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All right…I hope you’re ready because a lot of information—some of it important, some of it useless—is about to come your way in a rapid-fire way.
Again, this is material collected over the last 12 months while I was looking for “ongoing history” ideas…some of this info doesn’t fit with the mandate of the program…some of it is orphaned from programs that never quite took shape…and some of these items were just too weird to gloss over, so I made a note…what you do with what you’re about to hear is up to you.
Let us begin with 60 mind-blowing facts about music...the 2024 edition.
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The way I see it, there are three types of bands that stretch across a spectrum…first, there’s the extreme sort, a group that will do almost anything to attract attention…you’re probably thinking of some names right now.
Next to them are the traditional sort, and they comprise the vast majority of bands out there…these are groups that go out there, do their thing earnestly and honestly, and hope that this will be enough for music lovers…they occupy a huge part of this spectrum.
And then we have the third type: the quirky, eccentric, and weird…these groups come in all sorts of flavours, from mildly bent to the gloriously stupid and the confoundingly weird…these bands go a long way into making music fun and unpredictable.
Not all land with audiences—they’re too strange, not enough people get the joke, or maybe they’re just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
But there can be a balance between being quirky and fun and having songs that have widespread appeal…they have just enough of the nerd factor to set themselves apart while not being so nerdy that they’ll turn too many people off.
This is really hard to do…it takes songwriting skills, careful management of your image, and plenty of creativity and imagination, especially if you want to main things over more than just a couple of albums and touring cycles.
Among the very, very, very best of this class of band is Weezer…they’ve perfected a formula that includes musical talent, wit, self-deprecation, left-of-centre thinking, a desire to have fun, a willingness to experiment, some clever marketing, and above all, to let their fans in on everything…it’s an approach that has worked very, very well for decades.
This is part two of “Rivers Cuomo and Weezer: alt-rock’s nerd heroes”.
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If Rivers Cuomo of Weezer were to walk past you on the street, you probably wouldn’t notice him…if you did, you might think that this stranger kinda looked like Louis Tully, the nebbish accountant played by Rick Moranis in a couple of “Ghostbusters” movie.
Chances are he’d be wearing skinny jeans, a t-shirt, a hoody, maybe a baseball cap, indistinguishable from a hundred other short, slight, guys with glasses that you encountered that day…and that’s just the way he likes it.
But Rivers Cuomo is an unlikely sort of rock star and is extremely committed to being a rock star—or at least doing the things that he hopes will keep him at that level.
He’s highly educated, deeply introspective, very private, and always looking to learn something new, be studying the mysteries of writing the perfect song to computer programming to intense forms of meditation to careful study of the music industry… and one day, he wants to make a weezer movie—not a tour film, but some kind of actual movie.
Weezer has been together for more than 30 years…there have been no break-ups and reunions…there haven’t even been any official hiatuses.
But Rivers has also taken up pickleball with a vengeance…he’s a very good chess player, too…he’s fascinated with Japanese culture.
What else?...PETA once voted him “the sexiest celebrity vegetarian,” although he confesses to hating carrots…he doesn’t have a middle name because his parents wanted him to choose one when he got old enough—but he never got around to it.
Fox filmed a pilot for a tv show based on the years rivers went to harvard…and he once had a pet squirrel named “Mr. Peanutbutter.
That’s just a start…think we can fill up an entire program with fascinating facts about Rivers Cuomo and Weezer …I bet we can.
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We’re about to get all dreamy and floaty and all blissed out by taking a look at another specific genre…a post-punk genre called “dream pop”…it’s a thing unto itself but it’s also related to other genres where atmosphere, sonic textures, and (in some cases) sheer volume reign supreme…and from its origins in the early 80s, dream pop has had a profound effect on music that is felt even today.
It touches on and overlaps with other alt-rock subgenres including shoegaze and anything resembling modern psychedelic material…it has a volume continuum that ranges from barely-there softness to somewhere beyond a jet engine…but at the same time, it never loses touch with melody.
So, complicated stuff—and i haven’t even mentioned vocal styles, guitar effects, production methods, and all the other goodness that goes into making something dreamy—or in extreme cases, nightmarish.
Here…let me show you.
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This is an episode all about bust-ups and break-ups, those times when tensions within a band get so high that things get weird and violent and—well, let’s just say “regrettable”.
Some of these incidents resulted in nothing more than an airing of the grievances…steam was let off, people calmed down, and it was back to business as usual…other times, though, the damage of was irreparable and it marked the end of the group forever—or at least something close to it…
You want stories?... You want drama?... You want weird…stand by…i got the stories ---and they are not pretty.
