Ongoing History of New Music

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Michael Hutchence: 25 Years Later Nov 23, 2022

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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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Musicians Battling Disease Part 2 Nov 16, 2022

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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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Musicians Battling Disease Part 1 Nov 09, 2022

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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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Driven By Her: Women of the 21st Century Nov 03, 2022

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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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The History of Distortion and Feedback Nov 02, 2022

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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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Rock Explainer 2 Oct 26, 2022

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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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Rock's Greatest Disasters Oct 19, 2022

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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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Hidden Tracks and Other Sundry Oct 12, 2022

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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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Driven By Her: Guitar Heroes Oct 06, 2022

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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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The Roots of the 90s CanRock Explosion Oct 05, 2022

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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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