Ongoing History of New Music

Every once in a while, something extraordinary happens in rock’n’roll…I hate the use the cliché of “a perfect storm,” but that’s exactly what I’m talking about…a bunch of things involving culture, politics, demographics, economics and technology all collide and mix in just the right way for something totally new and unexpected to be created… Lemme give you some examples…Elvis came along in the 1950s just as million post-war kids—these new constructs that were now called “teenagers”—began gravitating to new radio stations that played music derived from a mix of the blues, country and r&b…this music greatly annoyed their parents, something that made it dangerous and forbidden… In 1964, the Beatles appeared on the Ed Sullivan show with a fresh, new sound that helped drag America out of the funk that followed the assassination of JFK…as far as rock is concerned, the 60s really began that February night in 1964… Let’s try something more current…you might remember the appearance of the music video in the early 80s transformed the industry…. or the time you heard “smells like teen spirit” for the first time and immediately you somehow knew that whatever came next in the 90s would be very, very different… And hip hop? don’t get me started…there are people—academics! —who will argue that the appearance of hip hop in popular culture was an even bigger deal that the Beatles… There’s one other event that we need to include on this list: the rise of punk rock in the middle 70s…as it was happening, it was no big deal…it was an aberration, a niche thing that indulged weirdos and misfits… “it’s just noise,” said the rock purists, “ignore it and it’ll go away” … But it didn’t…in fact, we’re still talking about punk…and punk became more than just a form of music… it became a way of thinking and acting and creating and presenting…it’s music, film, visual art, literature, dance, politics… it altered much of western thought…the punk aesthetic—that “screw you, I’m gonna do it anyway” ethos—can be found virtually everywhere in society today… But what led to this? what were the factors that led to the rise of this music? and how it appears worldwide at virtually the same time in an era long, long before the internet? great questions…. let’s see if we can find the answer to the question: “why did punk happen at all?” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Myths and legends come in all sizes…Atlantis…that’s a big one that we can’t seem to wrap our heads around…but maybe homer was just yanking our chain… “feed a cold, starve a fever”…turns out that’s wrong…depriving yourself of calories may make it harder for your body to fight off that infection or virus… “we only ever use 10% of our brain”…wrong…neuroscience has proven that to be false…the right number may be 20%--but there’s a lot of dispute over that… Here are some other myths I’ve run across…don’t feed pigeons uncooked rice or they’ll blow up…the great wall of china isn’t the only man-made object that can be seen from space…and you can’t certainly see it from the moon… Oh—and the “fact” that men think about sex every seconds…untrue…it happens a lot every day, but there’s no basis in any scientific literature that it happens every seven seconds…we’d never get anything done… There are also myths and legends in music, too…Robert Johnson’ pact with the devil at the crossroads…Gene Simmons of Kiss did not have a cow tongue grafted onto his…Jim Morrison, Biggie, Tupac and Elvis are most certainly very dead…but Paul McCartney is still very much alive… But what about the alt-rock word?...what kind of myths and legends lurk there…stick around…you may be very, very surprised… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Some years ago, I had a conversation with Don Letts, the DJ, filmmaker and confidant of The Clash…and he said something that stuck with me: “the average lifespan of a band is seven years…that’s enough for them to form, get big, become stars, develop creative differences and break up” … He’s not wrong…the clash did their best work from ’76 to ’83…The Beatles from ’63 to ’70…Nirvana was around from ’87 to ’94…  But then there are the exceptions, groups that have survived multiple seven-year cycle…U2, the Stones, Oasis, Green Day, Foo Fighters…and if we’re going to make a list, we must include Blink-182…this is a band who had a big rise and then a big fall before clawing back again…  This kind of roller coaster career can be really hard on a band—and there are often casualties…you’ll see what I mean as we get into part three of the rise and fall and rise of Blink-182… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It’s rare that a band has a career with two acts…it’s not impossible…the survivors of Joy Division managed to do quite well as new order…the Barenaked Ladies were once written off before roaring back to life…and how many times has Black Sabbath risen from the ashes?... I’ll give you another one…Green Day…they’d run out of gas by the end of the 90s and contemplated breaking up for good…but then they reinvigorated themselves with their “American idiot” period and continue to do well… And then there’s the story of Blink-182…by 2000, they’d made it to the top and were selling albums by the tens of millions…but then things slowly started to go sideways—badly… However, like Green Day, Blink-182 was able to recover from that career nosedive—but not before having to enduring some serious—and literal—casualties…this is part two of the rise and fall and rise of Blink-182… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

After grunge blew up in the early 1990s, the walls between mainstream rock and the alternative universe crumbled completely…what other music had been hiding in the plain sight?... There was goth and industrial and various forms of electronica…and there was all this punk rock…tons of it…all different flavours, too…pop punk, punk-funk, hardcore, garage punk, glam punk, queercore, riot grrrl, ska-punk… Punk had always been there, waiting to be discovered by a whole new generation…and finally, the time was right… There was green day, offspring, rancid…then there was sublime, no doubt and 311…NOFX, Pennywise and Bad Religion…some of these bands were brand new…others had been doing their thing for a while… Alot of the big action seemed to be centred in California…orange county, the bay area…but down in the skatepark suburbs of San Diego, something began brewing that would end up being responsible for selling 35 million records… These guys went from zero to worldwide superstars and then almost back to zero again before clawing back… This is part one of the rise and fall and rise of blink 182… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices