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Happy Thanksgiving, friends! This holiday marks a few of my favorite traditions–football, gorging, and the airing of long-simmering family tension. It’s also a great time to reflect on history–the good, the bad, and the ugly. Casey Kasem’s Top 40 Countdown for Thanksgiving week of 1982 has a bit of all three. November 20th, 1982—The Week…
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“Apache” is a cornerstone in the foundation of hip hop. But how did a 1960 instrumental novelty by a British ukulele player become “The Hip-Hop National Anthem”? The story starts as so many hip-hop stories do—with a Burt Lancastar film. British songwriter Jerry Lordan was inspired to compose the instrumental after watching classic American western…
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In 1981, California-based power pop band Tommy Tutone released the enduring one-hit wonder–“867-5309/Jenny.” In addition to topping Billboard’s Hot Mainstream Rock Tracks chart, “Jenny” enumerated the single most famous phone number in radio history. According to songwriters Jim Keller and Alex Call, both the number and the titular protagonist were fictional. But some pop songs…
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Ribs Records, Jazz on Bones or Bones Music was a type of audio bootleg recorded onto discarded x-ray film as a way of cutting costs and proliferating smuggled Western music behind the Iron Curtain in the 1950s. Find out how ribs records were made and why they were important.
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I had all kinds of words and stories to go with this playlist but I ran out of time. So instead, I’m just gifting you a killer playlist of bloody bangers, a sonic backdrop for your costume prep, trick-or-treating, and candy gorging. (No judgement, but that candy was supposed to be for the children.) Anyway,…
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The story of Norwegian black metal band Mayhem may be the most disturbing story in rock history. You’ve been warned.
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The Bitter Sweet Saga of “Bitter Sweet Symphony”– How The Verve Struck Gold and Lost It All
Updated:The Verve saw massive success with “Bitter Sweet Symphony” in 1998. So how did the Rolling Stones’ ex-manager end up with 100% of the profits?
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1990 was a year of dramatic global transition. With the reunification of Germany, the toppling of the communist government in Yugoslavia, and the defection of the Baltic States, the Soviet Union was on the verge of collapse. Even as the Cold War drew to a close, Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait signaled the start of a…
