12tone

A funny thing happens when you mention the 1995 Oasis hit Wonderwall. It warps whatever conversation it's brought up in, transforming it into a debate about the song's merits, its meaning, and what a "wonderwall" even is. It occupies a near-unique place in modern music culture, the poster child for the overplayed, a deeply controversial song that everyone seems to have an opinion about. Here's mine.

I am very serious about this. I'll be honest, I don't really have a good explanation for this one. I just wanted an excuse to do an excessively thorough deep dive through every possible three-note chord and I needed a framing device and this sort of happened from that. Sometimes that's how art works, y'know?

Never change, AC/DC. Do you ever just stop and think about AC/DC? I do. They fascinate me as a band because they simply figured out what they wanted to sound like early on and then just, like, stuck with it. Over the years, they've actively refused to evolve their sound, with Angus Young even openly mocking the idea that they'd want to, and yet they still made a huge mark on the world of rock, because the sound they were so stubbornly committed to was really, really good.

Who is the Devil? As a longtime rock and metalhead, I've heard hundreds of songs trying to answer that question, and the thing that strikes me most is how varied those answers are. As an artist, the Devil is whoever you need him to be, a symbolic chameleon taking whatever shape best fits the song. He's one of our most ubiquitous folklore characters, as slippery as he is powerful, and to better understand him, Polyphonic and I are turning our attention to one of the most definitive depictions of the Devil in rock: Sympathy for the Devil, by the Rolling Stones.

This was a... surprising experience. I'm always looking for ways to become a more engaged music listener, and one of the best ones I've found is listening games. I do these fairly often in my personal life, picking some restriction and making myself do it for a while to see what happens, but now that it's become a part of my musical practice I wanted to talk about it in a video, and to do that I had to pick something really ambitious, and long story short I wound up listening to a single song, over and over, every day for a month to see how that repeated exposure changed my experience of it. I did a lot of active listening exercises along the way, approaching it from every angle I could think of, and in one of my longest videos ever, I want to talk about what that was like and, more importantly, all the things I learned.

The early '80s were an exciting and scary time in the world of music. The first wave of truly affordable electronic instruments were just hitting the market, and pioneers from across the musical spectrum were trying to figure out what to do with them. These new machines were bulky and unreliable, but they offered powerful new ways to create and conceive of sound, and they turned out to be a lifeline for a struggling pair of artists who had just watched their musical dreams go up in flames. The remnants of the pop rock band The Tourists, Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart knew they had just one shot left, so they swung for the fences, and the result was Sweet Dreams.

Sequels. They're everywhere, from TV, to movies, to books. But not music. It's not that it never happens, but it's really rare compared to most other mainstream art forms, and as a true believer in the narrative potential of music, I find that kinda disappointing. So I set out to understand what makes them so uncommon, and what, if anything, we can do about it.

Rage Against The Machine are musical arsonists. They're loud, angry, and always ready to break stuff. But in all the noise, it's easy to loose track of the deeper messages that run through their work. So I want to pull one of those messages out. I want to look at Testify, a song that, perhaps more than any other in their catalogue, perfectly captures the hope of Rage Against The Machine, and see how they make something so jagged and jarring to listen to also feel... important.