Ongoing History of New Music

This episode begins shortly after 9 am on the Saturday I turned 6…for reasons that will forever remain mysterious, the present from my grandmother was a Lloyds portable transistor radio…model tr-62…made in Taiwan…built with 6 transistors… This thing revealed a wider world to me…I grew up in a small town with three tv stations (one of which was in French) and the only radio I heard was what mom and dad listened in the kitchen or in the car… But now that I had my own radio, I discovered that there were many, many, many other stations out there…and in the wintertime, when the atmosphere turned into a giant reflector for distant am signals, I started to listen to stations from Minneapolis, Denver, Chicago, Louisville, and many others… At some point, I decided that I wanted to be part of this world of news and information and entertainment and music…and to make a long story short, here I am…. ‘course, you may be listening to this as an internet stream or a podcast…but the original construction of the program was for traditional, terrestrial over-the-air FM radio… Radio is everywhere:  the clock radio, the kitchen, the stereo in the living room, the car, the office, the gym, the store…in fact, there are so many radios that they outnumber people in North America…there are thousands of FM stations and thousands of am stations…. But because radio is so ubiquitous, most people don’t give it much thought…it’s always been there, and it’s always been free and it’s so easy to use…radio has become so tightly integrated in our lives that we don’t notice it perhaps as much as we should… And then there are those who maintain that radio is dead and that no one listens anymore…that’s rubbish, of course…I could cite you all kinds of all kinds of statistics to prove that radio is still very popular, powerful, and profitable—like almost 90% of the population listens to radio over the course of a week—but just take my word for it… But radio is in a period of transition as new technologies come into play…however, the radio industry is very aware of what’s going on… These are all reasons why I want to talk about radio….plus this will give me an excuse to play some great songs about the medium… Oh—did I mention that radio has now officially been around for 100 years?....yes…yes, it has—and here’s its story… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the olden days of newspapers—and I’m talking decades ago—there was a specific way printing photographs…photos were given to the printer who copied the picture using a special camera that converted everything to something known as “half-tone” so it could be put in the paper… If you looked closely at the resulting picture, you’d see that it was made up of a pattern of dots…each one was a different size and proportional to the blackness of the original photo in that particular location of the photograph… Viewed at a distance, it looked like a normal picture…but if you got up close, all you saw was the dots… Wait…try this…have you ever sat up close to a tv?...I mean really close…so close that you can see the individual pixels…that’s kind of cool because you get to see the tiniest components of the video that’s being broadcast… But looking at a pixel or two isn’t helpful when you’re actually hoping to understand anything that’s been broadcast…you’re too close…there’s no perspective to anything… Sometimes to really understand things, you need to sit back—waaaaaay back—in order to perceive things, to understand things, to appreciate things and why they are the way they are…in other words, you need the big picture…   To torture this metaphor even more, the same principles can be applied to music before certain things come into focus…and that’s what we’re about to do…this is part two of a program called “big picture stuff”… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When it comes to music, it’s so easy to get lost in the weeds…to become distracted by all the minutiae and trivia… There’s nothing wrong with that, of course…it’s the study of exactly this kind of granular stuff that pays my salary…however, there is a “can’t see the forest for the trees” angle to all this… Sometimes, we need to stand way back—and I mean way back—before some vital things come into focus… I’m not talking about just learning not just to see the trees but the forest, but the whole of the countryside…no, wait…more than that…we need altitude…not just for a 35,000-foot view, but maybe all the way up into geosynchronous orbit so we can assess everything about a certain subject… Wait…this metaphor is getting out of control…what I’m trying to say is that if we step back far enough, we can learn some really interesting things about why music is the way it is…   What you’re about to hear may change the way you think about the history of music…this is big picture stuff—really big stuff—part 1… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Back in the day...when singles were released on vinyl...you needed to put a song on either side of the record. Sometimes it was another version of the same song, or just the same song again, or maybe a live version...or maybe something completely different. A song that the band didn't know what to do with. Something special...something unique. What I've gathered here are 9 great B-Sides. Some are landmark singles in a bands history, some are ones you might never have heard before... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

People often ask me where I come up with ideas for this program…my answer is always the same… you know that feeling when it’s Sunday night and you promise yourself you’ll start on that assignment that’s due the next morning as soon as “the Simpsons” is over?... Yeah, that’s me…every week…and after more than 700 of these one-hour assignments stretching back to 1993, I hit a wall…total writer’s block… I started to panic…there are hard deadlines…I have a contract…I’m expected to deliver another new show…there are radio stations all over the place that need new programming from me…what the hell am I gonna talk about this time when I got nothin’?... I mean, this is the seven hundredth and forty-sev— Wait…show number 747?...that’s the same as the airliner…what about stories of alt-rock and airplanes?... And so I started go back through all my files—and sure enough, there’s tons of stuff on the subject…plane crashes, near-misses, air rage, terrorist bombings… Well, that settles it…show number 747 will be able civil aviation and alt-rock…there…that wasn’t so hard, was it?... Dodged that bullet for another week… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It is a fact of life that there are periods where everything old is new again…if you look at Broadway, for example, old productions are always being brought back… Take “West Side Story,” for example…it first premiered in 1957 and was brought back in 1960, 1964, 1980, 2009, and 2020…that’s five revivals…the Gershwin musical “Porgy and Bess” has been brought back seventimes… Movies are always being rebooted… “Ghostbusters,” “Planet of the Apes,” “King Kong,” “Robocop,” “Willy Wonka,” “Halloween,” “Spider-Man”…“A Star is Born” first appeared in 1937 and was remade in 1954, 1976, and 2018… Then there are all the tv remakes…”MacGyver,” “90120,” “Dynasty,” “Lost in Space,” “Roseanne,” “Twin Peaks”…“Star Trek,” of course… And then