Ongoing History of New Music

Latest Episodes:

The Sum 41 Story As Told By Deryck Whibley: Part 1 Oct 30, 2019

Show notes

If you’ve ever seen Sum 41 perform live, they seem larger than life…big…loud…brash…in your face…very punk rock…and out front is Deryck Whibley…he’s like a man possessed….it all makes for a great show…

But in person, Deryck is life-sized…he moves carefully and takes care to sit up straight because of a chronically bad back…the tea he likes to drink can make him almost appear delicate…

But when it comes to conversation about Sum 41 their career, he’s super-engaged…as the only permanent member in the history of Sum 41, he is the band…so when I wanted to talk about where this group came from and how things have evolved over a quarter century, he’s really the only guy I needed to talk to…and man, we talked…

This is the Sum 41 story according to front man Deryck Whibley, part 1…

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

Solo Noel Gallagher Oct 23, 2019

Show notes

It all came to an end on august 28, 2009, with a plum thrown against the wall…after eighteen years, the most volatile band in the world came to an end…

Noel Gallagher and Liam Gallagher had always fought, but never like this time backstage five minutes before a show in Paris…words were exchange, the plum was thrown, violence was threatened, and a guitar was destroyed....

Two hours later, Noel issued a statement: "it's with some sadness and great relief to tell you that I quit Oasis tonight. People will write and say what they like, but I simply could not go on working with Liam a day longer."

Noel had left Oasis before…but this time he meant it…and since then, he’s kept his word…no amount of money or demands from fans or passive-aggressive pleading from Liam will changed his mind…

Instead, Noel has gone his own way, both professionally and personally…and the impression I get is that he’s never been happier, more relaxed, or more confident with the way his life is going…

Let’s get caught up with solo Noel by having a chat with the man himself….

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

Riot Grrrls - A Primer Oct 16, 2019

Show notes

There is no question that the vast majority of rock history involves dudes…it’s been a very male thing…not always, but most of the time…

There was a time when it was “common knowledge” that girls just couldn’t rock…they didn’t have the feel…they were built wrong…it just wasn’t in their DNA like it was with guys…

That’s crap, of course…but it took a long, long time for those prejudices to be defeated—dead and buried…

The original punk rock of the mid-70s was a great help, thanks to the movement’s dogma that anyone with anything to say should be able to say it, regardless of musical ability, social class, race, or sex…lots of women were able to get on board with that…

But there was some backsliding in the 80s…for example, hardcore punk was among the most testosterone-drive bro-rock ever…women were pushed to the back…and when grunge came along in the early 90s, it was again very dude-heavy…

Even though parts of the grunge world were down with feminist causes and ideals—Kurt Cobain and the guys in Pearl Jam pretty woke and sympathetic, the scene as still very much a boy’s club…very male…

This time, though, a group of women were determined to carve out their own space…music that would be about them and for them…music that would speak to issues that they cared about…and music that could rock just as hard and be just as abrasive as what the guys were doing…sometimes even more so…a lot more…

They became known as “riot grrrls”…and this is their story…

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

A Guide to Genres: Part 2 Oct 09, 2019

Show notes

I’m trying to imagine what it might be like to design an Amazon warehouse…a typical fulfillment centre is at least a million square feet filled with a zillion kilometres of shelving…

And given that amazon is all about speed—the company is always trying to cut down the time between the time you click “checkout” and when the package shows up at your door—they’re always looking for the most efficient ways to find whatever you ordered on those shelves and stuff it into a box…

The logistics of this is mind-boggling…not only do you have to categorize millions of items but you have to group them in such a way that things that are in the demand the most don’t create choke points for the robots that grab the stuff off the shelves…

Music is a lot like an Amazon warehouse, except in some cases, it’s worse…not only do we have to categorize everything to a very granular detail, but we also have to make it possible for us to fortuitously stumble over something you might like…

This is when we get into the whole idea of genres…at last count, Spotify has organized things into 2,424 different genres…there’s also website called “every noise at once” that lists about 2,000…

This is both terrifying and fascinating…and it deserves study…this is a guide to genres, part 2…

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

A Guide to Genres: Part 1 Oct 02, 2019

Show notes

Humans have always tried to make sense the world by putting things into neat little piles and filing them away somehow for further reference…it just makes things easier…

If you study biology, you’ll know about kingdoms, phylum’s, classes, orders, families, geneses, and species…libraries organize books with things like the Dewey decimal system and the universal decimal classification….and when you go grocery shopping, there are signs directing you to the right aisle or department…

This applies to music, too…we like to organize music into categories called “genres”…

This used to be fairly easy…at the turn of the 20th century, we basically had popular songs of the day (vaudeville, show tunes and the like), folk and traditional music, religious music, and material from classical composers…

Music has always separated and stratified and evolved, leading to sub-categories…within classical music, for example, we had baroque, chamber music, choral, and so on….

