Ongoing History of New Music

This historical, true crime podcast hosted by Kru Williams from History Television's hit original series Deadman’s Curse: The Legend of the Lost Gold investigates the curse and legend surrounding the lost gold mine of Pitt Lake. On their quest they're joined by members of the Stó:lō and Katzie First Nations, historians and cultural experts of diverse backgrounds, as they sort fact from fiction and...

If you’re listening to this show, you are a music fan...any arguments?...probably not... “fan” is short for “fanatic”–a person who is extremely passionate and enthusiastic about something...could be sports, could be movies, could be music...and fans tend to be reasonably uncritical about the objects of their affection...          But all “fanaticism”–and we’re using the proper dictionary terms her...

There’s an old saying that goes “he who dies with the least regrets wins”... Good words to live by because by the time we shuffle off this mortal coil, all of us are going to have done and said things that we wish we hadn’t...and chances are, we hope that no one finds out about this stuff... It’s the skeletons in the closet–pieces of our past that we try not to show (or even try to hide) from othe...

I have a fascination with the strange...what seems ordinary at first glance is–well, isn’t ordinary at all.... Once you get in the habit of looking past the obvious, the universe opens up in some interesting, unexpected and really cool ways... For example, if you’re ever in Albania and you agree with what someone says, shake your head from side-to-side...if you disagree, nod...in other words, do t...

It’s always a shock when we hear that a rock star has died...but when the news about Chris Cornell came out on May 18, 2017, it was extra-jarring... The overall impression was that he was a guy who had it good...he’d been a central fixture of the grunge era as the front man of Soundgarden...there was an totally unexpected hit with the Temple of the Dog project...then a solid three-album run with A...

This universe is very weird...so weird, in fact, that we often don’t question its weirdness even though it’s right in front of us...we’re completely caught up in it... For example, when someone takes a group picture, there’s always that person that demands that everyone “say cheese”....that’s a way to get everyone to smile...you can’t help but smile when you say “cheese”.  No one is really sure wh...

Times are good for vinyl...the format was all but dead until some desperate record store owners invented “record store day” in 2008...since then, we’ve seen double-digit increases in vinyl sales year after year after year... Things are so good that in several countries, the revenue brought in by selling vinyl is greater than the revenue generated by compact disc sales...we haven’t seen anything li...

If you’re going to commit to being in a band, you have to prepared to deal with the bad as well as the good... The good stuff can include fame, money, perks, and the ability to make a living by playing music...enviable stuff... But then there’s the bad stuff...problems with your record label...lineup changes...dealing with the fickle tastes of the public...writer’s block...internal struggles...man...

Being in a band is hard...keeping a band together is harder still...and if a band can keep it together for more longer than a decade, they should get some kind of medal... Let’s give props to the Red Hot Chili Peppers, still going since their establishment in 1983...Metallica has been with us since 1981...both new order and Depeche Mode go back to 1980... The current lineup of U2 has been the same...

There is a new gold rush going on right now—but this one is different...it has nothing to do with minerals or oil or any other traditional commodity...it’s not what we’ve seen with crypto currency...it may have to do with stock markets, but not always...and yet it’s a form of investment, one that should continue to pay off for decades to come...  I’m talking about the rush to buy up song catalogue...

My main interest with skateboarding is the music that’s evolved along with it...in fact, there’s a whole subgenre of alt-rock built on skateboarding culture....and there are plenty of legendary rock acts that found their first fans among the skate crowd... This music goes back a lot farther than you might expect, too...i think it’s time that we gave skate punk its due... Learn more about your ad c...

I vividly remember my first encounter with Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails...it was April 17, 1990, at the old RPM club in Toronto... Nine Inch Nails were opening for Goth God Peter Murphy and frankly, no one cared... I was there with a bunch of people chatting at the bar while this noisy band blitzed their way through the first four songs of their set...and then came song number five...it was an...

This is part 2 of our look at true stories of plagiarism and unfortunate sonic coincidences in the world of Alt-Rock Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Let me ask you this...how many times have you heard a song and said "Hey that song sounds just like something I heard last month. That guitar riff is really familiar....don't they realize those chords were used in a song years ago?!?!?!" This sort of thing happens all the time...in fact it happens more than most people realize. Sometimes quiet deals are worked out behind the scenes and the public...

We’ve all been there...tickets for a concert you really, really want to see are set to go on sale at exactly 10am...you’re on the Ticketmaster site as the clock ticks toward the appointed time... 9:59:57...9:59:58...9:59:59...ten o’clock!...show time... Enter...nothing...refresh refresh refresh the browser...nothing...you try mashing the f5 button a bunch times...no luck....you hit control-r a cou...

Let’s define a “concert ticket”...it is a contract between you, an act, a promoter, and a venue that allows you admission to specific event at a stated time and place...seems simple enough...let’s continue... A concert ticket can cost money that goes to covering costs and making a profit for those staging the concert...or in some cases, it can be free and is used mainly for tracking attendance......

Once upon a time, it was illegal—criminal—to be another other than heterosexual...any hint that you may be something other than straight could get you into all sorts of trouble—and career suicide was the least of your worries... In 1895, the famous English playwright, Oscar Wilde, was put on trial for homosexual practices...he was found guilty and sentenced to two years in jail...he never recovere...

I vividly remember sitting down to write the first-ever episode of “The Ongoing History of New Music”...I was in my living room with a blank yellow note pad...and I was terrified... To be brutally honest, I did not want this gig...but the powers-that-be decreed that this was my new job...if didn’t want to do it, that would have been cool...I was told I’d receive a manila envelope containing a mode...

A couple of years back, I did an episode called “The Diversity Show”...it ran in February as part of Black History Month...the goal was to salute the contributions of people of African descent to the world of rock... It was quite the list...Jimi Hendrix...we had to talk about Jimi, one of the greatest guitarists of all time...then there was Death,  a criminally overlooked band from Detroit called...

At the dawn of the 21st century, vinyl was dead, dead, dead...we were all going digital and there was no point in keeping this ancient format...vinyl records were dusty, scratchy, and noisy...they took up too much storage space...they warped and got water damaged... But the biggest knock against vinyl was that it wasn’t portable...MP3s were a brand-new thing back then and the idea of being able to...

Like Homer Simpson, I love my TV...without my local, network, cable, on-demand, and streaming shows none of us would have made it through the pandemic...  The downside is that in order to remain distracted and entertainment, I became over-subscribed...mixed with my perpetual fear of missing out, I’ve ended up paying for more cable channels than I need and subscribing to channels I don’t even watch...

Back in the late 70s, the BBC debuted a science education show called “Connections”...the host was James Burke, an affable, professorish guy, usually dressed in a beige polyester leisure suit who gave the term “interdisciplinary” a whole new meaning... His thing was to take disparate developments in science and technology and show how they were actually interconnected in ways that led to our moder...

When humans first started making audio recordings of music, they were limited as to how long those recordings could be... An original Edison cylinder could maybe hold two minutes of music, therefore any songs committed to the format had to be two minutes or shorter—otherwise you’d run out of space... When Emilee Berliner came along with his flat rotating disc that spun at 78 rpm, capacity increase...

Have you ever had to work together with your significant other?...and I don’t mean anything like housework or parenting or anything like that...I’m talking about a job—your primary source of income—where the two of you have to work on the same things under the same circumstances in the same place?... This can go one of two ways...first, the bond between you grows stronger because you have shared i...

Sometime around 2016, I got the sense that we were entering into a new era of rock history: a period when the musicians we loved and admired began to die... Listen, there had been many deaths before then, but they seemed reasonably few and far between...but 2016 seems to have been the year—for me, anyone—when I realized that many of our most beloved musicians were getting older and starting to die...