Ongoing History of New Music

The last few years have been rough for music fans…Scott Weiland, David Bowie, Prince and a dozen more have left us…2017 has also had its share of loss…Chuck Berry…Gregg Allman…Chris Cornell—and now Chester Bennington of Linkin Park…  A new ongoing history show about Linkin Park is on the schedule for the fall…but in light of the events of the past week, we’ve pulled out an older show dating to 200...

Being in a band seems straightforward…you pick up some instruments and start playing…but it’s much more complicated than that…the music that you end up making is influenced by so many outside forces…where you grew up…what music you listened to as a kid…what music you listen to now…the city in which you’re writing songs…the city in which you’re recording those songs… All these factors (and more!) A...

We’ve all done something that we’ve later regretted...it seemed so right at the time, you know? In hindsight, though, it turned out to be really, really dumb… Maybe we were misinformed or lacking all the information we needed…maybe it was emotion or ego that prompted us down that path… or maybe we just disobey what our gut was telling us… “Hey! What’s that big wooden horse outside the city gates!...

There are many ways to clear or expand your mind to allow creativity to flow, stress to dissipate and peace to descend on the mind and body…exercise, meditation, prayer…but that takes exertion, practice and devotion…what if there was a simpler way? Well, there is…drugs…it’s not the smartest way to solve your problems, but for centuries and centuries, drugs have worked for artists… We can go all th...

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...

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

There’s a misconception that it takes a lot of people to come together to create a viable music scene…not true… The original punk scene in New York consisted of a few dozen weirdos who hung out at places like CBGB, the mudd club and Max’s Kansas city in the uglier end of town… The UK punk scene started with a similar number in the fall of 1976, pretty much every London punk fit into a single club...

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 195...

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 nu...

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...

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 the...

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-pun...