But as the population changed and as the recorded music industry began to take hold and more people began to buy records, music this fragmentation began to speed up…

Jazz showed up in the 1910s and soon splintered into a bunch of different sounds…by the 1920s, we were hearing the origins of what eventually became all the flavours of country and western music…the blues records of the 20s and 30s was the forerunner of rhythm and blues…

And then when rock’n’roll came along in the 50s, things started simply enough—it was a vaguely defined sound that you knew when you heard it…but the more time went by, the more complicated rock became…genres, sub-genres, sub-sub-genres, sub-sub-sub genres…derivations, offshoots, spin-offs, outgrowths, branches, by-products…

And now that we’re all about streaming algorithms—things that require many, many different data points if they’re going to work properly, the number of genres has exploded…people are confused…

That’s why we’re going to do this: strip back all the terms used to describe rock in order to understand the natural order of things when it comes to organizing things…this is the ongoing history guide to genres…

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

Ultra-Deep Background on Dave Grohl: Part 3 Sep 25, 2019

Show notes

Whenever you’re having a bad day, I want to think of this number…the probability of you existing—that you’re this sentient being, alive in this vast universe—is exceedingly small…in fact, it’s about zero…

Your mom and dad have to meet…they have to stay together long enough to have kids…then that egg and that sperm have to connect, and so on…

A guy by the name of Dr. Ali Binazir has calculated the odds of you being you…by that number is 1 followed by 2,685,000 zeroes…

By way of analogy, here’s how he describes it…

Imagine there was one life preserver thrown somewhere in some ocean and there is exactly one turtle in all of these oceans, swimming underwater somewhere.

The probability that you came about and exist today is the same as that turtle sticking its head out of the water — in the middle of that life preserver. On one try.

Mind-boggling, right?...now let’s get even weirder…add in the chances of you getting into a band that becomes successful…and not just successful, but a group that becomes world-changing…add another six zeroes to that last number…

Now consider this: what if you got into a second successful band that stays together for decades and also becomes one of the biggest things rock has ever seen…that’s good for, what, three more zeroes?...

So in this completely unscientific extrapolation of Dr. Binazir’s estimation of the uniqueness of existence, the chances of Dave Grohl being Dave Grohl is approximately one in two quadrillion, 685 trillion…give or take…

This is the third and final part of our ultra-deep look at the guy…

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

Ultra-Deep Background on Dave Grohl: Part 2 Sep 18, 2019

Show notes

When you reach a certain level of fame, you can expect that everything you do will be recorded somewhere…it’s out of your control…fans will do it…your management team will do it…your social media people will make sure that it gets done…probably someone at your label…and they’ll just keep doing it…

Your life becomes one ever-expanding Wikipedia page…not that this is a bad thing…it’s just something certain famous people have to live with…

This brings me to Dave Grohl…he is one of the best-documented guys in music…everything he’s ever does and continues to do is written down somewhere…

There’s the Foo Fighters, of course…we know a lot about the Dave and the Foos…there was his time in Nirvana before that…a little bit has been written about them…

Then there are the side projects, the guest appearances…the documentary work…the soundtracks…. we’ve even been introduced to his mom, who wrote a book about raising rock stars…

Seriously…with all this attention, what else is left to tell?...well, you might be surprised…this is part two of a program I call “ultra-deep background on Dave Grohl”…

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

Ultra-Deep Background on Dave Grohl: Part 1 Sep 11, 2019

Show notes

A couple of years back, i was invited to 606 studios, which is the headquarters of all things Foo…it’s the house of foo…

This is where the Foo Fighters rehearse and record…it’s where they have band meetings…and it’s where they store a lot of their stuff…i had all five guys to myself for an interview…and there was no other way to describe them as a bunch of others…

Taylor Hawkins took the lead on this…and the whole time Taylor was talking, Dave Grohl was sitting there with a big smile on his face…he knows he’s among the luckiest humans alive…sure, he’s talented and ambitious, but so many things completely beyond his control had to go right for things to turn out the way they have…it’s really amazing…

Dave’s career has been extremely well documented—but there might still be a number of things that you don’t know about him—especially from the early, early, early years…let’s dig into that, shall we?

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

History of Shoegaze Sep 04, 2019

Show notes

Every once in a while, a form of music comes along that makes it its mission to break with the traditions of rock n roll.

Okay...well maybe the instrumentation is largely the same...but it's the way they are used.

And it's usually done by people who don't know there are rules when it comes to rock and people just want to get together and play.

And this happened in the late 80's when we were first introduced to the idea of Shoegaze. The result was a wall of sound with atmospheres and harmonics. And It was truly unique.

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

The History of Vinyl: Part 2 Aug 26, 2019

Show notes

As we looked at in part 1, Vinyl is making a comeback.

But how did this happen? Will it last? And what lies ahead for the future of one of the oldest forms of recorded music?
This is the History of Vinyl...Part 2

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

Our TOPPODCAST Picks

Follow Us

Stay Connected

Ongoing History of New Music

Related Podcasts

Links

Stay Connected