LET IT ROLL

For eight years I made a podcast called Let It Roll. Five hundred–plus episodes, over five hundred hours, mostly long conversations with the authors of the best books on music history — the business, the technology, the money, and what it cost the people who actually made the music. Roughly 1917 to now, with some preludes going back to the Renaissance. Here's something I've never said out loud: I DELIBERATELY RELEASED THE EPISODES AS AN INCOHERENT JUMBLE OF WILDLY CHANGING TOPICS FROM WEEK TO WEEK TO FUCK WITH YOUR HEADS AND GET PEOPLE OUT OF THEIR MUSICAL SAFETY ZONES. Like The KLF, there was an occult practice to it — occult as in "hidden," not hoo-ha. Anybody who listened regularly was a subject of the experiment. And if I'm honest, it was also an attempt to break the psychological control my own musical obsessions held over me. Now I'm putting the whole thing back together in chronological order, so you can finally see what the argument was. That's happening over on Substack, along with a new subscriber chat where I'm writing about the parts I never finished — the interviews I couldn't get, the sources that got silenced by sinister forces, and the method underneath all of it. So you know what you'd be walking into: I'm not interested in arguing about which record is better than which record. There are plenty of places for that. I'm interested in trying to objectively weigh what actually mattered — how popular something was in its own era, how influential it turned out to be later, whether it's still relevant, what it did socially, what it broke open technically, and whether there was a lot of mayhem and riot around it. That last one is always a sign somebody was onto the real shit. If that's your kind of thing, come over to S U B S T A C K. L I N K I N R E P L I ES. One honest note about this post. I'm not going to be in the comments here. The conversation I actually want is the one on Substack, and I'd rather do that properly in one place than badly in two. But I do read this page, and if you've got something to say — a correction, an argument, a record I got wrong — I genuinely want to hear it. Come say it where I can answer you.