

According to fender, women now make up at least 50% of all the beginner guitar players in North America and the UK…in South East Asia, that number is more like 70%...

That’s interesting, given that it wasn’t all that long ago that it was accepted fact that a girl could not play an electric guitar—not as good as a guy, anyway…

That attitude abounded through the 70s and 80s…today, that’s no longer the case…the intimidation factor is gone…women are marching right into male-dominated music stores and buying guitars…some take traditional lessons, but others are using online tutorials so they can avoid any hassles and harassment…

And most importantly, we’re seeing more female guitar heroes…you no longer have to be a dude to be a guitar role model…and those are the people we’re going to explore on this episode…this is modern guitar heroes: the women…

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What is a guitar hero?...yes, yes, it’s a video game that vaguely simulates playing a real guitar…what else?...

Yes, yes, it means someone who can rock the “expert level” at guitar hero, the video game…but before that, it meant something totally different…

A guitar hero was a guy—and it was almost always a guy—who had achieved a seemingly supernatural mastery of the electric guitar…they were so good that other experts looked to them to learn and for inspiration…

Chuck Berry…Jimi Hendrix…Eric Clapton…Jimmy Page…Pete Townshend… Jeff Beck…they were among the first to be declared guitar heroes…they pushed the limits of what could be done with the instrument, amplifiers, and effects pedals…

More followed…Eddie Van Halen…Angus Young of AC/DC…The Edge from U2…Slash…Stevie Ray Vaughn…Randy Rhoads…

All excellent players…this got me thinking about guitar heroes from the world of alt-rock, specifically from when things exploded in the early 90s?...

They aren’t betterthan the first generation of guitar heroes…just different, you know?...let’s make a list, shall we?...

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Hey it’s Alan and this week we’re going to do something a bit different for the podcast…

When we recorded our 1000th episode of the ongoing history at Corus Quay…we ended up with a lot of content that we couldn’t fit into the radio show. 

If you caught last week’s podcast, you will have heard the story of how the ongoing history came to be, and how we got to 1000 shows. 

You also would have heard part of the Q&A session we did with the Q107 morning show, and our live audience.  

But…there was so much recorded…and we didn’t want it to go to waste…that we thought, “why not do a second podcast, of just that part of the night”

So…here is the full q and a session from the 1000th episode of the ongoing history of new music, recorded live at Corus quay on December 5th 2023…I think you’re going to enjoy this…

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On Tuesday December 5th, in front of a live audience at Corus Quay, the Ongoing History of New Music recorded the 1000th episode of the radio program.

What some people don't know is that this Podcast started out as a radio show in February 1993 on 102.1 The Edge in Toronto. It has taken over 30 years to reach out 1000th episode!

This is a podcast of that evening complete with part of the Q&A that took place.

Next week there will be a "Part 2" Podcast containing everything not included in this episode.

There was a lot of content!

Enjoy the 1000th episode of the Ongoing History of New Music, and thank you for your continued support.

Show contact info:

X (formerly Twitter): @AlanCross

Website: curiouscast.ca

Email: [email protected]

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With over 300 OGH podcasts to choose from, we know that sometimes older episodes get lost in the library.

So, here is a topic we had a request to dig up again...and this episode first aired on radio in November of 2010 as we look at one of the most under appreciated and underrated members of any rock band...the bass player. 

These are the most influential bass players in the history of alt-rock.

Next week...it's the 1000th episode of the Ongoing History of New Music

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You may be aware of a podcast that came out in the spring of 2020 that sought to get to the bottom of a certain musical mystery…it’s called “wind of change” and it explores the possibility that a metal power ballad was a contributing factor to the fall of the soviet union in the very early 90s…

Stay with me… “Wind of Change” was a global hit for The Scorpions; a metal band out of Hanover in what was then WestGermany…

The Scorpions sing in English…but they also recorded a Russian version under the name “Veter Peremen”…and when the song was released on January 20, 1991, it became a worldwide hit…

Estimates are that it sold 14 million copies…it’s the best-selling single by any German artist…and because it was such a big hit in the USSR, the band presented Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev a gold record…even today, the song is a massive, massive hit among several generations of fans in Eastern Europe…

For years, rumours have swirled about this song…it is said that it was the product of a CIA operation design to destabilize Soviet society with its message of change and revolution…it worked so well that by the end of 1991, the Soviet Union had crumbled…

Did the CIA commission someone to write “Wind of Change,” get The Scorpions to record it, which somehow helped bring about the end of the USSR from within?...I’m not going to cover that here, so you’ll have to listen to the podcast…

But I can tell you that this might not have been the first time rock music was used by a foreign intelligence operation to drive a wedge into a specific society…the popular music of the west—especially the music produced by the USA—was feared by Soviet bloc authorities…but the Soviets also knew that music could also be a weapon against the west…

Here’s another theory…could it be that punk rock was actually KGB plot against the west?...did things also operate in the opposite direction…here’s what we know—or at least think we know…

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If you are a professional musician—that is, you’re being paid to write and perform music and can actually make a living from it—you’re part of an infinitesimal quintile of people who are able to do that… you are living the dream…

This, in fact, may be the only career you’ve ever known…you’ve never had a “real” job…maybe you’ve had a chance to see the world because of music…and if you love what you’re doing and the money works, you want this to go on forever…but it won’t…at some point, the music stops…

It might not be your fault…the music industry moves fast…one day you’ve got it all figured out, working from immediate deadline to immediate deadline and from gig to gig…and then everything stops…

Maybe it happens quickly…maybe it happens slowly then all at once…music changes…the industry changes…trends change…technology changes…and what you offer—what you can do—is no longer in demand…

It’s like captain Jean-Luc Picard has said: “you can do everything right and still lose…that’s not weakness…that’s life”…

So what’s next?...if you exit the world of music—be it voluntarily or by force—what do you do next?...

Maybe it’s best to study what some other musicians have done to transition from rock star to civilian life…this is a look at examples of life after music…

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In the mid-15th century, France was ruled by Louis XI, otherwise known as “Louis the Prudent”...but he was always known as “Louis the Cunning” and “The Universal Spider” because he was always spinning plots and looking for conspiracies...when it came to dissent and wars, he was a brutal sort...

Being a despot is hard work and sometimes you need cheering up...that’s why he challenged Abbe De Baigne, a builder of things, to create a brand new musical instrument for his amusement...

The result was the piganino, a keyboard that required a number of pigs of varying sizes...each was laid out on a flat surface, smallest to largest...above the hind end of each pig was a spike connected to a piano-like keyboard...by pressing a key, the corresponding pig would be spiked, resulting in an oink of a certain note...it was thus possible to play a tune by poking the pig...

It didn’t sound very good, but it worked and Louis XI found it very funny...the pigs did not...

Music and technology have always had an interesting relationship...sometimes it’s harmonious and wonderfully...other times—like with the piganino—there’s a hideous clash... ...however, the piganino, invented 600 years ago, was the forerunner of future music-related technologies like sample, sequencing, and synthesis...the tech—or at least some of the concepts—would eventually win out...

If we step back and look at the history of science, math, and engineering and the practice of creating the art music, we’ll see that every time the two intersect, technology almost always comes out the winner...and that’s okay...

Something that seems radical, evil, transgressive, impure, and corrupting turns out to be a pretty good deal and music is the better for it...

Here are some stories about the clashes between tech and music...I’ll lay out the facts and you decide if these were good things or bad...

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It was Tuesday, May 24, 2016...you know how when you land the flight attendant says it’s now permissible to “use transmitting and receiving functions your portable devices” while you’re taxiing to the gate?...

I’d just landed on a 14-hour flight from Hong Kong...and as soon as I flicked my phone out of airplane mode, it blew up...emails and texts all about one thing: The Tragically Hip had just announced that their singer, Gord Downie, had brain cancer...

At first, this didn’t make sense...had the jet lag kicked in already?...was this some kind of hoax?...I mean, this was Gord...he was practically a Canadian superhero...nothing like this was supposed to happen to him...

But it was true...the emails and texts kept popping up...dozens, hundreds of them...and we all know how the next 18 months played out...

When Gord left us in October 2017, it was really rough...the best tweet I saw that day was “Canada closed: death in the family”...the country spent the next week trying to explain to the rest of the world how a singer of a rock band had brought an entire nation to tears—even the Prime Minister...where else in the world does something like that happen?...

The answer is you have to be a special kind of person: artist, writer, thinker, activist, and poet… this is the story of Gord Downie, Canada’s own rock poet…

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It’s 1986 and Michael Morrison is offered the opportunity of a lifetime. A chance to leave his life of poverty in Newark and start afresh. It’s a job offer he can’t afford to refuse. Michael has no idea what this new job has in store. But he soon realizes: he’s just joined ‘the biggest gang in America’. Join Seren Jones to hear Michael’s story and find out what it means to be both Black and Blue.

Want to hear more? You can follow along on your favourite podcast app here: https://link.chtbl.com/blackandblue-rssdrop

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When someone dies, our first reaction is disbelief...we’re stunned...that’s immediately followed by a need to know what happened...how?...where?...it’s only natural...we need information to help us process the news and the emotion that comes with it...

The next stage is might be “could anything have been done to prevent this?”... “Could someone have helped or intervened?”...In some cases, perhaps...in the case of health issues, maybe not...

And finally, there’s this:... “could what happened to that person happen to me?”...again, totally normal...

When it comes to the death of a famous musician, there’s an additional aspect to processing the news...chances are we never knew this person as, you know, a person...our only relationship with them has been as a fan...so why does their death affect us?...

Here’s a possible answer...although we never knew them, it was through their music that we learned more about ourselves...and in a way, when they die, a little of us dies, too...

This might only cause us to go deeper into what happened...we just need to know, to make sense if it, and to put everything to rest the best we can...yes, some people get very nosey and gossipy and intrusive, but there’s always a way to handle what’s known through the public record: family statements, doctors’ accounts, police reports, coroners’ testimony, toxicology examinations, and autopsy results....

And we often can’t look away because we just need to know...this is “the last moments of, part 2”....

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It’s always a shock when a rock star dies...and our first reaction is “what happened?...how did this person die?”...

That’s completely natural...whenever we’re met with something incomprehensible, we demand an explanation...sometimes one comes quickly...other times, it takes days, weeks, months, and even years for the truth to come out—if at all... 

And how much are we entitled to know?...when do we cross the line from being curious and concerned to gawking and prurient and prying and invading very private space?...

Yet there is something to be said for learning about how someone died...maybe there’s a lesson to be learned or a cautionary tale, steps we or someone else can take to make sure something like this never happens again—or at least not as often...

A celebrity death is news, part of the public record...and wanting to know what happened helps us process the news and all the emotions that go along with such a death...

Besides, some will say, these doomed people are celebrities...and as celebrities, they lived with the idea that the public was interested in multiple aspects of their existence, including how they died...it goes with the territory...

And one other thing: could we ourselves ever meet such an end?...

With all that in mind, let’s look at some notable rock star deaths, focusing on what happened in the last moments of their time on earth...

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The old days of air travel were quite risky…compared to today, the chances of your flight going down were far greater …every airport had kiosks and coin-operating vending machines where you could buy life insurance before you headed to the gate—you know, just in case you thought you weren’t going to make it to your final destination…

1977 was one of the worst years for accidents in aviation history…in addition to several violent hijackings every month—sometimes with fatal results—There were also passenger plane crashes with great loss of life…including the worst aviation disaster of all time when two 747s planes collided on a runway in the Canary Islands, killing 583 people.

Frank Sinatra’s mother, the Prime Minister of Yugoslavia, and all but one member of the University of Evansville basketball team died in crashes…

But then there were the events of October 20, 1977, when a rickety chartered plane went down in a swamp in Mississippi…on board were members of Lynyrd Skynyrd…six of the 24 passengers died, including singer Ronnie Van Zandt, guitarist Steve Gaines, backup singer Cassie Gaines, and assistant road manager Dean Kilpatrick…both pilots also died…

What happened?

Have I got a story for you...

Show contact info:

X (formerly Twitter): @AlanCross

Website: ajournalofmusicalthings.com

Email: [email protected]

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/uncharted-crime-and-mayhem-in-the-music-industry/id1710775237

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One of the most important parts of music is beat and rhythm...without beats, without rhythm, there’s no groove...without a groove, there’s no movement or dancing or really physically getting into the music...beats and grooves are essential building blocks for so much of modern music...

In some songs, the beat is subtle but there...you feel it without someone having to keep it for you...but in others, you need a timekeeper, someone to emphasize and augment and the beats and the rhythms...

For centuries, that job has fallen to drummers and percussionists...but what if a drummer or percussionist isn’t available?...or if you want to try something rhythmic but with different sounds, sounds that a drummer can’t make?...then you might find yourself reaching for a drum machine...

Since their introduction in the very early 1980s, drum machines have become an essential part of modern compositions and productions...in fact, it’s impossible to imagine the music we have today without such electronic devices...

Oh, we still have human drummers—we always will—but drum machines have taken us places that human timekeepers never could...and I’m speaking as someone who plays drums myself...

But how did this all come about?...let’s investigate...this is the history of machines that keep time for our music...

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For centuries, there’s been a dance between music and technology with each affecting the other in some way...almost always, though, there’s no fighting progress...music (and everything to do with it) ultimately bends to the needs and demands of new technology...

For example, when the Catholic Church built big, echo-y cathedrals in the Middle Ages, the sacred music in those buildings adapted to this new architecture so that it made use of the natural reverb...

Fast-forward a bunch of centuries...Thomas Edison’s talking machine, first demonstrated in 1877, and Emile Berliner’s gramophone, which debuted 10 years later, were the first machines able to capture sound, up to three minutes at a time...but because of that recording limit, the standard length of a popular song became about three minutes...the music bent to the limitations of the medium...

I can give you other examples: radio changed the way music was consumed, marketed and sold...jukeboxes help spread the word on R&B, country, and rock’n’roll...they were so popular that a coin shortage in 1937 was blamed on the popularity of jukeboxes...

Electricity gave us amplifiers and the electric guitar...the microphone turned singers from people who could belt out tunes at high volumes into crooners who used the mic to create softer, more intimate performances...

Synthesizers were reviled by many musicians at first because one could make the sounds of an entire orchestra, threatening the livelihoods of professionals...but they were eventually accepted...sampling was thought to be evil and illegal at first, but we worked that out...file-sharing of mp3s meant that no one would ever pay for music again, but now hundreds of millions of people are paying for streaming...there’s more, but you get what I’m talking about...

This music-and-tech balance continues today...and on episode five of our look at rock in the 2010s, we’re going to look how that particular dance played out and the effect these interactions had on our music...

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We as parents get so little time to ourselves. So if you know when vacationing with kids actually becomes a relaxing vacation… please let us know.

In this episode we discuss the literal ups and downs of traveling with kids.

You can find and listen to this podcast wherever you get your podcasts: https://link.chtbl.com/badparents

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It’s an established fact that music comes in many different types of cycles...a sound and style will be big for a while, reach a peak with the public, and then slowly fade out....but once established, it’s unusual for a sound to completely disappear, never to be heard from again...

The only genre I can think of is---maybe alt-rock-style rockabilly...it was big in the very early 80s with bands like the stray cats...but then it just kinda went away...there’s never been a rockabilly revival—at least in the sense and style and scope of what we heard way back then when it was huge for about 18 months...

Instead, after enjoying a time at the forefront of music, many of the cycle-prone rock sounds recede into the shadows, never really going away...they lie in wait until someone comes along—often a generation or two later—to rediscover and reactivate it...

When that happens, it’s usually given a sonic update and if the timing is right, the sound enjoys a new period of time in sun before the cycle repeats yet again...

The longer you live and the more music you become familiar with, the more you begin to see these cycles play themselves out, sometimes over and over again...we see it every decade...

The 2010s were no different...we saw a series of revivals, rediscoveries, and comebacks, all based on the musical dna of what had come before...let’s examine that...this is the history of the 2010s, part 4...

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It must have been so easy to write about rock back in the 50s...comparatively easy to today, i mean...everything was so new that that’s all you had to pay attention to...there wasn’t exactly anything called “rock history” back then because the music had no history...

What began as a spark in the early 50s turned out to be the musical equivalent of the cosmological big bang...and as the years and decades passed, this music—which began as a fresh take on the 12-bar blues template—separated, segmented, stratified, mutated, evolved—with increasing speed...

New genres began to appear yearly, monthly, and sometimes even weekly...today, it seems like every single day results in some kind of derivative spin-off sub-sub-sub-sub-genre...

The new sound and approach may gain traction and stay with us for some time, perhaps even carving out its own permanent space in the rock universe...more likely, though, a new genre will have a half-life shorter than hydrogen 7...and to save you from looking that up, that’s a tiny, tiny fraction of a second: a decimal point followed by 23 zeroes...

But there’s no stopping the fission and fusion of rock...we’re always going to get new sounds...keeping up with them all is another matter...

This is part of what makes writing a musical history of the 2010s so challenging...the number of iterations rock went through in that decade was insane...but if we’re going to understand what happened to rock during that time, we’re going to have to at least try...

This is the history of the 2010s, part 3...

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Traditional wisdom says that the recorded music industry is dominated by the major labels...there used to be a bunch of them, but over the last 25 years, their number has been whittled down to just three companies: universal (the biggest), Sony, and warner music...

Here’s something you may not have know...at last estimate, about 95,000 songs are uploaded to the streaming music services every day...of that number, only about 4% are from those three majors...the rest is from indie labels and do-it-yourself musicians...

Let me flip that around: 96% of all new music comes from independent musicians...the market share of indie labels has been rising by double-digits for almost 25 years now...

Indie music—or at least material from bands not directly signed to one of the three majors—was an important aspect of the 2010s...major label acts were still important, but without the indies, it would have been a pretty empty decade...but thanks to the sheer volume of new music and some crafty distribution by indie-friendly companies, we got to hear a lot of it...

The width and breadth of indie over those ten years was staggering...and without the influence of independent musicians, styles, and trends, major label mainstream rock would have been much different...

Let’s examine that...this is part two of the history of rock in the 2010s...

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We never know we’re living through history as it happens...for example, if we’re trying to assess what happened in a particular decade, we can’t really do it justice if we attempt to analyze things day to day...you need a break, a little time for things to settle into place when it comes to the grand scheme of things...

Take the 60s, for example...this sounds a bit weird at first, but they didn’t end when the calendar flipped over to January 1, 1970...decades have momentum—sometimes a hangover—that carries things forward for a year or two or even three afterwards...

For example, the 50s carried on until probably 1963...it took the assassination of JFK to really kick off the new decade...historians have made convincing arguments that the 60s didn’t end until 1972-ish...

The 70s may have ended relatively on time, brought about by things like the death of disco, a terrible recession, the election of Ronald Reagan, and other markers that said the “me decade” of 70s were done...

I’d say that the 80s ended by the end of 1991, thanks to the first gulf war, another awful recession, and a wholesale sea change in music as we quickly transitioned from a world awash in hair metal to the new alternative generation...

I’d put the end of the 90s in 2001..buried by 9/11 and the retaliation that followed, the rise of the internet, the bursting of the dot-com bubble, and the end of the traditional music industry, the introduction of the iPod...

The aughts?...that’s another decade that I feel ended on time...so much came to a screaming halt with the financial crisis—the great recession in 2008—and by the time the clouds parted, we were done with that decade...

This leaves us at the dawn of the 2010s which was one of the few decades that started right on time...and for the next 10 years, we saw everything from prosperous economic growth to the rise of authoritarism...and technology?...wow...the 2010s saw more people get into tech and gadgets than at any time in history...smart phones, the explosion of social media, cord-cutting...

Which brings us to music...when we look back on that decade, what happened?...what did we learn?...and how were trends and styles and consumption different than earlier decades?...

Let’s find out...this is the history of the 2010s, part 1...

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Continuing to dive into the Ongoing History of New Music archives, here's a show for 2016 that we are surprised has not been posted yet!

At some point in your life, you said “I’m never going to become like my parents”…yes, you did…don’t lie…we all did…

We vowed that we’d never become old and stodgy and boring and stuck in their ways and closed to new ideas…

Do not panic…this is totally natural…this cycle of life has been going on since the invention of music—and it only accelerated with the birth of the recording industry in the late 1800s…

Every generation has its thing…and every generation thinks that the people who came before them and comes after them are weird and wrong…

This is part two of the more things change, the more things stay the same…

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Continuing to dive into the Ongoing History of New Music archives, here's a show for 2016 that we are surprised has not been posted yet!

Have you every heard yourself say this?

kids these days! What’s wrong with them? All their crazy music. It’s just noise!

That usually leads to…

music isn’t as good as it used to be. When i was younger—high school, university—music was awesome!

That’s followed by a list of bands and songs you believe to be the greatest ever, a lot of which aren’t as popular as you still want them to be…and then things usually end up like this…

if today’s kids would stop and listen to what we used to listen to, they’d see that i’m right! Then we’d start getting some goodnew music!

Don’t worry…if any of this sounds familiar, it’s because this is totally natural… 

People always hate the music of the generations that are coming up behind them…and I mean always…

The young are always denigrated for their music, their way of dancing, their technology and their overall disrespect for their elders and history and the way things used to be… 

It’s the cycle of life…and it’s been going on for not just decades, but centuries…here…let me show you…

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This week we go back into the Ongoing history vault from 2008 and the second of two parts on world records.

Most people want to leave this earth being known for... something.

We want it to be at least a little memorable... to some, so that our time on this planet won't be forgotten so quickly. It's that whole sense of self my soul has self-esteem issues thing that we're all born with. Maybe you want to be known for being kind to animals. Maybe you're good at math, and you want people to remember your gift for solving difficult differential equations.

Or maybe you want to be known as the only man who has ever eaten an airplane.

You heard me.

Michelle Lottito is also known as Massio Monge-tut, which translates as Mr. Eat Everything. He's the world record holder of the largest meal ever eaten. In this case, it's a Cessna 150. This is an airplane, and has a wingspan at just over 33 feet and weighs about 1100 pounds. It can carry two people at a maximum altitude of 14,000 feet for just over 400 miles, and this dude ate one. Apparently, he has a stomach lining that's twice as thick as it should be, which allows him to digest things like nuts and bolts and sheet metal and chain. Wonder what kind of wine goes with the prop assembly. Anyway, Michelle Lottito will be forever known as the guy who ate an airplane. A meal that size is a world record.

Which is another thing that got me thinking. What are some of the superlatives and some of the weirdness that comes from the world of New Rock and alternative music when it comes to stuff like this? So I started looking, and I found out a lot.

This is the Ongoing History of New Music Book of World Records, part two.

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This week we go back into the Ongoing history vault from 2008 and the first of two parts on world records.

Chances are you have at least some kind of talent. Maybe it's not something very useful, but at least it's something that you can do that no one else can. My mom used to say that everyone is good at something or at the very least, known for something that no one else is.  For example, I grew up with a kid who could dislocate his thumbs at will. It was great for freaking out substitute teachers. He got to go home early a lot. Another kid could pop a wheelie on his bike and ride it all the way home like that, and he'd live more than a mile from the school. Sometime in the 1970s, though, the world discovered the Guinness Book of World Records. And that's when we realized that there were things out there much stranger than we could ever realize. Like the dude from India whose fingernails had a combined length of over 20ft. Or Elaine Davidson, the world's most pierced woman; 720 piercings, including dozens in her face. Another dude from Scotland has tattoos over 99.9% of his body, making him the world's most tattooed man. Then, in the summer of 2008, Sandy Allen died. She was the world's tallest woman. At 7ft seven inches, she lived in the same Indiana nursing home as Edna Parker, who died year earlier at the age of 115. And up until then; she had been the world's oldest woman. Now, this kind of got me thinking. Has anyone ever put together a list of world records for the world of new rock? A list of all the superlatives, the biggest, the shortest, the highest, the longest, the most expensive, all those things? And I couldn't find one. So I thought to myself, hey, there's a gap in the market. There’s got to be enough genuine and morbid curiosity out there to make it worthwhile. And who knows? Maybe a project like this might inspire someone to-do something great, or at least something weird. Which, of course, would be good, too. Therefore, ladies and gentlemen, I give you…The Ongoing History of New Music “Book of World Records version 1.0” part one.

