Ongoing History of New Music

To fans of any kind of rock, may 18, 1999, seemed like the end of the world...the Backstreet Boys released their new cd called Millennium...on that first day, it sold more than 500,000 copies...by the end of the week, it had sold 1,134,000, a new all-time sales record...And those are just the u.s. Numbers...add in the rest of the world and the total was much higher...And it was only going to get twice as bad...just 308 days later, ‘N sync–another blood boy band–set an even scarier record...by the end of its first week in the stores, their No Strings Attached sold 2.4 million copies...And just 56 days after that, Britney Spears sold half a million copies of Oops!...I Did It Again on day one and 1,319,193 in its first seven days....When the dust cleared at the end of 2000, it was clear that vacuous pop music had taken over the universe...these CDs weren’t just selling by the tens of millions....they were selling by the hundreds of millions...In second place was rap and hip-hop, thanks to people like Eminem, Nelly and Dr. Dre...the biggest selling rock records of the year were from Sreed, Santana and a Beatles r compilation that featured songs that were more than 35 years old...The prognosis wasn’t good...if rock–all rock–wasn’t dead, it was at least very, very ill...and unless somebody did something, it looked like it was all over...This is chapter 14 of the complete history of alt-rock... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you were around in the early 90s, you probably remember it as a time of awesome new music...it seemed that every single day, there was a cool new band, a great new sound, a scene you didn’t know about...Grunge was king with nirvana and Soundgarden and pearl jam...green day and offspring had brought punk back...Manchester led into Britpop with Oasis and the Stone RosesNine Inch Nails, Ministry, Chili Peppers, Beastie Boys, Tool, Stone Temple Pilots, Smashing Pumpkins, all these bands and more grabbed everyone’s attention...hair metal was dead!....classic rock?  Over!....Lollapalooza was the coolest event of the year...The alternative nation had triumphed!....no more bad, boring, mainstream pop and rock!...Well, hang on...rock music has always run in a series of cycles that can be traced back to the 1950s...we’ll get into that later, but all I need to say is “what goes up must come down”...and the alt-rock party came down...hard...and it hurt...This is chapter 13 of the complete history of alt-rock... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It is almost impossible for anyone from a lightweight boy band to transition to serious, respected artist…it can be done—we can look at Justin Timberlake and, um…well, we can look at Justin Timberlake….And as tough as that is, it’s even more difficult to move from being pigeonholed as a novelty act to one that carries gravitas and serious artistic merit…yet that’s what the beastie boys managed to do…No one took them seriously for the first eight years of their career…they were spoiled, snotty frat boys writing goofy songs and making funny videos… “Licensed to Ill” was a parody of hip hop…a good one, but a still a parody…let’s not forget that “Rolling Stone” described the album as “three idiots make a masterpiece”…But then something changed…The Beastie Boys grew up…they grew as artists…they grew as businessmen…they grew as humans…They took risks…they experimented…they branched out…they sought to make a difference—not just in music but in the world…and by the time it all came to an end with the death of Adam Yauch in the spring of 2012, The Beastie Boys had cemented a reputation as one the most important bands of not one but at least two generations…This is remembering The Beastie Boys, part 2. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The British music scene has always operated at warp speed...songs and bands and sounds have always come and gone very quickly, even before the age of the internet...This is what happens when you have a lot of people crammed onto an island linked together by a huge and obsequious national broadcasting network and goaded by a hyper-competitive music press...But every once in a while–maybe once a decade–something sticks...a movement takes root, grows organically and then suddenly explodes to the point where everyone is talking about it...it even goes international with its songs and sounds and fashion and politics..In the 60s, it was the British invasion, led by the Beatles and the Stones...in the 70s, it was the British spin on punk rock with the Pistols and the Clash...the 80s began with all those telegenic British bands on MTV which set off the music video revolution...and in the 90s–well, that’s where it gets a bit complicated...Not complicated in a bad way...i mean in an interesting way...it was an explosion of pride in British-ness that we hadn’t really seen since February 7, 1964, when Pan Am flight 101 from London landed at JFK airport in New York carrying a band called the Beatles...This is chapter 12 of the complete history of alt-rock–and it’s all about the thing they called “Britpop”... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For an entire generation of music fans—two generations, really—The Beastie Boys were always there…and now that they’re no longer with us, there are a lot of people who feel like there’s a void in music…But we’ll always remember their contributions…and there were a lot…this is part one of “Remembering The Beastie Boys”… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

