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Ongoing History of New Music

Curiouscast

Ongoing History of New Music looks at things from the alt-rock universe to hip hop, from artist profiles to various thematic explorations. It is Canada’s most well known music documentary hosted by the legendary Alan Cross. Whatever the episode, you’re definitely going to learn something that you might not find anywhere else. Trust us on this. read less

Our Editor's Take

“There's nothing really quite like this show,” says Canadian radio stalwart Alan Cross. “Try it once, and you'll get hooked. Trust me.” He's talking about the Great White North's favorite music podcast, Ongoing History of New Music. What's so addictive about it?

In the trailer for the show, Cross explains the program's goal. It's “to provide context. And background. And perspective on the music you love.” For instance, rock & roll and tattoos go hand-in-hand, right? But has anyone explored how the phenomenon went mainstream in the music world? Cross devotes an entire episode to it.

Or take the episode “18 Bands Who Changed Lead Singers.” Almost everyone knows about Van Halen and AC/DC. They found even greater success after their original singers either quit or perished. But besides those two, who else immediately comes to mind? Does Cross actually have sixteen others to talk about?

He sure does. Plus he covers music success stories who were late bloomers. Musical offspring of famous parents receive an episode. He speaks in great detail about the concept of selling out—so much detail, in fact, that it requires two episodes.

And all these examples are only from the first half of 2022! Indeed, when it comes to getting the most out of music, “context is everything,” Cross says. “You've gotta know the details.”

Well, Ongoing History of New Music is here to help. Because as Cross insists, “The more you know about music, the more meaning it has and the greater the emotional impact. And everybody wants that, right?”

