A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs - Podcast Rankings and reviews

This is a top shelf podcast of history and context, told with balance and sensitivity. The “song” in each episode is really just a destination of an often multi hour journey through all the threads that led to that song’s creation, often with a history of the artist deftly entwined in the narrative. It's amazingly deep, well researched, avoids hagiography, and most importantly: stitches the various threads of music genres and movements together that gives incredible context to the song discussed.

The sheer amount of research that must have gone into this podcast is mind boggling. Each episode, Andrew draws from his vast knowledge to tell compelling stories, built around rock music’s foundational songs. Despite the naming conventions used for the episodes, the scope of each episode is much broader than the titular song. They cover the life story of the musicians, their influences, the culture in which they operated, the business of rock music, and so much more. For music lovers, I cannot recommend this podcast highly enough.

I was a music obsessed teenager in the 60’s and consumed as much news as I could about what was going on at that time. Music journalism was hard to come by. Even buying a Rolling Stone magazine required a trip to one of the city’s few cool record shops back then. Mr. Hickey’s historical perspective, his exhaustive research and his storytelling ability expand so much on what I knew, or thought I knew. Just an amazing example of all that a podcast can be!

This one goes deep, and for those of us who enjoy that, this is fantastic.

Mr. Hickey does such a great job of creating context for each song / artist / time period. I’m not a fan of 50s rock ‘n’ roll, but I have a whole new appreciation of the context of the times: the music industry, the norms of the music industry at the time, etc.