Ongoing History of New Music Ongoing History of New Music

It’s often very hard to know when history is happening, even if you’re in the middle of things…even when it’s super chaotic and you might feel that something very important is happening, but you really can’t be sure…it’s only with time that things come into focus…

When it comes to music, we know that some years were more important than others…1956, for example…people who were alive back then were occupied by Cold War tensions, the growing civil rights movement in the U.S., the increasing penetration of television into homes, and a couple of bad earthquakes and hurricanes…

But at the same time, a new singer named Elvis Presley was at the forefront of this new thing called “rock and roll” …a new construct called “the teenager” was off listening to this music on their new transistor radios…and if they had a tv in their house, they were watching Dick Clark and “American Bandstand”.

Meanwhile, in the UK, a form of pre-rock music called “skiffle” was taking off…within a year, a skiffle-loving band called “The Quarrymen” was playing gigs—and they would, of course, later become the Beatles…

Speaking of whom, 1964 was also an important year…more than 70 million people watched the Beatles on “The Ed Sullivan Show” that February, kicking off their international career and the British invasion…

The years 1967 through 1969 also turned out to be a big deal…the rise of FM rock radio…the Beatles and Bob Dylan drew people away from singles to albums…the "Summer of Love"…the constant flow of music inspired by opposition to the Vietnam war…Woodstock…Altamont…

Books have been written about how important 1971 and 1972 were to rock…. David Bowie introduced Ziggy Stardust…john Lennon’s fight to keep from being deported from the u.s…big records from Led Zeppelin, The Who, Black Sabbath, Yes, The Rolling Stones, Black Sabbath, Alice Cooper, Deep Purple, and Rod Stewart, all of which are now considered all-time classics…

1976: no one knew it at the time and few paid attention, but that was the year punk was born…1984: Prince, Springsteen, Van Halen, U2, The Smiths, and Metallica all had major records…and then 1991: the grunge revolution and the explosion in all things alternative.

Which brings me to 1994…rock had been on an upswing for a couple of years…and when we look back now, it’s obvious that the grunge and alternative scenes of the '90s peaked during those twelve months…let’s take a look back, shall we?

Usually, the whole idea of being famous is to be, well, famous…you’re known by everyone…your face is everywhere…you’re a celebrity…and you get invited to the best parties, you get endorsements, you get free stuff…
Sure, there’s a trade-off…your right to privacy is greatly diminished…your every move is scrutinized…it might become harder to maintain meaningful relationships…and then there’s the constant pressure to live up to this thing you’ve become…this is emotionally draining…
After a while, you may start to resent this fame thing…the challenges and pitfalls can overshadow all the perks…
But you can also be famous and not famous at the same time…you just have to be very, very careful about revealing who you are…
There’s the story of Comte de Saint-German…he was some kind of adventurer in the 1700s who popped up throughout Europe…he spoke almost every language on the continent, knew a lot about chemistry, and was quite the musician….he was so mysterious and amazing that he acquired the nickname “the wonderman”…
Remember tank man?... He’s the guy who held up that row of tanks during the crackdown on Tiananmen square in China…no clue who this dude is…
Who is Satoshi Nakamoto?...is he the creator of bitcoin?...he disappeared from the internet around 2014 and stayed hidden…there are theories but nothing concrete…
Let’s riff on that a little bit more…can you be a famous musician and still be able to walk through the mall without anyone knowing you are?...yes…it’s difficult and comes with its own tradeoffs, but it can be done…plus you have to work very hard to maintain the art of hiding in plain site…
This is the history of anonymous artists from the world of rock…
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When something bad happens, we want to know why…the weirder and badder the event, the more we need to know…
It can’t possibly be random…someone needs to be responsible and held accountable…someone needs to be blamed…and there had better not be any loose ends…
Certain segments of the population have always been suspicious of the official story…forget the simplest of most logical explanation…these awful events or phenomenon’s are the work of some kind of secret cabal or organization pulling the strings of life on earth…it was a conspiracy…
For example, the most famous murder of modern times was the assassination of JFK on November 22, 1963…more than sixty years later, it seems like no one believes that lee Harvey Oswald was the lone gunman…
To be fair, they might be right…there’s been a lot of investigation into the JFK case over the decades…i’m one of those nuts who reads, watches, and listens to everything involved with the assassination…and I gotta tell you that i’m convinced this was the result of a loose need-to-know operation involving the CIA, the deep stage, Cuban exiles, and American mobsters…
There’s also something called “Occam’s razor” which dates back to the 14th century…this Monk—William of Occam—was annoyed at how people blamed supernatural forces when even the simplest thing went wrong…his answer to that was “look, the simplest and most obvious explanation is usually the correct one”…
But try that approach with people who believe the earth is flat and that we never went to the moon…Covid-19 was engineered by the media…and the Illuminati live beneath the Denver airport…
The world of conspiracy theories is a bottomless pit of weirdness…and when it comes to music, one of the deepest and strangest of these theories has to do with what happened above a greenhouse in Seattle on April 5, 1994…
Boy, have I got stories—multiple stories, in fact—about this one…in fact, it might be the most compressive study you’ve ever heard on the subject…this is uncharted: music and mayhem in the music industry, episode 12: it’s the ever-popular Kurt-Cobain-was-murdered theory…

Show contact info:
X (formerly Twitter): @AlanCross
Website: curiouscast.ca
Email: Alan@alancross.ca
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When something bad happens, we want to know why…the weirder and badder the event, the more we need to know…