there are musical reboots, scenes and sounds that are brought back by people who are sometimes generations removed from when this music first appeared… Maybe it starts with people who stumble on some old records…or maybe they independently discovered sounds and styles that they thought they were new… Whatever the cause or source, music is constantly being recycled and renewed…and that’s what we’re looking at with this series of shows…this is “alt-rock revivals: part 5”…and the focus is New Wave… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Take a look in your closet…are you the kind of person who won’t throw out anything because you’re sure it’ll come back into style one day?... I am…long after this stuff have ceased sparking joy, it’s still hanging in my closet…I have these sport coats and suits that I paid good money for…and even though I haven’t worn any of them for years, I can’t bring myself to throw them out… “yeah, they look a little dated, but one day”…maybe…hope springs eternal…none of them will fit, but that’s beside the point… For support, I look at my vinyl collection…there was a time when vinyl was considered nothing more than toxic landfill… “the future is digital!” We were told… “free yourself from all those bulky, dusty, crackly vinyl records…throw them out!...throw them out!”… For some reason, I didn’t fall for that…I kept my vinyl…and now that the format has been revived, I look like a genius… Bottom line, though, is that even though many things in this universe come in cycles, we’re not always sure when something old will become new again… At some point, everyone enjoys a comeback, a resurrection, a re-establishment, a re-introduction…but you never rush these things, especially in music… Something has to happen where a significant number of people in different areas simultaneously come to the conclusion that it’s time to revisit some older music and put a modern shine on it… This is what happened with garage rock at the very end of the 90s and the early 2000s…after laying low for a couple of decades, it roared back so strong that it set the agenda for much of modern rock for years to come… Let’s look at this….it’s alt-rock revivals chapter 4: garage rock… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We hear this phrase all the time: “once in a generation”…fine, but how long is a generation?...according to Wikipedia, it’s about 30 years, which is the time it takes children to be born, grow up, become adults and then start to have children of their own… The international society of genetic genealogy sets the length of a generation between 29 and 31 years… But that’s if we’re talking about the child-parent-child cycle of human existence…we can also use the word “generation” to describe other cycles—like music…let’s try to do that… We all go through a period of “coming of age” with music…this is the period in our lives when music is central to everything we do…we use music to figure out who we are…we use it to bond to other like-minded people…and we use music to project our identity to the world… “thisis who I am!” That period—and I’m generalizing here—begins when we enter high school and ends when we get around to being adults…that’s roughly 10 years: 14 to 24, plus or minus a couple of years… If we consider that ten-year period to be a generation in music, the cycles will repeat much faster than the standard genealogical definition of “generation”… Extrapolating this reasoning (as dodgy as it might seem to some), it’s should be no surprise that we experience periodic revivals in music as age into, through, and out of that musical sweet spot in their lives…   So how long are these cycles?...well, using the rules I just described, we should experience revivals every 10 to 12 years…ish…   This brings me to Emo…when can we expect a revival in that area?...this is chapter 3 of a series entitled “alt-rock revivals”… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Certain types of music have been around forever…jazz, for example, has been with us for over a hundred years…classical music goes back at least six hundred years…and then there’s religious music which can date back a thousand years or even more… If you study this sort of thing—it’s a form of ethnomusicology—you’ll see that revivals happen all the time all over the world with all kinds of different music… If type of music lasts that long, it’s gotta be always there in the background…it can’t ever have actually died off…and it really helps if these old sounds experience periodic comebacks…you know, just to give things a boost from time to time… Music revivals can be defined as social movements where a segment of the population decides that a specific era or musical system needs to be restored…they’re tired of what’s happening in the mainstream and look for something from the good old days to soothe their souls… And revivals have an interesting side effect…when a form of music comes to the fore again, it has a chance to renew, to regenerate, to evolve… This is where we encounter one of the most durable and regenerative music of the last hundred years…this is chapter two of alt-rock revivals…and this time, we’re going to talk about Ska… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We begin this episode with Ecclesiastes, chapter 3, verses 1-3…ish: “to everything there is a season, a time to every purpose under the heaven…a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted…a time to rock, a time to dance, a time to head bang, and time to chill”... Okay, I don’t think that last part is in any edition of the standard bible…I might have made it up… Here’s what I’m trying to say…the universe moves in cycles…things are born, build up, peak, and fade away…but they don’t necessarily die…they just go into some kind of stasis, a type of hibernation before something triggers a rebirth…and if the conditions are right, the whole process repeats again… This happens with music a lot…certain genres, certain scenes, have periodic revivals… Lemme give you an example…in the late 50s, all the cool kids were into folk music…stuff that was a generation old suddenly became the thing all the hipsters were listening to…the Kingston trio…Peter, Paul, and Mary… This translated into a big boom for modern folk music that eventually manifested in Bob Dylan and everyone who followed him… Around the same time in the UK, the big thing was known as “trad jazz”…English hipsters who were unimpressed with this new rock’n’roll thing, decided that traditional jazz that was originally big 60 years previous was where it was at… Again, there was a revival with new artists like acker bilk, Kenny Ball, and Monty Sunshine…suddenly, New Orleans Dixieland was in vogue…things lasted until about 1965 before it all died away… In 1973, 50s rock’n’roll made a comeback... “American Graffiti,” “Happy Days,” Elton John singing “Crocodile Rock”—stuff like that… Alternative rock has been around long enough so that it has seen its own internal revivals…sounds from alt-rock history that have been rediscovered and advanced by a new generation of fans… Even the punk rock of the middle 70s was a revival of sorts…at its heart, that punk was a back-to-basics form of rock’n’roll but done with speed and a sneer…and that’s where we’ll start…this is alt-rock revivals, part one: punk… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices