Ongoing History of New Music

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 empir...

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...

In the summer of 2006, a young Calgary woman was on top of the world. She had a supportive family, amazing friends and a great job. But life as she knew it came to an abrupt stop in the middle of the night on August 6, 2006. In this episode, Global News senior crime reporter Nancy Hixt shares details of a violent attack- a story that’s every woman’s worst fear. www.calgarycrimestoppers.org - refer...

Streaming is a very cool way to access tens of millions of songs with a few pokes on your phone…the idea of being able to listen to virtually any song from any era of human history with such ease is something akin to magic… The downside of streaming is that it doesn’t provide any context to what we’re hearing…a continuous stream of music tells us nothing about the artist or the song…it’s just musi...

A band is like a plant…stay with me on this…like a plant, a band grows from seeds to maturity, bursts for with new seeds and then eventually withers and dies…it’s the cycle of life, you know?... But like plants (or animals or any other living thing), the lifespan of bands varies greatly…you could last as long as rehearsal—kinda like, what, a dandelion?…or you might find yourself on some kind of 50...

A boy cannot become a man in the Satere-Mawe tribe of the Amazon Rain Forest until he can stand being stung by a swarm of Bullet ants…they’re called that because it’s said their sting is as painful as being hit by an actual bullet…if the kid can handle it without shedding a single tear, then he is officially a man…I can’t explain it…and I’ll bet that no one in this tribe can, either…it’s just alwa...

The biggest tech story of recent years has been the rise of artificial intelligence…the subject of ai is everywhere… it’s been “AI this” and “AI that”… The Wikipedia article on ChatGPT, the company that really got things rolling in this area, was the most popular Wikipedia article in all of 2023…50 million visits… That made it more popular than even Christian Ronaldo, the world’s most famous athle...

Once upon a time, I was deep into collecting bootleg recordings of my favourite bands…and this obsession came from a really good place…at least I thought so… I’d already bought all the albums and singles, collected a bunch of memorabilia, snapped up the t-shirts, and gone to all the shows…but I wanted more…the only place let to go was unofficial—read: illegal—releases… Almost everything I accurate...

Hey It's Alan...and I want to introduce you to my brand new, one-of-a-kind true crime podcast called Uncharted: Crime and Mayhem in the Music Industry.  On this podcast I take you inside unbelievable stories of murder, plane crashes, court battles, and even run-ins with the mob! In this podcast you'll hear all about the dark side of world of music. We're releasing new episodes every two weeks, so...

On December 24, 1877, Thomas Edison filed a patent for a new invention he referred to as a “talking machine”…for the first time ever, audio could be captured, played back, stored, shared, and analyzed… When asked what the point of his machine was, Edison listed some future possibilities…. His phonograph (as he called it) would eventually be used as a method of preserving great speeches….it could a...

We would not be sitting here talking about rock music if it weren’t for people of African descent…if you start in the present and begin to trace things backward to important innovations and accomplishments, nine times out of ten, you’ll end up exploring something from black culture… And we can go way, way back—right to 1619 when the first slave ship arrived in north America at the British colony o...

I really, really want to believe…there are trillions of galaxies in the observable universe, each containing billions of stars…there’s gotta be something out there…we can’t be alone… Organisms floating in the acid clouds of Venus…remains of bacteria in the Martian soil…creatures swimming in vast oceans below the ice of Europa…something lurking in the methane lakes of Titan…and that’s just the star...

Hey It's Alan...and I want to introduce you to my brand new, one-of-a-kind true crime podcast called Uncharted: Crime and Mayhem in the Music Industry.  On this podcast I take you inside unbelievable stories of murder, plane crashes, court battles, and even run-ins with the mob! In this podcast you'll hear all about the dark side of world of music. We're releasing new episodes every two weeks, so...

Decades ago, I was the best man for my buddy Charlie and was in charge of driving the bridal car from the church to the reception…the happy couple were in the back seat…next to me up front was the bride’s sister-in-law… When I started the car, “Welcome To The Jungle” started playing on the radio…the sister-in-law freaked out… “What is this garbage?...turn it off!”…I looked at Charlie…he looked at...

A year ago, I began what will unfortunately be a regular series of these programs from now on…it’s an annual look back on the musicians we lost in the previous year… Rock star deaths have been on our mind since late 2015 when Scott Weiland of the Stone Temple Pilots died, followed a few weeks later by Lemmy of Motorhead…then the floodgates opened in 2016: Bowie, Prince, Leonard Cohen, Glenn Frey o...

I’m not gonna lie…I’m addicted to listicles…not the click-baity ones that have sub-headlines like “and you won’t believe #6!”…I’m only interested in the ones that offer interesting or weird facts…usually that means Buzzfeed, Bored Panda, Upworthy, Laughing Squid—you know the kind…“today I learned” and “I was today years old when I discovered”…that sort of thing… Here's one…there is a species of mo...

Hey It's Alan...and I want to introduce you to my brand new, one-of-a-kind true crime podcast called Uncharted: Crime and Mayhem in the Music Industry.  On this podcast I take you inside unbelievable stories of murder, plane crashes, court battles, and even run-ins with the mob! In this podcast you'll hear all about the dark side of world of music. We're releasing new episodes every two weeks, so...

It’s been a rough decade for the electric guitar…sales of new instruments have dropped by a third, from 1.5 million globally to around just one million… Why?...generations brought up on electronics are opting out of creating music with traditional instruments like the guitar…instead, they use laptops, iPads, gear like Ableton Live an any number of programmable keyboard devices… Most guitars are be...

What is a guitar hero?...yes, yes, it’s a video game that vaguely simulates playing a real guitar…what else?... Yes, yes, it means someone who can rock the “expert level” at guitar hero, the video game…but before that, it meant something totally different… A guitar hero was a guy—and it was almost always a guy—who had achieved a seemingly supernatural mastery of the electric guitar…they were so go...

Hey it’s Alan and this week we’re going to do something a bit different for the podcast… When we recorded our 1000th episode of the ongoing history at Corus Quay…we ended up with a lot of content that we couldn’t fit into the radio show.  If you caught last week’s podcast, you will have heard the story of how the ongoing history came to be, and how we got to 1000 shows.  You also would have heard...

On Tuesday December 5th, in front of a live audience at Corus Quay, the Ongoing History of New Music recorded the 1000th episode of the radio program. What some people don't know is that this Podcast started out as a radio show in February 1993 on 102.1 The Edge in Toronto. It has taken over 30 years to reach out 1000th episode! This is a podcast of that evening complete with part of the Q&A that...

With over 300 OGH podcasts to choose from, we know that sometimes older episodes get lost in the library. So, here is a topic we had a request to dig up again...and this episode first aired on radio in November of 2010 as we look at one of the most under appreciated and underrated members of any rock band...the bass player.  These are the most influential bass players in the history of alt-rock. N...

You may be aware of a podcast that came out in the spring of 2020 that sought to get to the bottom of a certain musical mystery…it’s called “wind of change” and it explores the possibility that a metal power ballad was a contributing factor to the fall of the soviet union in the very early 90s… Stay with me… “Wind of Change” was a global hit for The Scorpions; a metal band out of Hanover in what w...

If you are a professional musician—that is, you’re being paid to write and perform music and can actually make a living from it—you’re part of an infinitesimal quintile of people who are able to do that… you are living the dream… This, in fact, may be the only career you’ve ever known…you’ve never had a “real” job…maybe you’ve had a chance to see the world because of music…and if you love what you...

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