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If you're a fan of a particular artist, you want as much as you can get from that artist,

you know, the albums, the singles, the t-shirts, all the downloads and all the swag and that's great when your favourite group releases an album.

But with some bands going 234 or even more years between records, things get kind of dry. Now in the olden days, that was too bad distribution systems being what they were access to everything a band did was pretty much impossible.

The access was tightly, tightly controlled, but the best you could hope for was for one of those rare elusive and highly legal bootleg records, unauthorized recordings issued by some shadowy label without the permission of the artist.

Mostly these bootleg recordings featured live performances. After all, they were the easiest to make, but some contained stuff in the vaults that was never ever designed to be heard by anyone outside of the band's inner circle. 

Heck, some of this material wasn't even heard by the executives of the group's record label for years. We had this cat and mouse game between the labels and the artists and the bootleggers and hard core fans were right in the middle, waiting, hoping and praying that they could somehow get their hands on this stuff.

Bootleggers moved offshore to places like Italy, Singapore and Indonesia where copyright laws were, uh shall we say a little looser?

One of the great bootleg labels was called KTS. They were renowned for two things, 

super high quality live recordings that they got from somewhere and a wide selection of studio recordings that were never ever supposed to be released. I have a bunch of KTS releases and they are very, very good.

Then along came the internet and the bootleg CD industry suddenly dried up pretty much overnight. Why bother putting out something that you had to manufacture in a Backstreet factory in China when you could just put it all online.

Meanwhile, a strange thing happened with performers and managers instead of being all freaked out about this unfinished or unapproved stuff getting released into the wild by someone else, they started doing it themselves.

I mean, why not use this material to forge a deeper relationship with their best customers, their biggest fans. The result has been an explosion of interesting material from some very big bands.

And here's how you can track down some of it for yourself.

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There’s a fine line between “wonderful” and “weird”...things that are “wonderful” tend to inspire you with awe...you feel warmth and light and awe and admiration...and you may suddenly find yourself believing in goodness and a higher power...

I saw a total solar eclipse once...that’s exactly how I felt...maybe you’ve had a similar experience...

But just a few centimeters from “wonderful” is how you feel when you run across something that’s genuinely “weird”...you might still feel awed—but you might also experience disbelief, confusion, disgust...and you may even feel a little throw-up at the back of your throat...

Or you might laugh...”Weird” fan be funny....or you might think that something “weird” is really, really cool...see, there’s good “weird” as well as bad... “wonderfully weird,” if you will...it’s all in the eye of the beholder...

Let’s see where this stuff fits in with you...its part ten of “100 weird things about new rock”...

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Money is a weird thing...when you don’t have it, it’s all you can think about...when you do have it, it’s the last thing on your mind...

It’s gotta be especially weird for successful musicians...99.9% of all rock performers come from very modest backgrounds...for years, they make sacrifices for their art, hoping and praying that one day, they won’t have to worry about where their next meal comes from or how they’re gonna manage to pay the rent....

But 99.99% of professional musicians will never hit the big time...they may make an okay living, but they’ll never be rich...

But what about that 1/100th of 1 per cent that do hit the big time?...for them, life changes a lot and it changes fast...suddenly, they’re able to do and have things that they never even dreamed of...

Some can handle it and ease into the über-rich lifestyle with elegance and grace...others–well, not so much...others still use their positions to do strange, excessive and occasionally destructive things...

And, not surprisingly, things on all sides of the ledger can get quite weird...

This is part 9 of “100 weird things about new rock”...it’s 10 tales of wealth, success and excess.

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The standard musical diet consists of three things: sex, drugs and rock’n’roll....all three of these stapes affect the same areas of the brain...

We’ve talked about this before, but here’s a quick refresher course in neuroscience...

In your head, you have the amygdala, the cerebellum and the nucleus accumbens...they’re involved in the process of creating and regulating dopamine, which is the hormone that makes you feel good...

These regions analyze what’s going on when you have an orgasm, take cocaine or listen to a great song...dopamine is released into the bloodstream, which is a signal to the rest of the body that says, “this is good!  Let’s have more!”...

Needless to say, dopamine is a pretty addictive hormone...mix music and drugs and you’re heading down a slippery slope...as we’ve seen many times–including earlier this in this year–things can get very weird very quickly...

But musicians taking drugs is often a very solitary and personal thing...with sex, other people are involved...most of the time...but then again, we are talking about weirdness, aren’t we?

You might want get the kids and grandma to do something else for the next hour...this is “100 weird things about new rock, part 8"–and the topic what happens when new rock and alternative music mixes with weird sex...

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It is a fact of human nature that those given the power to make rules that govern the behavior the rest of us will devote their lives to making and enforcing those rules...

Most of the time, that’s a good thing...if you murder someone in cold blood and you’re caught, you’ll face justice...robbery is illegal...and so is owning a pig in France and calling it “napoleon”...

No, seriously...it’s against the law to name your pig “napoleon” if you live in France...in California, women may not operate an automobile while wearing a house coat...and in Canada, it’s apparently illegal to remove a bandage in public....who knew?...

Then there are all the weird lawsuits–like the dry cleaners who were sued for $54 million for losing a pair of pants...or the American politician who filed a suit against god for causing natural disasters and inspiring terrorists...

And then there are all the tiny legal nuances that either allow cases to proceed or have them dismissed on a technicality—hello, O.J. Simpson...

The world of rock is not immune to legal foibles...crimes, felonies, misdemeanors, weird lawsuits, legal charges, jail time–the works...

Which got me thinking: what are the weirdest intersections of the law and new rock of all time?...I came up with a list of ten....

This is “100 weird things about new rock, part 7: 10 stories from the legal files:... 

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I think we take music for granted...as much as we love it; we also treat it like something disposable...

And I don’t if we can be blamed for it...I mean, there’s just so much music out there...there’s a never-ending supply...

We hear a song...we evaluate it–sometimes in less than 3 seconds–and then we either accept or reject the song...and if we accept it, we’ll listen to it only until something better comes along...

We seldom stop to think about all the effort–the time, the inspiration, the emotion, the skill, the technology, the money–that went into creating that one song...

While music can be written and created anywhere, you need a recording studio to preserve it, to put it into a form in which it can be duplicated and then distributed to the world so we–the fans–can finally get to hear it...

And recording studios can be weird places...confining windowless rooms where time seems to lose all meaning...yet the goal is to capture the energy of a live performance...

In other words, there’s a lot that can happen between the time a songwriter feels that creative flash and we finally get to hear the end result...and yes, it can get very, very weird along the way...

This is part 6 of “100 weird things about new rock”...I call this episode “studio stories”...

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Some things just go together naturally...

A nice sauterne is a fine companion to foie gras that is served with fruit compote...or, if that’s too rich, strawberry jam works well in a sandwich with peanut butter...

And, as even the most casual observer knows that rock music often comes with side order of drugs...

In case you haven’t noticed, rock and drugs often have some kind of symbiotic relationship...

I mean, the self-appointed moralists who want to sanitize life for the rest of us kinda have a point...the world of rock’n’roll is filled with stories of druggy excess and the kind of misery only drugs can offer...

A lot of lives have been ruined or ended by that dangerous combination of rock music and drugs...and more often than not, things can get really weird...really weird...

I have ten stories where rock and drugs have intersected with very strange results...

It’s part five of “100 weird things about new rock”...

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From the outside, being in a famous touring rock band seems like a glamourous thing...you travel the world, playing for thousands of adoring fans night after night with your gang of buddies...

Oh, the gloriousness of it all...the private jets!...the media exposure!...the excitement!...the perks!...the sites!...the sex!...the drugs!...your every whim catered to by people whose job is to, well, cater to your every whim...

And that really is the reality–for maybe the top 1/10 of one per cent of groups in the world...for other 99.9%, going on the road is a trying ordeal that can get pretty uncomfortable real fast...

I mean, think about it...for the entire time you’re on tour, you’re living in a bubble, going where you’re told to go, doing what you’re told to do and living out of suitcases for months on end...

You can wake up in the van or the bus one morning after the gig and quite literally have no idea what country you’re in, let alone what city...

Then there’s the bad food, the interviews with the same stupid questions all the time, annoying fans, the late nights, too much alcohol, too many drugs and not enough sleep...

The only thing that makes it all worthwhile is the fact you get to play every night...but even that gets old after a while...all you want to do is go home, do the laundry and finally be left alone for a while...

With that kind of working environment, life on the road can get pretty weird...how weird?...let us count the ways...

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This historical, true crime podcast hosted by Kru Williams from History Television's hit original series Deadman’s Curse: The Legend of the Lost Gold investigates the curse and legend surrounding the lost gold mine of Pitt Lake.

On their quest they're joined by members of the Stó:lō and Katzie First Nations, historians and cultural experts of diverse backgrounds, as they sort fact from fiction and give Slumach a voice from the other side of the veil.

You'll hear about how an Indigenous prospector, accused of murder set a curse on anyone who searched for his hidden gold just before he was hanged. Over a century later, a prospector, a mountaineer, a truth-seeker and a way-shower band together to walk the same paths of those who went looking for Slumach’s cursed gold and never returned find how a single bullet was the catalyst for a 150-year-old mystery.

Click here to find it on your favourite podcast app.

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If you’re listening to this show, you are a music fan...any arguments?...probably not...

“fan” is short for “fanatic”–a person who is extremely passionate and enthusiastic about something...could be sports, could be movies, could be music...and fans tend to be reasonably uncritical about the objects of their affection...         

But all “fanaticism”–and we’re using the proper dictionary terms here–is not the same...we can go from being a casual fan of something to being a devotee...but then “fan” gives away to the negative connotations of “fanatic,” all the way up to “zealot” and “militant”...this is where things get unbalanced, obsessive and dangerous...

If you’re a public figure—say, a famous musician–your whole goal is to attract fans...your whole life is about finding people who really, really like what you do....

The problem is, however, that with the good come the weirdo’s...and this is where things can get very, very strange...

This is part three of “100 weird things about new rock”...ten tales of fans, stalkers and the downright crazy...

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There’s an old saying that goes “he who dies with the least regrets wins”...

Good words to live by because by the time we shuffle off this mortal coil, all of us are going to have done and said things that we wish we hadn’t...and chances are, we hope that no one finds out about this stuff...

It’s the skeletons in the closet–pieces of our past that we try not to show (or even try to hide) from other people...

But in the era of tabloid celebrity, paparazzi, Facebook, MySpace, twitter, Wikipedia, blogs, tmz.com, the smoking gun and Pérez Hilton, it’s getting harder and harder to keep the bad stuff buried...it has a way of being exhumed...

You know the kind of stuff I’m talking about...the rumour that Hitler’s paternal grandparent was Jewish...the alien autopsies at area 51....Angelina Jolie’s allegedly history of bisexuality [pause]...uh, sorry...where was I?...

Anyway, all of this got me thinking: what are some of great secrets from the world of new rock and alternative music that today’s performers would rather we not discuss?...

This is part two of “100 weird things about new rock”...

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I have a fascination with the strange...what seems ordinary at first glance is–well, isn’t ordinary at all....

Once you get in the habit of looking past the obvious, the universe opens up in some interesting, unexpected and really cool ways...

For example, if you’re ever in Albania and you agree with what someone says, shake your head from side-to-side...if you disagree, nod...in other words, do the opposite to what you would do at home...that’s just the way it is in Albania...

Here’s another...how many different characters have been featured on The Simpsons?...those who have the time to count those sorts of things say the number is 320...

One more:  the highest possible score on an old-style Pac-Man game is 3,333,360 at the end of level 256...at that point, the game suffers what can be best described as a “nervous breakdown” and the display goes all weird...game over...

Stuff like this got me thinking...would it be possible to compile a list of the weirdest things ever from the world of new rock and alternative music?...

Of course it would...prepare for wonderment...

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It’s always a shock when we hear that a rock star has died...but when the news about Chris Cornell came out on May 18, 2017, it was extra-jarring...

The overall impression was that he was a guy who had it good...he’d been a central fixture of the grunge era as the front man of Soundgarden...there was an totally unexpected hit with the Temple of the Dog project...then a solid three-album run with Audioslave...

His solo recordings were hit-and-miss, but given everything else he’d done, fans gave him a pass when he stumbled...

Then came the Soundgarden reunion, which began in 2010 and ran for almost eight years...there was a new album—“King Animal” in 2012—and sold out tours...there were also plans for a second post-reunion record for which Chris had already recorded some vocal takes...

But then he gone by his own hand in that hotel room in Detroit...another member of the grunge brigade, joining Kurt Cobain, Andrew Wood, and Layne Staley...and it’s possible that Chris’ fate had a fatal effect on his good friend, Chester Bennington, who took his own life two months later...

Chris may be gone but we’re still talking about him, still listening to his music, still marveling at that voice...as with all great artists, the fascination continues...

Let’s take a dive into Chris’ world with ten interesting things about the man that you may not know...

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This universe is very weird...so weird, in fact, that we often don’t question its weirdness even though it’s right in front of us...we’re completely caught up in it...

For example, when someone takes a group picture, there’s always that person that demands that everyone “say cheese”....that’s a way to get everyone to smile...you can’t help but smile when you say “cheese”. 

No one is really sure who was first to employ the “cheese” trick for photography... In the early days of the camera, it was considered undignified to be captured with any kind of grin...the command from the photographer used to be “say prunes”...that’s why so many old photos have people doing duck lips...

The earliest reference to “say cheese” comes from a Texas newspaper report in October 1943...Joseph E. Davies, a former ambassador to Moscow, was interviewed gave away his secret to look pleasant no matter what the circumstances... “just say ‘cheese’”, he advised...Davies wasn’t the inventor of the phrase, though...he says he learned it from some politician...

Let’s try something more current...when we enter the full address of a website in a browser, we go http://www. Whatever”...that’s a bit unwieldy...the story of the URL is very complicated, but it breaks down like this...

The “http” stands for “hypertext transfer protocol,” the set of rules that govern transferring files over the internet...the “www” is “world wide web,” which is where the url lives...but what’s with “//”?...that’s a holdover from the computer code that was written for the Apollo missions to the moon...

And by the way, the guy who first put all this together is Tim Berners-Lee back 1992...he’s really, really sorry for all the confusion and if he had it his way, he’d go back and come up with something better...

Since we’re on the topic of rockets, why is there a countdown to launch?...seems obvious, right?...tick down the seconds until the engines fire...but get this: nasa took this idea from a 1929 silent film called “frau im mond”—which translates as “women in the moon”...it’s considered to be one of the first serious sci-fi films...for its rocket launches, it features a countdown from “six”...6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, now!”

Again, this is stuff right in front of our faces that we’ve just accepted as part of life without ever really questioning what’s going on...now let’s extend this to the world of music...there are many strange things that we just accept as fact and protocol...but why?...let’s find out...

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Times are good for vinyl...the format was all but dead until some desperate record store owners invented “record store day” in 2008...since then, we’ve seen double-digit increases in vinyl sales year after year after year...

Things are so good that in several countries, the revenue brought in by selling vinyl is greater than the revenue generated by compact disc sales...we haven’t seen anything like this since the late 80s...

What’s driving the boom?...many things, from audio quality to the ability to display the music you love in your home... “look at how many linear feet my record collection takes up!...not only that, but I’ve chosen a format that isn’t portable and requires me to purchase special equipment to play it...that’s how much I love music”...

Vinyl is something you can hold in your hand...plus there’s the disc itself, the artwork, the liner notes, the lyrics and all the tactile sensations that go with playing a record...

Once you’re smitten, it’s not too hard move to collecting interesting records...you hit used record stores, go to record shows, and scour sites like discogs and eBay to fill in the gaps in your vinyl library...

And then there’s the final leap: you become a hard-core collector and look at vinyl as an investment...you start lusting after records that are insanely rare and very valuable—and very expensive...these records cost hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, and in a couple of very special cases, hundreds of thousands of dollars...

What are these records?...where can you find them?...and what’s it gonna cost me?...this is a tour through some very valuable vinyl...and hey: maybe one of this records is in your music library right now…

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If you’re going to commit to being in a band, you have to prepared to deal with the bad as well as the good...

The good stuff can include fame, money, perks, and the ability to make a living by playing music...enviable stuff...

But then there’s the bad stuff...problems with your record label...lineup changes...dealing with the fickle tastes of the public...writer’s block...internal struggles...management hassles...I guess we can add pandemic lockdowns, too...

I could go on, but you get the point...

These are the things that can be deadly for any group at any level...but none of these issues are necessarily fatal...and this is where I direct you to exhibit “A”: Canada’s 54-40...

This band has been a going concern since 1980...and while there have been a couple of lineup changes over the years—three, by my count—the core of the group is still there...

This is the story of 54-40—in their own words, part 2

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Being in a band is hard...keeping a band together is harder still...and if a band can keep it together for more longer than a decade, they should get some kind of medal...

Let’s give props to the Red Hot Chili Peppers, still going since their establishment in 1983...Metallica has been with us since 1981...both new order and Depeche Mode go back to 1980...

The current lineup of U2 has been the same since that day in March 1978 when they changed their name from “The Hype”...as they were doing their thing in Dublin, the cure was coming together in England...

Pretty good...here are a few more longevity champions...Blondie, formed in 1974...Kiss, 1973...The Eagles, 1971...The Who, 1964...The Rolling Stones, 1962...The Beach Boys, 1961...

Now let’s look at just Canada...Sloan has been with us since 1991...The Tragically Hip, 1985...Loverboy, 1979...April Wine, 1969...Rush lasted a full 50 years before they broke up...they were formed in 1968...and we there’s still a version of The Guess Who out there, maintaining a streak that started in 1965...

I should also point out that the Nanaimo Concert Band has been a going concert since 1873—not with the original members, of course...there have been some lineup changes...

Another name that needs to be added to this list is 54-40...they were established in 1980 and are still going...there have been some changes in personnel, but the core of the band is still intact, still touring, still recording, still on the radio.. 

They outlasted the original wave of punk, new wave, 80s hair metal, grunge, the resurrection of indie rock in the 2000s, the rise of the internet, the demise of music video channels, and—well, you get the idea...

So this is as good a time as any to sit down with the band to let them talk about their decades in the Canadian music business...this is “54-40, in their own words, part 1”

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There is a new gold rush going on right now—but this one is different...it has nothing to do with minerals or oil or any other traditional commodity...it’s not what we’ve seen with crypto currency...it may have to do with stock markets, but not always...and yet it’s a form of investment, one that should continue to pay off for decades to come...

 I’m talking about the rush to buy up song catalogues, the rights to material created by some of the biggest artists on the planet...you’ve probably heard of some of these transactions...

 Everyone from the killers to Barry Manilow to Silverchair to the Beach Boys to members of Alice In Chains have cashed out...Imagine Dragons netted $100 million...Justin Bieber, $200 million...the Chili Peppers, $140 million...Bruce Springsteen sold his music for over half a billion dollars...

 There are about a dozen well-capitalized companies in this game...they’re spending billions of dollars hundreds of thousands of songs...who are they and where’s the money coming from?...

 If someone is buying, who’s selling?...who sets the price?...if you’re a successful musician, what are the advantages to selling you’re life’s work?...how long has this been going on?...and what do these big catalogue says mean for the future?...

 Let’s find out...this is a primer on the stampede to buy (and own) the greatest music of all time...

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My main interest with skateboarding is the music that’s evolved along with it...in fact, there’s a whole subgenre of alt-rock built on skateboarding culture....and there are plenty of legendary rock acts that found their first fans among the skate crowd...

This music goes back a lot farther than you might expect, too...i think it’s time that we gave skate punk its due...

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I vividly remember my first encounter with Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails...it was April 17, 1990, at the old RPM club in Toronto... Nine Inch Nails were opening for Goth God Peter Murphy and frankly, no one cared...

I was there with a bunch of people chatting at the bar while this noisy band blitzed their way through the first four songs of their set...and then came song number five...it was an insanely heavy version of the Queen song, “Get Down Make Love” from their 1977 album, “News of the World”...

It took about 30 seconds for the crowd to pick up that the band had launched into a cover...and it was a good cover...an excellent cover...and I remember seeing the entire audience turn as one toward the stage to see what the hell was going on...

My memory is that everyone suddenly got into the band...and for the rest of the set—which consisted of “Ringfinger,” Down In It,” and “Head Like A Hole”—the crowd went nuts...and we were rewarded for our attention by the band smashing their gear to bits at the end...

That was it...I was sold on this new band and I’ve been a fan ever since... Nine Inch Nails is one of my desert island bands...I’ve seen the band more times than I can count...I’ve interviewed Trent on multiple occasions...

I have just about every single physical release, including several box sets...if you look in my cd library, you’ll find that I have more Nine Inch Nails bootlegs than anyone else...I even wrote a book on the first two albums...

With all that in mind, here are some of my favourite stories about Trent and the band...and because I like being cute about things, I’m calling this show “Nine Inch Nails tales”.

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This is part 2 of our look at true stories of plagiarism and unfortunate sonic coincidences in the world of Alt-Rock

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Let me ask you this...how many times have you heard a song and said "Hey that song sounds just like something I heard last month. That guitar riff is really familiar....don't they realize those chords were used in a song years ago?!?!?!"

This sort of thing happens all the time...in fact it happens more than most people realize.

Sometimes quiet deals are worked out behind the scenes and the public never knows, other times things get ugly....

These are true stories of plagiarism and unfortunate sonic coincidences in the world of Alt-Rock...part 1

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We’ve all been there...tickets for a concert you really, really want to see are set to go on sale at exactly 10am...you’re on the Ticketmaster site as the clock ticks toward the appointed time...

9:59:57...9:59:58...9:59:59...ten o’clock!...show time...

Enter...nothing...refresh refresh refresh the browser...nothing...you try mashing the f5 button a bunch times...no luck....you hit control-r a couple of times...still nothing...but then, one last time and you’re in!...except you’re not...at 10:01 and 17 seconds, the show you so desperately wanted to see is sold out...

What the--...you did everything right...how could so many tickets get sold so fast?...hello, what’s this?...tickets are already for sale on the secondary market?...and the price is double the face value?...what just happen

This is just one ticket-buying scenario...maybe you were able to get in only to discover that tickets were already selling for quadruple the original price—and that’s through the primary seller—in this case, Ticketmaster...

You’re the act’s biggest fan!...you should be able to get tickets to at least one of their shows...and you’ve been shut out in less than 90 seconds...hello?...ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?...

Hold on...back up...there’s a lot to process here and it can get pretty emotional...buying concert tickets can be one of the most frustrating of all retail experiences...and a big part of the problem is that the average person doesn’t understand how it works...

Wait...that sounds condescending, but I don’t mean it to be...getting a ticket to a concert should be simple—but it’s not...the complexities of buying and selling concert tickets today would drive Einstein insane...

Stick around and I will do my best to unravel everything for you and by the time we’re done, I won’t have made it any easier to get a ticket, but maybe you’ll understand why you can’t get one...this is the weird history of concert tickets, part 2...

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Let’s define a “concert ticket”...it is a contract between you, an act, a promoter, and a venue that allows you admission to specific event at a stated time and place...seems simple enough...let’s continue...

A concert ticket can cost money that goes to covering costs and making a profit for those staging the concert...or in some cases, it can be free and is used mainly for tracking attendance...

Fair enough...a concert ticket can be pre-printed on card stock...it can be printed by a machine when you buy it...it can be a bar or QR code on a piece of paper you print out at home...it may have a little hologram thingy on it or some other sort of security device...that ticket may be tied to the credit card used to buy the ticket—or it may not...and when you go through the door, a person may take your ticket, tear your ticket in half, or just scan it...

But maybe you don’t have a physical ticket at all...you have an e-ticket which has been living on your phone for months...you poke through a bunch of screens until you finally find it, holding up everyone in line and thinking to yourself you should have really called it up earlier because you couldn’t remember where you stored it and then get that scanned...

Fine...that’s a concert ticket...but who are the people behind issuing and redeeming all these tickets?...what entities get to determine how much we have to pay?...how come we have to buy so many tickets through Ticketmaster?...and what about these services charges and dynamic pricing and scalpers who somehow get their hands on tickets in second if not before tickets go on sale to the general public?

And here’s a bold statement: everything you know about concert tickets is probably wrong...

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Once upon a time, it was illegal—criminal—to be another other than heterosexual...any hint that you may be something other than straight could get you into all sorts of trouble—and career suicide was the least of your worries...

In 1895, the famous English playwright, Oscar Wilde, was put on trial for homosexual practices...he was found guilty and sentenced to two years in jail...he never recovered from the ordeal and died soon after his release...

In 1959, Liberace, the famous pianist, sued the London Daily Mirror for libel for implying that he was gay...it went to trial and on the stand and under oath, Liberace stated that–this is 1959, remember–he had never indulged in homosexual practices...the judge believed him and he won $24,000...

In 1982, a former male bodyguard sued him for palimony–and this time, Liberace had to pay out $95,000...finally, in 1987, he died of AIDS–and the Daily Mirror came calling, looking for a refund of their $24,000...

And look at Elton John...despite the fact that he married a woman in 1984, the rumours of his homo- and bisexuality helped erode his fan base in the late 70s...he had to hide it for decades, something that took a serious emotional toll...

When you put everything into this kind of context, you can see how far things have come today...if someone comes out, this admission is greeted by most with a shrug...it’s like “okay...cool...whatever”...

And not only that, but sexual orientation is protected by law in much of the world...for example, in late 2004, the French parliament adopted legislation that could get a person one year in jail for insulting homosexuals...this law treats anti-gay and sexist comments in the same way other laws treat racist and anti-Semitic insults...say something homophobic in France and you could end up with 12 months in the clink plus the equivalent of a $75,000 fine...

But it wasn’t always this way, including in the world of new rock, which was supposed to be so progressive, liberal and tolerant...here of some stories of brave people who took a lot of arrows for who they were.

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I vividly remember sitting down to write the first-ever episode of “The Ongoing History of New Music”...I was in my living room with a blank yellow note pad...and I was terrified...

To be brutally honest, I did not want this gig...but the powers-that-be decreed that this was my new job...if didn’t want to do it, that would have been cool...I was told I’d receive a manila envelope containing a modest severance package...

That wouldn’t work...I’d just gotten married and I’d just bought a house with a 12 ½ per cent mortgage...and I’d done radio all my adult life, so I didn’t really have a lot of skills for any other line of work...

So I told the bosses that “okay, I’ll do it”...what other choice did I have?...

So there I am, sitting looking at this blank yellow note pad this was before the internet and before anyone started writing books on the history of alternative music... ...where to start?...how to organize everything?...and how could I come up with something every single week?...

What’s that quote from the ancient Chinese philosopher, Laozi?... “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step”...so I just started scribbling notes...

A few days later, I had a script for the first episode of “The Ongoing History of New Music”...I decided that the best way to begin was to make a pilot, a show that laid out what the program would be...I was a total guess...I had no idea...none...

I figured I’d do the show for a couple of years and then move on...people would get tired of it, it would outlive its usefulness, or I’d just end up getting fired—for real, this time...

But here we are, 30 years later, and I’m still doing “Ongoing History” shows...and as I sit here, it’s February 2023, we’re about 30-ish episodes from Ongoing History show number one thousand...that’ll happen sometime in November...

Things have changed a lot since I wrote and recorded that first episode, things that we’ll get into when we get to show number one thousand...but for now, to mark 30 years since the first episode aired, we’ve pulled the recording from the archive and are making it available for the first time as a Podcast...God, the concept of Podcasts was still years away when we started this...

So just for fun, let’s take a listen to that very first program, broadcast on February 28, 1993...I hope this isn’t too cringey...

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A couple of years back, I did an episode called “The Diversity Show”...it ran in February as part of Black History Month...the goal was to salute the contributions of people of African descent to the world of rock...

It was quite the list...Jimi Hendrix...we had to talk about Jimi, one of the greatest guitarists of all time...then there was Death,  a criminally overlooked band from Detroit called Death who were about 20 years ahead of their time...

We talked about Bad Brains, the great hardcore band from DC...we moved to English for discussions about Ska stars The Specials and The English beat...the punk-funk of Fishbone, the metal crunch of both Living Colour and Ice-T’s and BodyCount

And we included Lenny kravitz, Bloc Party, Bakar, Kenny Hoopla, and more...

But the list was incomplete, of course...there was only so much time and there are so many people and events we need to talk about...so let’s spread the recognition around a little more for Black History Month 2023...

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At the dawn of the 21st century, vinyl was dead, dead, dead...we were all going digital and there was no point in keeping this ancient format...vinyl records were dusty, scratchy, and noisy...they took up too much storage space...they warped and got water damaged...

But the biggest knock against vinyl was that it wasn’t portable...MP3s were a brand-new thing back then and the idea of being able to carry around a thousand songs on a device that could fit in your pocket was pretty sexy...

While vinyl never went out of production, fewer and fewer records were manufactured...pressing plants shut down and the machinery either sold off for parts or scrapped entirely...and if you happen to need a new turntable or a cartridge, good luck...try and find one...

Two groups of people stood between vinyl and its extinction: hardcore collectors who never bought into all the digital promises and djs who preferred spinning records instead of mixing CDs...

Vinyl was doomed...but then it wasn’t...starting in 2008, a weird thing happened...like some zombie in one of those old Italian horror movies of the early 80s, the format rose from the dead...

And today, vinyl is doing something it hasn’t done since the early 90s: generating more revenue than cds...the world still buys more compact discs, but because vinyl sells at a premium, it brings in more money than CDs...

Despite supply chain issues, shortages of polyvinyl chloride, back-ups at pressing plants, and higher and higher prices, more people are getting into vinyl every day...that’s why I thought it was time that we explored a few more stories about a format that refuses to go away...

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Like Homer Simpson, I love my TV...without my local, network, cable, on-demand, and streaming shows none of us would have made it through the pandemic...

 The downside is that in order to remain distracted and entertainment, I became over-subscribed...mixed with my perpetual fear of missing out, I’ve ended up paying for more cable channels than I need and subscribing to channels I don’t even watch...

 I’m just too lazy to go through my credit card statements, find the offending charges, and then go through the hassle of calling customer service and cancelling my subscription...I gotta do that...

 But I’ve been a TV junkie since I was a kid...and one of the things that’s always fascinated me are TV theme songs...some are bespoke compositions commissioned specifically for a show...others are formerly standalone songs that licensed for a program...

 In both cases, being the writer of a theme song can be extraordinarily lucrative, especially if the show is a hit and goes into syndication...every time the theme you wrote gets played on TV—broadcast or streamed—anywhere in the world, you get paid...every...single...time...

 And since having your song played as part of a TV show, you’re constantly advertising its existence to the world...if you’re lucky, it’ll blow up into something even bigger...and although it doesn’t happen much anymore, your label might decide to release your TV theme as a single...and if it becomes a hit that way, wow....

 What I’d like to do is look at the history of some of these TV themes, focusing on rock bands who made some very good money—sometimes-insane money—from somehow ending up being associated with television...

 This could very well alter the way you listen to TV from now on...

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Back in the late 70s, the BBC debuted a science education show called “Connections”...the host was James Burke, an affable, professorish guy, usually dressed in a beige polyester leisure suit who gave the term “interdisciplinary” a whole new meaning...

His thing was to take disparate developments in science and technology and show how they were actually interconnected in ways that led to our modern world...nothing, he demonstrated, existed in isolation over the long term...

One show connected the invention of the cannon to the first movie project in the late 1800s...there were obviously a lot of steps in between, but Burke was able to draw a very clear line...another demonstrated the few degrees of separating between drinking gin and tonics to astronomers discovering the true size of the universe...

“Connections” remains one of my all-time favourite TV shows...and to be honest, more than a little of this program is inspired by the way James Burke was able to tie things together...

I’ve always wanted to create a proper “connections”-type show, but it’s been hard because so much knowledge and research and analysis and synthesis is required...and if I’m honest, what you’re about to hear has taken years to pull together...I hope I can do things justice...

Here is my attempt to create some connections between rock music and some seemingly unconnected inventions, events, and discoveries from the past...

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When humans first started making audio recordings of music, they were limited as to how long those recordings could be...

An original Edison cylinder could maybe hold two minutes of music, therefore any songs committed to the format had to be two minutes or shorter—otherwise you’d run out of space...

When Emilee Berliner came along with his flat rotating disc that spun at 78 rpm, capacity increased a little bit...you now had around three minutes for a song before you ran out of space...so everyone who wanted to make audio recordings adapted to the limitations of the technology...

And this, more than anything else, standardized the length of songs in modern popular music to around three minutes, something that persists even today...how long are most songs?...somewhere in the neighbourhood of three minutes...

Another thing: in the old days, there was just one version of a song...you wrote it, you recorded it, it was manufactured, sent to the stores—and that was it...

But in the 1960s, this, too, began to change with the rise of the album...radio stations loved their three minute songs because it meant they could get in more songs per hour...but with the extra space provided by albums, songs grew longer than the standard three minutes...the only way to get a great (but long) song on an album onto am radio (which dominated at the time), you made to make that long song shorter...

This gave birth to the first radio edits...there was the shorter single version and the longer original album version...sometimes there was serious butchery involved, but hey: radio wanted things down to around three minutes...

But why stop there?...couldn’t you have multiple versions of the same song destined for different uses?...why couldn’t, for example, a short song be made longer?...or made more interesting with different mixes and instrumentation and arrangements?...the original song is the same...it’s just that you could add (or subtract) or re-arrange things from the original recording and release that, perhaps expanding the market and reach for the song and the artist...

This gave birth to the remix, an artistic and technological development that took what were once finished single static songs and turned them in to something entirely different....

This is the history of the remix...

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Have you ever had to work together with your significant other?...and I don’t mean anything like housework or parenting or anything like that...I’m talking about a job—your primary source of income—where the two of you have to work on the same things under the same circumstances in the same place?...

This can go one of two ways...first, the bond between you grows stronger because you have shared interests, goals, and frustrations...your combined knowledge and talents can make things proceed more efficiently and perhaps in directions two uninvolved people might never think to take...

Or things can go south...no work-life balance...disagreements on how the work should be done...this can led to lots of unhappiness, fights, and maybe a breakup...is it worth it?...

When it comes to the history of rock, there are a lot of couples working in the same bands...sometimes things work out great....other times, these arrangements annoy others in the group...if the couple breaks up, does the band break up, too—or does everyone suck it up and keep going?...

And then there’s the worst case scenario when one member of the couple de-couples with one member of the band and then couples up with someone else within the group...what happens then?...

Time for a little couples therapy...let’s see if we can sort through everything from wedded bliss to horrible divorces and break-ups...

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Sometime around 2016, I got the sense that we were entering into a new era of rock history: a period when the musicians we loved and admired began to die...

Listen, there had been many deaths before then, but they seemed reasonably few and far between...but 2016 seems to have been the year—for me, anyone—when I realized that many of our most beloved musicians were getting older and starting to die off...

That one year alone we lost David Bowie, Glen Frey of The Eagles, Prince, Leonard Cohen, and George Michael....we lost both Keith Emerson and Greg Lake of the prog band Emerson, Lake, and Palmer...Paul Kantner of Jefferson Starship...Maurice white of Earth, Wind, and Fire...Beatles producer George Martin...and that’s only a partial list...

In 2017, it was Gord Downie, Tom Petty, Gregg Allman, Chris Cornell, ac/dc’s Malcolm Young, Walter Becker of Steely Dan, and Chuck Berry, among others....

The following year, we lost Dolores O’Riordan of The Cranberries, Mark E. Smith of the fall, Avicii, Aretha Franklin, and Pete Shelley of The Buzzcocks.

Then in 2019, Keith Flint of The Prodigy, Mark Hollis of Talk Talk,  Ranking Roger of The English Beat and General Public, Ric Ocasek of The Cars, drumming legend Ginger Baker...I could go on, but you get the idea...

The one thing that binds all humans on this planet together is that some day, we’re all gonna shuffle off into the great beyond... No one is getting any younger...and over the next decade, we’re going to lose some of the personalities who have always been with there for us over the last 30, 40, 50, or even 60 years...

With that grim reality in mind, I think the time has come for an annual look back for those whom we’ve lost in the last 12 months as a way to recognize their contributions to the world of music...this is 2022 in memoriam...

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In most rock bands, we hear most about the singer and the guitarist...you know...those two up front tend to get the most attention, and the most adoration.

That leaves the bass player and the drummer to do the best that they can. This is often extremely unfair as they form the foundation of any bands sound....the bass and the beat.

You can have the greatest lead singer on the planet, and the flashiest guitarist around...but if you ain't got that swing...you ain't got a thing.

So we're gonna salute the people at the back of the stage. The people who lay down the groove so the singer and guitarist have something to work with.

These are new-rocks greatest rhythm sections.

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When it comes to what you are about to hear, there is nothing wrong with your equipment or how it was produced...this music is exactly as it was intended to be. It is exactly as it was record, and exactly as it was to be presented to the universe. We are now ready to dive into some of the most alternative music you will ever hear. Welcome to the ultra strange world of Outsider Music.

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A few years ago, there was a revival. A rediscovery of a sound that we used to call Techno-Pop.

Some people loved it...some people hated it. But whatever the opinion, it was a very important part of Alt-Rock history. So what was Techno-Pop? Who were the main artists? Where did it come from? And where did it go?

Let's explore...

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Well, it’s that time again...another year is almost at an end—and once again, we have been subjected to the whims of the universe and human stupidity through 2022...

It got better with covid but then we have the war in Ukraine...politics are more polarized than ever no matter where you go...social media is still making us stupider...and try as he might to leave the planet, Elon Musk is still here...

When it comes to the world of music, we lost Taylor Hawkins, Andy Fletcher of Depeche Mode, Paul Ryder of The Happy Mondays, Mark Lanegan, Dallas Good of The Sadies, Meat Loaf, Ronnie Hawkins, Coolio, Olivia Newton-John, and Ronnie Spector, among others...

It’s still hard to make a living from streaming, artists are getting burned out on the road, and inflation is killing everyone...

That’s a lot to deal with...here’s hoping that 2023 will be better...we gotta think that because otherwise, we’d go crazy...

This is also the time of year I try to clean up the home office where I do all my “ongoing history” research and writing and production...I’m always looking for interesting and cool stuff to talk about when it comes to anything related to music...when I have enough material on a particular subject, I can write a new episode...

But there’s also a lot of orphaned material—research that has gone unused because I couldn’t find a place for it for whatever reason...it would be a shame for all this knowledge and trivia and factoids to go to waste, so it’s time for the annual purge...

So watch out...a lot of information is about to dumped on your...this is the 2022 edition of 60 mind-blowing facts about music...

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It was a classic battle between good and evil and it gave us one of the greatest toys of all time. Today, we journey back to revisit the history of the iconic Transformers.

From their early days in Japan to dominating TVs and toy shelves in North America, this is another defining 1980s toys franchise that was also a masterclass in marketing. So hit play and let's roll out!

Support the show and get bonus audio content at Patreon.com/80s

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When Joe Strummer died on December 22, 2002, no one could believe it...first of all, the guy was only 50...second, this was a guy who ran marathons...third, he’d been strict vegetarian since 1971... 

And fourth, it was Joe Strummer, one of the toughest and most uncompromising musicians in the history of not just punk, not just alternative, but rock period, full stop... 

Yet it happened in his kitchen in Somerset, England, just after he finished walking the dog...cause of death?...heart attack, caused by an undiagnosed defect in his heart that had been there all along...sudden heart failure...he immediately lost consciousness and never woke up...

To be specific, he suffered from an “intra-mural coronary artery”...this is when one of the main vessels supplying blood to the heart ends up growing inside the heart muscle as the person grows older...it is an exceedingly rare condition with fewer than 100 fatal cases recorded worldwide in the last 50 years...

That’s what took Joe from us?...what are the odds?...I guess I just told you...

But even though Joe has been gone for 20 years, he’s still remembered and still revered as an iconic figure—and someone whose work has been discovered by generations since he died...

To help that along—and to commemorate 20 years since his passing—I’ve come up with something I call “20 short stories about Joe Strummer”...

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Rock’n’roll is built on the electric guitar...well, mostly...and not really in the beginning...in fact, the electric guitar as we know it, didn’t have much to do with the birth of rock at all...

The earliest rock evolved out of rhythm & blues combos...by the early 50s, many of them featured some kind of electric guitars...but the honk and rhythm came from saxophones and pianos which were slowly pounded into matchsticks...

The piano contributed bits of jazz, boogie-woogie, barrelhouse, and juke-joint energy...and even through the 1950s, the construct known as the “guitar hero” was largely absent from the world of rock’n’roll—outside of chuck berry, of course...

 Instead, the early pioneers were piano heroes...Little Richard...Jerry Lee Lewis...Fats Domino...Ray Charles...Huey “piano” Smith...

 But when guitars got louder, started sounding dirtier, and began to wail more powerfully, the number of rock’n’roll piano heroes were outgunned and began to recede into the background...not entirely, though... Again, I’m talking just about pianos...none of this fancy synthesizer stuff...

Elton John, Billy Joel, and Carole King have had massive careers based largely on piano songs...the Beatles—especially Paul McCartney—served the cause...Freddie Mercury of Queen wrote much of their greatest songs on piano...

There are others...Leon Russell, Mike Garson (who played with Bowie for years), Chuck Liddell (a favourite of the Rolling Stones), Dr. John, Billy Preston, Stevie Wonder, Ray Manzarek of The Doors, Rick Wakeman of Yes, Keith Emerson of Emerson Lake and Palmer...

But you notice what’s missing from that list?...any piano heroes from the world of alt-rock...does even such a thing exist?...actually, yes...they’re a bit hard to spot, but they’re out there...here—let me show you...

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From 1964 to 1966, The Beatles played only a handful of shows in Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal. Each show was pandemonium but the story of the Beatles in Canada goes far beyond that. From their first visit to Canada in Winnipeg, to the famous Bed-In in Montreal in 1969.

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Being a music fan was much different in the era before the internet...news traveled slowly often passed through many filters—so many filters, in fact, that a tremendous amount of information was either stripped out or drastically altered by the time it reached us...

This was never more true in cases when something awful happened—like, say, someone dying...think back to all the confusion and speculation and conspiracy theories that popped up in the wake of Kurt Cobain’s death...

Three years later, we encountered something similar...it was another suicide—maybe...and for much of the world, this death was treated as a tabloid story because of some speculative and some very lurid details involving the three key elements: sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll..

But for others, especially in Australia, this death was a very big deal and extremely traumatizing...it had such an impact that a quarter of century later, fans are still talking about what may (or may not) have happened in a luxury hotel suite in Sydney on November 22, 1997...

 This is the story of inxs and the death of Michael Hutchence...

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In the old days before the internet, musicians had an aura of mystique about them...we only knew what they wanted us to know or what music writers could ferret out...it was an era of secrets and information that was kept quiet...

Now, though, things are different...because of social media and our always-on culture, information is everywhere...artists have never given up as much personal information as they do today...too much information, sometimes...

 We don’t want our heroes to be life size...the reason we admire them in the first place is because they seem to operate on a plane higher than us...they’ve got a special talent that affects us not just emotionally but occasionally, spiritually...

 What, then, do we make of things when we hear our favourite artist is human and fallible like the rest of us and suffer from health problems?...I’ve seen two reactions...

 One is a disbelief that they’re mortal...don’t they have some kind of superpowers that keep them free from sickness and disease?...we might have a hard time accepting that...

 The second reaction is that such challenges humanize them... You know: “hey, they’re like the rest of us...I can relate”...perhaps this knowledge intensifies our relationship with that person...

 And if the artist is open and honest about their condition, it can be inspiring...maybe even by talking about what they’re facing, they can help other people with the same challenges keep moving forward...this, I think, is the real value in the personal health information they share...

 Here is part two of a program featuring musicians who have had to deal with disease...

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The human body is a wonderful thing, a marvel of evolution, biology, chemistry, and more than a few bits—like consciousness—we don’t understand...and for the most part, this meat bag of water and chemicals works pretty well...

But it’s not perfect...we will continue to age as long as we can’t figure out how to improve the reproduction of telomeres, those little strands of special proteins at the end of our chromosomes...after many, many reproductions, they become ratty and degrade, which has a bad effect on our DNA and leads to the symptoms of aging...

We’re susceptible to infections by bacteria and invasions by viruses...and sometimes there are things within our own bodies that turn on us, resulting in cancer and other diseases...

However, this is all part of life...it’s still we gotta deal with...and because musicians made of the same stuff as us, we often hear of the health issues that befall them...in this sense, they are just like you and me...

What we’re going to do is look at 25 musicians who have health issues, how these challenges have affected their music, and how they’re managing to keep on keeping on, despite the difficulties...

There are some stories of bravery and inspiration here—and maybe, just maybe, these stories will help someone...this is part one of musicians battling disease...

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There’s no way to sugarcoat it: the music industry has a reputation of being unkind to women...it has been a struggle from the beginning...and even after decades of work, things have evolved to the point where less than a quarter of the acts on some music charts are women...

The actual figure for the billboard hot 100 is around 22%...and it’s been stuck at that level for over a decade...

I found a few more stats...if we look at that same decade-long period, women made up only 13% of songwriters...and if we look at female producers and engineers, the number is less than 3%...in other words, gender parity is a long way off...

So yeah, it’s tough out there and it needs to get better...fortunately, there have always been women driven to make it regardless of the obstacles and difficulties in their way...they want to remake the world of music to make it more inclusive and, in some cases, have forced it to bend to their will...this has been true since the dawn of recorded music until today...

In fact, what today’s female artists lack in sheer numbers, they make up for in power and influence...here...let’s tally up some of the women who are changing the game in the 21st century...

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Once upon a time not that long ago, all music was expected to sound clean and clear. Pure, accurate, right in tune. And lo, it was…fine. 

But with the introduction of the electric guitar and the amplifiers that went with them, some intrepid players started experimenting with ways to toughen up that sound. They wanted more power, more growl, more rawness. And over a period of about 20 years, the clean, pure sound of the original electric guitars gave way to something dirty, distorted, filled with harmonics, and various amounts of feedback and noise. 

What was once considered undesirable, irritating, excruciating noise is now looked upon as beauty. 

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There’s the La Tomatina festival that happens on the last Wednesday in August in Spain...this is the largest public tomato fight in the world...first of all, why would you do this on a Wednesday?...and second, this seems like an awful waste of food...

No one is really sure where this tradition began, either...we think it started in 1945 when there was a brawl in the main square and one of the few weapons available were the tomatoes on carts of the vegetable stands...

They do something weird in Denmark, too...if you’re 25 years old and it’s Valentine’s Day and you’re single, your family and friends are supposed to throw cinnamon at you...no one really knows why or when this started...but it is a thing...

And how about this...there’s a temple called Sir Saneswar in India...there is a tradition whereby parents who were married at this temple throw their newborn babies from the top of the building...it’s a 50-foot drop...the baby is caught by people holding a big cloth below...I’m sure there are reasons for this, but they all escape me...

Let’s segue to this...rock music has been around long enough—three-quarters of a century—that some we’ve developed some weird habits and behaviors, things that we do just because...

We engage in this behavior or do these things because everyone else is doing it...and if you were to ask around a reason why, no one would have a good explanation...you just accept this thing—whatever it is—as part of the culture...

But what if you really, really want to know?...what if you just can’t take someone’s word that this is what’s supposed to be done?...that’s where this program comes in...This is another edition of something I call “the rock explainer”...

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Humanity has always been set by disasters, whether they’ve been acts of god or something we somehow brought on ourselves...war, disease, earthquakes, famine, floods, volcanic eruptions, fire, plane crashes, industrial accidents, sinking ships, extreme weather...

The worst disaster of all time?...probably the influenza epidemic of 1918 to 1920...it’s possible that up to 100 million died during that three-year period...

Then again, world war ii was worse....by some estimates, the death toll was 120 million...and the black death of the 14th century was bad...it may have claimed up to 200 million lives or about 20% of the population of the planet...