It can’t possibly be random…someone needs to be responsible and held accountable…someone needs to be blamed…and there had better not be any loose ends…

Certain segments of the population have always been suspicious of the official story…forget the simplest of most logical explanation…these awful events or phenomenon’s are the work of some kind of secret cabal or organization pulling the strings of life on earth…it was a conspiracy…

For example, the most famous murder of modern times was the assassination of JFK on November 22, 1963…more than sixty years later, it seems like no one believes that lee Harvey Oswald was the lone gunman…

To be fair, they might be right…there’s been a lot of investigation into the JFK case over the decades…i’m one of those nuts who reads, watches, and listens to everything involved with the assassination…and I gotta tell you that i’m convinced this was the result of a loose need-to-know operation involving the CIA, the deep stage, Cuban exiles, and American mobsters…

There’s also something called “Occam’s razor” which dates back to the 14th century…this Monk—William of Occam—was annoyed at how people blamed supernatural forces when even the simplest thing went wrong…his answer to that was “look, the simplest and most obvious explanation is usually the correct one”…

But try that approach with people who believe the earth is flat and that we never went to the moon…Covid-19 was engineered by the media…and the Illuminati live beneath the Denver airport…

The world of conspiracy theories is a bottomless pit of weirdness…and when it comes to music, one of the deepest and strangest of these theories has to do with what happened above a greenhouse in Seattle on April 5, 1994…

Boy, have I got stories—multiple stories, in fact—about this one…in fact, it might be the most compressive study you’ve ever heard on the subject…this is uncharted: music and mayhem in the music industry, episode 12: it’s the ever-popular Kurt-Cobain-was-murdered theory…



Show contact info:

X (formerly Twitter): @AlanCross

Website: curiouscast.ca

Email: Alan@alancross.ca

Historians love to investigate causes and effects…it’s possible for a teeny-tiny seemingly inconsequential thing to set off a cascading series of events…and before you know it, the universe has changed forever…
Let me give you an example…a bunch of inept anarchists in Sarajevo were out to make a statement about the liberation of Bosnia and Herzegovina under occupation of the Austro-Hungarian empire…
When the Archduke Franz Ferdinand visited Sarajevo on June 28, 1914…two guys were set to toss a bomb at his six-vehicle motorcade, but they chickened out…then a guy named Nedeljko Cabrinovic threw a second bomb, but it bounced off the back of one of the cars…
The archduke, his wife, and the governor of Bosnia sped off—although the governor suggested that they take a slightly different route…the driver—Leopold Lojka—got confused and turned right instead of left into a very narrow street… 
When he tried to back up, the car stalled—and it stalled right in front of another member of the anarchist group named Gavril Princip…up until that second, he’d been discouraged that the assassination plot had failed and had allegedly slinked off to schiller’s delicatessen to get a sandwich and sulk about the afternoon’s failures…
(that’s not true, by the way…it just makes for a better story)…
Anyway, Princip’s target sitting directly in front of him, trapped…he pulled out his pistol and fired two shots…one hit the Archduke’s wife, killing her instantly…the other hit Ferdinand in the jugular…he died within half an hour…
This created a series of crises involving a web of alliances across Europe and within a few months, the great war had begun, resulting in the deaths of 20 million people and injured 21 million more…it led to the Treaty of Versailles , the humiliation of Germany, the rise of Adolf Hitler, the carnage of World War Two, the spread of Communism, the arms race, the cold war, and the world order as we know it…
If Leopold hadn’t hung a right instead of a left—or if you like the myth of Princip going for a sandwich—how would the 20th century have been different?...
Why am I recounting this?...because there are ways we can make connections like this in the world of rock….here…let me show you…
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For the first 60 years of the recorded music industry, things sounded awful…the quality of the recordings people had to put up with were terrible…the old 78 rpm records played on gramophones were no match when it came to hearing music live…we just didn’t have the technology to capture audio so that when we listened back, it sounded real…
That began to change in the late 1940s with the introduction of vinyl records: the 33 1/3 rpm vinyl album and the 7-inch 45 rpm single…it changed further with the switch to magnetic recording tape in the early 1950s…
New microphones, better tape machines, and further understanding of acoustics when it came to building recording studios…then came better turntables, amplifiers, and speakers…recorded audio started to sound more and more like the real thing…
In the middle 50s, people started to hear about something called “high-fidelity”…it was a marketing term invented by the audio industry to describe equipment capable of producing music properly…
Once stereo recordings came along in the late 50s, music fans went wild and started buying hi-fi gear for their homes…then their cars…and then for going mobile…
It was an endless pursuit for perfect sound, music that was loud, clean, clear, and accurate…meanwhile, recording studios were constantly in a state of retrofitting and refurbishment because artists demanded the best for their music…
That was the 1970s…in the 1980s, there was a reaction, a backlash, an artistic regression, after the introduction of the compact disc…for some, this music was too perfect, too shiny, too unreal…
They felt it contained none of the imperfections that made it human…beauty, they thought, was in the mistakes…that’s what made music authentic…audio quality mattered less than being able to listen to music that obviously came from the heart…
These music fans even had a name for this approach…if the best-sounding audio was high-fidelity, then what they wanted was the opposite: low-fidelity…and that aesthetic continues today…this is the history of Lo-Fi music…
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