Ongoing History of New Music
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Top 10 Ongoing History of New Music Episodes
Goodpods has curated a list of the 10 best Ongoing History of New Music episodes, ranked by the number of listens and likes each episode have garnered from our listeners. If you are listening to Ongoing History of New Music for the first time, there's no better place to start than with one of these standout episodes. If you are a fan of the show, vote for your favorite Ongoing History of New Music episode by adding your comments to the episode page.
The History of the 2010s Part 3: The New Genres
Ongoing History of New Music
09/27/23 • 24 min
It must have been so easy to write about rock back in the 50s...comparatively easy to today, i mean...everything was so new that that’s all you had to pay attention to...there wasn’t exactly anything called “rock history” back then because the music had no history...
What began as a spark in the early 50s turned out to be the musical equivalent of the cosmological big bang...and as the years and decades passed, this music—which began as a fresh take on the 12-bar blues template—separated, segmented, stratified, mutated, evolved—with increasing speed...
New genres began to appear yearly, monthly, and sometimes even weekly...today, it seems like every single day results in some kind of derivative spin-off sub-sub-sub-sub-genre...
The new sound and approach may gain traction and stay with us for some time, perhaps even carving out its own permanent space in the rock universe...more likely, though, a new genre will have a half-life shorter than hydrogen 7...and to save you from looking that up, that’s a tiny, tiny fraction of a second: a decimal point followed by 23 zeroes...
But there’s no stopping the fission and fusion of rock...we’re always going to get new sounds...keeping up with them all is another matter...
This is part of what makes writing a musical history of the 2010s so challenging...the number of iterations rock went through in that decade was insane...but if we’re going to understand what happened to rock during that time, we’re going to have to at least try...
This is the history of the 2010s, part 3...
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Great Alt-Rock One-Hit Wonders of the 90s: Part 2
Ongoing History of New Music
11/11/20 • 22 min
Creating art is hard...if it wasn’t, everyone would do it—and everyone would be successful at doing it...even those who can create art—the people with the right stuff—have a finite supply of good stuff within them...
Take Margaret Mitchell, for example...she wrote exactly one novel...but that novel was “Gone With The Wind”...Pulitzer Prize, a classic movie with multiple Academy Awards, 30 million copies sold, endless adaptations...it even got her face on a stamp...in short, “Gone With The Wind,” first published in 1937, was and still is, a cultural phenomenon...
But that’s all she ever did...ol’ marge hit it out of the park on the first pitch and that was it...one novel...she is perhaps the greatest literary one-hit-wonder of all time...
Maybe that’s all she had in the tank...or maybe she looked at all the success she got from just that one novel and said “right...my work is done her...anything else I do will just be a letdown...I’m stopping while I’m way ahead”...totally understand that...
Other artists, though, keep trying after that one hit...but for whatever reason, the magical pixie dust that they managed to harness that one time disappears forever...
Man, to get a taste of standing on the mountaintop only to be denied it ever again...but—and let’s be clear about this—at least they made it to the top of that mountain, even if it was just once...and if they’re lucky, that one trip can sustain them for the rest of their careers—the rest of their lives...
This is another program featuring those who got to the top just one...its great alt-rock one-hit wonders of the 90s, part 2....
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The Last Moments Of - Part 2
Ongoing History of New Music
11/01/23 • 40 min
When someone dies, our first reaction is disbelief...we’re stunned...that’s immediately followed by a need to know what happened...how?...where?...it’s only natural...we need information to help us process the news and the emotion that comes with it...
The next stage is might be “could anything have been done to prevent this?”... “Could someone have helped or intervened?”...In some cases, perhaps...in the case of health issues, maybe not...
And finally, there’s this:... “could what happened to that person happen to me?”...again, totally normal...
When it comes to the death of a famous musician, there’s an additional aspect to processing the news...chances are we never knew this person as, you know, a person...our only relationship with them has been as a fan...so why does their death affect us?...
Here’s a possible answer...although we never knew them, it was through their music that we learned more about ourselves...and in a way, when they die, a little of us dies, too...
This might only cause us to go deeper into what happened...we just need to know, to make sense if it, and to put everything to rest the best we can...yes, some people get very nosey and gossipy and intrusive, but there’s always a way to handle what’s known through the public record: family statements, doctors’ accounts, police reports, coroners’ testimony, toxicology examinations, and autopsy results....
And we often can’t look away because we just need to know...this is “the last moments of, part 2”....
