Pop Life

In 2025 we celebrate the 40 year anniversary of a fascinating year in pop music. It was the year the MATERIAL GIRL was CRAZY FOR hits, the most-streamed music video of all time took to MTV, British artists continued to RULE THE WORLD, and artists from around the world raised money with large celebrity recording sessions and live concerts.   Today we would be CARELESS to WHISPER so we will SHOUT ab...

One of the most essential building blocks of popular music is the chord; two or more notes played at the same time often on a guitar or piano keyboard. Almost every popular hit song ever written not only has chords, but a pattern of chords that occur throughout the song called a chord progression. In this episode of Pop Life we analyze the most common chord progressions in popular music and why th...

2024 celebrates the 40 year anniversary of what the music industry and many music critics call the best year in popular music history. The King of Pop, The Boss, a Prince, the Material Girl, an Innocent Man, and many other unusual stars made the charts and the news, as in Huey Lewis & the News.  Eric and Scott will guide you to see and hear why 1984 was so thrilling and why it’s a REFLEX to ca...

One-hit wonders.  It’s a phrase used in many areas of life, but is usually most associated with popular music.  It refers to the artist that has one moment in the spotlight and then fades away as quickly as they arrived.  It can almost be a badge of honor, even though most one-hit wonders tried to accomplish more.   In this episode we talk about the most famous one hit-wonders as well as our favor...

50 years ago, the streets of New York City were flooded with a new sound... Dance beats spun on turntables by a DJ. Spoken words delivered by a Master of Ceremony. Extended breaks causing listeners to move in ways never seen on a dance floor.   In this episode we talk about a new music that his the streets in 1973 and has become the most popular music in the United States in 2023: hip hop.  Our gu...

In the second half of the 1970s and first half of the 1980s, there was a genre of music that featured elements of smooth vocals and harmonic structure, jazz and a relaxed but distinct groove that was dominating the radio airwaves.  Crazy thing, this genre didn’t have a name until the mid-2000s. On this episode of Pop Life, Eric & Scott talk about what defined this music, what made it so popula...

The second half of the 1970s was dominated by a style of music with pulsing beats, cool bass riffs, funk guitar, elaborate keyboard and string parts, courageous horn lines, iconic vocals and dance moves that still live on today. We remember DISCO.   But in 1979, disco came to a sudden halt. As cool as disco was, it quickly disappeared from pop culture. Let's explore this sudden ending on Pop...

In the 1990s, the music scene was dominated by grunge and alternative rock, hip hop and R&B, dance music, and at the end of the decade, boy and girl bands and Latin pop.   There was also another kind of music that began dominating the airwaves in the late 90s, or should we say, dominating radio speakers in big automobiles, a type of middle of the “road” music called MINIVAN ROCK.  Another epis...

Taylor Swift recently became the first artist to lock down the top ten hits in one week. All the songs, including "Anti-Hero," (which is still in the Top 10) were from her album “Midnights”.  Eric has been a chart follower forty years and is really impressed.   But forty years ago, in the year 1983, there were equally if not more impressive records being broken and the 80’s “sound” was b...

In this episode of Pop Life, we’ll talk about how sampling began, its role in hip-hop and beyond, and the technology and legalities that allow it to happen. Another episode of Pop Life by Eric & Scott.

In this episode we discuss a song that back in 1985, we had no idea we’d still be talking about 37 years later...and it’s impossible to ignore! It’s on one of television’s most popular shows, getting plays on the radio hundreds of times a week and being streamed tens of thousands of times a week. Given that it was not even close to placing as one of the top 100 songs of 1985 when it was originally...