Ongoing History of New Music

Maybe this isn't a topic you thought about in New Rock, but it's time for us to take a look at New Rock Hair. Seriously... We've dug back into the archives and found this one from 2006 where we have a dive into the hairstyles of New Rock. Dreadlocks, Mullet's, Punk, Bowie...and of course Robert Smith among others. This is a good one! Trust us...   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Let’s make a list of all the things we did not have on January 1, 2000…ready?...iTunes, iPods, iPhones…YouTube, Facebook, Twitter…Snapchat, Spotify, smartphones… There was no Netflix (at least as we know it now)…no MySpace…no Instagram Well, what didwe have?...dial-up modems…Windows 98 (if you were lucky) or Windows 95 (if you weren’t)…Apple?...still mostly a corporate basket case…even Google was less than 18 months old… If we look at music, we were mad for compact discs…they were selling by the hundreds of millions, ensuring that the music industry was drowning in money… Vinyl?....dead, dead, dead…the only thing that was keeping that format on life support were club djs who still preferred the feel and action of records over CDs in the booth… We had MP3s and we’d begun to trade music files online, but that was still a clunky and frustrating experience for most people—unless you’d discovered this new thing called “Napster” that had been out for about six months… Now fast-forward ten years to December 31, 2009…everyone was getting smartphones…global CD sales had dropped from a high of 26 billion U.S. dollars in 2000 to around 9 billion in 2009 with no end in sight…the number would get much smaller yet… Meanwhile, vinyl was starting to come back…everyone was using digital music files…streaming music services were starting to catch on…and Apple and Google and Facebook were among the most powerful companies in the world… The recorded music industry was in complete disarray, bleeding money, laying people off, dropping artists, and still trying to litigate their way back to their former glory… The first decade of the 21stcentury was an era of massive technological disruption…how did our music adapt?...let’s examine that…this is the oughts, part 5…   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Crime Beat” is a new investigative podcast series hosted by Crime Reporter Nancy Hixt. She's been covering cases for over the past 20 years and knows her hometown by the crime scenes she's been to. Journey deep inside some of Canada’s most high-profile criminal cases. Each bi-weekly episode will take you inside the story to give you details you didn't hear on the news.   Here’s a sneak peek from episode 2 of the series…. and while you’re listening, search and subscribe to “Crime Beat” for free at Curiouscast.ca or wherever you’re enjoying this podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Music is always evolving, mutating, and modifying itself…enough people may agree on a certain direction for a new sound to become a new sub-genre…and in time, sub-sub-genres may spring from that offshoot, multiplying things even more… Think about it…in the 50s, you had rock, pop, country, and R&B…most everything that was released back then could be classified under one of those four headings…today, Spotify has organized things into nearly 2,000 different categories… There’s music with names like “dark psytrance” to something called “stomp and flutter”…you might be into “vapor soul” or “fussball,” “gymcore” or “catstep,” “footwork” or “sleaz33e rock”…seriously….these are all actual Spotify genre classifications…. Now let’s circle back to alt-rock in the early 2000s…after a decade of things staying fairly close to a certain set of specs, it began to mutate again…yes, guitars were still important, but not essential…and there were certain shifts in attitude and outlook, created by world-shaking global events—because as we’ve learned, the sound of an era’s music is always just a little downstream from what’s happening in society at large… Let’s deconstruct this concept a little further…this is alt-rock in the oughts, part four. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

They've been around since the early 80's and still recording and touring. It's really incredible considering how self-destructive Depeche Mode has been over that time.  Really....it is amazing what has happened to them over the years. And that includes the time Dave Gahan was essentially dead. Well we had a request recently wondering "If we've ever done a profile of Depeche Mode". And while we have done a number of things over the years, the is perhaps our most interesting show on the band. So from mid 2006, this is a trip back to...at the time...25 Random Facts About Depeche Mode. Enjoy! (the non-silence) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In times of crisis, we start to look for a leader, someone who can get us out of trouble…this is a trope of every comic book universe movie and half all the action-adventure stuff… But it’s true…when things are bad, we first look to people with experience, with knowledge, with strength to lead us away from whatever is wrong… There was a lot of this sort of talk among rock fans at the end of the 90s…pop, electronica, and hip-hop had taken over…rock itself had fallen into the doldrums and every fan was hoping, praying that someone or something would come along and inject new life into the genre… And as hopeless as some people felt at the time, sometimes you just gotta be patient…a couple of things inevitably happen when it seems that rock is on the ropes… First, a new generation of young people decide to take matters into their own hands and kick-start things themselves…we saw this with the indie rock revolution that started taking hold in the very late 90s and then exploded for the next decade… Second, trends and cycles in music and demographics inevitably start to work in favour of the music you like…for the previous 50 years, when rock was on the descent, pop was on the ascent—and vice versa…in the early 2000s, it was time for that polar shift in the public’s tastes… And third, sometimes the old guard needs a little time to catch their breath, to take the lay of the land, and to figure out what their next moves should be…and if they do it right, their careers move into a new phase, a new act… This exactly is what happened in the first half of the first decade of the 21stcentury…and the results were amazing…this is the history of the oughts, part 3: the return of rock… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