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We’ve all sat listening to music and though to ourselves “what does this song mean?...what’s the singer (or the band) trying to say?”.
Sometimes it’s nothing…it’s just a bunch of words strung together in a way that sounds fun…other times, lyrics to a song may be just some kind of stream of consciousness thing that somehow made sense to the singer or the lyricist at the time…or maybe it didn’t…lots of songs are written in altered states.
A song could be an oblique and opaque form of poetry that’s supposed to resolve itself in the brains of each individual listener…there have been many times when I’ve asked a singer “what does this song mean?”… and their answer is “well, what does it mean to you?...whatever you say is the right answer”.
Okay, i get it…it’s art…art is supposed to be open to personal interpretation…when you hear something beautiful or provocative or inspiring, who cares what the initial intent was—if there even was one…all that matters is that the song somehow hits you on some kind of emotional level that’s difficult or impossible to quantify or describe.
Then again, some songs have a very specific point…they tell a story…or they’re inspired by something that happened in real life and the composer is trying to capture what he or she felt and saw.
And then there are the stories of the creation of the songs themselves…something happened for that song to be born…what was it?...and what were the circumstances, the serendipity, the accidents, the crazy coincidences that needed to manifest for a great song to come to life?.
Let’s explore that…this is another episode of stories behind songs.
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This is an episode about murder…call this a crossover episode with my true crime podcast, “Uncharted: Crime and Mayhem in the Music Industry”.
For as long as rock music has existed, people have been blaming it for turning impressionable people to the dark side, inspiring them (if not outright encouraging them) to do evil things.
My opinion is that an unstable mentally ill person is liable to be triggered by anything…and yes, sometimes that trigger might be a song…there are, however, not that many documented cases of this happening. I call this episode “murder ballads (and other deadly songs)”…and what you’re about to hear is not pretty.
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When Nadine Bailey was 7 years old she woke up terrified of dark figures looming at the end of her bed and an eerie presence all around her. From then on every night was the same, she was visited by phantom-like shadows and no matter where she went, the ghostly encounters followed her. Ever since that moment, hauntings, spirits and the unexplained have consumed her entire life and for the past 20 years she's been an award-winning guide with Edmonton Ghost Tours Along the way she has taken people into the shadows, uncovering the macabre tales that linger in the darkness and inside some of the most haunted houses, hospitals, prisons, and more. On Haunted Canada, Nadine journeys through terrifying and bone chilling stories of the unexplained. Join her if you dare.
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Anyone with a passing knowledge of rock is aware of its origins back in the late 40s and early 50s when blues, rhythm and blues, western, country, folk, and hillbilly traditions began to mix and match, eventually coalescing into what became known as “rock’n’roll”.
If you’re an alt-rock fan, you’ve heard the story of how all this began with the garage bands of the late 60s and the punk rock explosion of the mid-70s.
The birth of modern electronic music?... It has a rich and complicated origin story that stretches back to the 40s before the technology was cheap enough for young musicians to give it a go in the 70s.
Ska and reggae?... Understanding those sounds and their enduring appeal requires a deep dive into Jamaican culture and politics.
Once we get to the 80s, things really begin to separate, segment, and stratify…goth, industrial, punk-funk, hardcore, dream pop, all the various flavours of metal…the last time I checked into Spotify’s classification system, the platform had sorted music into more than 2500 different genres—and that number keeps growing.
This program has looked at many of these origin stories…and it’s time that we did another one.
If you have ever enjoyed a pint in a traditional pub, you’re going to love this…it’s the history of Celtic rock.
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If you’re a musical artist and you start to do well, the point will come when you need a manager.
The manager is the person who looks after all the business stuff so the musician can get on with the business of making music…managers deal with booking gigs, marketing, promotions, promoters, publicity, support staff and road crews.
They collect the money and pay the bills…and the oversee all the infrastructure of your career: lawyers, accountants, and all the other people involved in running the business that is you and your music.
But it doesn’t stop there…managers can also function as advisors, sounding boards, fixers, father and mother figures, referees, bail bondsmen, bouncers, psychologists, and even amateur physicians and pharmacists—for good or for not-so-good reasons.
They need to be on top of trends, have all the right connections, understand audiences, be able to navigate record companies, and translate contracts…it can be a 24/7 job.
