Hey, it's Alan, and I just wanted to let you know that you can now listen to the ongoing

history of new music early and ad-free on Amazon music, included with Prime.

There are many ways to tell a story, a book, a movie, a TV show, a video, a comic book,

a radio show. You can also use music, of course. A ballad is a story set to music. A lot of music videos

have narratives. And for something more grand, you need opera or ballet or some kind of singing

and dancing musical. The other musical option is a concept album. These are records where all

the songs and all the imagery is somehow tied together by some kind of unifying theme or thesis.

The music and the lyrics and even the artwork come together to tell some kind of story.

Concept albums were absolutely huge in the late 1960s and 1970s, but then they fell at a favor.

The popular consensus seemed to be that they were nothing but overblown, pompous ego

trips that didn't hold together when subjected to intellectual scrutiny.

In the 80s and 90s, the concept album all but disappeared.

Punk and alt rock had a lot to do with its death, because these types of projects were seen

as vestiges

of old rock and needed to be expunged from the culture. And that's pretty much the way it was for

years. But if you look around today, you'll see that the stigma surrounding making a concept

album has pretty much disappeared. Everybody's doing it now, including a lot of acts inspired by the

very bands who tried to stomp out these lot of acts inspired by the very bands who

tried to stomp out these types of records back in the 80s and 90s. So I'll tell you what,

let's take a look at the history of all this. It's the concept album in Alt Rock.

This is the ongoing history of new music podcast with Alan Thras.

Welcome to our new kind of attention.

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