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Even More Rock Conspiracies
Ongoing History of New Music
11/25/20 • 32 min
The universe is a weird, random place that has little regard for what us puny humans think...this is something we find very, very hard to accept...we’re always looking for explanations for the weird, random, and sometimes evil things that befall us...
Occam’s razor—the idea that the simplest explanation is usually the correct one—doesn’t cut it for some people...they believe that there are nefarious things afoot...
For example, I know someone who is all-in when it comes to this QAnon rubbish...quick explanation: a government insider believes that Donald Trump is leading a secret global fight against a cabal of Satan-worshipping politicians and celebrities and journalists who are engaged in everything from child sex trafficking to cannibalism...
Everything about qanon is bat-guano crazy and nothing to do with reality...yet there are people who believe that people Barack Obama, George Soros, and Tom Hanks will soon be arrested and jailed for their hideous crimes...
This is more nutty than even the most out-there “JFK-was-assassinated” or “9/11 was an inside government job” theories...or the idea that the moon landing was faked...or that Sandy Hook was a false flag event...or that Bill Gates is big on vaccinations because he wants to inject miniature tracking chips into all of us...
What else is out there?...chemtrails...the truth about the Denver airport...the UFO cover-up...the evils of fluoridation...flat-earthers, weather control machines, the illuminati, freemasonry...
Okay, what about music?...are there any conspiracies that have taken root?...the answer is “yes...plenty”...and here’s another look down that rat hole of insanity...
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Hidden Figures
Ongoing History of New Music
11/18/20 • 28 min
I’ve always been something of a nut when it comes to the space program...but even though I’ve read all the books, seen all the documentaries, and watched all the movies, I was still surprised to learn something new with the movie “Hidden Figures”...
This was a 2016 film based on a book of the same name...it told the true story about black female mathematicians who worked at nasa during the hottest period of the space race...
They were “computers” in the original sense of the word: people who computer things complex things like flight trajectories, re-entry methods, and landing coordinates...they were even assigned to check and correct the calculations spit out by NASA’s big ibm mainframes...their work was essential to the American space effort...
But this being the 60s, these women were segregated away from the other scientists, meaning that their work was largely forgotten until the movie and book came out...
This got me thinking...are there any forgotten figures in music?...I’m talking about women who did awesome and important things but have largely been ignored by the traditional history of rock?...I’m talking about people beyond Deborah Harry, Janis Joplin, Stevie Nicks, Chrissie Hynde, and Courtney Love...
Well, yes...yes, there was...and we need to know about them...let’s do that now...
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History of Pop Punk: Part 1
Ongoing History of New Music
10/07/20 • 23 min
Before we get to the topic at hand, I’d like to revisit the movie “Forrest Gump,” specifically Forrest’s shrimp boat buddy, Benjamin Buford Blue—but you can just call him Bubba...he knew all the ways one could serve up shrimp...
What Bubba could do for shrimp, other people can do for punk...punk rock comes in as many different varieties of shrimp...there’s hardcore punk, ska-punk, cyberpunk, synthpunk, anarcho-punk, cowpunk, gypsy punk, Christian punk, Celtic punk, art punk, garage punk, glam punk, crust punk, horror punk, street punk, melodic punk, afro-punk, skate punk, Chicano punk, folk funk, trall punk...
There’s punk blues, punk pathetique, punk metal, riot grrrl, queercore, rapcore, straight edge, emo, and oi...
And then we can get into all sorts of subgenres...hardcore punk includes bent edge, deathcore, pornogrind, screamo, powerviolence, positive hardcore, nard core, nintendocore...and that’s about all I know about that...
Most of these punk derivatives are pretty niche and none of them have a hope in hell of growing beyond a cult following...but a few have blown up into worldwide phenomenon’s—including a version that I haven’t mentioned, which remains one of the most popular forms of punk rock of all time...
This is the history of pop-punk, part 1...
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History of Pop Punk: Part 2
Ongoing History of New Music
10/14/20 • 29 min
Here’s a list of words that shouldn’t go together but do...alone together...how many times did you uses that during the coronavirus pandemic?...deafening silence...I know what that means, but when you think about it, the juxtaposition is strange...
Definitely maybe...good name for a Britpop album, but an odd combination of words...random order...walking dead...original copy...
Here’s another one: pop-punk...you know what I mean by that...but those words should not go together...punk was originally created as an attack pop...
Over the decades, pop and punk merged to create a hybrid that’s responsible for selling hundreds of millions of records and concert tickets...
How did this happen?...that’s what we’re looking at...this is part two of a history of pop-punk...