Bottom line is that a manager can make or break a career…they are incentivized by their commission, which is usually somewhere around 15%...the more you make as an artist, the more they make…if they’re good at their job, your career grows and the money roles in.
These are the stories of nine managers who have had an impact—mostly good, but also, you know, not-so-great.
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For some people, history is dry and boring…it’s all dates and wars and dusty facts about things that don’t have anything to do with life today…and yes, that can be true…but history also helps us understand why things are the way they are…study the past, understand the present, and maybe predict the future—at least to some extent.
But history can also be stupid…and when it is, it can be fun to learn about these things…and in addition to all the dates and wars and famous people, i think we need to stupid history’s stupid bits…i’m calling this instalment “stupid history: the music version”.
These are some of the dumbest stories from music history that i believe should be taught alongside the serious stuff…i think it adds colour and understanding—and it shows that history’s heroes are as dumb and weird as everyone else.
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By the time this episode is over, you will learn things about your fellow music fans (and music in general) that you can use to astound your friends…and when they say “go on, that’s not true,” you can simply point them to the research.
Some are the result of serious, empyreal scientific work at universities and labs…other were conducted by professional pollsters and survey-takers…and then there’s the category of survey where a piece of research is really just a masquerade for an advertisement.
Everything you’re about to hear that is the result of a legitimate study—or at least something pretending to be.
I call this episode..."Survey Says: Useful and Odd Music Surveys and Polls".
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After years and years or rumour and speculation, we now have an Oasis reunion.
The brother Gallagher have agreed to reunite…and possibly burry the hatchet. This for a series of shows next summer in the UK, Ireland, Canada, the USA, Mexico, and beyond.
A lot of this coincides nicely with the anniversaries of their first two albums….1994’s Definitely Maybe, and What’s the Story Morning Glory from 1995.
We really don’t know how we arrived here with a reunion, I mean…this is Noel and Liam after all…but anyway, it's here...it's happening.
So we thought why not go back into the podcast vault and re-release a two part series we call “Oasis at War”.
It’s a look at one of the most intense sibling rivalries in music…and boy…there is a lot to go through.
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We don’t like to think about our favourite musicians as being mortal…because let’s face it, we believe that they do extraordinary things and make us feel in ways we otherwise wouldn’t.
Rock stars are special, superhuman, because they can do what we can’t and live a lifestyle that we can only dream about.
Yet they are just as human as you and, fallible to temptations, in danger of accidents, and vulnerable to all the failings that may plague the body and brain.
When one of our favourites die, it’s like a little bit of us goes with them…in most cases, we’ve never met these people…we might have never seen them in the flesh…but because what they do speaks to us in only the way music can, it hurts when they’re gone.
And in a weird way, it’s instructive to look at how they died…these deaths can be cautionary tales that we as fans can learn from—you know, “hey, i’m not gonna let that happen to me!”.
Their deaths may provide retroactive insight into the music they made—where in their hearts it came from—so we understand them better as both artists and humans…when they’re gone, we may appreciate their music even more…you don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone, right.
This is another installment of “the last moments of”.
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After years and years or rumour and speculation, we now have an Oasis reunion.
The brother Gallagher have agreed to reunite…and possibly burry the hatchet. This for a series of shows next summer in the UK, Ireland and beyond.
A lot of this coincides nicely with the anniversaries of their first two albums….1994’s Definitely Maybe, and What’s the Story Morning Glory from 1995.
We really don’t know how we arrived here with a reunion, I mean…this is Noel and Liam after all…but anyway, it's here...it's happening.
So we thought why not go back into the podcast vault and re-release a two part series we call “Oasis at War”.
It’s a look at one of the most intense sibling rivalries in music…and boy…there is a lot to go through.
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It may not seem like it, but everything in this universe is connected in all kinds of unseen ways.
Humans have always known that chaos is a capricious and fickle thing, something that can show up when you least expect it…i find this aspect of history fascinating.
There’s the butterfly effect, the concept that a butterfly flapping its wings in China will set off a complex domino effect in the atmosphere that somehow results in a low-pressure wave blasting from Africa across the Atlantic causing a hurricane in the Caribbean.
That doesn’t really happen…it was a metaphor created by a meteorologist and mathematician named Edward Norton Lorenz in 1963 when he discovered that a miniscule change in atmospheric conditions ---he ascribed a value as tiny as 0.000127—could make an enormous difference down the road …this shows why it’s so hard to forecast the weather…a little difference can add complexity and instability to a system.
