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.

On May 18, 2017, Chris Cornell, singer for Soundgarden and audio slave, passed away in Detroit.

He had one of the greatest voices in rock, and his passing marks the end of one of the bands who made grunge and alt rock possible.

Chris leaves behind a tremendous legacy, and with that in mind, we've pulled out this ongoing history of new music show from the archives.

This was originally broadcast on November 29, 2015.

There's a misconception that it takes a lot of people to come together to create a viable music

scene. That's just not true. The original punk scene in New York consisted of a few dozen weirdos

who hung out at places like CBGB, the Mud Club, and Maxis Kansas City in the uglier end of town. The UK punk scene started with a similar number in the fall of

1976. Pretty much every London punk fit into a single club on Oxford Street for a two-night

music festival. Capacity at the 100 Club was officially 350, but there was plenty of room

to move around. The start of the English techno-pop scene

focused around a few people who hung around the Blitz Club in Covent Garden. The same can be said

for a dozen other scenes that resulted in sounds that eventually spread around the world. And that

includes grunge. Grunge started with maybe a dozen people in and around Seattle. Really, that's it. But within a few years, it expanded to become the dominant sound of Western rock for much of the 90s and into the 2000s. To become this big in such a short period of time required a swift and steady chain reaction. Among those dozen or so people were artists who were not

only to form successful bands, but multiple successful bands. And every one of these groups

exploded with such a great force that it was enough to prompt other neighboring music fans

to do the same. To prove my point, I would like to trace one of those chain reactions. And for the

purposes of this show, we will call the singularity of this particular chain reaction, Chris Cornell.

A lesson in grunge physics is coming up. This is the ongoing history of new music, the podcast

edition with Alan Cross.

About 175 meters below the border of Switzerland and France lies the biggest and most complicated

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