Show Notes
TRIGGER WARNING: This episode discusses minstrelsy and blackface and includes a recording of a 1902 ‘coon song,’ presented as historical evidence. Racial slurs occur in the song’s title and in the discussion around it.
In this episode, author Peter Doggett and host Nate Wilcox discuss "Electric Shock: From the Gramophone to the iPhone – 125 Years of Pop Music."
Peter explains how he came to take on such an ambitious project, why he started with the advent of recorded music rather than the advent of sheet music, the first format wars between Thomas Edison’s phonograph and Emile Berliner’s gramophone, the first recorded music superstars, and one unfortunate early hitmaker who found himself having to do a new recording every time a copy of his hit record was made.
This episode originally dropped in 2018.
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