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17:42146K views · 14d ago · 17:42
Sometimes you just get an idea and you can't stop until you've made it happen. That's what this video is. For years I've been saying that the next step in developing my chord loop model is a corpus study, looking through a large set of randomly selected songs to see how they actually use chord loops, but I never did it because I never had time. Until now.
26:2772K views · 3mo ago · 26:27
What can I say about ABBA that hasn't already been said? The combination of Benny Andersson, Frida Lyngstad, Agnetha Fältskog, and Björn Ulvaeus (and, behind the scenes, Michael Tretow) were, for a time in the '70s, an unstoppable juggernaut of disco-infused pop. With some of the most polished productions in music history, ABBA's music has meant different things to each new generation, but it's never gone away.
23:2358K views · 4mo ago · 23:23
The early '90s were a wild time. Rock was coming out of the age of hair metal and arena rock, and into... well, it wasn't quite clear yet. Grunge was on the rise, hip-hop was breaking out, metal and punk were both driving themselves deeper into underground scenes, and dancing around the fringes was a weird little movement of happy-go-lucky jam bands.
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18:5622K views · 6mo ago · 18:56
How do we know how modern music came to be? We tell stories and imagine clear evolutions, but the process of cultural change is rarely simple enough to track with such straightforward tools. And yet we find them irresistible. The stories of the great innovators of centuries past, who laid the foundation for the modern musical world, have echoed throughout history, and they're great stories, but what do we do when we don't know what's true?
18:3671K views · 7mo ago · 18:36
More than any other genre, emo music, along with its close cousin pop-punk, captured the bizarre, directionless angst of adolescence in the early 21st century. Stuck in the shadow of global events we were too young to really understand, with new information technologies exploding our social networks, a stage of life that has always been confusing and disorienting was made even more so by the unique circumstances of the era.
21:31109K views · 9mo ago · 21:31
Gotye. To my generation, that name causes an almost pavlovian reaction, conjuring up a simple guitar loop that all of us heard thousands of times and could recognize from multiple rooms away. But what made Somebody That I Used To Know so infectious, and more importantly, why did we never hear from him again?
22:50252K views · 10mo ago · 22:50
Recently, I got called out. Or, ok, not called out exactly. More like tagged in. Another music youtuber, Michael Jesse, made a whole video about this bizarre mystery surrounding Linkin Park's Breaking The Habit, but he couldn't come to a satisfying conclusion, so at the end of his video, he asked for my opinion. Like, me, specifically.
22:07139K views · 11mo ago · 22:07
The New Wave movement is a fascinating cultural moment to me, with new technologies merging with older practices to create some truly weird and wonderful music. But within that scene is the Neue Deutsche Welle, a specifically German take on the genre that grew up in a country living more than most in the shadows of the Cold War, and perhaps its most famous members were the band Nena.
24:2038K views · 1y ago · 24:20
The history of metal music can be broken up into a couple distinct periods, and the early '80s saw the beginning of one of its most important phases. The Neoclassical movement would become one of the most influential ideas in metal, with its focus on elaborate, technical guitar work making it a clear forebear to subgenres like tech death, djent, and mathcore, and leading the charge was a young virtuoso named Randy Rhoads.
26:2977K views · 1y ago · 26:29
It's hard to pick just one song to pay tribute to the Prince of Darkness: With a career spanning over 50 years, Ozzy Osbourne has touched so many lives and made so much incredible music. But to me, and to a lot of metal fans, his greatest works were set in motion in 1979, when he met his greatest collaborator, Randy Rhoads. Though the two of them worked together for only a few short years, their innovative collaboration helped change the face of metal forever.
22:3927K views · 1y ago · 22:39
When I first started studying music, there were a lot of things that confused me. It felt like there were whole languages of practice that musicians all knew, and I had no idea how to speak any of them. With a lot of work and some very patient teachers, I eventually got fluent, but one problem that stuck with me is, in hindsight, a fairly simple question: What's the difference between 3/4 and 6/8?
21:4358K views · 1y ago · 21:43
Few songs are as misunderstood as Ironic. Or maybe few songs are understood as correctly while still missing the point. It's a straightforward song, but one fateful choice has made it the subject of decades of pedantic debate and mockery. Which, don't get me wrong, I love a good pedantic argument, but I do think it's a shame 'cause once you look past the word choice, there's a lovely song there waiting to be discovered.
15:1128K views · 1y ago · 15:11
A great song is about more than just having interesting parts. That's enough to make it good, but to become truly great, you need cohesion: Each part should flow seamlessly into the next, properly managing listener expectations and crafting a dynamic journey, but that's... I mean, it's hard. How do you do that?
24:2761K views · 1y ago · 24:27
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...
28:1864K views · 1y ago · 28:18
Does this matter? Probably not. But it matters to me. 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.
23:11184K views · 1y ago · 23:11
FIXED VERSION: Sorry about the audio issues, this one should be all good! 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.
25:2095K views · 1y ago · 25:20
I live in an endless void of my own creation. Watch this video on Nebula Bluesky Script And thanks as well to Henry Reich, Jon Hancock, Eugene Bulkin, Adam Neely, Dave Mayer, OrionWolfie, CodenaCrow, Arnas, Caroline Simpson, Michael Alan Dorman, Blake Boyd, Charles Gaskell, Tom Evans, David Conrad, Ducky, Nikolay Semyonov, h2g2guy, Andrew Engel, Peter Brinkmann, naomio, Alex Mole, Betsy, Tonya Custis, Graeme Lewis, Jake Sand, Scott Albertine, Conor Stuart Roe, ZagOnEm, רועי…
25:0558K views · 1y ago · 25:05
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.
▶️ Mentioned videos: Noah's video
24:1056K views · 1y ago · 24:10
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.
22:05111K views · 1y ago · 22:05
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?
24:21118K views · 1y ago · 24:21
But can one ever truly understand Wonderwall? Help support LA fire relief efforts Watch this video on Nebula 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.
🎵 Mentioned music: s merits, its meaning, and what a
14:55265K views · 1y ago · 14:55
I didn't know any of this. Did you? Watch this video on Nebula Did you know I've never made a Christmas video before? It's true. I have a complicated relationship with Christmas music, and I've always been hesitant to bring that into my work, but there are a couple songs that really resonate with me, and the Carol of the Bells tops that list, so I figured after all this time, I should probably try talking about it. And then I started reading up on the history and... y'all.
25:52225K views · 1y ago · 25:52
I've been thinking a lot recently about the presidency of George W. Bush. His two terms coincide almost perfectly with my teenage years, and watching how he led the country had a huge impact on my relationship with politics. These days, he's mostly rebranded himself as just a goofy little man who loves to paint, but that's not the Bush I remember.
23:5881K views · 2y ago · 23:58
Because being a father is hard sometimes. Watch this video on Nebula What does it mean to be a father? It's a question explored by many great works of art across the years, but in this current moment, one of the most thoughtful takes on the question must be Harry Chapin's classic ballad, Cat's In The Cradle.
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