It’s not just me, right? The world is getting weirder. Between ever-shortening news cycles, social media, and the general vibe of the planet, we wake up each day wondering, “What new hell will befall us over the next 12 hours?”
It’s not always bad, but weirdness is everywhere. For example, there’s a museum in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, commemorating the time in 1889 when a dam broke, causing a flood that killed 2,200 people. This year, that museum was closed due to flooding.
How about this one: a guy driving an ice cream truck in Las Vegas was attacked because someone thought it was an “ICE” truck—an Immigration and Customs Enforcement vehicle filled with unidentified masked dudes looking to snatch people off the street and deport them to El Salvador or Uganda or wherever.
Meanwhile, this is how they do it in Iceland: there was a proposal to sentence low-risk criminal offenders to stocking shelves in grocery stores. As someone who did just that for five years, I might consider this cruel and unusual punishment.
My job involves filtering through a million news sources looking for information about music. Much of what I find ends up in Ongoing History of New Music programs and podcasts. But I also run across a lot of stuff that just doesn’t fit for whatever reason.
Maybe it’s off-brand. Maybe it’s just a one-off fact that I can’t use at the moment. Or maybe it’s just too weird for anything I’m working on.
But data should never be discarded or ignored because you never, ever know when you’ll need it. If that weren’t the case, we’d all have fewer than 500 pictures on our phones.
So what happens is that I set aside all this orphaned information throughout the year. And then when we get to December, I drop it all into a single program so it can be disseminated for the greater good—at least I hope so.
So here we go again: it’s the annual “60 Mind-Blowing Facts About Music in 60 Minutes,” the 2025 edition.
Songs heard on this show:
- Devo, Uncontrollable Urdge
- Kate Bush, The Man with the Child in his Eyes (Live)
- Happy Mondays, Step on
- Deftones, Change in the House of Flies
- Tori Spirit, Smells Like Teen Spirit
- The Smiths, This Charming Man
- Joy Division, She’s Lost Control
- Oasis, Wonderwall (Live)
- My Chemical Romance, Helena
This is Eric Wilhite’s playlist.
The Ongoing History of New Music can be heard on these stations. Don’t forget that there’s a podcast version, too, in case you miss any episodes. Get them for free wherever you get your podcasts.
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