Remember that “treehouse of horror” episode from “The Simpsons” where homer accidentally turns a toaster into a time machine? ...he travels into the past where he manages to screw up the future multiple times by making the tiniest mistake.
This is based on a 1952 short story by Ray Bradbury entitled “A Sound of Thunder” …a man named Eckels goes back in time and kills a dinosaur…when it returns to the present, everything is different.
We hear about “black swan” events, a random thing that no one expects or could have predicted, yet it happens…and suddenly, everything changes.
Covid-19 was an example of that…whatever spawned the virus—bats, infected animals in a wet market, a lab leak—started as something very, very small but ended up changing the lives of virtually everyone on the planet.
We can also apply this sort of investigation to the world of music…if you pick a topic or thing, you can often trace it back to something that illustrates the wonderful and awful randomness of the universe.
This is another episode that I call “connections”.
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Tell me if this sounds familiar…you’re sitting around with a bunch of friends talking about music when someone says “what’s that song with the thing at the beginning and the boom-boom sound effects?....it’s got that guitar—or maybe it it’s not… you know the one!”…and then the friend gets frustrated when he gets a bunch of blank stares.
If you’ve ever worked in a record store, you know the stare because you’ve done it with the customer who wants you to identify the artist, song, and album from her little acapella performance…and then she gets mad when you come up blank.
Same thing happens with me and with all people who work in radio….a couple of times a week, I’ll get an email like this: “i’m hoping you can help me find a song”…uh-oh…“I think it’s from the 80s but maybe not…there are some beats on a bassline with a melody that goes “oooooooeeeooo” or something…the video has a bunch of dancers in it…do you the song?”…uh, no…i don’t.
Some attach audio files of them plunking out notes on an instrument—and there have been at least a couple of people whistling.
But here’s the weird thing…sometimes—just enough times—you actually get it right…it’s like a tiny explosion in your head as your personal database throws up the correct answer…when that happens, it feels so good!...you solved a mystery and made someone happy in the process…i love that feeling.
Things have changed in this century, of course…tracking down a mysterious song is easier than ever thanks to listening apps like Shazam and Soundhound…or you can enter some lyrics into a site like lyricfind.com.
Even throwing a bunch of random words into the google search bar can get you started…I’ve found crowdsourcing a song identification problem through certain websites (reddit, for example) can sometimes be helpful.
But even with all this technology and the ability to tap into the minds of music fans around the planet, some songs just don’t want to the identified…and this has become a serious game for music fans… “challenge accepted,” as they say.
These mysterious songs that are missing from the musical record are part of a category that’s been dubbed “Lostwave”…and this is their story.
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There’s a scene in the 2000 movie “High Fidelity” that introduced a lot of people to the name Belle and Sebastian.
Rob, the owner of a record store, and his employee, Dick, are enjoying a new arrival.
Then Barry, another employee played by Jack Black, bursts through the door.
This goes on for a while before Rob has enough and rips the cassette out of the machine.
I have a couple of issues with that scene…first, I have a hard time believing that an obnoxious snobby indie record store clerk would love “Walking on Sunshine” by Katrina and the Waves that much…way too commercial, way too overplayed.
Second, there is nothing wrong with Belle and Sebastian—although I will admit they’re not for everyone.
They are part of a genre called “Twee Pop”…you may never have heard the term before, but its influence is everywhere these days…and it has a long history when it comes to alt-rock and indie rock…it’s certainly something we should take a look at…so let’s do that, shall we?
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I do not dance…I’m too awkward and too self-aware of my awkwardness…I know we’re all supposed to dance like no one is looking, but when it comes to me, people will look, point, and judge…
My wife realizes this…since we were married decades okay, she’s had to be content with the fact that she got that dance at the wedding and that’s pretty much it…and that’s because she’s not into dancing, either…
I can feel the judgment stop it…
This doesn’t mean that music doesn’t move me…I’ve got that involuntary need to move when the music is great…and I don’t mean tapping a toe or nodding my head, although that’s where it starts…
Put it this way: I’ve done my time in the pit…I’ve been elbowed, kneed, kicked, head-butted, burn with cigarettes and joints, and doused with water (at least I hope it was water)…no problem because that’s all part of the pit experience…the only thing I haven’t done is stage dove or crowd-surfed…I’m not sure why…
But here’s a question: why is there a pit in the first place?...who came up with this idea?...how did it spread?...and is it the same everywhere?...
These are important anthropological questions…we’re deal with a type of human behavior that’s seen all over the world…I think we need to study this…here a whole hour on the history of moshing…
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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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