cover of episode 60 Mind-Blowing Facts About Music in 60 Minutes: The 2023 Edition

60 Mind-Blowing Facts About Music in 60 Minutes: The 2023 Edition

2024/1/17
logo of podcast Ongoing History of New Music

Ongoing History of New Music

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Shownotes Transcript

I’m not gonna lie…I’m addicted to listicles…not the click-baity ones that have sub-headlines like “and you won’t believe #6!”…I’m only interested in the ones that offer interesting or weird facts…usually that means Buzzfeed, Bored Panda, Upworthy, Laughing Squid—you know the kind…“today I learned” and “I was today years old when I discovered”…that sort of thing…

Here's one…there is a species of moth that lives in the amazon jungle that drinks the tears of sleeping birds…it’ll sit on a bird’s neck, stick a long proboscis under the bird’s eyelid, and slurp away the tears…I know! Right?...

Here’s another: until the 1800s, polite people didn’t eat bananas because their shape made them an “immoral fruit”…importers had to hire women for ads showing them eating bananas to prove that there was nothing wrong with them…

Okay, okay…one more…and I’m sorry if this is going to trigger you…if you take public transit, approximately 15% of the air you breath contains human skin…all those floating specs you see in the sunlight?...skin…gross, but I love this stuff…

A big part of my job is searching for facts, although most of what I’m looking for involves music…I’ve heard that if you play hip-hop to a wheel of cheese as it’s maturing, the cheese will have a stronger flavor and aroma…as late as 1948, you could win an Olympic medal for music…and if you want to play music for you dog, choose Reggae…scientists have proven that that’s the music they like the most…

Over the course of the year of researching and writing this program, I run across all kinds of weird facts…most I can incorporate into various shows…others, not so much…

But these orphaned facts need a home…so once every 12 months, I devote a program to clearing out all this information from post-it notes, highlighted passages in books, pages torn from newspapers and magazines, and various files on my computer and throw them all into one program…what you do with this stuff is up to you…this is the annual show I call “60 mind-blowing facts about music in 60 minutes”…

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