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Episodes

Rivers Cuomo and Weezer - Alt-Rock's Nerd Heroes Part 1
Available on 04-12-2024
Rivers Cuomo and Weezer - Alt-Rock's Nerd Heroes Part 1
If Rivers Cuomo of Weezer were to walk past you on the street, you probably wouldn’t notice him…if you did, you might think that this stranger kinda looked like Louis Tully, the nebbish accountant played by Rick Moranis in a couple of “Ghostbusters” movie. Chances are he’d be wearing skinny jeans, a t-shirt, a hoody, maybe a baseball cap, indistinguishable from a hundred other short, slight, guys with glasses that you encountered that day…and that’s just the way he likes it. But Rivers Cuomo is an unlikely sort of rock star and is extremely committed to being a rock star—or at least doing the things that he hopes will keep him at that level. He’s highly educated, deeply introspective, very private, and always looking to learn something new, be studying the mysteries of writing the perfect song to computer programming to intense forms of meditation to careful study of the music industry… and one day, he wants to make a Weezer movie—not a tour film, but some kind of actual movie. Weezer has been together for more than 30 years…there have been no break-ups and reunions…there haven’t even been any official hiatuses. But Rivers has also taken up pickleball with a vengeance…he’s a very good chess player, too…he’s fascinated with Japanese culture. What else?...PETA once voted him “the sexiest celebrity vegetarian,” although he confesses to hating carrots…he doesn’t have a middle name because his parents wanted him to choose one when he got old enough—but he never got around to it. Fox filmed a pilot for a tv show based on the years rivers went to Harvard…and he once had a pet squirrel named “Mr. Peanutbutter. That’s just a start…think we can fill up an entire program with fascinating facts about Rivers Cuomo and Weezer …I bet we can.
Stories Behind Songs - 5
13-11-2024
Stories Behind Songs - 5
We’ve all sat listening to music and though to ourselves “what does this song mean?...what’s the singer (or the band) trying to say?”. Sometimes it’s nothing…it’s just a bunch of words strung together in a way that sounds fun…other times, lyrics to a song may be just some kind of stream of consciousness thing that somehow made sense to the singer or the lyricist at the time…or maybe it didn’t…lots of songs are written in altered states. A song could be an oblique and opaque form of poetry that’s supposed to resolve itself in the brains of each individual listener…there have been many times when I’ve asked a singer “what does this song mean?”… and their answer is “well, what does it mean to you?...whatever you say is the right answer”. Okay, i get it…it’s art…art is supposed to be open to personal interpretation…when you hear something beautiful or provocative or inspiring, who cares what the initial intent was—if there even was one…all that matters is that the song somehow hits you on some kind of emotional level that’s difficult or impossible to quantify or describe. Then again, some songs have a very specific point…they tell a story…or they’re inspired by something that happened in real life and the composer is trying to capture what he or she felt and saw. And then there are the stories of the creation of the songs themselves…something happened for that song to be born…what was it?...and what were the circumstances, the serendipity, the accidents, the crazy coincidences that needed to manifest for a great song to come to life?. Let’s explore that…this is another episode of stories behind songs. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Connections 3
25-09-2024
Connections 3
It may not seem like it, but everything in this universe is connected in all kinds of unseen ways. Humans have always known that chaos is a capricious and fickle thing, something that can show up when you least expect it…i find this aspect of history fascinating. There’s the butterfly effect, the concept that a butterfly flapping its wings in China will set off a complex domino effect in the atmosphere that somehow results in a low-pressure wave blasting from Africa across the Atlantic causing a hurricane in the Caribbean. That doesn’t really happen…it was a metaphor created by a meteorologist and mathematician named Edward Norton Lorenz in 1963 when he discovered that a miniscule change in atmospheric conditions ---he ascribed a value as tiny as 0.000127—could make an enormous difference down the road …this shows why it’s so hard to forecast the weather…a little difference can add complexity and instability to a system. Remember that “treehouse of horror” episode from “The Simpsons” where homer accidentally turns a toaster into a time machine? ...he travels into the past where he manages to screw up the future multiple times by making the tiniest mistake. This is based on a 1952 short story by Ray Bradbury entitled “A Sound of Thunder” …a man named Eckels goes back in time and kills a dinosaur…when it returns to the present, everything is different. We hear about “black swan” events, a random thing that no one expects or could have predicted, yet it happens…and suddenly, everything changes. Covid-19 was an example of that…whatever spawned the virus—bats, infected animals in a wet market, a lab leak—started as something very, very small but ended up changing the lives of virtually everyone on the planet. We can also apply this sort of investigation to the world of music…if you pick a topic or thing, you can often trace it back to something that illustrates the wonderful and awful randomness of the universe. This is another episode that I call “connections”. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Lostwave
18-09-2024
Lostwave
Tell me if this sounds familiar…you’re sitting around with a bunch of friends talking about music when someone says “what’s that song with the thing at the beginning and the boom-boom sound effects?....it’s got that guitar—or maybe it it’s not… you know the one!”…and then the friend gets frustrated when he gets a bunch of blank stares. If you’ve ever worked in a record store, you know the stare because you’ve done it with the customer who wants you to identify the artist, song, and album from her little acapella performance…and then she gets mad when you come up blank. Same thing happens with me and with all people who work in radio….a couple of times a week, I’ll get an email like this: “i’m hoping you can help me find a song”…uh-oh…“I think it’s from the 80s but maybe not…there are some beats on a bassline with a melody that goes “oooooooeeeooo” or something…the video has a bunch of dancers in it…do you the song?”…uh, no…i don’t. Some attach audio files of them plunking out notes on an instrument—and there have been at least a couple of people whistling. But here’s the weird thing…sometimes—just enough times—you actually get it right…it’s like a tiny explosion in your head as your personal database throws up the correct answer…when that happens, it feels so good!...you solved a mystery and made someone happy in the process…i love that feeling. Things have changed in this century, of course…tracking down a mysterious song is easier than ever thanks to listening apps like Shazam and Soundhound…or you can enter some lyrics into a site like lyricfind.com. Even throwing a bunch of random words into the google search bar can get you started…I’ve found crowdsourcing a song identification problem through certain websites (reddit, for example) can sometimes be helpful. But even with all this technology and the ability to tap into the minds of music fans around the planet, some songs just don’t want to the identified…and this has become a serious game for music fans… “challenge accepted,” as they say. These mysterious songs that are missing from the musical record are part of a category that’s been dubbed “Lostwave”…and this is their story. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
A Brief History of Alt Psychedelic Rock
21-08-2024
A Brief History of Alt Psychedelic Rock
Here’s one of the most misunderstood and misused words in the English language: “psychedelic” … The word first came into use in 1956 when a psychiatrist named Humphrey Osmond was studying a new class of pharmaceuticals that had potential when it came to treating certain mental disorders… A chemical known as lysergic acid diethylamide—LSD, for short—had been extracted by a Swiss scientist named Albert Hoffman from a fungus called “ergot”…from 1943 on, medical professionals tried to figure out what it could be used for…it was even marketed commercially for a while under the brand name “delysid”… Then the CIA got involved, thinking that LSD could be used for things like interrogation, chemical warfare and mind control…but that’s a whole other story... Because the chemical resulted in people entering an altered state of perception, some started using it recreationally… artists discovered its properties and started taking acid trip, looking for inspiration and new creative roads… Then other psychedelics went mainstream, including mescaline (which comes from the peyote plant) and psylocybin (which you get from certain mushrooms) before just about all of these drugs were made illegal… Meanwhile, “psychedelic”—which means “soul-revealing” in Greek—became an adjective…it describes anything that could be described as mind expanding, anything that alters the way we perceive reality… Naturally, this quickly extended to music…psych became a thing in the 60s—that sound, feel, vibe, attitude continues today with alt-rock… This is a quick history of psych in the world of alternative music…   Songs used in this episode: Kula Skaker - Tattva The Soft Boys - Give It To The Soft Boys Teardrop Explodes - Sleeping Gas Echo and the Bunnymen - Bring on the Dancing Horses Siousxie and the Banshees - Dear Prudence Spaceman 3 - Revolution The Bangles - Hero Takes A Fall My Bloody Valentine - Soon The Verve - Slide Away Tame Impala - Elephant Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The History of the Record Store
14-08-2024
The History of the Record Store
Before we begin, I am very aware that there are people listening to this program who have never, ever set foot in a record store…they came of age musical after the Internet changed everything about how we hear about, acquire, and consume music… But remember this: for over a hundred years, the only way you could hear music on-demand was to own it…you had to purchase a piece of plastic for x dollars and for that price, you could listen to that music an infinite number of times for no additional charge… You made not just an emotional investment in that music, but a financial one as well…and dammit, you were going to make sure you listened to that piece of plastic until you wrung out a possible bit of enjoyment you could from it…otherwise, you’d have to come to terms with the fact that you wasted your money… There was another aspect to this emotional investment, too…in order to acquire this music, you had to leave your home, find your way to a record store, and search through all the shelves hoping to find something…if you were looking for something specific and it wasn’t in stock, you had to special-order it, which was a whole new level of emotional investment… And while you were at the record store, you interacted with records that you didn’t know about…just flipping through the racks looking at albums was an education in itself…maybe you’d go with a couple of friends, fan out across the store and then compare finds… Maybe you’d meet a stranger and strike up a conversation…and if you were a regular, it’s possible that the person behind the counter became a trusted source for recommendations…or maybe you’d go see an artist play live or for some kind of autograph session… Record stores are still with us, but there are fewer and fewer of them—certainly way less than the glory days of music shopping from the 60s through to the late 90s…and a lot of legendary stores and chains have disappeared forever… But while it lasted, it was pretty amazing…this is the story of the record store… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices