Pop Life

2024 celebrates the 40 year anniversary of what the music industry and many music critics call the best year in popular music history. The King of Pop, The Boss, a Prince, the Material Girl, an Innocent Man, and many other unusual stars made the charts and the news, as in Huey Lewis & the News. Eric and Scott will guide you to see and hear why 1984 was so thrilling and why it�

One-hit wonders. It’s a phrase used in many areas of life, but is usually most associated with popular music. It refers to the artist that has one moment in the spotlight and then fades away as quickly as they arrived. It can almost be a badge of honor, even though most one-hit wonders tried to accomplish more. In this episode we talk about the most famous one hit-wonders as well

50 years ago, the streets of New York City were flooded with a new sound... Dance beats spun on turntables by a DJ. Spoken words delivered by a Master of Ceremony. Extended breaks causing listeners to move in ways never seen on a dance floor. In this episode we talk about a new music that his the streets in 1973 and has become the most popular music in the United States in 2023: hi

In the second half of the 1970s and first half of the 1980s, there was a genre of music that featured elements of smooth vocals and harmonic structure, jazz and a relaxed but distinct groove that was dominating the radio airwaves. Crazy thing, this genre didn’t have a name until the mid-2000s. On this episode of Pop Life, Eric & Scott talk about what defined this music, what

The second half of the 1970s was dominated by a style of music with pulsing beats, cool bass riffs, funk guitar, elaborate keyboard and string parts, courageous horn lines, iconic vocals and dance moves that still live on today. We remember DISCO. But in 1979, disco came to a sudden halt. As cool as disco was, it quickly disappeared from pop culture. Let's explore this sudden endin

In the 1990s, the music scene was dominated by grunge and alternative rock, hip hop and R&B, dance music, and at the end of the decade, boy and girl bands and Latin pop. There was also another kind of music that began dominating the airwaves in the late 90s, or should we say, dominating radio speakers in big automobiles, a type of middle of the “road” music called MINIVAN R

Taylor Swift recently became the first artist to lock down the top ten hits in one week. All the songs, including "Anti-Hero," (which is still in the Top 10) were from her album “Midnights”. Eric has been a chart follower forty years and is really impressed. But forty years ago, in the year 1983, there were equally if not more impressive records being broken and the 80’s “s

In this episode of Pop Life, we’ll talk about how sampling began, its role in hip-hop and beyond, and the technology and legalities that allow it to happen.Another episode of Pop Life by Eric & Scott.

In this episode we discuss a song that back in 1985, we had no idea we’d still be talking about 37 years later...and it’s impossible to ignore! It’s on one of television’s most popular shows, getting plays on the radio hundreds of times a week and being streamed tens of thousands of times a week. Given that it was not even close to placing as one of the top 100 songs of 198