At the end of the 90s, rock music was deep in the doldrums…fans were genuinely worried for its future…and it did look bleak, especially in contrast to how exciting things had been earlier in the decade… But in ’98 and ’99, rock was under assault on three sides…pop music was king and the whole world had gone crazy for those sounds…then there was rap and hip-hop, which kept getting more popular and stronger every month…and then there was electronica, which was siphoning away rock fans to go dance in a warehouse somewhere… Like I said, it was dire…and lots of rock fans were despondent…it was around then, when rock music was deep in the doldrums, that I wrote a newspaper op-ed…it was a pep talk of sorts…it was called “Britney Spears, the end is nigh”… Basically, I said “there are cycles in music that go back to the 1950s…they describe a fight between rock and pop…when one is at its height, the other is at its low in terms of popularity…yes, pop is hot right now, but rock will come back…and of you look at the history of these cycles, rock should be ready for a big comeback in about two years”…   Turns out I was right…and the artists to lead the comeback were a bunch of young unknowns with fresh ideas…   This is part two of our look at the music of the oughts…I call this episode “the indie revolution”… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How long should we wait before we write the history of a decade?...we can write things down as they happen, but that’s only the first draft…time has to pass before we can wrap our heads around exactly what happened, what it all meant, and the lasting effects of those ten years… Something that may have appeared to be insignificant at the time turned out to be a really big deal…it was only after many years passed and the ripples from that thing or that event played out do we realize “holy crap!...that was history!”… When it comes to the history of music, it’s often convenient to break things down into decades because that seems to be the natural order of things…music is a great barometer of the life and times of a decade because it’s so intertwined with society: politics, economics, demographics—everything to do with culture…understand the music of a decade and you’ll have a better understanding of what happened during that time… The 50s marked the birth of rock’n’roll…the 60s brought us The Beatles, the rise of the album, and the mega rock festival…in the 70s, we got punk, metal, disco, and rap…the 80s?...techno-pop, hair metal, and the era of classic rock…the 90s were all about grunge, the Lollpalooza generation, Britpop… That takes us to the end of the 20thcentury…and as transformative and disruptive as the 90s were—the Internet, cell phones, sampling—that was only a warm-up for the next ten years…by the time it was over, everything had changed… This is a history that first decade of the 21stcentury, which we’re going to call “the oughts”…this is part 1… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There are people who still believe that the resurrection of vinyl is a fad, a passing trend, something of which people will tire and we’ll all move on… This, frankly, is insanity…total insanity… Vinyl LP sales have been going up by double digits year-over-year since 2008…and that’s just new releases…these figures don’t include the sales of used records in record shops, at record sales, or online through eBay or sites like discogs.com… The numbers also don’t include vinyl sold at the merch table at gigs…and it doesn’t include the millions of younger people who have been raiding their parents’ collections… People are deep into vinyl and are embracing (or re-embracing) the format more and more with every passing week…why?...maybe it’s a reaction to the digital age…people want something physical, tangible, something they can hold in their hands… Maybe it’s the idea that vinyl is inconvenient when compared to digital formats…listen to a vinyl record requires physical presence and care…or maybe it’s the warm, real sound of the audio… Whatever…I’m always getting email from people who want to know more about vinyl as people want to have a closer relationship with their music collections…okay…you asked for it…here’s more about vinyl that you ever need to know… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When you’re in a band and things begin to take off, life starts to move pretty fast…days start to blur as you move from gig to the studio, from the studio to the van, and back from gig to gig… Unless you have someone document what’s happening, you run the risk of forgetting a lot of what you go through—both the good stuff and the bad… One way to combat that is through talk therapy—or at least my version of it…this involves getting the entire band together at the same time and getting them to talk about their experiences…once everyone starts to reminisce, the memories start to come back… That’s what I was hoping for with Arkells when all five guys gathered for a long talk…this is part two of “Arkells: in their own words”… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices