Ongoing History of New Music

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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