Then there the kinds of things that happen when people are supposed to be having fun...on February 14, 2004, the roof of an indoor waterpark in Moscow collapsed, killing 28 people...

On December 8, 1863, up to 3,000 people were killed in a fire at a church celebration in Santiago, Chile...

Or how about this: sometime around the year 283, a wall at Circus Maximus, the chariot-racing stadium in Rome collapsed...it’s said that 13,000 spectators died...and that happened about 150 years after a previous collapse where there were around 1500 deaths...

The universe is gonna do what the universe is gonna do...you can be as careful as humanly possible yet still get caught up in something awful...

This applies to the world of rock, too...it has seen its own situations where there has been loss of life...they need to remembered and memorialized to we can minimize the chances of these things ever happen again...

This is a list of rock’s greatest disasters...

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This is a program about the hidden audio that lurks in your music collection. You don’t know about it…you didn’t ask for it…you maybe didn’t even want it…but it’s there…and it needs to be exposed…

And it’s more than just hidden songs, too…there’s all kinds of weirdness tucked away—if you know where to look…and when I say “weird”, I mean “super weird”

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Once upon a time, musical instruments were divided into two groups: those appropriate for women to play and everything else... 

That first group was very small...playing the piano was considered feminine...the violin?...yes, providing it was done gently and with ladylike comportment...and then—well, that’s about it...

Drums?...forget it...too physical and sweaty...brass instruments were out...in fact, so were all wind instruments, not even the flute...however, the acoustic guitar was okay...it wasn’t very loud and produced tones delicate enough to be appropriate for a young lady to play... 

This, of course, was silly...women had been doing amazing things with guitars stretching back to the invention of what became the modern acoustic guitar back in the early 1800s..and we can go back through the stringed instruments in history: the lute, the kithara, the chartar, the tanbur, the oud, the mandolin, the cittern, and so on...women played all of them—although we know almost nothing about them...

That’s the way it was for decades...and let’s not even talk about the electric guitar...even as late as the 1980s, there was this sexist attitude that girls just couldn’t play like the boys...they did not know how to rock out with a Les Paul or a strat or whatever...

In 2003, Rolling Stone published a list of the 100 greatest guitarists of all time...you know how many women were on that list?...two...two!

Today we know that’s crazy...there are plenty of excellent guitars with double-x chromosomes...and thanks to them, people are exploring the history of the guitar heroine, women advanced the cause of the six-string, public preconceptions be damned...

This is a look back at the women who made the guitar sing...

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There was a time in this country when Canadians didn’t really care about Canadian music...no, wait...let’s start over...

There was a time in this country when Canadians didn’t like Canadian music and did whatever they could to ignore it and pretend it didn’t exist...yeah, that’s more accurate...

There was one exception to this rule: if a Canadian artist received some kind of validation from outside the country—preferably the united states—then suddenly, they were worth paying attention to at home...

It was a mix of insecurity and what I believe are Canada’s two unofficial mottos...the first is “why can’t you be happy with what you have?”...the other is “who do you think you are?...you think you’re better than everyone else?”...

That’s harsh, but it’s true...and for years, ambitious, talented Canadian musicians flowed south to seek their fortune in America...Paul Anka...Neil Young...Joni Mitchell...

And yes, there were those who remained in Canada—Gordon Lightfoot is one...The Guess Who is another—but they really weren’t fully accepted at home until they had a hit in America...suddenly, the attitude swung 180 degrees?... “them?...oh, yeah they’re one of us!”...

This is the way it was for several decades—a frustrating situation for countless musicians...

But then things started to warm up a bit in the 1980s...and by the time the 90s arrived, attitudes towards homegrown talent had swung in the other direction...not only were Canadian music fans loving Canadian bands, Canadian music being heard all over the world...wait—let’s try that again, too...Canadian music was in demand all over the world...

Some have called this the great Can-Rock revolution of the 1990s...and it changed everything...here’s how it all started...

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If there’s one thing I’ve learned in all my years dealing with musicians, there are artists and then there are artistes...here’s how I tell them apart...Artists make art, but they also have other interests, pursuits and abilities...Bono is an example of an artist...he’s the front man of U2 but is also involved in politics, activism, tech, and a load of other things...and everything he does is done with an artistic flair and the soul of a performer...

Artistes also make art...but it’s all they do...in fact, it’s all they can do...they live to create art and are often not very good at anything else...in fact—to put a fine point on it—they may be hopeless at life in general...

That’s not a judgment or a criticism...it’s just how their brains are wired...they are on this earth with an almost supernatural ability to do nothing but create beauty through art...

But this power comes with pitfalls......they might have trouble with day to day tasks like handling money, shopping for groceries, keeping a schedule, or being able to deal with everyday social situations...

They may suffer from depression, anxiety, bi-polar disorder...they may be on the autism spectrum...and they may be prone to addictions: alcohol, drugs, sex...and if they managed to become well-known for their art, the insane pressure, crazy schedules, hedonistic lifestyle, and living in a bubble of fame can exacerbate things until—well, until things get very, very bad...

I’ve met a few such artistes in my life—and in my experience, there is no better example than John Frusciante, who, of course, is best known for his work in the Red Hot Chili Peppers...

His life, both in and out of the band—and he’s joined three times and quit twice—has been very long and strange...this is part two of that journey....

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And if I’m sitting with my taxonomy flowchart, this is where I write the name “John Frusciante,” the occasional guitarist of the Red Hot Chili Peppers...

And I use the word “occasional” deliberately because he’s been in and out of the band a number of times over the last 30 years...as I write this, he’s “in”—but who knows for how long...

And I’m classifying him as periplaneta americana because despite everything he’s been through, he’s still alive...I mean, he’s live a hard life...drugs, various health problems both of the physical and mental variety—even dabbling in the occult...yet through it all, he’s been able to help the Chili Peppers create the best music of their career...

This is the long, strange trip of John Frusciante...

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The most powerful and strangest lump of organic material in the known universe is sitting inside your skull...the human brain weighs about three pounds—call it about 1400 grams if you’re feeling metric—and contains about 10 billion neurons...a piece the size of a grain of sand contains 100,000 neurons and over a billion synapses...

At the same time, it uses only about 10 watts to function...that’s ten times better than your laptop...and one brain (we think) is equivalent to at least 100,000 laptops when it comes to computing power...

 Even then, it can do things no computer can do, no matter how big...that thing in your head could have a storage capacity of perhaps up to 2.5 petabytes, although no one knows for sure yet...in fact, the capacity of the brain might be unlimited...not bad for something that’s 60% fat...

There is no obvious biological reason for it, but our brains seem to be hardwired for music...there are special areas of the brain devoted just to deal with music...

Maybe this is a result of our ancient ancestors trying to imitate birdsong...it could be related to language...maybe it has something to do with storytelling...details are sometimes easier to remember if they’re put to music...or maybe music developed along with religious rituals and chants...

Because the way music is wired into the brain, it’s a very useful tool when it comes to figuring out how that 10-watt lump of fat in our skulls work...and sometimes we learn things that are completely unexpected and almost always totally wonderful...

Let me show you...here are some mind-blowing facts about music, the brain, and the body...

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Have you ever heard of a woman named Rosalind Franklin?...probably not, but you can draw a line from today’s covid vaccines all the way back to her in the 1950s...she conducted some serious research into the makeup of rna molecules...

Rosalind also did some groundbreaking research into the structure of DNA molecules...without her, Jim Watson and Francis Crick may not have discovered how DNA was constructed...they’d go on to win the Nobel prize in 1962...was Rosalind ever given the credit she deserved?...no...

What about grace hopper?...ring any bells?...back in the 1940s, lieutenant Grace Hopper invented some computer programming techniques used by the army during World War II…this was the basis of Cobol, the compute language still used by business, finance, and administrative software today...

Let’s try Susan Kare...no?...she’s the one who came up with the trash can icon and the command key on mac computers...she was integral to making the mac operating system as user-friendly as possible...

Okay, here’s a name you may know: Hedy Lamar...famous actress from old Hollywood in the 30s and 40s and one-time date of Howard Hughes, right?...but she also worked with a guy named George Antheil to come up with a radio “frequency hopping” technology that made today’s Wi-Fi, cellular phones, Bluetooth, and gps communications possible...in fact, some call Hedy Lamar “the mother of Wi-Fi”...but does she get the appropriate credit for that?...nope...

Those are just a few unsung heroines of technology...their work changed the world...and there are so many more in other fields, too...back in the late 1800s, Nellie Bly became the first investigative female journalist...effa Manley was the first woman to own a sports team...that was back in the 1930s...Beulah Henry was nicknamed “Lady Edison” because she was such a prolific inventor...

And while we all know about Joan of Arc, what about Matilda of Tuscany?...she had a 40-year military career who successfully led troops against the Holy Roman Emperor again and again almost a thousand years ago...these are just a few unsung heroines from history...

There are similar stories from the world of music: women who changed so much but have been given so little credit...let’s see if we can’t do a little bit to fix that...

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If the doomsayers are correct, something monumental–something transformative–is going to happen on December 21, 2012...this is the day the b’ak’tun cycle ends...

The Mayan long count calendar runs out...after 5,125 years, it comes to an end date...what will happen next is up for debate...

It could be the end of the world...Earth may collide with Nibiru, its long-hidden nemesis planet...some say a black hole may swallow us up...a catastrophic shift in the polar magnetic fields...

Others believe we will achieve some kind of spiritual enlightenment, which will usher humankind into a new era of peace...

Or maybe nothing will happen...okay, so maybe we’ll get another bad John Cusack movie on the subject...that’s not good and the prospect is admittedly frightening–but it’s just a movie...

History has shown that humans are really, really bad at predicting the apocalypse with any degree of certainty...

I, however, have another theory...I believe that there may be a fundamental shift on planet earth around the time of December 21, 2012...and it has to do with rock music...

No, no–stay with me on this...I’m not crazy...or at least, I might not be...I hope not...

This is the fifteenth and final chapter of a series I call “the complete history of alt-rock”...

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To fans of any kind of rock, may 18, 1999, seemed like the end of the world...the Backstreet Boys released their new cd called Millennium...on that first day, it sold more than 500,000 copies...by the end of the week, it had sold 1,134,000, a new all-time sales record...

And those are just the u.s. Numbers...add in the rest of the world and the total was much higher...

And it was only going to get twice as bad...just 308 days later, ‘N sync–another blood boy band–set an even scarier record...by the end of its first week in the stores, their No Strings Attached sold 2.4 million copies...

And just 56 days after that, Britney Spears sold half a million copies of Oops!...I Did It Again on day one and 1,319,193 in its first seven days....

When the dust cleared at the end of 2000, it was clear that vacuous pop music had taken over the universe...these CDs weren’t just selling by the tens of millions....they were selling by the hundreds of millions...

In second place was rap and hip-hop, thanks to people like Eminem, Nelly and Dr. Dre...the biggest selling rock records of the year were from Sreed, Santana and a Beatles r compilation that featured songs that were more than 35 years old...

The prognosis wasn’t good...if rock–all rock–wasn’t dead, it was at least very, very ill...and unless somebody did something, it looked like it was all over...

This is chapter 14 of the complete history of alt-rock...

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If you were around in the early 90s, you probably remember it as a time of awesome new music...it seemed that every single day, there was a cool new band, a great new sound, a scene you didn’t know about...

Grunge was king with nirvana and Soundgarden and pearl jam...green day and offspring had brought punk back...Manchester led into Britpop with Oasis and the Stone Roses

Nine Inch Nails, Ministry, Chili Peppers, Beastie Boys, Tool, Stone Temple Pilots, Smashing Pumpkins, all these bands and more grabbed everyone’s attention...hair metal was dead!....classic rock?  Over!....Lollapalooza was the coolest event of the year...

The alternative nation had triumphed!....no more bad, boring, mainstream pop and rock!...

Well, hang on...rock music has always run in a series of cycles that can be traced back to the 1950s...we’ll get into that later, but all I need to say is “what goes up must come down”...and the alt-rock party came down...hard...and it hurt...

This is chapter 13 of the complete history of alt-rock...

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It is almost impossible for anyone from a lightweight boy band to transition to serious, respected artist…it can be done—we can look at Justin Timberlake and, um…well, we can look at Justin Timberlake….

And as tough as that is, it’s even more difficult to move from being pigeonholed as a novelty act to one that carries gravitas and serious artistic merit…yet that’s what the beastie boys managed to do…

No one took them seriously for the first eight years of their career…they were spoiled, snotty frat boys writing goofy songs and making funny videos… “Licensed to Ill” was a parody of hip hop…a good one, but a still a parody…let’s not forget that “Rolling Stone” described the album as “three idiots make a masterpiece”…

But then something changed…The Beastie Boys grew up…they grew as artists…they grew as businessmen…they grew as humans…

They took risks…they experimented…they branched out…they sought to make a difference—not just in music but in the world…and by the time it all came to an end with the death of Adam Yauch in the spring of 2012, The Beastie Boys had cemented a reputation as one the most important bands of not one but at least two generations…

This is remembering The Beastie Boys, part 2.

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The British music scene has always operated at warp speed...songs and bands and sounds have always come and gone very quickly, even before the age of the internet...

This is what happens when you have a lot of people crammed onto an island linked together by a huge and obsequious national broadcasting network and goaded by a hyper-competitive music press...

But every once in a while–maybe once a decade–something sticks...a movement takes root, grows organically and then suddenly explodes to the point where everyone is talking about it...it even goes international with its songs and sounds and fashion and politics..

In the 60s, it was the British invasion, led by the Beatles and the Stones...in the 70s, it was the British spin on punk rock with the Pistols and the Clash...the 80s began with all those telegenic British bands on MTV which set off the music video revolution...and in the 90s–well, that’s where it gets a bit complicated...

Not complicated in a bad way...i mean in an interesting way...it was an explosion of pride in British-ness that we hadn’t really seen since February 7, 1964, when Pan Am flight 101 from London landed at JFK airport in New York carrying a band called the Beatles...

This is chapter 12 of the complete history of alt-rock–and it’s all about the thing they called “Britpop”...

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For an entire generation of music fans—two generations, really—The Beastie Boys were always there…and now that they’re no longer with us, there are a lot of people who feel like there’s a void in music…

But we’ll always remember their contributions…and there were a lot…this is part one of “Remembering The Beastie Boys”…

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One of the great indirect heroes of modern rock’n’roll was born on March 21, 1865...his name was brigadier general George Owen Squier....he was an Army officer with a PhD in electrical science and a thing for music....he invented a technology to designed to compete with a new thing called “radio”....

Wireless radio, he figured, was useless...it was prone to static and fade-outs and just didn’t sound very good...his idea was to run wires into homes and businesses, just like we have with cable TV today or as they were beginning to do with telephones back then...he called the concept “wired radio”....

Just before he died in 1934, he came up with a new name for his invention.....playing with the words “music” and “Kodak,” he came up with “Muzak”...

The whole thing with “wired radio” didn’t take off with consumers, but businesses were into it...closed circuit music, specifically tailored to their environment, 24 hours a day without interruption or static?...that’s brilliant....and shopping malls and elevators haven’t been the same since....Muzak became the world’s biggest supplier of elevator music...

So where am I going with this...great question...

By the 70s, Muzak corporation was earning more than $400 million a year by distributing this type of music all over the world from its headquarters in Seattle.....it was used for crowd control, a management tool and something to fill the empty silence of a department store or dentist’s office...

And for a time, the Muzak executives thought this was a good unofficial slogan: “boring work is made less boring by boring music”....you bored yet?...

Fifty-two years after the George Squire died, a new type of music started coming from the back room of Muzak headquarters in Seattle......but it wasn’t exactly elevator music....

The music came from the shipping room where a Muzak employee named Bruce Pavitt spent his coffee breaks running a new independent record label devoted to the local music scene.....in fact, Muzak’s payroll supported at least half a dozen local musicians......and while no one could have possibly known what where this was going to lead, the decidedly non-muzak music these people were into would eventually change the world of rock’n’roll forever.....

This is the complete history of alt-rock, chapter 11...

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We're digging back into the original Ongoing History vault and have found this requested show on lost albums.

Sometimes an artist will work on, and almost finish an album. But for whatever reason...creative concerns, fear it is too "out there", misplaced master tapes...the album never sees the light of day.

Why is that? How many times has it happened in alt-rock? And to who?

Well...we're glad you asked.

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Once upon a time, all music was made mechanically...something had to be hit with a hand or a stick...or strummed or plucked...or air had to be forced over a reed or through a valve...

Then along came electricity...it took a while, but electricity was tamed so that it could not only power new forms of musical instruments, but the energy itself could be made musical...

By the beginning of the 1980s, the people of planet earth were most pleased at what they had accomplished...but in the background, some people knew that there was still more work to be done....

They began asking “what if anything could be made into music?”...others still mused “what if we could take existing music, chop it up and reassemble it into something brand new?”...

Some used the old ways, chopping up these sounds mechanically using proven machinery like turntables and tape machines...but others learned to use new inventions called “computers” and “samplers”...

And so it came to pass that all through the 80s, people began to experiment with electricity and the new machines...and by the time the decade ended, there was plenty of new and interesting music to go around...music was being made by machines, orchestrated by computers and programmed by punks...and things would never be the same again. 

This is the complete history of alt-rock, chapter 10...

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Women helped changed the face of ROCK as hair metal from the 80’s gave way to brand new sounds and VERY different attitudes in the 90's. On this episode of "Driven by Her" presented by our friends at Porsche Canada we're showcasing amazing, driven women like Alanis Morrissette, Ani DiFranco, and Bikini Kill. They carved their own path and created the seismic shift in music that came with Generation X because the 90's couldn't have rocked at the level they did without their influence along with the other women who helped define a generation.

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Okay, stay with us as this could get a bit confusing.

Since the Ongoing History takes the summer months off to write and research new shows, we dig into the vault to post older episodes that first aired on radio from 1993 onward.

Some still sound relevant, and others...not so much.

This episode is "Radio episode 601" (aired in 2009-ish) but "Podcast Episode 345.

So if some of the content seems a bit "dated" this could be the reason.

But we feel the material is still relevant.

Enjoy and please continue to send in your questions to Alan so we can keep doing episodes like this one.

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It had taken a few years, but by the middle 1980s, the underground music scene in north America had reached some kind of a tipping point...enough people had discovered punk, new wave and all the sub-genres associated with both so that things started to become really interesting...

Campus radio stations began to have more clout...the more support they gave to these non-mainstream bands, the more they were appreciated and the more power they wielded...

And as these stations began to communicate with each other through publications and charts and conventions, their influence and reach grew even more...turns out that a surprising number of people were really tired of whatever the mainstream rock industry was pumping out...each day, the “alternative” scene–that’s what we were calling it by the mid-80s–attracted more fans who were only too happy to evangelize the epiphanies that led to their conversion...

Yes, college radio helped...so did all the bands willing to tour alt-friendly clubs...and so did independent record stores which set themselves apart from the big chains by stocking more of the weird stuff....

But we can’t forget the roll of MTV and any channel or show that played videos from all those weird, new telegenic bands from the UK...

If you spent any time at all watching music videos in the middle 80s, it was obvious that as interesting as the growing alt-rock scene was in north America, there was something just as interesting happening on that cold, rainy rock in the north Atlantic...and it was all happening so fast...

This is the complete history of alt-rock, chapter nine...

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Sometimes people get so pissed off or so inspired by something that they just have to sing about it…this is the protest song and it’s been with us for centuries…

It’s music that encourages political and social change… and if done right—and if circumstances are correct—the song can mobilize people to take action, lift spirits and annoy (or even scare) authorities of the establishment…

Protest music comes in all forms: classical, folk, reggae, pop, hip hop and, of course, rock…it can rail against war, demand social justice, call out politicians and petition for greater rights for women, minorities, labour and the marginalized…

The singers and musicians behind this music may be regarded as thought leaders, social influencers and even prophets—and least for a time…

What i’d like to go is go through the history of protest in song from the world of alt-rock, those times when a loud guitar becomes tool for making things better—for everyone…

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When punk rock first appeared in the middle 1970s, the major record companies in north America really didn’t care...they were happily making millions and millions of dollars from big rock bands like Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Fleetwood Mac and The Eagles.....

And there was millions more coming in from disco...which was sweeping the world....it was like a plague–but a profitable one...so why would they bother with this weird stuff bubbling up from tiny, scary clubs on both sides of the Atlantic?...they were too busy going to big stadium shows and getting down at Studio 54...

But this new music wouldn’t go away...so when Led Zeppelin broke up and the Stones and The Eagles and Fleetwood Mac disappeared up their own buts and the disco bubble finally burst the record execs tried to tame it......marketing the gentler and less intense bands under the umbrella of something they called “New Wave”.

Oh, they tried with punk, but they got it really, really wrong...you gotta wonder what was going through that executive’s head when The Ramones were picked to open shows for toto....

No, seriously...The Ramones were the opening act for Toto on one tour...I swear I didn’t make that up...it happened in Lake Charles, Louisiana...January 26, 1979...they were also paired up with Foreigner and Blue Oyster Cult...

But we have to be fair....the general public just didn’t get punk....when The Sex pistols appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine in the fall of 1977, it was one of their poorest-selling issues, ever....mind you, the headline read “rock is sick and living in London”...the story began with a quote from Isaiah 3:24: “instead of perfume, there will be rottenness”....

After that, most Rolling Stone writers were instructed to stop writing about this music...it was bad for business...really bad...

But there were people who got it....and frankly, fans of non-mainstream music were quite happy to be left alone...they were into this new music precisely because they hated the mainstream...and over the next dozen years, the musical underground was allowed left to gestate undisturbed......it slowly mutated and evolved into something very unique---very powerful...this is the complete history of alt-rock, chapter 8...

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Pearl Jam is one of the most-documented bands of the last 30 years…even before the internet came along, fans were obsessive about cataloguing everything the band did…tour schedules, setlists, bootleg recordings, news stories…

Pearl Jam encouraged this, too…a big part of their long-lasting appeal has been this relationship—this covenant—they’ve had with their fans about collecting and archiving stuff…

The band understands this because they’re collectors, too…all you have to do is look at the 20th anniversary box set for the “Ten” album that came out in 2009…it came with things like a replica of Eddie’s notebook at a cassette designed to be just like the one Eddie used to audition for the band back in 1990…

The band’s stories have been told many times, but you get the sense that the history of Pearl Jam is so deep that there still must be more to learn about theme…imagine what it might be like for a fan to dig through all kinds of Pearl Jam emphera to see what unusual things can be found there…

That’s been done…and i’m here to report back…

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Before we go any further with our history of alt-rock, a lesson in cosmology is in order...sometime around 16 billion years ago, there was this infinitely dense and infinitely tiny thing called a “singularity”...don’t ask where it came from or who made it...that’s just asking for trouble...

The best anyone can tell is that one day–well, there weren’t “days” back then because time didn’t exist (again, let’s not go there)–this thing just exploded...astronomers call this “the big bang”...

This explosion moved outward in all directions, stretching space (well, creating space–but that makes the brain hurt)....then started to cool, got lumpy and clumpy and eventually coalesced into stars, planets, people and goats...

Everything we see and perceive is the result of that big bang...sorry, creationists...the world isn’t flat, either...and don’t send me emails...

Now it’s time for a wild but very apt analogy...if we look at the punk rock of the middle 1970s, we can think of it as a musical big bang...the ideas and attitudes it generated spread out in all directions and eventually began to coalesce into new ideas and attitudes...they were all made up of the same basic elements, but they combined to form totally new life forms...and there were probably goats involved somewhere, too...

This is the story of some of those new life forms...it’s chapter seven of the complete history of alt-rock...

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Nirvana is one of those bands where it seems we know everything…when they broke through with the “Nevermind” album in 1991 and 1992, there was a rush to learn everything we could about them…and then we Kurt died—which happened roughly at the same time the internet began to be a thing with the general public—that interest exploded…

Now, in the decades since nirvana ceased to exist, study of the band, its history, its individual members and its influence can best be described as scholarship…that’s how deep we are into the band…so what’s there left to learn, really…

While, you might be surprised…here are ten unusual and little known things about one of the best documented bands in the history of rock…

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In the late 1950s and early 1960s, a group of young French film makers decided to mess things up...they insisted on more artistic control and less meddling by the studios......this free-form attitude, they said, was necessary to advance the art of film.....                         

