"He starts way back at the very beginning—Episode 164, on the Velvet Underground, for instance, opens with John Cage going door to door in Santa Monica..."

"... offering to sell housewives lessons in music and art appreciation. Hickey plays no interviews—it’s just his research, painstakingly arranged to make a point. At first, these essays were of manageable length—half an hour for Episode 4, discussing 'Choo Choo Ch’Boogie,' by Louis Jordan. ('In the nineteen-forties and early fifties, the train still meant freedom, still meant escape, and even once that had vanished from people’s minds it was still enshrined in the chug of the backbeat, in the choo choo ch’boogie.') But the transcript of even that episode is four thousand words long, which, multiplied by five hundred, would give you two million words of content, and would best Gibbon by half a million. (Winston Churchill’s six-volume history of the Second World War clocks in at around 1.25 million words; the Bible barely hits three quarters of a million.) And, in any event, Hickey’s ability to control his material has begun to gloriously unravel as he has proceeded. A recent episode—No. 165—is devoted to 'Dark Star,' by the Grateful Dead, and it clocks in at well over four hours and 38,458 words. At this pace, Hickey will eclipse every literary project in history; the current plan is to reach the five hundredth song sometime late in this decade, but that presupposes he can keep writing what amounts to a book every fortnight or so. We shall see."

Writes Bill McKibben, in "A Music Podcast Unlike Any Other/Andrew Hickey has embarked on a heroic and wild effort to tell the history of rock music in five hundred songs" (The New Yorker). Much more at the link.

I'm thrilled to see a New Yorker article on "The History of Rock Music in 500 Songs," which I've been recommending to you since September 2021, with this post. There are 8 more posts of mine, just click on the "Andrew Hickey" tag.