7182: Prince — The Paradox of Total Control and Purple Genius | pplpod
Prince played twenty-seven instruments on his debut album. He wrote, produced, and performed nearly everything himself, maintaining that control for his entire career. The paradox: the man who control...
16 Kesä 20min
7181: Modest Mussorgsky — The Aristocrat Who Wrote Masterpieces While Living in Squalor | pplpod
Modest Mussorgsky was born into Russian aristocracy and died in a charity hospital wearing a borrowed dressing gown. Between those points he composed some of the most original music of the nineteenth ...
16 Kesä 20min
7180: Felix Mendelssohn — The Prodigy Who Rescued Bach from Two Centuries of Silence | pplpod
Felix Mendelssohn composed a string octet at sixteen that professionals twice his age could not match. But his most consequential act was conducting Bach’s St. Matthew Passion in 1829, a work unheard ...
16 Kesä 18min
7179: Ma Rainey — The Fearless, Unapologetic Mother of the Blues | pplpod
Ma Rainey was performing the blues before the genre had a name. She dressed in gold and ostrich feathers, sang about desire with a frankness that scandalized polite society, and built a touring career...
16 Kesä 20min
7178: Jimi Hendrix — The Quiet Genius Beyond the Burning Guitar | pplpod
The defining image of Jimi Hendrix was a guitar on fire at Monterey Pop. The reality was a shy, soft-spoken man who practiced obsessively, heard music in colors, and pushed electric guitar technique f...
16 Kesä 24min
7177: The Rolling Stones — How Rock’s Greatest Outlaws Built an Empire on Rebellion | pplpod
The Rolling Stones were marketed as the band your parents should fear. What started as genuine blues devotion became the most carefully managed outlaw brand in entertainment — a billion-dollar empire ...
16 Kesä 20min
7176: Muddy Waters — How a Mississippi Sharecropper Plugged In and Electrified the Blues | pplpod
Muddy Waters was recorded on a Mississippi plantation by Alan Lomax for the Library of Congress. Within a decade he had moved to Chicago, plugged in an electric guitar, and invented a sound that becam...
16 Kesä 24min
7175: Madonna — How She Hacked the Music Industry and Never Stopped Reinventing | pplpod
Madonna arrived in New York in 1977 with thirty-five dollars and a conviction she would be the biggest star in the world. Within seven years she was exactly that, maintaining her position through rele...
16 Kesä 19min
