Ongoing History of New Music

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder—or in the case of music, the ear…what’s pleasant to one person is nothing but noise to someone else… This is where it’s good to have some patience…there are some forms of art whose beauty isn’t obvious at first…you need to stick with it…and after you’ve given it a chance and decided that it’s not for you, fine… But what about those times when something happens—suddenly or slowly and either on your own or with the prompting of someone else—and you realize that the weird music you’re listening to is actually pretty good?... This is the payoff…yeah, you really had to work for it—but it was worth it…with me so far?.. “Beauty” doesn’t mean “perfect”—at least in the technical sense…sometimes imperfection makes something more beautiful…or at least more interesting… This brings me to the topic of singing voices…this is a very subjective area…how many times have you said, “Listen to that guy!... I can’t stand his voice!...how did he ever get a record deal?... I mean, listen to him!” But then others hear the same thing and go, “wow…that’s really different…really expressive…it’s full of character and emotion…what a bold move giving this dude a chance to real millions of people… I love this guy!”… These are the kind of singers we’re about to review: guys with some of the most unusual voices in the history of alt-rock. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For a very long time—too long—women were locked in very defined roles when it came to rock’n’roll…girls were expected to look pretty and do little more than sing…okay, maybe shake a tambourine or something…but that was about it… And when it came to singing, “Just stick with conventional stuff, dear…don’t get any crazy ideas in your head…this is a woman’s role in rock, and you should stick to it…that’s a nice little lady”… But then along came punk rock in the 1970s…punk did many things for rock—including knocking down a lot of heretofore inviolable gender roles…the central tenet of punk was that anyone should have the right to say anything in any matter they want regardless of who they are…that included women and their right to self-expression… The result was fantastic. Freed from all the old expectations, women were free to reinvent themselves as musicians in a million different ways leading to a wonderful array of female performers… Some of my favourites are the ones who decided to spit in the face of virtually every rock’n’roll convention—women who (before punk came along and liberated everyone from the tyranny of “the way things ought to be”) developed styles that were different and unique and utterly unlike anything the world had ever heard before… Yes, some of them were an acquired taste and took a little getting used to…but once people figured out what they were trying to do and what they were all about, it was inevitable that they would become addicted, enchanted, and inspired…  We’re going to look at ten of these women…I call them “The Queens of Quirk” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

All right…I hope you’re ready because a lot of information—some of it important, some of it useless—is about to come your way in a rapid-fire way. Again, this is material collected over the last 12 months while I was looking for “ongoing history” ideas…some of this info doesn’t fit with the mandate of the program…some of it is orphaned from programs that never quite took shape…and some of these items were just too weird to gloss over, so I made a note…what you do with what you’re about to hear is up to you. Let us begin with 60 mind-blowing facts about music...the 2024 edition. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The way I see it, there are three types of bands that stretch across a spectrum…first, there’s the extreme sort, a group that will do almost anything to attract attention…you’re probably thinking of some names right now. Next to them are the traditional sort, and they comprise the vast majority of bands out there…these are groups that go out there, do their thing earnestly and honestly, and hope that this will be enough for music lovers…they occupy a huge part of this spectrum. And then we have the third type: the quirky, eccentric, and weird…these groups come in all sorts of flavours, from mildly bent to the gloriously stupid and the confoundingly weird…these bands go a long way into making music fun and unpredictable. Not all land with audiences—they’re too strange, not enough people get the joke, or maybe they’re just in the wrong place at the wrong time. But there can be a balance between being quirky and fun and having songs that have widespread appeal…they have just enough of the nerd factor to set themselves apart while not being so nerdy that they’ll turn too many people off. This is really hard to do…it takes songwriting skills, careful management of your image, and plenty of creativity and imagination, especially if you want to main things over more than just a couple of albums and touring cycles. Among the very, very, very best of this class of band is Weezer…they’ve perfected a formula that includes musical talent, wit, self-deprecation, left-of-centre thinking, a desire to have fun, a willingness to experiment, some clever marketing, and above all, to let their fans in on everything…it’s an approach that has worked very, very well for decades. This is part two of “Rivers Cuomo and Weezer: alt-rock’s nerd heroes”. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices