I used to be a big fan of “King of the Hill”…Hank Hill would often look at his son Bobby and say…

 “that boy ain’t right”

I know how he feels…you know when you encounter someone and there’s something off about them?...they’re not malevolent or evil in any way…they’re not a danger to themselves or anyone else…they’re just different…

They look at the world in ways you wouldn’t think to—which is kinda cool in a lot of ways… but at the same time it might be a bit—well, maybe “unnerving” is too strong…but at the same time, you’re not really sure what’s going on or how you should react…

This happens a lot with music…you encounter artist who has a complete unexpected attitude to towards the universe…this is to be expected…art can comes from a strange, uncharted place in the soul…and since all souls are different, you’d expect that some weird will leak out from some of the weirder souls…

And because alt-rock has a history of being open to different forms of expression, some of these souls have found homes in this province of rock’n’roll…and some of those have even had hit records…

Maybe we should look at some of these musical outliers…it’s a tense world…maybe this will help loosen us up…and hey, who doesn’t like a bent sense of humour from time to time?

Buckle in…this is about to get weird…and at some point, you will be thinking

“that boy ain’t right”
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Bent Bands

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.

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One of the most attractive things about rock is that it’s often dangerous…from the very beginning, rock has been about rebellion, a disregard for the rules, and thumbing its nose at the status quo…rage against the machine summed it up nicely with their song “killing in the name… f-you, I won’t do what you tell me…
There’s an edginess to rock that’s addictive…most of us live pretty normal lives, so there’s something cathartic seeing rock stars live out our wildest, most reckless impulses and fantasies…rock stars get to do what we wish we could…
When we go to a show, there’s always that hope we’re going to see and experience something a little unhinged, unpredictable, and primal…between gigs, we like to soak up the gossip and stories of bad behaviour from books, biopics, and social media…
The music is fine…but we also want spectacle on and off stage…
It’s all in good fun—until it’s not…there are limits to what we think is okay…legal lines can be crossed…and there are aesthetic, ethical, and moral areas that are just off limits…
But here’s the thing about some artists…they don’t care…they live in their own reality where the normal rules of society just don’t hold…we might see behaviours that are thoughtless, selfish, overly audacious, negligent, self-destructive, incredibly violent, and downright criminal…
For some, this is a lifestyle…for others, their dangerousness relates to illness, out-of-control passions, and, in some cases negligence and misadventure…
In short, there’s a subset of rock stars who are genuinely dangerous, not to themselves but others…and once we start seeking out these people and examining their actions, what we find can be terrifying on a series of different levels.
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The Most Dangerous Artists in Rock

The 1990s was a golden era for Gen X music fans…classic and heritage artists were still a thing, but it was clear that a new generation of rock artists was in control and was releasing music that captured the hopes, dreams, wishes, anger, and aggression of young people…we hadn’t seen that kind of thing since the 70s during the punk, post-punk, and new wave times…and for a little while, pop was not dominant…it was a time for rock-with-a-capital-R…
 Things really got into gear in 1991…momentum carried over to 1992 and 1993…and by the time we got to 1994, we were living in an alt-rock world…was it the greatest year for alternative ever?...maybe…let’s explore that…
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1994

Usually, the whole idea of being famous is to be, well, famous…you’re known by everyone…your face is everywhere…you’re a celebrity…and you get invited to the best parties, you get endorsements, you get free stuff…
Sure, there’s a trade-off…your right to privacy is greatly diminished…your every move is scrutinized…it might become harder to maintain meaningful relationships…and then there’s the constant pressure to live up to this thing you’ve become…this is emotionally draining…
After a while, you may start to resent this fame thing…the challenges and pitfalls can overshadow all the perks…
But you can also be famous and not famous at the same time…you just have to be very, very careful about revealing who you are…
There’s the story of Comte de Saint-German…he was some kind of adventurer in the 1700s who popped up throughout Europe…he spoke almost every language on the continent, knew a lot about chemistry, and was quite the musician….he was so mysterious and amazing that he acquired the nickname “the wonderman”…
Remember tank man?... He’s the guy who held up that row of tanks during the crackdown on Tiananmen square in China…no clue who this dude is…
Who is Satoshi Nakamoto?...is he the creator of bitcoin?...he disappeared from the internet around 2014 and stayed hidden…there are theories but nothing concrete…
Let’s riff on that a little bit more…can you be a famous musician and still be able to walk through the mall without anyone knowing you are?...yes…it’s difficult and comes with its own tradeoffs, but it can be done…plus you have to work very hard to maintain the art of hiding in plain site…
This is the history of anonymous artists from the world of rock…
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A History of Anonymous Bands

