9/28/2023 0 Comments Youth with you season 3 theme song![]() ![]() At first, these essays were of manageable length-half an hour for Episode 4, discussing “Choo Choo Ch’Boogie,” by Louis Jordan. Hickey plays no interviews-it’s just his research, painstakingly arranged to make a point. ![]() He starts way back at the very beginning-Episode 164, on the Velvet Underground, for instance, opens with John Cage going door to door in Santa Monica offering to sell housewives lessons in music and art appreciation. Put simply, Hickey has selected five hundred songs that he thinks delineate the history of what came to be called rock and roll, and he is devoting an episode to each. It seems entirely possible that he was born to take on this particular project, and it also seems entirely possible that it will kill him, because in its scope it summons up Gibbon or Pepys. And, as it happens, he has the kind of mind-rare, I think, for a fan-that can make all kinds of connections across time and place. He’s the sterner kind, a judicious completist who tries to read and pigeonhole everything about a phenomenon. He is, in other words, a fan-but not the gushy kind. ![]() The only background necessary to grasp a bit of Hickey is his bibliography: he has completed a guide to the first fifty years of “Doctor Who” a book about “The Strange World of Gurney Slade” (a surreal comedy series that ran for six episodes on ITV in 1960) histories of the Monkees, the Kinks, and Los Angeles pop music of the nineteen-sixties an “unauthorised guide” to a comic-book series called “Seven Soldiers of Victory” and a three-volume catalogue of every track the Beach Boys have recorded. But my semi-obsession for the last year may be the best example of all: a somewhat obscure project called, quite accurately, “A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs.” It comes from an Englishman named Andrew Hickey, about whom I can say very little-when I wrote to ask him a few questions, he wrote back to say, “I am an *extraordinarily* private person and don’t want *any* of my private life in the public domain.” It’s possible that this stance may be shifting just a bit-he e-mailed those of us who support him on Patreon recently to say that he’d recorded an interview with Rubin for future broadcast on one of Rubin’s podcasts-but I support him entirely in his resolve: his project is so vast that it can only be compared to, say, the construction of the Oxford English Dictionary. For decades, I’ve listened with pleasure to one of the pioneers in this subgenre, “Sound Opinions,” which mixes music history with contemporary-record reviews, and over time I’ve gone on to enjoy “ Song Exploder,” “Broken Record” (interviews with musicians now handled by Rick Rubin and, full disclosure, edited by my daughter), the BBC’s nostalgic “ Soul Music,” and “Heat Rocks” NPR’s ever-expanding “All Songs Considered” universe could by itself fill your listening hours. In fact, it’s charmed-it takes music from where it often resides (in the background) and isolates it, highlights it, pins it down where it can be examined. in her car as she drives toward the suspect’s house) that were tiresome halfway through the first season of “ Serial.”īut talking about music? That works. But sometimes that fascination is about how badly message and medium can line up: Joe Rogan talking for many hours about his particular views of the world strikes me as a mismatch surely the right medium here would be “barstool.” Even the true-crime fixation that often seems poised to take over podcasting strikes me as ill-fitting: the difficulty in making something sonically appealing that almost by definition went unrecorded means relying on a series of tropes (the reporter leaving a message on an answering machine, the reporter listening to the G.P.S. This congruence is rarer than you might imagine though I’ve never made a podcast of my own, for instance, I’ve always been interested in the medium (and long ago helped conceive of what became the wonderful Web site Transom, where novice podcasters learn their stuff). We live in a moment of so many different mediums-Op-Docs, TikToks, Discord chats-and, as a result, we occasionally experience a pleasure approaching bliss when someone lines up one of those forms with material that fits it perfectly.
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