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Another Look At Bootlegging: Part 1
Ongoing History of New Music
02/21/24 • 31 min
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 also be used for making audio letters, giving dictation, a talking clock, a telephone answering machine, and remote learning...and way down the list was “reproduction of music”...
That original talking machine technology has evolved greatly over the years and the “capture and reproduction of music” has moved way up on Edison’s original list of uses...the recorded music industry is now worth tens and tens of billions of dollars...
But the phonograph also gave birth to a new type of music industry...when it first went on sale, copyright laws weren’t ready...they had been drafted and enforced with the printed word in mind, not with audio recordings...this meant that people began making recordings that weren’t exactly authorized in the proper ways...
This gave birth to another industry, one that worked in the shadows of record labels, music publishers, performing rights organizations, and all the rest of the legitimate record music industry...
What started with secretly recorded Edison phonograph cylinders progressed through reel-to-reel tape recordings, unauthorized vinyl records, cassettes, CDs, and digital files freely traded online...you may have some of these recordings in your collection—and you may not even know it...
The original name of such recordings is “bootlegs”...here are a few things about them that you might wanna know...
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The Post-Punk Explosion Part 5: Goth
Ongoing History of New Music
04/07/21 • 35 min
On April 10, 1815, a volcano erupted in the central part of the Indonesian archipelago...Mount Tambora blew up, ejecting nearly 200 cubic kilometres of debris into the atmosphere...all that dust circled the earth, blocking out a significant amount of sunlight...
That blockage was so severe that the average temperature dropped almost a full degree...the result was that 1816 has gone down in history as “the year without a summer”...
There were food shortages and famines and outbreaks of disease...and not only was it cold, but huge storms battered much of Europe...
That summer, four artsy types were holed up at mansion called Villa Diodati near Geneva, Switzerland...to entertain themselves on through these dark, cold, wet, rainy days, these people drank, had sex, and took opium...and they tried to outdo each other by coming up with the best horror story...
One of them, John William polidori, came up with “The Vampyre” about undead bloodsuckers 80 years before Bram Stoker wrote “Dracula”...meanwhile, 22-year-old Mary Shelley, conjured up the idea of a mad scientist who created a new being by sewing together the parts of dead people...she called her story “Frankenstein”...
These two stories—imagined during the year without a summer, caused by the biggest volcanic eruption in 1300 years—created the foundation of gothic fiction, a type of horror that endures today...novels, movies, comic books, fashion styles, and yes, music...
In fact, the music part of this equation has blown up to the both where Goth music culture is one of the biggest musical subcultures the planet has ever seen...and that explosion happened in the wake of the original punk era of the 1970s...
This is the post-punk explosion part 5: Goth...
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The History of the 2010s Part 2: The Role of Indie Rock
Ongoing History of New Music
09/20/23 • 27 min
Traditional wisdom says that the recorded music industry is dominated by the major labels...there used to be a bunch of them, but over the last 25 years, their number has been whittled down to just three companies: universal (the biggest), Sony, and warner music...
Here’s something you may not have know...at last estimate, about 95,000 songs are uploaded to the streaming music services every day...of that number, only about 4% are from those three majors...the rest is from indie labels and do-it-yourself musicians...
Let me flip that around: 96% of all new music comes from independent musicians...the market share of indie labels has been rising by double-digits for almost 25 years now...
Indie music—or at least material from bands not directly signed to one of the three majors—was an important aspect of the 2010s...major label acts were still important, but without the indies, it would have been a pretty empty decade...but thanks to the sheer volume of new music and some crafty distribution by indie-friendly companies, we got to hear a lot of it...
The width and breadth of indie over those ten years was staggering...and without the influence of independent musicians, styles, and trends, major label mainstream rock would have been much different...
Let’s examine that...this is part two of the history of rock in the 2010s...
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FAQ
How many episodes does Ongoing History of New Music have?
Ongoing History of New Music currently has 478 episodes available.
What topics does Ongoing History of New Music cover?
The podcast is about Music, Music History, Podcasts and Music Interviews.
What is the most popular episode on Ongoing History of New Music?
The episode title 'The History of the 2010s Part 3: The New Genres' is the most popular.
What is the average episode length on Ongoing History of New Music?
The average episode length on Ongoing History of New Music is 31 minutes.
How often are episodes of Ongoing History of New Music released?
Episodes of Ongoing History of New Music are typically released every 6 days, 23 hours.
When was the first episode of Ongoing History of New Music?
The first episode of Ongoing History of New Music was released on Jan 31, 2017.
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