One of the great indirect heroes of modern rock’n’roll was born on March 21, 1865...his name was brigadier general George Owen Squier....he was an Army officer with a PhD in electrical science and a thing for music....he invented a technology to designed to compete with a new thing called “radio”....Wireless radio, he figured, was useless...it was prone to static and fade-outs and just didn’t sound very good...his idea was to run wires into homes and businesses, just like we have with cable TV today or as they were beginning to do with telephones back then...he called the concept “wired radio”....Just before he died in 1934, he came up with a new name for his invention.....playing with the words “music” and “Kodak,” he came up with “Muzak”...The whole thing with “wired radio” didn’t take off with consumers, but businesses were into it...closed circuit music, specifically tailored to their environment, 24 hours a day without interruption or static?...that’s brilliant....and shopping malls and elevators haven’t been the same since....Muzak became the world’s biggest supplier of elevator music...So where am I going with this...great question...By the 70s, Muzak corporation was earning more than $400 million a year by distributing this type of music all over the world from its headquarters in Seattle.....it was used for crowd control, a management tool and something to fill the empty silence of a department store or dentist’s office...And for a time, the Muzak executives thought this was a good unofficial slogan: “boring work is made less boring by boring music”....you bored yet?...Fifty-two years after the George Squire died, a new type of music started coming from the back room of Muzak headquarters in Seattle......but it wasn’t exactly elevator music....The music came from the shipping room where a Muzak employee named Bruce Pavitt spent his coffee breaks running a new independent record label devoted to the local music scene.....in fact, Muzak’s payroll supported at least half a dozen local musicians......and while no one could have possibly known what where this was going to lead, the decidedly non-muzak music these people were into would eventually change the world of rock’n’roll forever.....This is the complete history of alt-rock, chapter 11... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We're digging back into the original Ongoing History vault and have found this requested show on lost albums.Sometimes an artist will work on, and almost finish an album. But for whatever reason...creative concerns, fear it is too "out there", misplaced master tapes...the album never sees the light of day.Why is that? How many times has it happened in alt-rock? And to who?Well...we're glad you asked. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Once upon a time, all music was made mechanically...something had to be hit with a hand or a stick...or strummed or plucked...or air had to be forced over a reed or through a valve...Then along came electricity...it took a while, but electricity was tamed so that it could not only power new forms of musical instruments, but the energy itself could be made musical...By the beginning of the 1980s, the people of planet earth were most pleased at what they had accomplished...but in the background, some people knew that there was still more work to be done....They began asking “what if anything could be made into music?”...others still mused “what if we could take existing music, chop it up and reassemble it into something brand new?”...Some used the old ways, chopping up these sounds mechanically using proven machinery like turntables and tape machines...but others learned to use new inventions called “computers” and “samplers”...And so it came to pass that all through the 80s, people began to experiment with electricity and the new machines...and by the time the decade ended, there was plenty of new and interesting music to go around...music was being made by machines, orchestrated by computers and programmed by punks...and things would never be the same again. This is the complete history of alt-rock, chapter 10... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Women helped changed the face of ROCK as hair metal from the 80’s gave way to brand new sounds and VERY different attitudes in the 90's. On this episode of "Driven by Her" presented by our friends at Porsche Canada we're showcasing amazing, driven women like Alanis Morrissette, Ani DiFranco, and Bikini Kill. They carved their own path and created the seismic shift in music that came with Generation X because the 90's couldn't have rocked at the level they did without their influence along with the other women who helped define a generation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Okay, stay with us as this could get a bit confusing.Since the Ongoing History takes the summer months off to write and research new shows, we dig into the vault to post older episodes that first aired on radio from 1993 onward.Some still sound relevant, and others...not so much.This episode is "Radio episode 601" (aired in 2009-ish) but "Podcast Episode 345.So if some of the content seems a bit "dated" this could be the reason.But we feel the material is still relevant.Enjoy and please continue to send in your questions to Alan so we can keep doing episodes like this one. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices