Every once in a long while, a new genre of popular music emerges, evolves a little bit and then stays almost exactly the same with only the slightest of variations…not that there’s anything wrong with that…a formula is discovered…it seems to work…so why change it?...

Old-school 12-bar blues is an example…it features one of the most common chord progressions in Western music…the style of lyrics, phrasing, structure, and duration have been pretty much standard since the days of gospel and spirituals and African-based oral traditions…an Alabama musician named W.C. Handy was the first to codify 12-bar blues playing around 1905…

Ska might be an example…it has many different flavours, but there are common components under the hood, rooted in playing on the off-beat—the “one” and “three” instead of the “two” and “four”…

You might say the same about Reggae and its foundations in the debow beat, although you’ll probably get a little pushback from fans…

Lemme throw this into the mix: garage rock…two or three chords played on guitar, bass, and drums with a loose, rebellious vibe…nothing too complicated…it’s just gotta feel good…

And here’s one more that might not spring to mind right away: surf music…it, too, can come in different forms…as a type of garage rock…it can be punky…it can be hardcore…it’s great for skateboarding or snowboarding…and yes, it’s also about the beach, the boards, and the swells…

But it’s also more than that…it’s about guitars, amps, pedals, amps, cars, girls, beer, and parties…it can feature vocals but it might be best experienced as instrumentals….

There’s a lot more to surf music than you might think…and its importance and influence and legacy goes far beyond the beach...…here…let me show you.

Show contact info:

X (formerly Twitter): @AlanCross

Website: curiouscast.ca

Email: [email protected]

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I want you to take a deep breath…

It’s only when we focus on our breathing that we realize how important it is that 21% of our atmosphere is made up of oxygen…that is the ideal amount…

Drop too, say 15%, and it would cause all sorts of mental and physical impairment…if the oxygen levels were to increase suddenly, we’d suffer “oxygen toxicity,” meaning that our cells would oxidize, leading to exhaustion and death…

Meanwhile, spiders, roaches, and other crawly things would grow bigger and bigger because of their biology… if you think we have a wildfire problem now, imagine if those fires had more oxygen as fuel…

So, unless you’re hoping for a burning planet covered in spiders the size of a compact car, 21% it is…

Music is such an integral of our lives that we have no idea how important it is…I can even tell you…a study by Deezer, the French streaming service, says that to maintain a healthy lifestyle, we should listen to 78 minutes of music per day…

The study broke things down even further…that 78 minutes should be portioned this way for maximum benefit…

·      14 minutes of uplifting music to exercise your happiness.

·      16 minutes of calming music

·      16 minutes of music that counteracts sadness.

·      15 minutes of motivational music to help with concentration.

·      And 17 minutes of music that will help you deal with anger.

A few suggestions come with the study, too. Abba’s “Dancing Queen” is an example of the sort of happy music we should appreciate…when it comes to anger management, AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell” is about perfect, although certain tracks from Rammstein and Metallica are good, too—and Mozart for some reason…

This stuff fascinates me…and whenever I run across a study or some research that connects music and the brain and our overall mental and physical help, I bookmark it…and I’ve bookmarked so much that we can now do a full program on it…

This is another instalment of “The Medical Mysteries of Music”

Show contact info:

X (formerly Twitter): @AlanCross

Website: curiouscast.ca

Email: [email protected]

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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 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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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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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: [email protected]

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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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For the first 60 years of the recorded music industry, things sounded awful…the quality of the recordings people had to put up with were terrible…the old 78 rpm records played on gramophones were no match when it came to hearing music live…we just didn’t have the technology to capture audio so that when we listened back, it sounded real…

That began to change in the late 1940s with the introduction of vinyl records: the 33 1/3 rpm vinyl album and the 7-inch 45 rpm single…it changed further with the switch to magnetic recording tape in the early 1950s…

New microphones, better tape machines, and further understanding of acoustics when it came to building recording studios…then came better turntables, amplifiers, and speakers…recorded audio started to sound more and more like the real thing…

In the middle 50s, people started to hear about something called “high-fidelity”…it was a marketing term invented by the audio industry to describe equipment capable of producing music properly…

Once stereo recordings came along in the late 50s, music fans went wild and started buying hi-fi gear for their homes…then their cars…and then for going mobile…

It was an endless pursuit for perfect sound, music that was loud, clean, clear, and accurate…meanwhile, recording studios were constantly in a state of retrofitting and refurbishment because artists demanded the best for their music…

That was the 1970s…in the 1980s, there was a reaction, a backlash, an artistic regression, after the introduction of the compact disc…for some, this music was too perfect, too shiny, too unreal…

They felt it contained none of the imperfections that made it human…beauty, they thought, was in the mistakes…that’s what made music authentic…audio quality mattered less than being able to listen to music that obviously came from the heart…

These music fans even had a name for this approach…if the best-sounding audio was high-fidelity, then what they wanted was the opposite: low-fidelity…and that aesthetic continues today…this is the history of Lo-Fi music…

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In the summer of 2006, a young Calgary woman was on top of the world. She had a supportive family, amazing friends and a great job. But life as she knew it came to an abrupt stop in the middle of the night on August 6, 2006. In this episode, Global News senior crime reporter Nancy Hixt shares details of a violent attack- a story that’s every woman’s worst fear.

www.calgarycrimestoppers.org - reference case # 06274598

https://newsroom.calgary.ca/sexual-assault-case-from-2006-has-new-lead/

Contact:

Instagram: @nancy.hixt

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/NancyHixtCrimeBeat/

Email: [email protected]

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Streaming is a very cool way to access tens of millions of songs with a few pokes on your phone…the idea of being able to listen to virtually any song from any era of human history with such ease is something akin to magic…

The downside of streaming is that it doesn’t provide any context to what we’re hearing…a continuous stream of music tells us nothing about the artist or the song…it’s just music, standing alone with nothing to anchor it to anything…

It was different in the old days…if you bought an album, dammit, that was an investment…you paid money for it, which created a fiscal relationship with the artist…that meant you were more likely to stick with an album and get deeper into the artist and the songs…otherwise, you had this nagging feeling you had wasted your money…

Context means so much to the enjoyment of music—which is probably a reason you’re listening to me right now…you want more than the notes that make up a song…

Yeah, sometimes a song is just a song…you know, it’s got a good beat, you can dance to it and maybe sing along…it doesn’t really mean anything more than that…

But some songs are very deep…they actually form some part of a historical record…they tell the story of real people, real events and the things that came after…

That’s where we’re going with this show: everything we’re about to hear is based on fact, on history, on actual events…and you may be shocked by the truth beyond songs that you’ve been digging all your life…this isn’t anything you’re gonna get from a stream…trust me…

Songs in this episode:

The Clash - White Riot

Boomtown Rats - I Don't Like Monday's

U2 - Sunday Bloody Sunday

REM - What's the Frequency Kenneth?

Pearl Jam - Jeremy

Nirvana - Polly

The Tragically Hip - Wheat Kings

Filter - Hey Man, Nice Shot!

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