Ongoing History Of New Music

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

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

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 gu

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

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. Support: patreon.com/canadaehx Donate: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/craigU Donate: canadaehx.com (Click Donate) E-mail: craig@canadaehx.com Twitter: twitter.com/craigbaird Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@cdnhistoryehx YouTube: youtube.com/c/canadianhistoryehx Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

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

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 heal

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

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

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,

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

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

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

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

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 bei

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

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