Ongoing History of New Music

I’m trying to imagine what it might be like to design an Amazon warehouse…a typical fulfillment centre is at least a million square feet filled with a zillion kilometres of shelving… And given that amazon is all about speed—the company is always trying to cut down the time between the time you click “checkout” and when the package shows up at your door—they’re always looking for the most efficient ways to find whatever you ordered on those shelves and stuff it into a box… The logistics of this is mind-boggling…not only do you have to categorize millions of items but you have to group them in such a way that things that are in the demand the most don’t create choke points for the robots that grab the stuff off the shelves… Music is a lot like an Amazon warehouse, except in some cases, it’s worse…not only do we have to categorize everything to a very granular detail, but we also have to make it possible for us to fortuitously stumble over something you might like… This is when we get into the whole idea of genres…at last count, Spotify has organized things into 2,424 different genres…there’s also website called “every noise at once” that lists about 2,000… This is both terrifying and fascinating…and it deserves study…this is a guide to genres, part 2…

Humans have always tried to make sense the world by putting things into neat little piles and filing them away somehow for further reference…it just makes things easier…   If you study biology, you’ll know about kingdoms, phylum’s, classes, orders, families, geneses, and species…libraries organize books with things like the Dewey decimal system and the universal decimal classification….and when you go grocery shopping, there are signs directing you to the right aisle or department…   This applies to music, too…we like to organize music into categories called “genres”… This used to be fairly easy…at the turn of the 20th century, we basically had popular songs of the day (vaudeville, show tunes and the like), folk and traditional music, religious music, and material from classical composers… Music has always separated and stratified and evolved, leading to sub-categories…within classical music, for example, we had baroque, chamber music, choral, and so on…. But as the population changed and as the recorded music industry began to take hold and more people began to buy records, music this fragmentation began to speed up… Jazz showed up in the 1910s and soon splintered into a bunch of different sounds…by the 1920s, we were hearing the origins of what eventually became all the flavours of country and western music…the blues records of the 20s and 30s was the forerunner of rhythm and blues… And then when rock’n’roll came along in the 50s, things started simply enough—it was a vaguely defined sound that you knew when you heard it…but the more time went by, the more complicated rock became…genres, sub-genres, sub-sub-genres, sub-sub-sub genres…derivations, offshoots, spin-offs, outgrowths, branches, by-products… And now that we’re all about streaming algorithms—things that require many, many different data points if they’re going to work properly, the number of genres has exploded…people are confused… That’s why we’re going to do this: strip back all the terms used to describe rock in order to understand the natural order of things when it comes to organizing things…this is the ongoing history guide to genres…

  Whenever you’re having a bad day, I want to think of this number…the probability of you existing—that you’re this sentient being, alive in this vast universe—is exceedingly small…in fact, it’s about zero… Your mom and dad have to meet…they have to stay together long enough to have kids…then that egg and that sperm have to connect, and so on… A guy by the name of Dr. Ali Binazir has calculated the odds of you being you…by that number is 1 followed by 2,685,000 zeroes… By way of analogy, here’s how he describes it… Imagine there was one life preserver thrown somewhere in some ocean and there is exactly one turtle in all of these oceans, swimming underwater somewhere.   The probability that you came about and exist today is the same as that turtle sticking its head out of the water — in the middle of that life preserver. On one try. Mind-boggling, right?...now let’s get even weirder…add in the chances of you getting into a band that becomes successful…and not just successful, but a group that becomes world-changing…add another six zeroes to that last number… Now consider this: what if you got into a second successful band that stays together for decades and also becomes one of the biggest things rock has ever seen…that’s good for, what, three more zeroes?... So in this completely unscientific extrapolation of Dr. Binazir’s estimation of the uniqueness of existence, the chances of Dave Grohl being Dave Grohl is approximately one in two quadrillion, 685 trillion…give or take…   This is the third and final part of our ultra-deep look at the guy…

When you reach a certain level of fame, you can expect that everything you do will be recorded somewhere…it’s out of your control…fans will do it…your management team will do it…your social media people will make sure that it gets done…probably someone at your label…and they’ll just keep doing it… Your life becomes one ever-expanding Wikipedia page…not that this is a bad thing…it’s just something certain famous people have to live with… This brings me to Dave Grohl…he is one of the best-documented guys in music…everything he’s ever does and continues to do is written down somewhere… There’s the Foo Fighters, of course…we know a lot about the Dave and the Foos…there was his time in Nirvana before that…a little bit has been written about them… Then there are the side projects, the guest appearances…the documentary work…the soundtracks…. we’ve even been introduced to his mom, who wrote a book about raising rock stars… Seriously…with all this attention, what else is left to tell?...well, you might be surprised…this is part two of a program I call “ultra-deep background on Dave Grohl”…

A couple of years back, i was invited to 606 studios, which is the headquarters of all things Foo…it’s the house of foo… This is where the Foo Fighters rehearse and record…it’s where they have band meetings…and it’s where they store a lot of their stuff…i had all five guys to myself for an interview…and there was no other way to describe them as a bunch of others… Taylor Hawkins took the lead on this…and the whole time Taylor was talking, Dave Grohl was sitting there with a big smile on his face…he knows he’s among the luckiest humans alive…sure, he’s talented and ambitious, but so many things completely beyond his control had to go right for things to turn out the way they have…it’s really amazing… Dave’s career has been extremely well documented—but there might still be a number of things that you don’t know about him—especially from the early, early, early years…let’s dig into that, shall we?