It worked...lots of praise and success.....and in the process, their movement acquired a name: “nouvelle vague”.....film historians now say that this style and attitude was one of the most important developments in the history of motion pictures.....

Punk rock was dying...it had burned itself out after just a couple of years...but its legacy was still valid: that a free-form attitude towards music was the only way to advance the art of rock’n’roll..... It was “nouvelle vague” all over again.....only this time, they used the English translation....they called it “new wave”...This is chapter six of the complete history of alt-rock...

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In this episode of "Driven By Her," presented by our friends at Porsche Canada, Alan Cross and Ongoing History of New Music explore a subject that has fascinated Alan since he saw Karen Carpenter play a drum solo in the band's first television special in 1976. Turns out Karen considered herself a drummer who could sing and she had to fight to prove her legitimacy and talent to the rest of the world, especially in the male-dominated music industry. But if there was one woman who could play this well, there had to be others? were there more?

During the mid-70s the answer was "not really" but there were a few and in the decades that followed, more and more appeared, and today, female drummers are everywhere comprising a worldwide sisterhood some have called "chicks with sticks".

They were drummers, driven by that one thing that they needed more than anything else in the world. The one thing they were truly passionate about... in all cases it was the one thing that made them feel truly free. It's what drove them to singularly focus on crafting their unique talent and chase their dreams down whatever road it led them. 

But the road wasn't easy... there were a lot of roadblocks, plenty of skepticism, and loads and loads of sexism... Barriers that needed to be broken, attitudes that needed to change abilities that needed to be proven time and time again... This is the story of women with rhythm who changed the way we look at music. 

In partnership with Porsche Canada.

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I started thinking about “firsts” the other day, so I started looking things up…the first McDonald’s was in san Bernardino, California…the first guy to literally walk around the world on foot was Dave Kunist…it took him four years to walk 14,452 miles …the first person to be killed in an automobile accident was Bridget Driscoll of Surrey, England…in 1896, she was hit by a car traveling at 4 miles per hour…the first porn film?...”Bedtime For The Bride,” 1895…

We can get weirder…the first thing ever sold on ebay was a broken laser pointer for $14…the first video on YouTube is still up there…it’s called “Me At The Zoo”…the first person with a Facebook account outside the company who wasn’t a friend of Mark Zuckerberg was a guy from India named Sachine Kumar…

The more I looked at famous firsts, the more I started wondering about firsts in music….

Who was the first person to perform on a guitar run through an amplifier?...the first song downloaded from iTunes?...who was the first to drop an intentional f-bomb on record?...what was the first song to fade out instead of having a definite ending?...

You see where I’m going with this, right?...I started compiling a list of “firsts” in music—and then I set out to find some answers…which I did…prepare yourself…this could be the first time you hear about this stuff…

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Every once in a while, humankind has one of those pivotal years where everything changes...

325 AD and the council of Nicea...1215 and the signing of the Magna Carta...the discoveries of 1492..The revolutions of 1789...1919 and the Treaty of Versailles...the great stock market crash of 1929...the dark days of World War II in 1942...the unrest of 1968...the fall of the iron curtain in 1989...

In there somewhere is 1977...okay, so to say it was as important to world history as some of these other years might be stretching it...but still, a lot happened...

On January 3, a new company called “Apple Computer” was incorporated and the Apple ii went on sale that June...in October, Atari released the ground-breaking 2600 video game console...and in November, boffins running a computer network called Arpanet successfully test something called “tcp/ip” which lay the foundation for the internet...

As for music, most of the planet took notice when Elvis Presley died that summer...a big story, yes–but it’s not the music story that I’m thinking of...for that, we have to go to England where a perfectly good royal celebration was sullied by four clots called The Sex Pistols...and for that, we should be very grateful...

This is the complete history of alt-rock, chapter 5...

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Nerd…noun…a foolish or contemptible person who lacks social skills or is boringly studious…definition 2: a single-minded expert in a particular technical field...example: a computer nerd…

It’s an old word, too…the, er, nerds at google have a thing called “the ngram viewer” which scans the text of books going back to 1500…in other words, pretty much right back to the inventing of the printing press…

According to these nerds, “nerd” (the word) shows up for the first time in an book called “a true discourse of the assault committed upon the most noble Prince, Prince William of Orange, County of Nassau, Marquesse De La Ver & C,” by John Jarequi Spaniarde: with the true copies of the writings, examinations, and letters for sundry offenders in that vile and diuelifh (i have no idea what that word is) attempt”…

I can’t tell you what “nerd” referred to in that book because it’s written in old Spanish and i couldn’t be bothered to find a translation…I’d need a real etymological nerd for that…

The word fell into disuse after about 1725 returning into the popular lexicon thanks to Dr. Suess in 1950…to him, a “nerd” was some kind of creature found in a zoo…

But the following year, Newsweek magazine reported that “nerd” was being used in Detroit to describe an awkward sort of dude who wasn’t very cool…it kind of lingered in the slang world for the rest of the 50s and into the 60s before it really took off in 1974 with the TV series “Happy Days”…Fonzie was always calling Richie and Potsie “nerds” for being uncool dorks…so props to Henry Winkler…

By the end of the 70s—and coinciding with the rise of the culture around the personal computer, consumer technology and “Star Wars” and other science fiction pursuits—the use of “nerd” became even more widespread…remember the “Revenge of the Nerds” movies in the 80s?...

But now in our technological society, being called a nerd is a compliment…people aspire to be like Bill Gates and Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg…look at shows like “The Big Bang Theory” and “Silicon Valley”…we’re actually celebrating nerddom…people want to be nerds ‘cause—well, it’s kinda cool…the geeks have truly inherited the earth…

This brings me to music…nerdishness is now so widespread that nerds even have their own genre of music…and as you might guess, it falls squarely in the world of alternative music…

This, then, is a short history of what we unreservedly, unashamedly and unironically call “nerd rock”…

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In the middle 1970s, Britain was a mess...like the rest of the west, the country was blindsided by the Arab oil embargo...it was a recession that just wouldn’t end...

And to make matters worse, everyone seemed to be going on strike; from coal miners to gravediggers...unemployment was high, especially amongst young people...

The once mighty British Empire was in big trouble...there was a sense that it was all over...done...there was no future...

Complicating this was the class system...those at the top (including the Monarchy) kept on doing whatever they wanted to do while everyone else–well, let them eat cake, essentially...(I know I’m getting my countries and monarchies mixed up, but you get the point)...

Something had to blow, especially with the young...and when it did, it blew up real good...

This is the complete history of alt-rock, chapter 4...

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A few years back, the Ongoing History took a "break".

It's a long and somewhat complicated story, but we eventually picked up where we left off. 

This episode is the start of OGH v2.0 and a catch up from Alan's "Walk about" in the 3 years between the original radio episodes 691 and 692 of which this Podcast is based on. 

So please don't be confused if the radio episodes and podcast episode numbers don't add up. We're just digging into our vault to see what we can find and share. 

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The early 70s were like a bad hangover from the 60s...the hippie generation had its victories–civil rights, women’s rights, the pill, the end of the draft and the Vietnam war–but it there was also a sense that the whole “peace and love” approach to social change had played itself out...

Meanwhile, the 60s generation had grown up, graduated, moved on, settled down and basically got on with the business of being adults and dealing with the first oil crisis, inflation, recession, the cold war, unemployment, the shootings at Kent state and a corrupt American president who was forced to resign...

Rock music–which had been a big part of these sweeping social changes–was tired...the good vibes of Woodstock were destroyed by the violence of Altamont...the Beatles had broken up...Jim, Jimi and Janis were dead...and the last thing that people seemed to want was music with any kind of message...

But underneath this sombre, conservative mood, something radical was happening...sometimes things have to get really, really bad before someone says “right!  That’s enough!  I’m going to do something about it!”....and that’s exactly what happened....

This is the complete history of alt-rock, chapter 3...

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At some point, all of us will shuffle off this mortal choir and join the choir invisible…doesn’t matter who you are, how much money you may have or how famous you might be…in the end, we’re all mortal…

This really hits home when musicians we love disappear forever…it’s not like we personally know these people, but because their music helps us know ourselves, a little piece of us dies with them…

The circumstances of their passing’s vary…misadventure, accidents, overdoses, suicide…some can be explained away while other deaths will forever remain a mystery…

With that in mind, let’s take a look back on the last hours of some of those musician’s who have left us…

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As rock’n’roll approached its sweet 16 birthday in the early 1970s, it was obvious that it had grown up quite a bit...with each passing year, rock was becoming more sophisticated in both sound and execution...the first wave of rockers from the 50s and 60s had grown up.....they were now better musicians and could do more than play simple three-chord songs....

Rock was also becoming more complicated because it had the tools...by the early 70s, a four-track recording studio was hideously antiquated...people wanted to use studios with 16- and 24-track consoles and big tape recorders and racks of machines that could add cool effects to music...

Guitar amplifiers were bigger and more powerful, allowing for fatter chords and longer sustains and cooler feedback...and guitarists now had a huge array of foot pedals and other gear to help them create individual signature sounds...

And let’s not forget about everyone at home...home stereo systems began to improve... “hi-fi” wasn’t just for electronics geeks anymore...everyone was looking to get big amps with huge speakers...

You could even listen in the car...yeah, 8-tracks were clunky, but for the first time, you didn’t have to depend on the radio for music when you were on the road...

But then again, your city might have been lucky enough to have a progressive FM rock station.....imagine: music on the radio that was in stereo...

But for some, things were getting a little too sophisticated, the musicianship a little too accomplished, the recording a little too slick......there were those who felt that the road to technical perfection was not a good one.... something had been lost...it was time to get primal again...this is the complete history of alt-rock, chapter 2...

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Everything is virtual these days…outside of the stuff you’ve got in your pocket, money is nothing but a bunch of zeroes and ones…we shop online at virtual stores…we read virtual books on our tablets…

Even our relationships have gone that way because of Facebook and twitter and Instagram…

A lot of our music is virtual, too…it’s been that way since we started ripping our cds and trading mp3s online...then came stores like iTunes with its digital tracks and albums and metadata…

So it stands to reason, that we should have virtual artists, performers that don’t exist in real life…sure, there’s some human component, but the stay in the background where we rarely (if ever) see them…

Back in the 60s, we had the Archie’s, who were followed by Josie and the Pussycats…then Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem on “The Muppets” …

Dethklok, The Chipmunks, Prozzak, Crazy Frog, The Banana Splits….Mistula is from the Philippines and represented by a bunch of female dools…the bots are all cg creations…Hatsune Miku is a Japanese hologram…then there’s Jen and the Holograms…

They all have their appeal, but there is one virtual group that eclipses them all…not only have they had hit singles and multi-platinum albums, but they also tour…they’re even listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the most-successful virtual band of all time…

This is the story of The Gorillaz…

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Today, we can choose from an infinite array of music...there are so many songs and so many artists from so many genres over so many years that none of us will ever come close to experiencing it all...

But that’s okay because most of us have a favourite style of music...we tend to find a sound we like and stick with it over all others...for all kinds of very personal reasons, it becomes our favourite brand of music...

For example, if you’re listening to me right now, you’re probably a big fan of rock music...more specifically, you’re listening to this show on this station because at least some of your preferences lie in the realm of new rock, modern rock, alt-rock, indie music, alternative music–whatever you want to call it...there is a specific aesthetic and sensibility when it comes to rock music that seems to, well, move you...

But what, exactly, is that aesthetic?...how did these sensibilities and styles develop?...where did they come from?...why do we consider one band “alternative” and another one to be something else entirely?...and why are we so tribal when it comes to our choices in music?...

These are complex questions...and the answers can only be found by examining 60 years of rock history....this is the complete history of all-rock, chapter 1...

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It's another trip back into the Ongoing History vault to find this episode all about things you many not have known about some of your favourite Alt-Rock musicians. 

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This time, we take a trip way back into the Ongoing History vault and dig out a show from April of 2000.
What follows is the story of the trials and tribulations of the early days of Nine Inch Nails, and up to the release of the Broken/Fixed EP's. And a lot of this story is told by Trent himself. 
These are the deep, dark secrets of the early days of Nine Inch Nails.

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When a band forms, there’s little expectation that this could be a long-term endeavour...I mean, being a professional musician is hardly a sure thing...so many things could go wrong...

But sometimes, a group will gain a little bit of traction...suddenly, a year passes and things are still happening...then two...then five...then ten...and if things are just right when it comes to the music and the audience and the industry and technology and plain stupid luck, the band might wake up one day to find that they’ve been professional musicians for 25 years...

This is exactly what happened with The Trews...

A band’s silver anniversary is cause for celebration...that’s a long time to be in business...so it’s a good time to get everyone together to tell some stories...this is The Trews in their own words...

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Music is one of the greatest gifts the universe has bestowed on humanity...it provides so much joy and comfort and inspiration and enjoyment and motivation... It’s used in ritual and worship...and it allows us to communicate when words fail us...

Every culture we’ve ever known has had music...an existence without music?...inconceivable...

But like everything in this life, even the best things can be perverted and corrupted for malevolent purposes...and that includes music...

It can be something as simple as your brother or sister annoying you by playing their awful music at high volume...or music can be employed as a weapon, a tool of war, an instrument of torture, a form of intimidation, and a way of inflicting pain and distress...

And to be fair, it can also be used as gentle non-lethal retaliation against some kind of incursion or attack...no bullets may be fired, but a point will be made...

This use of music in these ways is almost as old as music itself...and this history isn’t pretty...welcome to the story of using music as a weapon...warning: this could get loud...

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One of the things that makes rock great is the energy and the power that comes with the music..and depending where you go, that energy and power varies from place to place...

If you’re looking to exorcise a little aggression and anger and frustration, you have several choices...there are various flavours of metal that can serve your purpose, ranging from the melodic (Metallica’s “Enter Sandman,” for example) along with Sabbath and Ozzy to the straight-from-hell insanity of black and death metal...

Industrial music is another option...guitars, synthesizers, and driving beats from acts like Nine Inch Nails, Marilyn Manson, and Ministry...

A third option is punk rock...it comes in many flavours, so there’s almost something for everyone...

But if you really want pure adrenalin, something aggressive, something super-physical, something primal, and something that can be dangerous and violent, there’s one particular part of the punk world that you’ll find very attractive...

It’s a space where things can’t be too hard, too fast, or too angry... And for many people, it’s become a lifestyle and even a lifesaver...it isn’t for everyone, but as we’ll see, its influence has extended far, far beyond just a bunch of guys yelling over loud guitars...misunderstood?...maybe...important?...definitely...this is the history of hardcore...

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It’s never too late to follow your dreams…here are a few inspiration examples…

Anna Mary Robertson was born in New York in 1860…for years, she worked as a housekeeper before moving to farm work with her husband, Thomas Moses…they had ten children…

When Thomas died, Anna needed something to occupy her time, so she took up painting…she was 78 years old…Anna became known as “Grandma Moses” and is one of the most celebrated American painters of the 20th century…she’s also held up as an example of never being too old to follow your dreams…

Then, early in 2022, I ran across the story of Ruth Slenczynska…she was the last surviving pupil of classical legend Sergei Rachmaninov…Ruth first met him when she was declared a child prodigy many, many, many decades ago, back in the 1920s…

She recorded some classical records for Decca in the 50s and very early 60s, but that was it…the contract lapsed and wasn’t renewed—that is until early 2022 when she signed a brand new record deal with Decca for a solo album entitled “my life in music”…Ruth Slenczynska got this record deal at the age of 97…

This got me thinking…rock is supposed to be for the young…new artists are almost always in their teens or early 20s…but not always…sometimes it takes a little longer and a lot more work before certain artists were able to get their big break…some had to wait until their 30s—ancient by any measure when it comes to the contemporary music business…

And given the ageism that persists throughout contemporary music, these accomplishments are all that more impressive…

Let’s take a look at the late bloomers of rock’n’roll…

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When someone in your band decides to leave, gets fired, or heaven forbid, dies, you have a problem…this is an issue if any member leaves, but if we’re talking about your singer, that’s a hurt on an entirely different level…

Your front person is an integral part of your sound…it’s the voice of your music…and there is nothing important to your music than its voice…

It gets worse, too…your front person often provides the central image of your band…that person is the one out front…that person takes centre stage live…that person is the one the camera follows in a video…that person is the one photographers focus on…and chances are, it’s that person’s name that comes to mind first with fans…

So what do you do when that person bails?...you have two choices…fold your tent and go home and maybe come back in a different form with a different name…or you suck it up and risk replacing that singer with someone else…

That is hard on so many levels…again, I go back to the notion of “voice”…you could find a sound-alike like we’ve seen with journey, a period of time with Judas Priest, and perhaps Queen…but the fans know you’ve just plugged that whole with a reasonable facsimile at best or a out-and-out fake at worst…

Instead, it’s probably best to focus on skills and chemistry…so maybe the new person does sound like the old one…but maybe they bring something new to the table, some intangible talent that not only dressed the wound but makes the body as a whole stronger?...

That’s really, really, hard…but it can be done…and here are 18 examples of bands who have done just that…

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I get a lot of email from young musicians looking for advice…they all ask pretty much the same questions: how to do I get more people to know about my music?...how do I get them to listen to my music?...how do I get my songs on the radio?...how do I get a record deal?...listen, if I had the definitive “silver bullet” answers to any of these questions, I’d not only be rich, I’d be worshipped as a God—which, come to think of it, would be kinda cool…

It has always been hard to make it in the music business…you need to not just be good but great…and—never discount this—you have to be lucky, to be in the right place in the right time with the right sound and image and attitude…

And since the internet disrupted everything, it’s become even harder…at the moment, there’s a split when it comes to artists…the majority of them made their bones and established their reputations before the internet hit the music industry around 2000—and everyone else…

The internet—free-flowing digital files, streaming, social media, YouTube, and all that ilk—has not only made music more accessible to everyone, but it’s also increased competition amongst musicians exponentially…it has never been harder for a new act to be heard about the noise of everyone else…

Here’s an exercise: name all the rock bands who have emerged since 2000 who are capable of filling an area as a headliner today…Arcade Fire, for sure…Muse, is another…Linkin Park, although they’re no longer with us…White Stripes and Jack White…and after that, you start to run out of names…

Here’s one more: Imagine Dragons…they were formed in 2008 and have since become a major alt-rock band…and yes, they can fill an arena…how did they do that?...let’s investigate….

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Back in 2014, I was invited to the foo fighters headquarters...this is 606 studios, the band’s hangout and nerve centre in Van Nuys, California...I was there to talk about the new album and TV series, “Sonic Highways”...

I got there before anyone from the band arrived...first to roll up was Taylor Hawkins...he was driving the same beat-up 1986 Toyota 4 x 4 pick-up truck that he bought for $400 when he was in high school...he could have taken his other truck, which was a 2005 Subaru Baja...

“not a very rock star ride,” I said when he got out...Taylor smiled—of course, he smiled—and said “it gets the job done”...Taylor was never much for the trappings of rock stardom... Here’s a quote: if you want to play music, play because you want to play music, not because you want to be rich and famous”....

We went inside where I noticed a poster on the wall for an obscure solo album by Queen drummer, Roger Taylor...it was a 1981 release called “Fun in Space”...what was that doing here?...

Taylor came alive... “Roger Taylor, man!...my favourite drummer ever!...Queen was my first concert and I’ve always been a fan of the guy...I mean, just the way he plays”...

And that’s how the conversation went until everyone else arrived and we had to start the interview...but during those 15 or 20 minutes, Taylor made me feel at home, a welcome guest in this sacred and very private Foo Fighters space...

I forgot that was talking to the drummer of one of the biggest bands on the planet...he was just this goofy, fun surfer dude who wanted to talk about music...I think he even made me an espresso...

That’s what I thought of when I heard that Taylor had died...he wasn’t just the Foos’ drummer and a beloved member of the band, he was a nice, normal guy, who wanted to do nothing more than be a dad and play rock’n’roll...

Let’s spend some time remembering Taylor Hawkins...

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We’re thrilled to share a special preview of the Broken Record podcast from Pushkin Industries. In honor of the Red Hot Chili Peppers new album, Unlimited Love, the band members sit with their legendary producer Rick Rubin to share exclusive insights about the band’s dynamic. In this preview,  Rick, John, and Anthony discuss John rejoining the band after a 10 year hiatus and how right it felt to be playing together again. You can hear the full episode, and more from Broken Record at https://podcasts.pushkin.fm/brokenrecordrhcp?sid=ongoinghistory.

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I’m going to explain why you might get frustrated at spellcheck on your phone or computer…and the answer has to do with a guy named Noah… no, not that Noah from the bible with the ark…another one…

Noah was annoyed…as a proud new American, he believed that his new country needed to set itself apart from its former colonial masters in every way possible so they new nation could truly be different and independent and separate…

By 1828, there was no need to take up arms anymore, so Noah picked up his pen…as an author of schoolbooks, his annoyance had to do with the way the British spelled some of their words…why could “colour” have that extra “u?”…the proper way to spell “centre” was “c-e-n-t-e-r,” not “r-e”…everywhere he looked, he saw what he believed to be nonsensical spellings…

He made a list of such annoyances…and in 1828, at the age of 70, Noah Webster published his “American dictionary of the English language”…and it was a hit—largely because Noah was already that guy with all the spelling books being used in school…

And so came to pass that Noah’s preferred spellings—again, modifications to the original British versions of these words—became adopted by America…and these spellings are what’s accepted today as correct in the U.S…

That means if you have a computer or a phone or whatever and you have your default language set to “English,” it’s most often means “American English” by default…and that means if you try to spell certain words the British or the Canadian or Australian way, you get a squiggly line underneath…

That really annoys me (and maybe you, too)—almost as much as when my iPhone insists that I mean to spell “ducking”…but that’s another story…but this story does explain why your device seems to hate your spelling skills…it goes back to grumpy Noah Webster and his nationalistic demands on language…

Rock music has been with us since the early 1950s…that’s long enough for many things to become entrenched, familiar, and basically just part of the scenery…there are so many things about rock that we just accept and don’t really question or wonder about…

But just like the spellcheck on your phone, if you start thinking about some of these things, you might wonder where they came from, why we do it, or who came up with the idea in the first place…let’s see if I can help…I call this episode “the rock explainer”…

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It’s hard being in a band…all that time close together, day and night, in cramped vans and crappy dressing rooms…record company issues, personal issues, personnel problems and the general fragile state of the human condition…it’s no wonder so many groups break up...after a while, it’s just too much trouble. But there are exceptions, bands that somehow manage to stay together in the same form forever, no matter what happens… the Radiohead that we know today is really the only Radiohead there’s ever been…U2 hasn’t had a lineup change since 1978… ZZ Top has been the same three guys since 1969…

And here’s another one to add to the list: Billy Talent…same four guys since 1993…how have they managed that?...well, if you want the truth, go to the source…

This is Billy Talent: in their own words, part 3

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Artists make art because they have it…there’s something in their hearts that forces them to turn what they feel inside into something the rest of us can see and hear and feel ourselves…

It supposed to be this pure thing…the pursuit of beauty for beauty’s sake…undistilled human emotion designed to create a reaction, to spread a profound messages, to make the universe a better and wiser and more joyful place…

Yeah…those are nice thoughts…but the universe being what it is, things don’t work that way…

Artists need to eat…they need to pay the rent…they need tools and supplies…they may need to travel from place to place…and they may need help from others—people that demand payment…

In other words, artists need money to survive…they may find that money from donations…maybe they have a patron…but in the modern world, what they really need is a regular income…

It used to be that musicians would play gigs and sell their music to the public…if they got it on the radio, then that was revenue stream…then came selling t-shirts and other merchandise…

But around the turn of the 21st century, things began to change…economic realities surrounding the evolution of the music business forced musicians to look at different ways of bringing in income…

What was once considered compromising artistic principles and destruction of your integrity of music by prostituting yourself to soulless multi-national corporations (and the like) started to look like not just like a pretty good idea but a very necessary one…

Oh, sure, you can reject the evil lure of money to maintain the purity of your music, but that’s not going to take you far if you’re homeless and hungry…and after a while, you realize that the shame levied upon you for finding new ways of making a living is actually the result of the audience’s idea of artistic purity…the audience expects you to do what they believe is the pure thing for their entertainment…

Whoa…these are complicated concepts…let’s proceed with part two of “the concept of selling out”…

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I’ve done hundreds of interviews with individual artists over the year…it’s relatively easy...all you have to do is get one person in a room, turn on the recording devices and you’re set…

When it comes to interviewing a band, you’re lucky to get two members in the same place and the same time… 

But getting every member of a band in the same place at the same time for an interview is next to impossible…I’ve only managed to be so lucky a couple of times… U2, Kings of Leon, Foo Fighters, Green Day, Blink-182—and that’s about it…

And lemme tell you something: each of these interviews required extraordinary efforts under extraordinary circumstances…

Such circumstances miraculously presented themselves with Billy Talent…all four guys around the same table in the same studio…the purpose?...to get them to tell the story of the band in their own words…this is part two of our conversation…

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One of the worst insults you can throw at an artist is to accuse them of “selling out”…the most basic definition is when the pursuit of money compromises, corrupts or otherwise interrupts the pursuit truth and beauty and all the purity and goodness that is supposed to flow from art…

But that’s an awfully broad definition which can be applied in a billion different highly subjective ways…at one extreme, some people believe that taking money for any kind of art is perverse…at the other, anything and everything has its price, high or low, depending on the circumstances…

And the world has changed…making any kind of art costs money…competition for attention among artists have never been greater…and we’d like to thing that great art inevitably and naturally rises to the top, but it just doesn’t…in a true meritocracy, it would…but we all know that’s not true…

And ever since the internet started shaping the way we find and consume music, the value ascribed to it—that is, how much we’re willing to pay for it—has dropped to near zero…thanks to streaming and YouTube, almost all the music ever created in the history of humankind is available for free…

But there are costs to making music…musicians (and those associated with its creation) have a right to make a living…where does the money come from?...

From a lot of different places, as it turns out…the sources of this working capital may be distasteful to some, but if you want to be a working musician these days, some creative and philosophical compromises need to be made…

What I’m trying to say is that “selling out” ain’t what it used to be….here…let me show you

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The best way to construct a profile on an artist is to round up everyone together, put them in a studio and get them to tell their story themselves…

But that can be difficult, especially with a band…beyond touring and recording schedules, everyone has their own lives and may even live in different cities…putting everyone in the same place could be impossible…

It took a while, but we did it…i have all four members of Billy Talent in one place…and they’re here for one purpose: to tell their story in their own words…

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In the days before Covid, I was always on the road…if it wasn’t a music conference in Singapore, it was an interview in London, the Juno’s in—wherever, or a concert in Los Angeles…this means I have seen more than my share of hotel rooms—everything from five-star luxury spots to sub-one-star establishments that come with a complimentary dead hooker under the bed…

This means I’ve developed a certain attitude toward hotels…

First thing you do when you get into the room is ditch the bedspread…they are never, ever cleaned…just tear it off, pile it in the corner, and then wash your hands…then try not to imagine what’s happened on that couch…

At night, there’s the sound of the air conditioning, the noises coming from the hallway…and what are they doing in the room next door?...

Then in the restaurant and the bar and the fitness room, you run into fellow guests…who are they?...what are they doing here?...what’s their story?...occasionally, I’d find out—like the time I ran across a Nobel prize winner who was living in this Asian hotel because he was too ill to fly back home…

Hotels are fascinating places where things happen that don’t happen anywhere else…strangers come together from everywhere to do things that they might not do anywhere else…no wonder so many books and TV shows and movies are set in hotels…I am fascinated with these places…

Here’s the segue: rock stars spend a lot of time on the road, meaning that they spend a lot of nights in hotels…and some of the rooms they stay in end up become part of rock’n’roll history…let’s take a look at some of them, shall we?...

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There are some people who just can’t get along…it could be the result of politics, religion, philophies, property, honour, a personal slight, a perceived insult, or—well, a million things, really…

The most famous feud in history might be the Hatfield’s and the McCoy’s who fought each other along the border between Kentucky and West Virginia in the late 1800s…it started over a hog…did it belong to Floyd Hatfield or Randolph McCoy?...in the end more than a dozen people were killed on both sides of the feud, largely over a pig…

Here’s something a little more relatable…German brothers Adolf and Rudolf Dassler co-founded a shoe company in their mother’s basement…when U.S. sprinter Jesse Ownes used their shoes for the 1936 Berlin Olympics, sales blew up…

But the brothers couldn’t deal with the success and kept fighting and fighting and fighting…finally, in 1948, they couldn’t take it anymore and the company split in two…Adolf called his company “Adidas”…Rudolf named his “Puma”…

And this is a good one…R2D2 and C3PO never liked each other…Anthony Daniels (C3PO) was a classical trained actor and never really like the fact that he had to play this robot…meanwhile, Kenny Baker, the little guy inside R2D2 was a circus performer…Daniels never, ever let Baker forget that he’d never been in the same league as him…

And that’s just one of many different feuds to be found in the performer arts…when artistic types have a beef, it can get very, very weird…

The Beatles vs. The Stones (although that was a manufactured fight…they were actually very good friends…but after the Beatles broke up, Paul and John scrapped a lot in the media…Ray and Dave Davies in The Kinks…no love lost there…David Gilmour vs. Roger Waters in Pink Floyd…Brian Love and Mike Wilson in The Beach Boys…

And think of all the rap beefs…Biggie vs. Tupac, Kanye vs. Drake, Nas vs. Jay-Z…that list is endless…

But what about more contemporary rock feuds, fights that have happened over the last couple of decades?...thanks for asking because here they come.

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Ever been to a concert and wondered "How do they make all of this work?". "How have I not gone deaf?" or "Why does the dude on stage wearing what looks like a pair of ear-buds?"

Well we're here to answer those questions and more as we delve deep into the history of concert sound...

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In assessing popular music in the last half of the 20th century, rock music was a massive cultural phenomenon…initially driven by young baby boomers, rock grew bigger and stronger, starting in the middle 60s, eclipsing all other genres…and central to this conquest was the electric guitar…

That sound, with all its power and distortion and infinitely diverse tonalities, can still drive music fans into ecstasy,

For many, the electric guitar is a symbol of rebellion and liberation…it was a new vehicle for freedom of expression…and it opened the doors to new types of creativity…and it was because of the electric guitar that rock went global…

Its history is a complicated one involving musicians, inventors, tinkerers, happy accidents, big multinational companies and lone wolves…some names are well known while others, despite their contributions to the decades-long evolution of instrument, languish in obscurity, known only to guitar geeks and obsessives…

And while there have been many occasions where pundits have declared that rock (and by extension, the tools to make this music) is dead, the electric guitar has proven to be extremely adaptable and has (so far) been able to take on all comers, especially when placed in the hands of radicals and rule-breakers…

If a power chord played through a Marshall stack has ever given you chills, then you’re in the right place…this is the history of the electric guitar, part 3…

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For centuries, music was nice and clean…while different instruments gave notes different timbres, the frequencies of those notes was expected to be clear and pure…yes, you could add a little umph by playing fortissimo, but the dogma was “let’s not overdo it”…

But sometimes the situation called for overdoing things…banging a piano turns a melody and a beat into some stompin’ boogie-woogie…a raspy, hard-blown saxophone brings energy to a performance…

But creating pleasant distortion with either of these  instruments—and we can name a few others—is limited to the abilities of the human body…volume and distortion and all the energy that comes with playing this way is restricted by how hard you can hit or blow into something…

The electric guitar has no such limitations…it can be played so that the notes are pristine…or you can summon all demons of hell with volume, distortion, power, and glory and that is cool…

The electric guitar is one of humankind’s greatest musical inventions…starting in the 1950s, it revolutionized many types of popular music: country, the blues, jazz, and most of all, rock…after it appeared, nothing was ever the same—and the sound of music changed forever…it’s impossible to imagine what today’s music would sound like had the electric guitar not been invented…

But how did we get here?...let’s pick up the story….this is the story of electric guitar, part 2…

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There are few instruments more powerful than the electric guitar…when the first primitive models appeared in the 1920s, no one gave them much thought…the electric guitar was brand new, unproven, and completely lacking in any of the kinds of traditions and gravitas enjoyed by the piano, the violin, or any number of brass instruments…

Besides, unlike all the other musical instruments in use, these required electricity, a concept that was still quite new…electric household appliances were just starting to catch on…and having a radio was still a novel thing…

But over the next 30 years, the electric guitar found its place in music, helped along by technology, the need for volume, changing social conditions, and the ever-evolving musical tastes of the public…

By the 1960s, the electric guitar was regarded as one of the most powerful musical inventions of all time…it was the sound behind rock’n’roll and all the social and cultural changes it created…it was the sound of freedom, power, rebellion, joy. heartache, aggression, and more…

In short, the electric guitar defined music for the latter half of the 20th century…it’s still an essential part of popular culture…and despite several challenges to its supremacy over the decades, it’s not going away anytime soon…

But how did a semi-obscure acoustic instrument get electrified in the first place? Who were the inventors and promoters? What technological innovations were needed? And of all the noisemakers you could choose, how did it become the foundation of rock’n’roll?...

This is the story of the electric guitar, part 1…

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The human body is a remarkably good piece of construction…it has its quirks and shortcomings, but for the most part is a pretty cool thing: functional, durable, and to other humans, attractive…

But there’s always room for improvements and modifications and decorations…archeologists have found mummified remains that are thousands and thousands of years old that’s sport tattoos…

There’s a guy named Otzl that was found in the Swiss Alps when a glacier melted…he’d been there for over 5,000 years—and the dude had 61 tattoos…

Egyptian mummies plus pacific islanders, members of ancient African communities, bodies dating to iron age Britain, early Japanese societies, and the Indigenous people of North and South America have all engaged in this kind of body art…

Tattoos have also been used to identify prisoners and slaves, to display religious connections, and associations with armies, navies, bikers, and criminal gangs…and for many people tattoos still carry some kind of stigma…only deviants and weirdos got tattoos…

But that’s changed a lot in the last 60 years—especially since the beginning of the 21st century…tattoos have long gone mainstream…in fact, in some circles, if you don’t have any ink, you’re the outsider and the weirdo…

This brings me to the world of rock’n’roll…tattoos are everywhere…and almost no one stops with one or two…the last time anyone counted, Travis Barker of Blink-182 has 117 different and distinct tattoos from the top of his head right down to his toes…

We’ll get to Travis in a bit…but let’s begin with a look at the history—the whole phenomenon—of rock’n’roll tattoos…

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We’ve all heard the stories about where punk came from…the New York Dolls and a few other bands start playing in a crappy area of New York that attracted musicians, artists, and degenerates with low rent…

This leads to the opening of CBGB, a club that becomes the centre of a music scene that gave a home to bands like television, Blondie, The Talking Heads, The Heartbreakers, and, most importantly, The Ramones…

In July 1976, The Ramones fly to London and play a show attended by curious kids who then either continue on with their punk plans—that would be The Sex Pistols, The Clash, and a few others—or inspire others to form their own groups…and from there, punk spreads across the world…

That’s a nice succinct look at punk’s origin story…what’s missing is Canada’s involvement—and believe me, the great white north had a lot to say about punk in those early days…and I mean, a lot…

Toronto was like the third leg of a punk triangle that extended to New York and London…ideas and trends and music was constantly exchanged…meanwhile, out on the west coast, there was a fierce Vancouver scene that worked mostly along north-south routes into the U.S.

And then across the country, there were pockets of punk that had their own influence…

This history needs to be told…and we’re going to do it by looking at the stories of 14 incredibly important Canadian punk bands from back in the day…

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Whether we want to admit it or not, each of us is product of our parents…we are like mom and/or dad…and that may manifest itself in different ways…

Maybe one of them was a great cook and that’s led to a life-long love of food…maybe they introduced to travel and now you spend all your extra money on airfare…or maybe one of them had some kind of craft that you gravitated towards…carpenter, knitting, gardening…

And chances are if you have musical parents, you’re going to end up musical, too—at least to some extent…it’s again that combination of nature and nurture…

Now imagine that your mom or dad is a famous musician…cool people are always dropping in…there are tours and time spent in the studio and parties and industry events…for anyone else, that would be mind-blowing…but for you, it’s just how life is…

And because that’s how your life is, you just fall into the lifestyle…you learn to play and write and perform…and because the parents have some connections and relationships, you might have the inside line on establishing a career…

Others without famous parents will cry foul, but that’s just the way it is…you’re a member of the lucky sperm club…

Some of these sons and daughters have actually done very well for themselves…Sean and Julian Lennon, son of John…four of five of Frank Zappa’s kids have had musical careers…R&B singer Stella Santana, daughter of Carlos…Norah jones is the daughter of Ravi Shankar, the Beatles’ favourite sitar player… and more recently, we have Wolfgang Van Halen, son of Eddie…

Here’s one that you may have missed…Redfoo of lmfao (he’s the one with the afro and the big glasses) is the son of Berry Gordy, the founder of Motown…think he was able to parlay dad’s contacts into something?...and here’s one I missed for years…Gary Lewis and the playboys was a big 60s pop group…Gary is the son of Jerry Lewis, the comedian…

What other parent-children connections are out there?...let’s have a look…this is another edition of musical offspring…

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With the way the music industry operates, this guys career should have been dead and buried long ago. I mean no offense…but look at this dude.

Even when he was young, he looked dorky. Bad glasses and poor posture. This was a guy who was a computer programmer for a cosmetics company. And in the age of Punk when everyone had safety pins stuck to their clothes, and leather jackets….this guy insisted on wearing a sport coat.

Yet he’s still here…still making music…and not only does he have the respect and admiration of many generations of fans, he’s collaborated with everyone from Paul McCartney to Burt Baccarat.

He’s delved into punk, sting quartets, jazz ensembles, and more…so how does he do it. And what’s the big deal about Elvis Costello?

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Although they were around really for just 4 years, The Smiths succeeded in becoming the most influential British indie band of the 1980's. They hastened the deal of tech-pop, and laid the foundation of what was to become Britpop. 

But how exactly did that happen and really, what is the big deal about The Smiths?

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Back in the day, they called The Clash "the only band that mattered" and few voices are more important or influential in the history of rock than that of Joe Strummer. Without Joe and The Clash, we wouldn't have a fraction of the bands and musicians that we do today. Put simply;  Joe Strummer is one of the most significant musicians in the history of rock. Full stop.

December 22nd, 2021 marks the 19th anniversary of Joe's sudden passing at just 50 years old. To mark the occasion, and honour Joe, we go back into the Ongoing History achieves and present our profile of Joe that first aired in the spring of 2003. 

This is our tribute to the legend of Joe Strummer...

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Is it really almost the end of 2021?...if I’m honest, it’s all been a blur, almost like 2020, with covid on my mind 24/7…it’s just reality…

You know how I’ve been spending my time?...I’ve spent almost two years in my office, throwing myself into work…I think i’ve read a record number of books…my iPad tells me that my screen time is up 23%...and I’ve posted somewhere around 2500 stories on my website…

Now that the end of the year is approaching and we’ll soon be into the holidays, it’s time for the annual office clean-up…

There are post-it notes everywhere with little tidbits of information I’ve found…i’ve bookmarked a ton of sites…there’s a little journal filled with scribblings…books with pages turned down and e-books with passages highlighted…

Much of this has already been turned into (or will be turned into) “ongoing history” programs and posts…but there’s also all kinds of fascinating stuff that I couldn’t use…they just didn’t fit in with anything that I’ve done in 2021…it’s orphaned material…

But I can’t throw out any of stuff…it’s too interesting, too important, to ignore…this information needs to be disseminated to the public at large…knowledge is power, right?...this material needs to be set free…

So once again it’s time for the annual data dump known as “60 mind-blowing things about music in 60 minutes”…

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Once upon a time, before social media and the internet, all musicians were mysterious…outside of seeing them live, our only connections with them were through their music, the liner notes and album artwork, and stories in music magazines…

Yes, there were the occasional tv appearances, but those were quite rare…in fact, it wasn’t really until music videos started to be a thing in early 80s that fans began to grasp what their idols looked like in a major way…

And consider this: it wasn’t until MTV and MuchMusic started interviewing musicians that we began to discover what their speaking voices sounded like…

Today, though, there are no more secrets…artists are in constant touch with their fanbase through social media…fans are constantly trading news online…camera phones are everywhere…we live in a world of oversharing and tmi…

Hell, even kiss—a band that spent its first decade hiding behind makeup as a way of creating myth and legend and essentially invented the concept of the mysterious, unknowable rock star—gave up on that idea in the 80s…

However, I’m happy to report that there are still some mysteries, artists who have managed to main a degree of anonymity…some have successfully obfuscated their identifies through disguise and subterfuge…others have disappeared into a hermit-like existence where they remain beyond the reach of the general public while still releasing material and maintaining a fanbase…

Who are these artists?...and how did they managed to stay out of the limelight?...these are alt-rock’s most mysterious musicians…

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I remember being in London in the summer of 2001…I made my usual pilgrimage up to the original Rough Trade records store on Talbot Street, off Portobello Road in Notting Hill…

I was a little bummed out with music at the time, so I was hoping for some inspiration…the mainstream was awash in pop music…spice girls, backstreet boys, Britney Spears…

And alt-rock had kinda lost its way after grunge burned out…the big acts were searching for direction…there were far too many one-hit wonders…and nu-metal, the biggest thing at the time, was very, very polarizing…you either were really into it or you hated it…

It also seemed that this new genre dubbed “electronica” was siphoning off a lot of rock fans…music made the old-school way with guitars, bass, drums, and vocals seemed old-fashioned, out of date, and played out…

But that couldn’t be true, could it?...in the past, every time rock was declared dead, someone or something came along and breathed new life into everything…

I told this story to Nigel, the guy at the desk of the tiny shop… “Give me something that is exciting, new, and fresh,” I said… “Give me hope”…

Nigel reached under the counter and pulled out a cd single… “Here, mate,” he said, “This should cure all your ills”…it was a song from The Strokes.

Turns out he was right…The Strokes were one of the very, very first new bands behind the indie-rock revival that began at the tail end of the 90s and blew up over the next couple of years…nice one, Nigel…

But why The Strokes?...where did they come from?...and why was this guy in London telling me about a band from New York?...this requires some explanation…

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This time we go deep into the vaults for an episode about the now seemingly long lost concept of "Album Artwork".

We'll look at some of the most famous of all time, and look into why this concept has all but faded away.

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Once upon a time many centuries ago, someone came up with the idea of taking all the world’s available knowledge and storing it one place…that way everyone who had questions had somewhere to go to get the answers…and thus the concept of the library was born…

Considerably later, this same concept was applied to recorded music and governments, public broadcasters and companies began collecting together as much of humankind’s recorded audio as they could…

The BBC famously has hundreds of kilometers of shelving for physical media…there’s a guy in Brazil named Zero Freitas who is on a quest to create a private collection of all the records ever made…he has at least 8 million records and more than 100,000 compact discs…

Nice…but this still doesn’t cover everything…

In the 80s, some people started to conceive of a giant computer somewhere that could hold humanity’s music in digital form…if you needed a song—any song—it would be available from that computer instantly…

In 1994, a law professor named Paul Goldstein popularized the term “celestial jukebox”…in his mind, this would be networked database available to anyone with a connection or this thing called the “internet”…

Five years later, napster went online...suddenly, it seemed that you could download any song you wanted—however illegal that might be…

Then, in 2003, came the iTunes music store…starting with several hundred thousand songs, it has since expanded to about 60 million tracks that are all for sale…but that still doesn’t quite cut it because it still involved buying this music…

Today, we have streaming…all the platforms draw from a digital music library that contains at least 75 million songs—and more are being added every day…and we can access this music anytime we want, from wherever we are, using whatever device we happen to have…and the price?...given what we’re able to do, it’s negligible…in fact, it can even be totally free…

Think about that: we can listen to virtually any song ever recorded in seconds and pay nothing…we now have theoretical celestial jukebox, something that was considered science fiction not that long ago…question: how well do you know how all this works?...this is 23 points you might not know about streaming, part 2”…

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Once upon a time, all music was sold to us on pieces of plastic…we had to travel through time and space to hand over hard-earned money to purchase those pieces of plastic…and there was a financial limit to the amount of plastic we could buy…bloody things were expensive…

Part the reason they were expensive was because baked into the purchase price was our ability to listen to that music an infinite number of times without ever having to pay for it again—unless of course you wore it out, damaged it, or somehow lost it…

It was hard to share this music, too…you could make a copy on tape, which took a long time…later, you could burn a cd, which was quicker but still took effort…and the ring of people with which you could share something was fairly limited…again, we’re dealing with issues of time and space…

What else can we say about the old days?...cost aside, our access to music was limited…we could only buy what was available in the store…and the store only stocked what it could acquire from a limited number of record labels…and only a very tiny percentage of people who made music had deals with record labels…

In other words, the supply of music was severely constrained…that’s another reason for the expense…there were many, many filters a song had to pass through before it even had a chance to landing in a record store…this created an artificial scarcity of music and the channels through which you could access the little that was available was limited and tightly controlled…

Wow….from where we are today, that sounds positively medieval, doesn’t it?...now it’s all about streaming, the ability access virtually any song ever recorded from everywhere on earth with just a few poke at your phone…and the price?...free—or something very close to it…

That’s all that most people know about how streaming works…but if you’re listening to this program, you probably need to know more about what we’ve all got ourselves into…here’s a deep dive into the whole business of streaming music, part 1..

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Being a rock star comes with all sorts of privileges: money, fame, plenty of sex, drugs…but those things can also be very dangerous.

Take the case of slash…in September 1992, Guns N’ Roses was on tour with Metallica…Slash and the band were staying in San Francisco ahead of a show across the bay in Oakland…and after the gig, Slash died…

Some drug dealers showed up at his hotel room at 5 am with all kinds of stuff… Slash took everything, including a powerful speedball, which is a combination of heroin and cocaine…

He wandered out into the hallway where he encountered a maid…he tried to ask her where the elevator was—and wham!...he was out…she freaked out and called for help…meanwhile, Slash lay there on the floor…

Paramedics arrived and gave him the old adrenalin-needle-to-the-heart trick and he was saved…when he came to, he was told that he’d been technically dead for eight minutes due to cardiac arrest…that seems like a long time, but that’s his story…

He was transported to the hospital but quickly signed himself out and was onstage for the next gig in L.A. two days later…about a decade later, though, he was diagnosed with heart disease and ended up with a pacemaker in 2004…

Slash is far from the only person who came back from the dead—or, at the very least, came awfully close to going into the light…here are some examples of rock stars who very nearly checked out long before their time…

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There was a time when movie soundtracks were the lifeblood of the recorded music industry…the lp record, which was introduced in June 1948, was developed at least partially at the behest of movie studios and Broadway show producers looking a better listening experience.

The first movie soundtrack to be released as a record seems to have been “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” in 1938…but the problem was that everything was divided up over multiple 10-inch 78 rpm records…every four minutes, you had to get up and either flip the record over or change it entirely…the same thing happened with “The Jungle Book” in 1942.

That all changed in the summer of 1948 when the 33 1/3 rpm lp allowed up to 22 minutes of audio per side…movie studios bought in and the marketplace was flooded with not only movie soundtracks but original cast recordings of Broadway shows throughout the late 40s, all through the 50s and into the 1960s.

Movie soundtracks were seen as “serious” music for adults…the kids and their rock’n’roll had their 7-inch singles…even as late as the middle 60s, movie soundtracks often did the biggest business.

Take “The Sound of Music”…it was a top 10 record in the U.S. for 109 weeks between May 1, 1965 and July 16, 1967…it was the best-selling album in the UK in 1965, 1966, and 1968…for years, the Guinness Book of World Records listed it as the best-selling album of all time…the best guess we have is that it sold 20 million copies—a very big number, especially back in the day.

As the years passed, it became standard practice to release a soundtrack album with your movie…in many cases, it was just the score, the incidental music written for the title credits, the closing credits and scenes in between.

In others, the records featured songs from the movie, some original, some licensed for the purpose…and some of these soundtracks went on to sell very, very well.

Prince’s “Purple Rain,” 25 million copies…“Titanic,” 30 million copies…“Dirty Dancing, “ 32 million…“Grease,” 38 million…“Saturday Night Fever,” 40 million…“The Bodyguard,” 45 million…even “Space Jam” from 1996 sold six million.

By the 90s, every movie had a soundtrack as part of its business plan…they were cheap to compile and the margins were fantastic…they even launched a career or two.

Let’s take a look at some of the key alt-rock-based movie soundtracks of all time…

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In the winter of 1417, a young man named Poggio Braciolini was searching through a library when it found an odd manuscript sitting on a shelf…it was a thousand years old—the last surviving copy of a poem by a roman philosopher named Lucretius…

What Lucretius said in this poem was radical—heretical, in fact…what it contained was against all the teachings of God and men…it was called “On The Nature of Things”…

First, he posited that the universe operated without Gods and that matter was made of tiny, tiny, particles that were in constant motion…

Despite the danger—this was explosive stuff in 1417—Bracciolini translated the poem…copies were carefully distributed over the next couple of hundred years…and the intellectual impact on Europe was incalculable…

Lucretius’ notions inspired new ways of thinking, leading to the renaissance, the enlightenment and all that followed…Bracciolini’s translation of “On The Nature of Things” quite literally changed the course of humanity…

Scholars have argued that because of him, the world became modern…that everything we take for granted today in terms of culture and thought happened because Bracciolini happened to find that one-and-only manuscript…

Yet have you ever heard of Poggio Bracciolini?...probably not…he is one of the great unsung heroes of history…

Now let’s apply the same sort of thinking to the history of rock…are there similar such people—people who did something that altered the course of this music yet we don’t know about them?...absolutely…and it’s time to give them some credit…this is part two of great unsung heroes of rock…

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Not everyone who managed to change the world is famous…it is possible to do something absolutely, monumentally world-shaking and not receive any recognition for it…

I’ll give you a name: Vasyli Arkipov…it’s possible that this guy is the only reason any of us are still alive…seriously…

October 27, 1962…it’s the height of the Cuban missile crisis…the soviets had nukes in Cuba aimed at the u.s. and more were on the way…John Kennedy responded by setting up a blockade around the island…

The USS Randolph was one of the ships in charge of enforcing the blockade…they spotted a Soviet sub that was sent to protect the flotilla of Russian ships approaching the island with more missiles on board…this one particular sub—a Foxtrot class b-59—was armed with nuclear missiles…Arkhipov was the second in command…

The Randolph began dropping depth charges in an effort to get the sub to surface…b-59 suffered damage…the crew couldn’t breathe…they wanted to fight back…the sub commander tried to raise soviet command for permission to fire—but he couldn’t reach them…

Because they’d been cruising submerged for days, they hadn’t heard anything from Soviet high command…but they had been monitoring American civil broadcasts which offered non-stop coverage of the crisis…and now they were under attack…maybe the war had finally begun…if that was the case, shouldn’t they launch their missiles?...

Captain Valentín Savitsky was in favour of an attack…so was political officer Ivan Maslennikov…but in order to launch the nukes, Stavisky and Maslennikov also needed agreement from Arkhipov…“what do you say, Vasyli?...do we engage the Americans with our special weapon?”…

Vasyli took a breath and replied “nyet…we do not fire…we have no proof that we are at war…what if we’re wrong?...if we launch, we risk starting an all-our nuclear war and  wipe out all life on the planet”…

The commander wasn’t happy with that, but rules were rules and he ordered that the crew stand down…no nuke would be fired that day…and when the sub did surface, it was confirmed that hostilities had not broken out…this is why Vasyli Arkipov is widely regarded as the man who single-handedly prevented a global nuclear war on October 27, 1962…yet how many people know his name?...

Now let’s take a big pivot into music…what kind of unsung heroes might we find there?...

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When a movie is successful, someone somewhere wants more…that’s when we get a sequel…if that follow-up does well, then the sequel gets a sequel…and if that film has traction, well, then you reach the level of franchise…

We’ve seen many movie franchises over the decades, Star Wars and Star Trek being among the most famous…but then we have all the Fast and the Furious films, Harry Potter, Rocky, Mission Impossible, Planet of the Apes, Toy Story, Lord of the Rings, and so on…

And I haven’t even mentioned the marvel cinematic universe, which has something like three dozen movies and the dc extended universe, which has almost 30…

Studios and producers love movie franchises because they’re reliable sources of revenue forever…fans will flock to any new release while they’re still bingeing on all the older movies…and don’t even get me started on things like merchandising…

What’s the oldest movie franchise?...that would probably be King Kong…the first Kong movie came out in 1933…the first Alice in Wonderland movie came out the same year…

The Wizard of Oz fits our definition…there have been four films since 1939…that counts…Godzilla…first one was 1954…and then we finally get to James Bond…

There have been 27 Bond films, starting with Dr. No in 1962…box office grosses are now around $14 billion U.S. dollars…that is just the movies…

Then we have the music…there are few crossover points between music and film that are more prestigious than being tapped to do the theme for a James Bond movie…

Every time a new chapter in the franchise is announced, tenders go out for someone to do the theme…and the competition is furious…

Sounds like there’s some interesting music history here—and there is…

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There are three moments when I remember looking at something in my hands and realizing that this was going to change my life…

The first time was on my sixth birthday when my grandmother gave me a portable transistor radio…I was still awfully young, but I somehow knew that I could now control not only what I listened to but where and when…

The second time was in 1999 when I was given a prototype of a device called an RCA Lyra…it was an early digital music player, capable of holding up to an hour’s worth of music…no matter how hard I shook it, the music would not skip…for someone who liked to go running to music, that was a big deal…

And the third time was when I searched for—and found! —an obscure song on my iPhone…I had just installed the long-gone Rdio app and was still very skeptical about this whole new streaming thing…the idea that you just paid for access and not to own the music?...rubbish—until that day when I figured it out…

We’ve come such a long way when it comes to making music portable, especially in the 21st century…what was once science fiction is now reality…taking our music with us is so easy right now, we forget how long it took to get us to this point—and how much technology we had to go through to get here…

This is the history of portable music, part 2…

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One of the many great things about music is that we can enjoy it anywhere…I’m talking about the recorded kind…everyone has a smartphone, and every smartphone has the capability of playing music, whether you’re listening to tracks stored in its memory or streaming something from a service like Spotify or apple music…as long as your device has juice, you can enjoy listening to music anywhere you are…

Take this program, for example…in its radio show form, it’s being heard in homes, cars, offices, and workplaces either over the air or through a stream…if you’re listening to the podcast, you might have downloaded it to a phone, a tablet or a laptop which you can fire up anywhere at your convenience…

But imagine for moment that you couldn’t take your music with you…if you wanted to listen to your favourite songs, you had to be present in a specific place and you couldn’t move from it…and that usually meant music inside the home—or perhaps someplace with something like a jukebox…

This might sound absolutely awful to you…I mean, we’re so used to conjuring up music whenever we want and wherever we are…we take it with us everywhere…it’s hard to imagine life without that ability…

That’s the way it was for most of human history, though…for centuries and centuries, the only way to make music portable was to bring a musical instrument with you and play it yourself…

The idea of making recorded music portable—at least in a way that is convenient, cheap, and reliable—is more recent than you might think…and it went through way more incarnations than you may realize…

What do you say we take a look at the history of portable music?...

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Long before I started doing this for a living, I had the notion that I was going to be a record producer…after all, I loved music and the idea of being able to help record it would be a great job…

So as high school wound down, I started to look around for schools that taught music production…and that’s when reality set it…all of them asked for a portfolio of past work…I was 18 years old and from a small prairie town…how was I supposed to have a portfolio of past work?...

They also made it clear that I had to be musically adept…I was a pretty good drummer, but that wasn’t enough…and I had seven years of accordion lessons, but that didn’t really cut it…I couldn’t play guitar or any other type of keyboard…

Long story short, I gave up on that dream after a few rejection letters and here we are…but I’m still fascinated by the talent and equipment that goes into making records—which is why anytime I get a chance to talk to anyone who does that, I’m in…

David Botrill is one of those guys…he’s a Canadian record producer who has worked with took, muse, peter Gabriel, the smashing pumpkins, rush, and a ton of others…he’s got three Grammy’s and has worked in some of the most famous recording studios from here to the UK.

And I’ve got a chance to talk to him about being a record producer?...let’s go…

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When it comes to music, not all years are created equal…listen, every year features some great new songs from great new bands…but over the long term, this music isn’t equally distributed…sometimes—maybe once a decade, but usually less—we run into what can only be described as an embarrassment of riches…

What i mean by that is that we go through a period where every week—even every day—seems to bring something amazing…

Like when?...1955, maybe…Elvis…Chuck Berry…Little Richard….Bo Diddley…Bill Haley and the Comets…they all exploded into public consciousness…it was the birth of rock’n’roll…

1965…The Beatles and everything they were doing…the rise of The Rolling Stones with “Satisfaction”…Bob Dylan releases “Like A Rolling Stone” for “Highway 61 Revisited” after going electric…

Actually, rock’s most prolific years—at least when it came to being an agent for social change and a driver of western culture—were 65, 66, 67, 68 and 69…

After that, we might consider 1977…punk, the beginning of new wave, the era of post-punk and all that came with it…

But then there was a long fallow period…lots of disco, lots of pop, lots of hair metal—which was great if you were into that, but not exactly music that changed the world…

But then came one particular year…if you look back on it, it’s astounding at what happened, what was released and the music we’re still talking about…by the time the calendar turned, everything—and i mean everything—was different…

This is the amazing year that was 1991…

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Whenever an artist goes into the studio, they hope for the best but expect the worst…you want it the album to sell and turn you into a global superstar with all the rights and privileges thereto…but there is no way to predict how the public will react to what you release…

You can throw all the money you want a song, an album, a band and there is zero guarantee that it will be successful…yet people will always try because every once in a while, something remarkable happens…

An album is a critical success…it turns into a commercial smash…and every once in a long, long while, it turns into a cultural phenomenon with an impact that lasts years, maybe decades…

This is what happened to U2 and “The Joshua Tree”…before the record came out, everyone expected that the band was going to deliver the goods on a very good album…they did that…

But then the record went on to sell somewhere beyond 25 million albums and is now considered to be one of the most significant rock releases of all time…

This is beyond just lightning in a bottle...how did they do it?...for some of the answers, i turned to one of the people who co-produced the album…that would be Daniel Lanois…this is U2 and The Joshua Tree, thirty years later, part 2…

Whenever an artist goes into the studio, they hope for the best but expect the worst…you want it the album to sell and turn you into a global superstar with all the rights and privileges thereto…but there is no way to predict how the public will react to what you release…

You can throw all the money you want a song, an album, a band and there is zero guarantee that it will be successful…yet people will always try because every once in a while, something remarkable happens…

An album is a critical success…it turns into a commercial smash…and every once in a long, long while, it turns into a cultural phenomenon with an impact that lasts years, maybe decades…

This is what happened to U2 and “The Joshua Tree”…before the record came out, everyone expected that the band was going to deliver the goods on a very good album…they did that…

But then the record went on to sell somewhere beyond 25 million albums and is now considered to be one of the most significant rock releases of all time…

This is beyond just lightning in a bottle...how did they do it?...for some of the answers, i turned to one of the people who co-produced the album…that would be Daniel Lanois…this is U2 and The Joshua Tree, thirty years later, part 2…

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On March 9, 1987—a little more than ten years after a bunch of kids met up in a Dublin kitchen—U2 released their fifth album…expectations were running pretty high…after establishing themselves with their first two albums, there was a leap ahead with the “War” album in 1983…

But then came “The Unforgettable Fire” in 1984…that represented another leap forward…things seemed more sophisticated, stronger, bigger, better…much of the credit has to go to the new production team of Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois, guys who found new ways to bring new things from the band…

The partnership worked so well that everyone agreed that they should work together on the next record, too…maybe they could take things even further, built up the band even bigger…

The result was “The Joshua Tree”…it has sold somewhere north of 25 million copies, making one of best-selling albums of all time…it became a number one album in two dozen countries…five of the eleven songs were released as singles, several of which sold more than a million copies on their own…

The tour in support of the record had to grow from arenas to stadiums…it resulted in a live record called “Live From Paris” and a documentary film called “Rattle and Hum”…and it earned U2 two Grammys: album of the year and group of the year…

“The Joshua Tree” set the band up as one of the biggest in the world…and over the coming decade, they would become the biggest band in the world….the album has been studied at all levels of academia…its songs covered thousands of times…the material has even been adopted as hymns for modern church services…

And later, in 2014, the album was added to the us library of congress as a recording considered to be “culturally, historically and aesthetically significant” …

Wow…that’s a lot stuff to think about when it comes to just one single album…. doesn’t it make you curious about what went into making it?...that’s how I felt…so I thought I’d talk to one of the guys who was there with the band the whole time…let’s get his story on the making of “The Joshua Tree”….

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“Even though it was the middle of summer, it was cold and wet,” Rob Baker remembers, “and after a full day in the studio, there was nothing to do but go back to where we were staying and watch the Olympics that were happening in Barcelona…and they were still talking about Canada and what happened with Ben Johnson four years earlier.”

The Tragically Hip were in the UK, recording what would be their third full studio album at Battery Studios, a facility protected from the rest of the surrounding grimy north west London neighborhood of Willesden Green by a big metal gate…after recording the last two albums away from home—Up To Here was done in Memphis and Road Apples required to move to New Orleans—a trip to London had seemed like a good idea, a chance to get away from all the distractions back home in Kingston, Ontario.

It may have been dreary on the outside, but the building itself was full of history…Pink Floyd, Paul McCartney, Black Sabbath, Rod Stewart, The Cure, The Who and dozens more had all made classic albums here. 

And when The Hip wrapped up the sessions for the album that would be called “Fully Completely,” they had an idea that they had created something extraordinary.  But what they didn’t know is they were about to enter the imperial phase of their career, a time when almost everything went right….

The album would eventually sell a million copies in Canada alone…and here’s how it happened.

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How well do you get along with your siblings?—assuming you have any, of course…brothers and sisters can be a pain, especially when you’re always in close quarters…and when you have to work with them, too—gawd, that can be ugly…

We’ve talked about musical feuds before… Madonna did not get along with her brother, Christopher Ciccone, especially after he published a memoir about growing up with her…things seem to be okay right now…

The Everly brothers, Don and Phil, did not get along…after a speed-fueled breakup in 1973, the talked to each other just once in the following ten years…that was at their father’s funeral…

Ray and Dave Davies of The Kinks…that’s a bad one…John vs. Tom Fogerty of Credence Clearwater Revival…Barry and Robin Gibb of the Bee Gees…Chris and Rich Robinson of the Black Crowes…and then there was John and William reed of the Jesus and Mary Chain…they’d even fight onstage in the middle of a show…

And I know they weren’t really brothers, but joey and Johnny Ramone didn’t talk to each other for years after Johnny stole and then married joey’s girlfriend…

But the most famous sibling rivalry in all of music has to be—has to be—Noel and Liam Gallagher…this is part 2 of “Oasis at war” …

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Siblings can be a pain in the butt…just because you’re related to someone doesn’t mean you’re going to get along…not everyone can be Venus and Serena Williams…here: lemme give you some examples…

Ann Landers and Dear Abbey were real people—and they were sisters: Eppie and Pauline Lederer…despite having newspaper columns were famous for dishing out all sorts of relationship advice to readers, they didn’t apply that wisdom to themselves…they spent their lives antagonizing each other…

Adolf and Rudolf Dassler were good young Nazis who owned a show company…but Rudolf was a little more into national socialism than Adolf…after World War II, their company split in two…they became Adidas and Puma…

There are lot of family feuds in show business… Olivia de Havilland and Joan Fontaine had a legendary ugly relationship… Julia and Eric Roberts…

And there have been plenty of intense sibling rivalries in music…Ray and Dave Davies of The Kinks…that one has been going on forever…the weirdness that is the Jackson family…and it hasn’t always been chocolate and unicorns for the Followills in Kings of Leon…

But the champion brawlers have to be Liam and noel Gallagher…sure, these guys have always fought with each other—we all know that…but are you aware of the depth and scope of this war?...when it comes to dysfunctional brotherly relationships, it doesn’t get much more intense than this…

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There's been a lot of talk and the Christian Rock scene....especially in new rock. And many feel the bands don't get their due. They are looked at preachy do-gooders. But that's not always the case. And many bands are crossing over. 

So let's have a better look and clear up many misconceptions. 

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This is a course in Rock Snobery. To help you understand why some terms exist in music and what they actually mean. 

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This week we look at one of the most under appreciated and underrated members of any rock band...the bass player. 

These are the most influential bass players in the history of alt-rock.

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Beauty is in the eye of the beholder—or in the case of music, the ear…what’s pleasant to one person is nothing but noise to someone else…

This is where it’s good to have some patience…there are some forms of art whose beauty isn’t obvious at first…you need to stick with it…and after you’ve given it a chance and you’ve decided that it’s not for you, fine…

But what about those times where something happens—suddenly or slowly and either on your own or with the prompting of someone else—and you realize that the weird music you’re listening to is actually pretty good?...

This is the payoff…yeah, you really had to work for it—but it was worth it…with me so far?..

“beauty” doesn’t mean “perfect”—at least in the technical sense…sometimes imperfection makes something more beautiful…or at least more interesting…

Which brings me to the topic of singing voices…this is a very subjective area…how many times have you said “listen to that guy!... I can’t stand his voice!...how did he ever get a record deal?...i mean, listen to him!”

But then others hear the same thing and go “wow…that’s really different…really expressive…it’s full of character and emotion…what a bold move giving this dude a chance to real millions of people…i love this guy!”…

These are the kind of singers we’re about to review:  guys with some of the most unusual voices in the history of alt-rock…

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For a very long time—too long—women were locked in very defined roles when it came to rock’n’roll…girls were expected to look pretty and do little more than sing…okay, maybe shake a tambourine or something…but that was about it…

And when it came to singing, “just stick with conventional stuff, dear…don’t get any crazy ideas in your head…this is a woman’s role in rock and you should stick to it…that’s a nice little lady”…

But then along came punk rock in the 1970s…punk did many things for rock—including knocking down a lot of heretofore inviolable gender roles…the central tenet of punk was that anyone should have the right to say anything in any matter they want regardless of who they are…that included women and their right to self-expression…

The result was fantastic…freed from all the old expectations, women were free to reinvent themselves as musicians in a million different ways…and that led to a wonderful array of female performers…

Some of my favourites are the ones who decided to spit in the face of virtually ever rock’n’roll convention—women who (before punk came along and liberated everyone from the tyranny of “the way things ought to be”) developed styles that were different, unique and utterly unlike anything the world had ever heard before…

Yes, some of them were an acquired taste and took a little getting used to…but once people figured out what they were trying to do and what they were all about, it was inevitable they became addicted, enchanted, inspired…

 We’re going to look at ten of these women…i call them “The Queens of Quirk”…

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One of the most useful things about music is that it can be used to tell the world who you are…we’ve all done it…it is a symbol of our individuality and belief in personal freedom…it proclaims our identity to the world…

Once you start doing that, you inevitably find that there are people just like you…once you’re drawn together by a love of a common sort of music, you find that you have other shared interests…

You start hanging out, maybe at a specific place…maybe you begin to talk about other things, like politics, social issues, fashion…more people join in, some in the same physical space, others franchsing your ideas because they heard about it somewhere…

It’s comforting, this little club, this tribe…it sets you apart…maybe others want to join in, looking to fit in with something they admire and desire…that makes you feel kinda cool, right?...

And if the circumstances are just right, you and your new friends—the ones you see and the ones you never met—find yourselves part of a musical subculture…

This sort of thing has been happening for decades…and in the next hour, we’ll visit a few of the more interesting, long-lasting and intense musical subcultures in rock…

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There is absolutely no need for music—speaking in terms of evolution, anyway…

As far as scientists can tell, there’s no compelling reason for humans to make and enjoy music…neurologically, we could get along quite well without it…sure, our world would be very dull, but we’d be fine as a species…

Yet for some reason, the human brain seems to be hardwired for music…and it looks like even the non-human brain was constructed this way…archeologists found a flute made out of bone constructed by neanderthals that was almost 90,000 years old… why?...

Here are a couple of theories…music was invented because humans (or neanderthals) wanted to imitate birdsong…music was invented as part of some kind of religious ritual or ceremony…or music began as vocalizations on the way to developing spoken language….

Whatever…the origins of music are a mystery—and so is much of what goes on in our brains when it comes to these sounds…

Let’s explore…here are nine things about your brain and music…

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I think one of the greatest gifts humans have is a sense of curiosity…the ability to question things around to learn why things are the way they are pushes us forward…

Here are my three favourite questions that i think everyone should ask…are we alone in the universe?...who really killed JFK?...and what do dogs dream about when they twitch in their sleep?...

But there are plenty of questions we don’t ask that we probably should…let me give you a few examples…

• When a prisoner about to be executed by lethal injection, why does the doctor swab the iv site with alcohol first?...
• Why doesn’t Tarzan have a beard?...
• And how about this: what’s the size of a fart …

But you see what I mean…these are questions that probably should have answers?...if you must know, it ranges between the size of a bottle of nail polish and a soft drink can…you’re welcome

After discussing important stuff like this with some friends, I got to thinking: can we find the same sorts of unasked questions in the world of music?...turns out we can…this is stuff we should be curious about…and are there answers to these questions?...let’s find out…

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So you’ve decided to go all retro and dive into vinyl…no more digital for you…you are going back to the future…it’s all about analogue, baby…

Buh-bye, mp3s and digital downloads—except maybe for the songs you want to load on your phone…but that’s the one and only exception…other than the songs you want to play through your car’s entertainment system…that’s two exceptions and no more…unless we count the songs you want to send to friends…those three situations cover off everything—except for the digital tracks you’ll stream…

But other than those three—four!—specific needs, you’re going to give up music encoded into zeroes and ones…binary is dead…no more pathetic sampling rates resulting in harsh-sounding square waves…not counting all the cds you own, of course…those are digital files, aren’t they?...i mean, you aren’t going to throw them out, are you?...probably just rip them into my computer…

But beyond those five situations, you’re done with digital…mostly…except when you can’t avoid it…which will be 90% of the time…

Still, you want to experience what everyone has been telling you about vinyl—and not only the sound but the whole experience of buying, unwrapping and playing it…

If you’re of a certain age or technology persuasion, getting back into vinyl is like riding a bike…the first time you try it again, you might be a bit wobbly…but what if you’ve never ridden that bike?...

Gather ‘round, friends…let’s get you started…this is your Ongoing History beginner’s guide to vinyl…

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Sometimes, the pressures of life become a little too much and the methods of escape you choose to cope with them aren’t exactly the best ones…over-indulgence with and reliance upon drugs and/or alcohol is never, ever a good thing…and once you get so far down this road, you need help…

When you’re a musician, you have to deal with a whole new set of circumstances…long days, weird hours, bad food, poverty…or maybe you’ve struck it rich and you can’t handle the fame…

Or maybe you love the fame a little too much…you like living in your bubble of unreality where people are afraid to tell you “no” and are only too happy to let you indulge in whatever you want, no matter how crazy…

Sometimes people seek help on their own…sometimes they need a little, er, encouragement to get the help they need….what you’re about to hear are some rehab stories about artists who took their lives to the edge…some were able to step back….and some—well, you’ll see…

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On Saturday, August 20, 2016, tens of millions of Canadians watched and listened to the final Tragically Hip concert from Kingston…given Gord Downie’s illness, we knew that was the last time we’d see the band perform together live…

That was followed by one of the saddest days in the history of Canadian music…. October 17, 2017, the day Gord Downie died…one tweet summed up everything: “Canada closed: death in the family”…

So that was it, then…after more than 30 years, the most Canadian rock band of all time was done…all we had were the music and the memories…

But what if we were wrong about that?...what if, somewhere, there was a trove of unreleased material that no one knew existed?...and what if a strange confluence of events led to that cache of music—songs that no one (even the band) had heard for decades—being found and released?...and what if those long-lost songs were really, really good?...

