Ongoing History of New Music

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The 2020 Xmas Show Dec 23, 2020

Show notes

This the 23rd annual ongoing Christmas show…and yeah, I know that 2020 has been a challenging year, but let’s look at some of the good things that happened…

Many of us learned to bake bread…drive-in theatres made a comeback for both movies and concerts…sweatpants are now accepted work attire… “Tiger King” was fun, wasn’t it?...and—uh…well, i’m sure there were many other nice things about 2020…

Oh!..oh!...less pollution because of less traffic…dog shelters were emptied out because so many people were adopting…we got out for more walks…oh—here’s a good one: Africa was declared free of polio in 2020…that’s definitely brilliant…

2021 will be a transition year…vaccines have to be administered, COVID cases will come down, and by this time next year, we’ll in a much better place…optimism is the best cure for anxiety…

So with that...let's dive into some our annual not-so-traditional Christmas show.

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60 Facts in 30 Minutes: 2020 Edition Dec 16, 2020

Show notes

Okay…let’s start the annual office cleanup…this is the time of year when I go through all the scraps of paper, all the scribbles on various notepads and all the post-it notes hanging everywhere…then there are the computer and phone notes that contain even more information…

The goal is to determine if anything I’ve written down or squirreled away somewhere is of any use for this program…

See, when you do a program like this, you always need to be on the lookout of interesting stuff…arcane knowledge…bits of trivia…oddities and strange connections…it’s a practically a 24/7 thing because you never, ever know when you’re going to run across something mind-blowingly fascinating…

The problem is that many of the cool things I discover don’t fit in with anything that I’m doing or writing about…but it seems a shame to discard or otherwise ignore any of this research because it’s still fascinating stuff…

So I spend the year collecting all this orphan material for this specific program every December…essentially, it’s a big data dump of music-related information…I just put it out there and let you do with it what you may…

Got that?...prepare yourself…this is the annual look at 60 mind-blowing things about music in 30 minutes…

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The Story of Stereo: Part 2 Dec 09, 2020

Show notes

We are always pouring sound into our heads, whether we’re using some kinds of speakers or wearing headphones…

I’m going to make a guess here, but I’m going to assume that most people demand a certain level of audio quality to what they’re listening to…you don’t want distortion and you’re hoping for a certain level of sonic realism…

You want to be able to close your eyes and feel the music around you…you want to be immersed in it…these sensations, as important as they are to our enjoyment of music, are now taken for granted…

But the technological journey to that led to us enjoying music this way took decades…and along the way, there were many twists and turns, false starts and dead ends, promising leads and utter failures…

This is the story of stereo, part 2

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Introducing: Whatever Happened To...? Dec 04, 2020

Show notes

You’ve heard the stories. You’ve felt for the people involved. But what happens after the cameras shut off and the reporters walk away? Just because a story disappears from the news doesn’t mean it’s gone. So whatever happened to the nuclear disaster at Fukushima? or the trapped Chilean Miners? And did anything actually come out of the Ice Bucket Challenge?

Join Global News reporter, Erica Vella on this unique history podcast as she takes you inside these stories and talks to the people at the heart of each one to find out exactly what’s happened since.

Listen now at https://link.chtbl.com/wht

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The Story of Stereo: Part 1 Dec 02, 2020

Show notes

Our ears are amazing things…evolution has created an ability that allows us to tell the direction of a sound…left and right, up and down, front and back…we can tell how close something might be, whether it’s stationary or moving, and if it’s coming towards us or going away…in other words, we hear sound in 3-d…very helpful for humans on the plains of Africa who had to be worried about being eaten by a lion…

This directionality also makes listen to music so enjoyable…the very same things that prevented us from being eaten allow us to appreciate music, whether it be live or recorded…

With a live performance, we’re in the same space as the musicians, so our ears and eyes work together when it comes to how we interpret what’s going on in front of us…we’re able to pick out all kinds of individual details…that includes the bad stuff like unwanted echo and reverb…and we’re always at the mercy of whoever is controlling and the mixing the audio for a gig…

But let’s focus recorded music…how do you create that illusion of sitting in front of a performer?...and I’m talking about the ability to close your eyes and visualize where everyone is onstage?...the singer out front…the guitarist slightly to your right…the keyboardist is slightly to your left…you can tell that the drummer is further back than everyone else, but parts of the kit are slightly spread out…and the bass player is in there somewhere, but doesn’t overwhelm the rest of the instruments…

For the last 60-plus years, technology has relied on a set of principles and techniques that allow recorded music to sound exponentially better that 99% of live performances—at least in terms of audio quality…listening to music this way is a totally immersive experience…

We call it “stereo”…and this is how this part of our musical lives came to be…it’s The Story of Stereo, Part 1

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Even More Rock Conspiracies Nov 25, 2020

Show notes

The universe is a weird, random place that has little regard for what us puny humans think…this is something we find very, very hard to accept…we’re always looking for explanations for the weird, random, and sometimes evil things that befall us…

