Ongoing History of New Music

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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