To answer those questions: yes, there was a stash of unheard songs…yes, their rediscovery was the result of an accident…and yes, they are really, really good…

The result was essentially a brand new Tragically Hip album that brings fans back to the band’s glory years of the early 90s…it’s like a time machine…the hip are together playing great—and Gord is back…

The new record is called “Saskadelphia”…we’ll hear all these once-missing tragically hip songs: how they were made, what happened to them, and how they were finally found…

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It takes a special kind of band to obscure their appearance…but if you can do it right, then it moves from being a silly gimmick to an important piece of your identity, image, and brand.…

When Kiss came along in the early 70s with their Japanese kabuki-inspired makeup, it wasn’t that far out…they came from New York where there was a glitter scene that had a lot of guys wearing make-up…kiss just took it to an extreme: The Demon, Star Child, Spaceman, and Catman…

It worked--eventually…Kiss has sold 100 million albums…there was that period after 1983 when they wiped off the greasepaint and showed their faces to everyone, but that’s not what the fans wanted, and they eventually brought it all back…

A more contemporary example is Slipknot…their masks have been an essential part of their identity since the band started up in 1995…it started with the clown wearing a clown mask for the band’s first gig shortly before Halloween that year…the rest of the guys thought it was dumb at first, but then they all joined in…

Fans now keep close tabs on each member’s mask, parsing what each new iteration—and they can change or be updated almost yearly—might mean…

There are other mask-wearing bands: the residents with their eyeball heads…any number of dark metal bands from Scandinavia like Ghost and Lordi…Pussy Riot (largely to keep their identity hidden from the authorities)…then there’s Gwar, who have taken it to a completely different level entirely with their alien costumes…and deadmaus has had his big mouse head for years…there are tons of others, but you get the idea…

This brings me to Daft Punk…from 1993 until their breakup in February 2021, they acted like robots with elaborate helmets that completely obscured their identity…we knew they were French, and we knew their real names…but beyond that, they were a cool mystery that we played along with…

Now that they’re done, though, it’s time to dig through their history…what the hell was Daft Punk all about?...and why did they matter so much?...here is their requiem…

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What do you for fun?...hobbies, pastimes—things that you do just for you, away from your job and all your other responsibilities?...

I’ve got my dogs…my wife and I like to travel…and I’ve always had this thing about the JFK assassination…I’ve read all the books, seen all the documentaries…I’ve even been to Dallas and the grassy knoll, and the book depository…I can’t explain it, but I just find it interesting…

Maybe you’re into sports…collecting hockey cards or wine or rare scotches…video games, Japanese anime, beanie babies, souvenir spoons…no need to justify anything…it’s just something you enjoy doing…it fulfills you somehow…

Now consider this….when we think of our favourite musicians, we probably imagine them being immersed in music all the time…I mean, 24 hours a day, seven days a week…all they do is think about music and make music…

But the truth is, you can’t do that…no one can…everyone needs a break from whatever it is they do…you gotta rest the brain, recharge, and go on a search for new inspiration…put down the instruments and see what else is out there…become a more rounded person…that’s one aspect…

Another is, “look…you’ve had some success in your career…you’ve made some money…enjoy it…indulge in those things that you’ve always dreamed of…you can’t take it with you, so spend some of that cash”…

All right, so like what?...I think you may be surprised…let’s take a look at the hobbies and non-musical passions of some very famous musicians…

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Let me say from the outset that I have nothing against small towns…I grew up in one myself…population: 2000…it was in the middle of the Canadian prairies…the nearest big city was Winnipeg…after that, you had to go at least 500 miles before you hit any major population centre…

I also want to make sure to let you know that I think living in a small town is a not bad idea…it’s not…it can be a wonderful, low-stress, low-cost secure existence…a lot of the people I went to school with still live in my small town…

But there are those who want out, people who want to experience more of the world…they find their lot dull, a dead-end, too far from where the action is…but how to escape?...that’s the problem…

One way would be to just buy a bus ticket and hit the highway…you could join the armed forces…or maybe you could form a band, write song songs and become world famous…yeah, that’ll never happen…or could it?...

There’s this old saying that all you need to change the world—your world—is three chords and an attitude…and it doesn’t matter where you’re from…you can be from the smallest town the map—even a town too small to be on a map—but if you get in with the right bunch of people and manage to pull together some good songs, who knows what might happen?...

Here…let me give you some concrete examples…you don’t have to be from L.A. or London or some other big city…you can be from—wherever…these are some big, big bands who actually came from small, small towns…

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The original punk rock explosion of the 1970s was two things…first, it was a major reset for rock’n’roll…think of it as a great musical decluttering…

Punk of the 70s wasn’t revolutionary…it was reactionary…the music was stripped back, and everyone went back to the basics…very important…

Second, there was an attitude shift…one of the central tenets of punk was that if you had the guts to say something, then do it…and if no one wanted to help you, well, then do it on your own…

Taken together, these two principles resulted in what can be described as the big bang for what would later be called “alternative music”…punk set off chain reactions of new ideas, new sounds, new attitudes, new fashion, new belief systems, and generally new ways of doing things…

The gloves were off, rules were broken, concepts were explored, and unintended consequences happened…we now look back on this as the great post-punk explosion of the late 70s and early 80s, an era that created so many of the basic foundations of the music we hear today…

There was new wave, technopop and all its subsets…industrial music, goth, and a revival of ska…those are the major post-punk genres…but there was more…a lot more…

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Every once in a while, music enters a state of flux where the direction of everything is, shall we say, undefined…we see and hear change but we’re not quite sure what it all means just yet…something is coming—but what?...

All bets are off, the rulebook has been declared invalid, and everyone is off doing their own thing…

I’ll give you an example…in mid-to-late 1950s Britain, popular music was evolving and mutating very quickly…in the midst of imported American rock’n’roll records, the skiffle craze, and various flavours of folk music, some young people rejected contemporary sounds in favour of something known as “trad jazz”…

This was a revival of something close to Dixieland jazz from New Orleans, which emerged around the same time as world war 1…that meant music made with trumpets, the trombone, clarinet, the banjo, upright bass, and drums…the new acts mined the more pure, more authentic sounds of the past, hoping to be inspired again…

And for a while, it worked…trad jazz was a thing until sometime in the 60s…everyone from pop songs to nursery rhymes were fair game for trad jazz arrangements…

I’ll give you another example—and it’s tangentially related to British trad jazz…it also has its roots in Dixieland but took a detour through the Caribbean before appearing in central Britain at the end of the 1970s…

That was also a time when the direction of music seemed undefined…on the bright side, it also meant that nothing was off-limits or out of bounds…it was the post-punk era…popular music had been shaken up by punk so much that people were more willing than ever to find new paths…

This is part 6 of the post-punk explosion…it’s the time of Ska…

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On April 10, 1815, a volcano erupted in the central part of the Indonesian archipelago…Mount Tambora blew up, ejecting nearly 200 cubic kilometres of debris into the atmosphere…all that dust circled the earth, blocking out a significant amount of sunlight…

That blockage was so severe that the average temperature dropped almost a full degree…the result was that 1816 has gone down in history as “the year without a summer”…

There were food shortages and famines and outbreaks of disease…and not only was it cold, but huge storms battered much of Europe…

That summer, four artsy types were holed up at mansion called Villa Diodati near Geneva, Switzerland…to entertain themselves on through these dark, cold, wet, rainy days, these people drank, had sex, and took opium…and they tried to outdo each other by coming up with the best horror story…

One of them, John William polidori, came up with “The Vampyre” about undead bloodsuckers 80 years before Bram Stoker wrote “Dracula”…meanwhile, 22-year-old Mary Shelley, conjured up the idea of a mad scientist who created a new being by sewing together the parts of dead people…she called her story “Frankenstein”…

These two stories—imagined during the year without a summer, caused by the biggest volcanic eruption in 1300 years—created the foundation of gothic fiction, a type of horror that endures today…novels, movies, comic books, fashion styles, and yes, music…

In fact, the music part of this equation has blown up to the both where Goth music culture is one of the biggest musical subcultures the planet has ever seen…and that explosion happened in the wake of the original punk era of the 1970s…

This is the post-punk explosion part 5: Goth…

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Dancing is as old as the human race…not long after we started walking on two legs, we found a groove and have been moving to the music ever since…

Fast-forward several million years and we find that wherever there’s music, there’s dancing that goes along with it…okay, maybe they didn’t exactly bust a move to medieval hymns in the gothic cathedrals, but there had to be at least some swaying going on…

We can’t help but move to the music….scientists have documented connections between the aural cortex and the movement centres of our brain…the millisecond we hear music, the motor cortex lights up, indicating a relationship between music, emotion, and the need to move in time with the music…in other words, we seem to be pre-wired to dance…not dancing (or at least moving to music) is unnatural…

This caused some problems with some rock fans in the 1970s…dancing was seen as uncool, unless you were pogoing or slam-dancing to a punk band…and when disco came along—the most uncool music and scene of all—dancing was almost a crime…what were you, some disco weirdo?...

Fortunately, that moratorium on dancing did not last long…the music and music fans needed to evolve to another level…and when that happened, dancing became not just okay but it was cool once again…

This is a look at how that happened in the years immediately following the punk rock of the 1970s…it’s part four of the post-punk explosion—and it’s all about alt-dance…

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By the time we got to the mid-70s, rock had organized itself so that were rules…you did things this way and not that way…then came punk…

One of the great gifts of punk rock was a reminder that you didn’t always have to follow the rules…once this attitude took hold, things began to fragment, metamorphosize and mutate at an increasingly rapid rate…

The stratification and segmenting was astonishing…once punk began to cool, the environment it created coalesced into what became known as new wave, an approach that redefined what rock could sound like…

Then new wave itself began to fragment, thanks to technology…the new cheaper, portable, and more powerful synthesizer was a godsend…you really didn’t have to know much about music to operate one…you just fiddled around until you found some cool sounds and then organized those sounds into a song…

Like the original punks, attitude and a willingness to put your music out there was more important than musical ability—except this time, you did it with this new technology…synths instead of guitars…this was the foundation of what came to be known as techno-pop, which blew up at the end of the 70s…

And it didn’t take long for techno-pop to separate into different strands which appealed to different people…some burned out quickly…new variants emerged for a while and then disappeared…and then there were the mutations that turned into something robust and enduring to the point where they still exist today…

This episode is about one such strand that survived the post-punk explosion of the late 70s and early 80s…we call it “industrial music”…and word of warning: this show is going to be very intense, very loud, and very heavy…

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For the longest time, the sounds of rock were made with voice, guitars, bass, drums, and keyboards like piano and organ…there were plenty of ways to manipulate the sounds of those instruments: effects pedals, studio tricks, happy accidents that happened when you least expected them…

And for a couple of decades, this was plenty to work with…we discovered all sorts of techniques to create sounds that no one had ever heard before…

But when engineers started messing with electricity in new ways, it became possible for musicians to create sounds that not only we’d never heard before but never imagined hearing…this resulted in an explosion of new, amazing music that was based mostly (if not entirely) on electronic sounds…

Experimentation started in the 60s…these sounds worked their way into prog-rock in the 70s…and at the very end of that decade, the technology had become cheap enough for young musicians in the last months of the original punk rock scene to adopt these music-making machines as their own…

I’m talking about synthesizers, of course…and as bands in sharp suits and skinny ties released spikey new wave pop songs, another group went all-in with synths…and in the post-punk era—which is to say the late 70s and early 80s—we had the era of era of techno-pop…here’s how that happened…

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If you’ve been around enough, you may remember those special times when you know  that you’re in a middle of music history being made…

You might be old enough to remember the early 90s…so much new and cool music—led by grunge but supported by all manner of alternative music—came out in ’91, ’92, ’93, ’94, and ’95 that you just knew you were in the midst of a very special time…

It felt that not a day went by without there being a new song, a new artist, a new sound, and a new scene worth checking out…it was the alternative revolution—and it was awesome… and so much of it seemed directed at and just perfect just for you…

But that was hardly the first time something like this happened…those who were teenagers in the middle 50s knew they were part of something special during the birth of rock’n’roll…

The history of the 1960s was largely written in the music of that decade…starting with the Beatles in 1964, every day seemed to bring something new, exciting, and groundbreaking…

If you were tied in with punk in the 70s, there was a sense among you and your friends that it was a really special time for music…

But what i want to talk about is the era that came immediately after punk…punk changed the way people looked at music, breaking down artistic, social, and demographic barriers…basically, a new generation of musicians ripped it rock and started again…that’s punk in a nutshell…

But that attitude didn’t end with the original punk rock explosion…instead, we saw an unstoppable chain reaction with resulted in sounds and styles and scenes that could not have been possible without punk…

These sounds weren’t punk, but you could tell by listening that something like punk had to have happened for this music to exist…

We now call this the post-punk era…and this period of time—roughly from 1978 through to the middle 80s—created the foundations for the alternative revolution in the 90s and beyond…

This is the post-punk explosion part 1…and we begin with this thing called “new wave”…

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Nerd…noun…a foolish or contemptible person who lacks social skills or is boringly studious…definition 2: a single-minded expert in a particular technical field...example: a computer nerd…

It’s an old word, too…the, er, nerds at google have a thing called “the ngram viewer” which scans the text of books going back to 1500…in other words, pretty much right back to the inventing of the printing press…

According to these nerds, “nerd” (the word) shows up for the first time in an book called “a true discourse of the assault committed upon the most noble Prince, Prince William of Orange, County of Nassau, Marquesse De La Ver & C,” by John Jarequi Spaniarde: with the true copies of the writings, examinations, and letters for sundry offenders in that vile and diuelifh (i have no idea what that word is) attempt”…

I can’t tell you what “nerd” referred to in that book because it’s written in old Spanish and i couldn’t be bothered to find a translation…I’d need a real etymological nerd for that…

The word fell into disuse after about 1725 returning into the popular lexicon thanks to Dr. Suess in 1950…to him, a “nerd” was some kind of creature found in a zoo…

But the following year, Newsweek magazine reported that “nerd” was being used in Detroit to describe an awkward sort of dude who wasn’t very cool…it kind of lingered in the slang world for the rest of the 50s and into the 60s before it really took off in 1974 with the TV series “Happy Days”…Fonzie was always calling Richie and Potsie “nerds” for being uncool dorks…so props to Henry Winkler…

By the end of the 70s—and coinciding with the rise of the culture around the personal computer, consumer technology and “Star Wars” and other science fiction pursuits—the use of “nerd” became even more widespread…remember the “Revenge of the Nerds” movies in the 80s?...

But now in our technological society, being called a nerd is a compliment…people aspire to be like Bill Gates and Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg…look at shows like “The Big Bang Theory” and “Silicon Valley”…we’re actually celebrating nerddom…people want to be nerds ‘cause—well, it’s kinda cool…the geeks have truly inherited the earth…

This brings me to music…nerdishness is now so widespread that nerds even have their own genre of music…and as you might guess, it falls squarely in the world of alternative music…

This, then, is a short history of what we unreservedly, unashamedly and unironically call “nerd rock”…

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Fifty years ago, there was no such thing as a Canadian music industry…well, at least not compared to the U.S. or the UK…we had bands that played gigs and recorded singles and albums…but there wasn’t much of an infrastructure to support a domestic scene…

Too few recording studios…a lack of experienced promoters, managers, and producers…there was a tiny collection of domestic record labels…and there was a steady drain of talent to the united states…if you wanted to make it really big, you had to leave the country…that’s kind of discouraging, right?

And Canadian radio stations weren’t helping…there was a perception that audiences did not want to hear much of this domestic music because, well, it wasn’t very good…it was inferior to all the music coming from America and England…this contributed to the overall opinion with the general public that Canadian music just wasn’t worth anyone’s time…

At the same time, though, it didn’t seem right that our musical culture and our music scenes (such as they were) be overwhelmed by foreign powers…Canadian artists were getting smothered in the crib…something needed to be done…and five decades ago, something was done, beginning on January 18, 1971…

It was difficult, expensive, and, in some quarters, wildly unpopular…but it turned Canada into a global musical powerhouse…this is fifty years of CanCon…

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Here is a truth that some people find very uncomfortable: rock, alt-rock and indie rock are predominantly white…why is that?...the answers—and there is more than one—are complicated…there has actually been a quite a lot of study on this question…

Perhaps it’s because non-white people don’t choose this music as part of the way they project their identity to the world…culturally, they just don’t identify with these forms of music, so they naturally gravitate somewhere else…

Others ask how this is different from someone choosing the music of their culture and ethnicity over that of another?...if you’re Italian, for example, the chances are you will have a greater affinity to Italian music than you would, say, gamelan music of bali…

Here’s another truth: any form of music tends to reflect the shared sentiments of a particular community…. compare indie attitudes with hip hop…an indie band wouldn’t think of singing about drinking Cristal in the back of a Maybach while discussing the size of the diamonds in their new grillz…. neither would a hip hop artist rhapsodically describe their new pickup...neither would a rock band, for that matter…

Each form of music has its own aesthetics…if they don’t mean anything to you on a cultural or emotional or personal level, then you’re not going to be into that music…

Others don’t buy into this, seeing the non-whiteness of rock as a status quo barrier to people of colour who would like to participate but feel excluded, an outsider, unwelcome…they also see countless microaggressions, covert expressions of racism and continued cultural appropriation…

We’re not going to solve any of these issues on this program…but I would like to acknowledge the contribution people of colour have made to the evolution of alt-rock…alt-rock is pretty white, yes—but not always…

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When you listen to music through a streaming music service, how aware are you of what you’re listening to?...sure, you can look at the screen, but what does that tell you?...the name of the artist, the name of the song, maybe the name of the album…how much time has elapsed, how much is left in the song…

But say you’re intrigued by what you’re hearing, and you want to know more…that means you’ve got to search the internet…Wikipedia is usually surprisingly accurate when it comes to learning more about a song or an album…who produced it, the engineer, the name of the studio, the supporting players, and so worth…

I mean, it does the job, but it feels kinda lacking…a bit antiseptic…

And then if you want lyrics, you have to search other sites…and again, these sites do a decent job, but…*sigh*…

Okay, I’ll just say it…I miss liner notes…I miss being able to sort through all the printing in a cd booklet or on a vinyl record…there’s something mysteriously cool about learning something about the artist or the music by finding something buried in the liner notes…

Writing and compiling this text used to be a big deal…people were paid good money and even won awards for writing liner notes…the industry has specialists for this sort of thing…

But as we get deeper and deeper into the digital era, liner notes are disappearing along with the concept of B-sides and bonus tracks, and album artwork…it’s all part of the evolution of music culture…

This is final part a series marking these changes…this is digital debris 3: liner notes

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A little while ago, I carved out some time to finally file some records and CD’s…I’d been procrastinating, but I finally summoned up the discipline to get it done…and honestly, it was a task that should have taken all of fifteen minutes…

But it ended up taking longer than that because I kept stopping to examine the artwork and the liner notes of almost each and every compact disc and vinyl album…

I’d forgotten how much I was into looking at my music collection…what was the artist trying to get across with the artwork on the front?...on the back?...on the inside?...

Unless you’re still buying physical product, this is an experience that has been largely expunged from music culture…yes, there are digital liner notes and digital artwork and maybe you’re curious enough to check out the fields in the metadata after a right click on the file…but it’s just not the same…

If you’re of a more recent generation, there’s a chance that you’ve never bothered with artwork and liner notes because you’ve always lived a digital life—and you have no idea what I’m going on about…but if you’re into vinyl and CD’s, you’ll understand how much things have changed…

Yes, we must roll with the times, but the disappearance of old-school album artwork and liner notes has somehow diminished the music experience, just like how we’ve moved away from things like actual B-sides and bonus tracks…let me show you what I mean…this is digital debris part 2…

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We are very, very deep into the digital world when it comes to music…virtually every song we could ever want is available to us instantly no matter where we are…all we need is an internet connection and we’re good to go…

The music industry loves this…in the old days, they had no choice but to manufacture, warehouse, transport, and distribute physical product by the ton, sometimes across vast distances…once these CD’s and records and tapes made it into the stores, then the labels had to collect the money from the stores plus deal with the return of unsold product…it was all very complicated and expensive…

Now with streaming, there’s no physical product…all the expensive overhead and those big fixed costs are gone…digital distribution is so much more efficient and profitable on every single level…

And for music fans, this way of obtaining and consuming music is not just convenient, but intoxicating… Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, Soundcloud, Bandcamp…tens and tens of millions of songs… for older people, this still feels like science fiction…

And there are also generations who have never, ever set foot inside a record store…they’ve never, ever handled something like a record or a cd or a cassette…for them, music has always delivered without any kinds of container…it’s completely ephemeral, unseen zeroes and ones that beam from somewhere…

While there will always probably be a market for music on physical formats, it’s going to shrink and shrink until it’s just a very niche-y thing…so be it…there’s no stopping progress…

But we are losing something…there are certainly pleasures and advantages to CD’s and vinyl…it appears, though, that many of these pleasures and advantages are also heading towards near-extinction…

I call this “Digital Debris”…here…let me show you what I mean…

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Okay…let’s go over this one more time…there are just twelve notes in the western scale…the ways they can be combined to form pleasing sounds are finite in number…it’s a big number, but it’s still finite…

If we look at chords—which are combinations of three or more single notes played simultaneously—the number is smaller still…and there are only so many ways in which chords may be played in a sequence that makes any sense to the ear and the soul…

For example, there are dozens and dozens of hit songs with the same four chords at their root…e, b, c#, and a, played in that order…

If I haven’t lost you to music theory yet, all these songs are constructed on those chords… “With or Without You” from U2, Green Day’s “When I Come Around” and “Bullet With Butterfly Wings” from the Smashing Pumpkins, and The Offspring’s “Self-Esteem”…plus “Don’t Stop Believin'’” by Journey, “Barbie Girl” by Aqua, and John Denver, “Take Me Home Country Roads”…

In fact, there’s a whole Wikipedia page dedicated to what’s know as the “i-v-vi-iv progression”…it can be played in different keys (for example, “bullet with butterfly wings” is in b-flat while “self-esteem” is in c-major) and the chords can be ordered differently, but the common dna is there…this is just how our scale works and how songs are constructed…

Now listen to me: this is not a sign that any of these artists lack in creativity… no one is breaking any rules…and no one is ripping off anyone because no one can have exclusive ownership over a chord progression…

However, there is a subset of people—lawyers, mostly—who believe that they should be able to sue artists for plagiarism if there’s any perceived similarity between two songs…the original composer needs to be compensated for this alleged theft…even the threat of a lawsuit and jury trial might be enough to scare up some settlement money…

This is insane…and the situation has been getting worse and worse…I think it’s time we deconstructed what’s happening with these crazy lawsuits that threaten to cripple all of music…

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One of the byproducts of doing a show like this for as long as I’ve been doing it is that it’s really hard to shut off your brain…

I’m always thinking about topic ideas, ways to link facts and trivia together, reading lots of books, talking to lots of people, and otherwise trying to come up with a constant stream of things we can talk about…

The result of all this researching and thinking and writing are some ideas and perspectives on music, music history, how music is made, how it’s consumed and distributed, and how seemingly small things have led to big changes…that’s one thing…

Another is the opinions formed by observing the opinions of others…why do people like some things and hate others?...and another is a list of ideas that aren’t quite fully formed…it seems like I’ve almost grasped a concept but it doesn’t feel right yet—but I feel that there’s a germ of truth in there somewhere…

I’ve also learned that when you’re not sure about something, source the crowd…you might like the answers, but it’s better than living in your own head…

So lemme bounce a few of these things off you and you can tell me if I’m onto something or if I’m off-base—or if I’ve completely lost the plot…

I call this episode “theories, thoughts, and half-baked ideas”…

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