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What In The World

  What in the World? – Can't Get There From Here and the Strange World of 1985 June 1985. The world was getting smaller. Television was making everything immediate. MTV was turning musicians into visual icons. Compact discs and videocassettes were changing how we consumed entertainment. The Cold War was still very much alive, but something was beginning to shift in Moscow. And somewhere between the optimism of Live Aid, the hysteria surrounding New Coke, and the increasingly polished world of 1980s pop culture, four musicians from Athens, Georgia released a song that sounded like it had wandered in from somewhere else entirely. Can't Get There From Here. It was R.E.M. being decidedly un-R.E.M. And perhaps that was exactly the point. Welcome to 1985 If you wanted to understand the mood of 1985, you could hardly have picked a stranger year. The Cold War was still casting a shadow over everything. But in March, Mikhail Gorbachev became leader of the Soviet Union, beginning a perio...
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Changing the Rules

  Five Rock Albums That Refuse to Behave There is a particular kind of album that makes you stop and listen twice. Not necessarily because the songs are loud. Not because the band is obscure. And not even because the record is some undiscovered masterpiece hiding in a dusty record shop. It is because you think you know what you're getting... and then the album changes the rules. A punk record suddenly sounds like psychedelic rock. An indie album starts throwing synthesizers at you. A supposedly straightforward pop record has something decidedly strange lurking underneath. A song you've been listening to for three minutes suddenly swerves into somewhere completely unexpected. That's the fun of digging deeper. Some albums announce exactly what they are from the opening seconds. Others leave the door slightly ajar and invite you to find out for yourself. Here are five records that do exactly that. 1. The Dismemberment Plan — Emergency & I (1999) Let's start with an alb...
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If You Know, You Know

  If You Know, You Know - The Secret Language of Rock Inside Jokes, Rituals & Band Lore Only True Fans Know You know you're dealing with a legendary band when the fans start speaking another language. A phrase gets shouted from the crowd. A strange symbol appears on a T-shirt. Somebody makes a bizarre gesture and suddenly everyone around them knows exactly what it means. To an outsider, it can look ridiculous. To the initiated, it's a badge of honour. Because rock music has never just been about the songs. Over the decades, bands and their fans have built their own little worlds — complete with rituals, mascots, strange traditions, running jokes and pieces of mythology that can be almost impossible to explain to someone standing on the outside. And that's where things get interesting. So forget the greatest hits for a moment. Let's go behind the curtain and discover some of the secret language of rock. The Ramones — “Gabba Gabba Hey!” Few phrases announce your alleg...
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Rocking the Iron Curtain

  Rocking the Iron Curtain The guitars they weren't supposed to hear Imagine being a teenager in East Berlin, Warsaw, Prague, Bucharest or Leningrad during the Cold War. Somewhere beyond the border, rock music was exploding. Hendrix was bending guitars into strange new shapes. The Beatles were changing everything. Led Zeppelin were making amplifiers sound like earthquakes. Punk was about to arrive and tear the rulebook to pieces. But you couldn't simply walk into a record shop and buy whatever you wanted. So you improvised. You listened to radio signals from across the border. You copied records onto cassettes. You traded tapes with friends. You waited for somebody who had relatives in the West to bring back a precious piece of vinyl. And sometimes, incredibly, you managed to get your own music recorded and pressed. The Iron Curtain was supposed to keep Western culture out. Instead, it helped create one of the strangest and most fascinating underground rock scenes in musical hi...
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When the Amplifiers Go Silent

  When the Amplifiers Go Silent: 14 Acoustic Hidden Gems That Prove Less Is More "The loudest songs in rock history aren't always the ones played the loudest." Rock music is often associated with towering stacks of amplifiers, screaming guitars, thunderous drums, and enough volume to shake the foundations of a stadium. Yet some of the genre's most powerful moments happen when all of that is stripped away. Remove the distortion, lower the volume, and suddenly there's nowhere to hide. An acoustic guitar doesn't forgive weak songwriting. It doesn't cover cracks with production tricks. What remains is the song itself—its melody, emotion, and soul. From the coffeehouse pioneers of the 1960s to the unforgettable MTV Unplugged era and today's modern acoustic storytellers, some artists discovered that their most moving work emerged when they turned everything down. In true Hidden Gems fashion, we're avoiding the obvious choices. No greatest hits. No overpl...
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