Occam’s razor—the idea that the simplest explanation is usually the correct one—doesn’t cut it for some people…they believe that there are nefarious things afoot…

For example, I know someone who is all-in when it comes to this QAnon rubbish…quick explanation: a government insider believes that Donald Trump is leading a secret global fight against a cabal of Satan-worshipping politicians and celebrities and journalists who are engaged in everything from child sex trafficking to cannibalism…

Everything about qanon is bat-guano crazy and nothing to do with reality…yet there are people who believe that people Barack Obama, George Soros, and Tom Hanks will soon be arrested and jailed for their hideous crimes…

This is more nutty than even the most out-there “JFK-was-assassinated” or “9/11 was an inside government job” theories…or the idea that the moon landing was faked…or that Sandy Hook was a false flag event…or that Bill Gates is big on vaccinations because he wants to inject miniature tracking chips into all of us…

What else is out there?...chemtrails…the truth about the Denver airport…the UFO cover-up…the evils of fluoridation…flat-earthers, weather control machines, the illuminati, freemasonry…

Okay, what about music?...are there any conspiracies that have taken root?...the answer is “yes…plenty”…and here’s another look down that rat hole of insanity…

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Hidden Figures Nov 18, 2020

Show notes

I’ve always been something of a nut when it comes to the space program…but even though I’ve read all the books, seen all the documentaries, and watched all the movies, I was still surprised to learn something new with the movie “Hidden Figures”…

This was a 2016 film based on a book of the same name…it told the true story about black female mathematicians who worked at nasa during the hottest period of the space race…

They were “computers” in the original sense of the word: people who computer things complex things like flight trajectories, re-entry methods, and landing coordinates…they were even assigned to check and correct the calculations spit out by NASA’s big ibm mainframes…their work was essential to the American space effort…

But this being the 60s, these women were segregated away from the other scientists, meaning that their work was largely forgotten until the movie and book came out…

This got me thinking…are there any forgotten figures in music?...I’m talking about women who did awesome and important things but have largely been ignored by the traditional history of rock?...I’m talking about people beyond Deborah Harry, Janis Joplin, Stevie Nicks, Chrissie Hynde, and Courtney Love…

Well, yes…yes, there was…and we need to know about them…let’s do that now…

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The Return of ACDC - Power Up Premiere Nov 16, 2020

Show notes

2020 has been a miserable year…the pandemic…economic ruin…the crazy U.S. election, which featured an impeached President…Kobe Bryant’s helicopter crash…the death of George Floyd…murder hornets arrived in North America…swarms of locusts descended on Africa…

There were so many hurricanes that they ran out of names…the Olympics were postponed...out-of-control wildfires in both North America and Australia…

And we lost more musicians…Neil Peart…Eddie Van Halen…Spencer Davis and dozens of others…

Yeah, it’s been rough…what we need is something to remind us of the before times, the better times, the times when we could count on certain things always being there…

A time when we could just turn it up, rock out and forget all the bad stuff…

That something has arrived…an event that shows us that things can turn around; even when it looked hopeless…it’s the return of AC/DC

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Great Alt-Rock One-Hit Wonders of the 90s: Part 2 Nov 11, 2020

Show notes

Creating art is hard…if it wasn’t, everyone would do it—and everyone would be successful at doing it…even those who can create art—the people with the right stuff—have a finite supply of good stuff within them…

Take Margaret Mitchell, for example…she wrote exactly one novel…but that novel was “Gone With The Wind”…Pulitzer Prize, a classic movie with multiple Academy Awards, 30 million copies sold, endless adaptations…it even got her face on a stamp…in short, “Gone With The Wind,” first published in 1937, was and still is, a cultural phenomenon…

But that’s all she ever did…ol’ marge hit it out of the park on the first pitch and that was it…one novel…she is perhaps the greatest literary one-hit-wonder of all time…

Maybe that’s all she had in the tank…or maybe she looked at all the success she got from just that one novel and said “right…my work is done her…anything else I do will just be a letdown…I’m stopping while I’m way ahead”…totally understand that…

Other artists, though, keep trying after that one hit…but for whatever reason, the magical pixie dust that they managed to harness that one time disappears forever…

Man, to get a taste of standing on the mountaintop only to be denied it ever again…but—and let’s be clear about this—at least they made it to the top of that mountain, even if it was just once…and if they’re lucky, that one trip can sustain them for the rest of their careers—the rest of their lives…

This is another program featuring those who got to the top just one…its great alt-rock one-hit wonders of the 90s, part 2….

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Introducing... 13 Hours: Inside the Nova Scotia Massacre Nov 09, 2020

Show notes

The deadliest shooting spree in Canada’s modern history left us with far more questions than answers. Join Sarah Ritchie, a reporter for Global News in Halifax, as she tries to unravel how something like this could happen there.

Sarah will take you through every hour, as it unfolded and together you’ll try and piece together what happened, what could or should’ve been done to prevent it and what we can learn to make sure a tragedy of this magnitude never happens again.

13 Hours: Inside the Nova Scotia Massacre: Listen NOW! https://link.chtbl.com/13hours

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