We are living in a second of such a lot of other mediums—Op-Doctors, TikToks, Discord chats—and, because of this, we on occasion revel in a excitement coming near bliss when any person traces up a kind of bureaucracy with subject matter that matches it completely. This congruence is rarer than chances are you’ll consider; even though I’ve by no means made a podcast of my very own, for example, I’ve all the time been within the medium (and way back helped conceive of what was the fantastic Internet web site Transom, the place beginner podcasters be informed their stuff). However now and again that fascination is set how badly message and medium can line up: Joe Rogan speaking for plenty of hours about his explicit perspectives of the sector moves me as a mismatch; no doubt the suitable medium right here could be “barstool.” Even the true-crime fixation that regularly turns out poised to take over podcasting moves me as ill-fitting: the trouble in making one thing sonically interesting that just about through definition went unrecorded way depending on a chain of tropes (the reporter leaving a message on an answering system, the reporter taking note of the G.P.S. in her automobile as she drives towards the suspect’s space) that had been tiresome midway in the course of the first season of “Serial.”
However speaking about tune? That works. In reality, it’s charmed—it takes tune from the place it regularly is living (within the background) and isolates it, highlights it, pins it down the place it may be tested. For many years, I’ve listened with excitement to one of the vital pioneers on this subgenre, “Sound Reviews,” which combines tune historical past with contemporary-record evaluations, and over the years I’ve long past directly to revel in “Music Exploder,” “Damaged Document” (interviews with musicians now treated through Rick Rubin and, complete disclosure, edited through my daughter), the BBC’s nostalgic “Soul Track,” and “Warmth Rocks”; NPR’s ever-expanding “All Songs Thought to be” universe may on its own fill your listening hours. However my semi-obsession for the ultimate 12 months could also be the most efficient instance of all: a slightly difficult to understand venture known as, moderately as it should be, “A Historical past of Rock Track in 500 Songs.” It comes from an Englishman named Andrew Hickey, about whom I will be able to say little or no—after I wrote to invite him a couple of questions, he wrote again to mention, “I’m an *extremely* non-public particular person and don’t need *any* of my non-public lifestyles within the public area.” It’s conceivable that this stance could also be transferring just a little—he e-mailed the ones people who improve him on Patreon just lately to mention that he’d recorded an interview with Rubin for long term broadcast on certainly one of Rubin’s podcasts—however I improve him totally in his get to the bottom of: his venture is so huge that it may possibly simplest be in comparison to, say, the development of the Oxford English Dictionary.
The one background essential to snatch slightly of Hickey is his bibliography: he has finished a information to the primary fifty years of “Physician Who”; a e book about “The Unusual Global of Gurney Slade” (a surreal comedy sequence that ran for 6 episodes on ITV in 1960); histories of the Monkees, the Kinks, and Los Angeles pop tune of the nineteen-sixties; an “unauthorised information” to a comic-book sequence known as “Seven Infantrymen of Victory”; and a three-volume catalogue of each observe the Seashore Boys have recorded. He’s, in different phrases, a fan—however now not the gushy sort. He’s the sterner sort, a even handed completist who tries to learn and pigeonhole the entirety a couple of phenomenon. And, because it occurs, he has the type of thoughts—uncommon, I believe, for a fan—that may make a wide variety of connections throughout time and position. It sort of feels totally conceivable that he used to be born to take in this explicit venture, and it additionally turns out totally conceivable that it’s going to kill him, as a result of in its scope it summons up Gibbon or Pepys. Put merely, Hickey has decided on 5 hundred songs that he thinks delineate the historical past of what got here to be known as rock and roll, and he’s devoting an episode to every.
He begins long ago on the very starting—Episode 164, at the Velvet Underground, for example, opens with John Cage going door to door in Santa Monica providing to promote housewives classes in tune and artwork appreciation. Hickey performs no interviews—it’s simply his analysis, painstakingly organized to make some degree. In the beginning, those essays had been of manageable duration—part an hour for Episode 4, discussing “Choo Choo Ch’Boogie,” through Louis Jordan. (“Within the nineteen-forties and early fifties, the educate nonetheless intended freedom, nonetheless intended break out, or even as soon as that had vanished from other people’s minds it used to be nonetheless enshrined within the chug of the backbeat, within the choo choo ch’boogie.”) However the transcript of even that episode is 4 thousand phrases lengthy, which, multiplied through 5 hundred, would come up with two million phrases of content material, and would very best Gibbon through part 1,000,000. (Winston Churchill’s six-volume historical past of the 2d Global Struggle clocks in at round 1.25 million phrases; the Bible slightly hits 3 quarters of 1,000,000.) And, in any tournament, Hickey’s talent to regulate his subject matter has begun to gloriously get to the bottom of as he has proceeded. A contemporary episode—No. 165—is dedicated to “Darkish Megastar,” through the Thankful Useless, and it clocks in at smartly over 4 hours and 38,458 phrases. At this tempo, Hickey will eclipse each literary venture in historical past; the present plan is to succeed in the 5 hundredth tune someday overdue on this decade, however that presupposes he can stay writing what quantities to a e book each fortnight or so. We will see.
Oh, and that summation doesn’t come with the bonus episodes of the podcast that he’s doing for his Patreon subscribers—an additional tune kind of each two weeks, the minor songs that don’t make his record of 5 hundred immortals however which he can’t endure (a completist, consider) to forget about. For example, just lately Hickey coated “I’m the City Spaceman,” through the Bonzo Canine Band, in an advantage episode that weighs in at forty-three hundred phrases and explores, amongst different issues, the crowd’s necessary influences on “Monty Python’s Flying Circus.” If all of this appears like an excessive amount of, it might be—aside from that it seems the historical past of rock and roll is a remarkably helpful means of telling the tale of the (English-speaking, for essentially the most phase) international in our time. There might not be a greater—and surely not more listenable—method to dissecting race in The us, the upward push of stripling tradition, the triumph and tribulation of consumerism. And Hickey does this admirably, in between explaining who used to be enjoying bass on what reduce.
The query of the place rock and roll starts is, in fact, as imponderable because the supply of the Amazon, and Hickey has reverent a laugh pulling down all of the conceivable contenders (“Rocket 88”? “Rock Across the Clock”? Giant Mama Thornton’s “Hound Canine”?). However his exploration of the tributaries is eternally illuminating—he starts with Benny Goodman’s “Flying House” and his live performance at Carnegie Corridor in 1938, which additionally featured Depend Basie, Lester Younger, Lionel Hampton, and Gene Krupa. He’s , above all, within the electrically amplified guitar solo that Charlie Christian performs in a recorded model of the tune a 12 months later. Hickey says:
[This solo] is not like just about anything else ever performed on guitar within the studio earlier than. Christian’s quick bursts of single-note guitar line are, to all intents and functions, rockabilly—it’s the similar more or less guitar enjoying we’ll pay attention from [Elvis’s guitarist] Scotty Moore 16 years later. It doesn’t sound like anything else innovative now, however, consider, up up to now the guitar had necessarily simplest been a rhythm device in jazz, with an overly small handful of exceptions, like Django Reinhardt. You merely couldn’t play single-note lead traces at the guitar and feature it heard over saxes or trumpets till the appearance of electrification.
The electrical guitar is the thru line right here, if there could be a motif for a symphony this absurdly large. Throughout the forties and fifties, Hickey follows this fuse because it sputters and flares, till in spite of everything, in October, 1962, it explodes with a bang that we nonetheless can pay attention—that used to be the month the Beatles launched “Love Me Do,” James Brown carried out “Are living on the Apollo,” and Booker T. & the M.G.’s launched “Inexperienced Onions.” (And Peter, Paul and Mary’s eponymous début album hit No. 1, and the Contours had certainly one of Motown’s first R. & B. smashes, “Do You Love Me.”) It’s at this level that Hickey’s episodes get started getting longer and longer; we’re at 1968 now, dwelling with all of the gods: Marvin, John and Paul, Stevie, Aretha. Ultimately, if Hickey’s well being holds up (he has described his dyspraxia, a congenital situation that reasons difficulties with motor talents and coördination, and he regularly writes his subscribers to mention that an episode has been behind schedule through sickness or fatigue), we can transfer previous, say, 1972, and into the lengthy technology of aftershocks; he admits that mentioning the tip of the rock-and-roll years is as arbitrary as naming its place to begin, however his (as but unannounced) 5 hundredth tune might be from 1999. After that time, he says, “more than a few flavours of hip-hop, digital dance tune, manufactured pop, and part a dozen genres {that a} middle-aged guy like myself couldn’t even title are having the cultural and business have an effect on that during earlier a long time used to be most commonly made through guitar bands.”