When something bad happens, we want to know why…the weirder and badder the event, the more we need to know…
It can’t possibly be random…someone needs to be responsible and held accountable…someone needs to be blamed…and there had better not be any loose ends…
Certain segments of the population have always been suspicious of the official story…forget the simplest of most logical explanation…these awful events or phenomenon’s are the work of some kind of secret cabal or organization pulling the strings of life on earth…it was a conspiracy…
For example, the most famous murder of modern times was the assassination of JFK on November 22, 1963…more than sixty years later, it seems like no one believes that lee Harvey Oswald was the lone gunman…
To be fair, they might be right…there’s been a lot of investigation into the JFK case over the decades…i’m one of those nuts who reads, watches, and listens to everything involved with the assassination…and I gotta tell you that i’m convinced this was the result of a loose need-to-know operation involving the CIA, the deep stage, Cuban exiles, and American mobsters…
There’s also something called “Occam’s razor” which dates back to the 14th century…this Monk—William of Occam—was annoyed at how people blamed supernatural forces when even the simplest thing went wrong…his answer to that was “look, the simplest and most obvious explanation is usually the correct one”…
But try that approach with people who believe the earth is flat and that we never went to the moon…Covid-19 was engineered by the media…and the Illuminati live beneath the Denver airport…
The world of conspiracy theories is a bottomless pit of weirdness…and when it comes to music, one of the deepest and strangest of these theories has to do with what happened above a greenhouse in Seattle on April 5, 1994…
Boy, have I got stories—multiple stories, in fact—about this one…in fact, it might be the most compressive study you’ve ever heard on the subject…this is uncharted: music and mayhem in the music industry, episode 12: it’s the ever-popular Kurt-Cobain-was-murdered theory…

Show contact info: 
X (formerly Twitter): @AlanCross
Website: curiouscast.ca
Email: Alan@alancross.ca
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Uncharted: The Ever-Popular Kurt-Cobain-Was-Murdered Conspiracy

Historians love to investigate causes and effects…it’s possible for a teeny-tiny seemingly inconsequential thing to set off a cascading series of events…and before you know it, the universe has changed forever…
Let me give you an example…a bunch of inept anarchists in Sarajevo were out to make a statement about the liberation of Bosnia and Herzegovina under occupation of the Austro-Hungarian empire…
When the Archduke Franz Ferdinand visited Sarajevo on June 28, 1914…two guys were set to toss a bomb at his six-vehicle motorcade, but they chickened out…then a guy named Nedeljko Cabrinovic threw a second bomb, but it bounced off the back of one of the cars…
The archduke, his wife, and the governor of Bosnia sped off—although the governor suggested that they take a slightly different route…the driver—Leopold Lojka—got confused and turned right instead of left into a very narrow street… 
When he tried to back up, the car stalled—and it stalled right in front of another member of the anarchist group named Gavril Princip…up until that second, he’d been discouraged that the assassination plot had failed and had allegedly slinked off to schiller’s delicatessen to get a sandwich and sulk about the afternoon’s failures…
(that’s not true, by the way…it just makes for a better story)…
Anyway, Princip’s target sitting directly in front of him, trapped…he pulled out his pistol and fired two shots…one hit the Archduke’s wife, killing her instantly…the other hit Ferdinand in the jugular…he died within half an hour…
This created a series of crises involving a web of alliances across Europe and within a few months, the great war had begun, resulting in the deaths of 20 million people and injured 21 million more…it led to the Treaty of Versailles , the humiliation of Germany, the rise of Adolf Hitler, the carnage of World War Two, the spread of Communism, the arms race, the cold war, and the world order as we know it…
If Leopold hadn’t hung a right instead of a left—or if you like the myth of Princip going for a sandwich—how would the 20th century have been different?...
Why am I recounting this?...because there are ways we can make connections like this in the world of rock….here…let me show you…
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