Prisoners of Rock and Roll

In this episode of Prisoners of Rock and Roll, we’re taking a look at celebrities who make music. Now, a lot of famous people have decided to make albums over the years. Some of them dabble in rock and roll on the side like a lot of us and use their celebrity status to get an album recorded. Others...

If you’re one of the thousands of people who listen to Prisoners of Rock and Roll – and shame on you if you aren’t – you know we do a segment in every episode called The Electric Chair where we kill a song for being terrible. Now, there’s a lot of awesome music out there. But let’s face it: there’s...

Alright, folks, it's time to dust off those platform shoes, grab your shiniest disco ball, and get ready to debate the ultimate question: Does Disco Suck? That's right, on this electrifying episode of Prisoners of Rock and Roll, we're diving headfirst into the glittery, dance-filled...

The Beatles were one of the most successful bands of all time, and critics loved them as much as their fans. Lucky for music fans, they also kept tons of recordings in their archives. The Beatles Anthology was a multimedia project that included a television documentary series, a book, and three...

Let’s face it. Rock and roll has always been dominated by dudes, but music is full of female trailblazers and trendsetters who rocked our world and left their mark on the industry. We’re talking about the soulful blues of Janis Joplin to Joan Jett’s punk guitar riffs. Debbie Harry embraced her...

Jazz was the soundtrack of America for decades – through prohibition, two World Wars, the Harlem renaissance, and more. From the soulful trumpet of Louis Armstrong to the haunting vocals of Billie Holiday, from the trailblazing talents of Dizzy Gillespie to the cool sounds of Miles Davis, these...

Are you ready to crank up the volume, tease your hair to new heights, and rock out like it's the 1980s? We're diving into the glitz, the glam, and the power chords of hair metal on the next episode of Prisoners of Rock and Roll.Now, let's address the elephant in the room. Hair metal...

Doo wop music. It’s the harmonized sound of street corner serenades and teenage romance. The irresistible sound that makes you wanna snap your fingers, sway your hips, and sing along with those timeless harmonies.This music broke down racial barriers years before the civil rights movement, as...

Kid Rock. Some love him, some hate him, but everyone has an opinion. He’s been around for nearly 25 years and has sold tens of millions of albums as his sound has evolved from hip hop to nu metal to country. But does he suck? That's the question we're going to argue today on Prisoners of...

If you’ve ever watched a movie, you’ve heard music from John Williams. He’s one of the greatest classical music composers of the last 100 years and one of America’s most accomplished musicians. His music has won 5 Oscars, 25 Grammys, and four Golden Globes. The only person with more Academy Award...

Released seven years after Aerosmith and Run DMC brought rap and rock together on Walk This Way, the soundtrack to the 1993 film Judgment Night was a groundbreaking moment in the crossover between the two music genres. Every song on the album was a collaboration between an artist from each genre...

It’s pretty easy to complain about the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame nominees every year – heck, we’ve done it ourselves more than once. But the nominees for the class of 2023 are out and it’s a pretty solid list. There’s a mix of artists from different eras and different genres. Some first timers and...

Chris Cornell was one of the best rock and roll singers of the last 40 years. He had an incredible four octave vocal range that showed could be incredibly powerful and delicate, sometimes in the same song. And the music he created was as diverse as his range. He came up in the music scene in the...

We are heading back to 1993 to to look at songs and albums that turn 30 this year. It was a solid year for rock and roll, with Versus from Pearl Jam, In Utero from Nirvana, and Siamese Dream from Smashing Pumpkins. Debut albums from the Counting Crows, the Cranberries, Bjork, Tool, Collective Soul,...

Live Aid was one of the biggest rock and roll concerts ever thrown. On July 13, 1985 dozens of some of the biggest acts in music performed at Wembley Stadium in London and JFK Stadium in Philadelphia to raise money to fight the devastating famine in Ethiopia. Organized in just 10 weeks, the show...

Les Claypool is a musical mad scientist and one of the weirdest musicians to have commercial success in rock and roll. He’s best known for his amazing bass playing and quirky sense of humor in leading the band Primus (and for doing the theme for South Park), but he’s also put together a handful of...

The Prisoners of Rock and Roll 3rd annual Christmas special. This year, we’ve decided to fill up the punch bowl, bake some cookies, and have a very special musical Christmas party. We’re opening up the studio and inviting artists who have recorded some of our favorite Christmas songs to stop by for...

Heavy metal music is usually about speed or power, or speed and power. It’s an incredibly diverse genre of music: two metal fans can have a conversation at a bar about music and quickly realize that there aren’t any bands that they both like. The lines between metal and hard rock and roll are...

We recently realized that we’ve been doing this show for almost two years and have rarely talked about modern rock and roll. That got us thinking – is rock and roll dead? The airwaves and Billboard charts are dominated by hip hop and country artists. The biggest draws on the concert circuit are...

Music is a huge part of any sporting event. Teams and stadiums use it to get crowds fired up and into the game, so much so that there are certain songs that you automatically associate with sports. In honor of the World Series, the Prisoners of Rock and Roll are holding our own music pep rally and...

Music is awesome. Have you ever had one of those moments where you start a song over at the beginning because you were doing something else and didn’t get to hear the whole thing? Or have you heard a song and are immediately transported back to some moment in time you associate with it? We have....

The Beastie Boys are so important to music because they never stopped evolving. They started as a hardcore band before putting down their instruments and becoming part of the golden age of hip hop. After being one of the first and most successful acts on Def Jam, they split with the label and took...

There’s no debate that Led Zeppelin is one of the most powerful heavy, blues, rock and roll bands of all time. But what IS up for debate is their originality. Several of their biggest hits borrow (or steal) from songs that came before them, mostly from African American blues singers who already...

The Sex Pistols were one of the pioneers of the music, fashion, and attitude of the punk rock movement. They were only together for about 2 ½ a half years and released just one album. But over that period, they were just as famous (or infamous) for their behavior as they were as for their music....

Woodstock was an important moment in pop culture, music, and the hippie movement. The organizers of the event originally planned it as a way to raise money so they could build a recording studio in New York. They sold tickets in advance but decided to let people in for free when nearly half a...

The drum is the world’s oldest instrument. Drummers can use their kit to lay down the back beat and help the rest of a band keep time, or they can use it in solos just like a guitar. In this episode of Prisoners of Rock and Roll, we’re taking a look at the best drummers in music history. We’re...

The Grateful Dead are among the most unlikely stars in the history of rock and roll. They created a culture and became one of the most famous bands in the world on their own terms. They toured relentlessly, made things up as they went and didn’t care about making mistakes. They never cared about...

Summertime is the right time for heading to the beach, going to the lake, or sitting by the pool. And you can’t do any of that without some music. In this episode of Prisoners of Rock and Roll, we’re talking about the best songs of summer. So open a cold beverage of choice, sit back in your beach...

Hey guys! Sorry you haven't gotten a new episode from us in a few weeks. Life outside of podcast land has been hectic, but we'll be back on July 11th. In the meantime, Check us out online, on Facebook and Twitter, or shoot us an email at prisonersofrockandroll@gmail.com. Learn more about...

Like rock and roll before it, hip hop gave a new voice to generations of people and became a cultural movement just as much as a type of music. In this episode of Prisoners of Rock and Roll, we’re taking a look at the Golden Age of hip hop. We’re going to look at the pioneers who started hip hop in...

The 1950s were an awesome time for music. And when rock and roll crossed paths with television, it blew the doors off of post-war America and changed everything it touched. These artists built the foundation of modern music and you can still hear their influence on artists 70 years later. Elvis....

Hair metal ruled the radio and the backs of denim jackets in the 1980s. A cornerstone of every hair metal band’s music output was a power ballad – this was a chance for the bad guys in rock and roll to show their softer side by slowing things down and singing about the women they love. These were...

Sub Pop was an independent record label that rose to fame by putting out albums by several Seattle rock bands before they got huge and had teenagers rocking Doc Martens and flannels. While the label is still around today, they’re best known for releasing early material from Nirvana, Soundgarden,...

When it comes to rock and roll, nobody does it louder or bigger than KISS. They took the idea that rock is about having a good time and then turned that up to 11 with their bluesy music, soaring solos, and some of the most recognizable looks in rock and roll.In this episode of Prisoners of Rock and...

By 1968, Elvis Presley he had been out of the music spotlight for a decade. He had only performed once since getting out of the army in 1960, and most of his time was spent turning out dozens of b-level movies that left him frustrated with his career. Then his manager and infamous jerk Colonel Tom...

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame has announced the nominees for the class of 2022. As always, the list includes some people who deserve to be inducted as well as some head scratchers. In this week’s episode of Prisoners of Rock and Roll, we’re talking about artists who have been snubbed by the Rock...

David Bowie defied every category society tried to put him in. He constantly experimented with new sounds in his music and releasing albums that were glam, proto punk, industrial, and plastic soul. He blurred the lines of gender, fashion, and sexuality. He also combined theater and music by...

Rush is one of the most successful progressive rock bands of all time. They’ve made 14 platinum albums and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame calls them “the patron saints of brainy, technical, ambitious rock and roll.” But we just don’t like them. Are we missing something? Do we have bad taste in...

1992 was a great year for music. Rock branched out into all sorts of different cool directions and we got to hear grunge and alternative albums from Alice In Chains, Faith No More, White Zombie, Soul Asylum, and the Gin Blossoms. We heard debut albums from Rage Against the Machine, Stone Temple...

American Pie by Don McClean is one of the most analyzed songs in rock and roll. This 8 and a half minute song looks at what happened to rock and roll – and America – in the decade after Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, and the Big Bopper died in a plane crash in 1959. Don McClean has never fully...

It's our second annual Christmas episode, where talk about some of the worst holiday tunes of all time. We discuss famously terrible songs by Kenny G, Mariah Carey, Paul McCartney, and the Carpenters. We also play the sequel to Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer and some lesser known songs...

In 1979, Pink Floyd released their amazing double album The Wall. It’s a rock opera about a dark and gloomy rock star named Pink who became so disenfranchised by the world around him that he built a wall around his life as he descended into madness. It’s one of the most famous concept albums of all...

Johnny Cash was a county music legend and one of the founding fathers of rock and roll, but he thought he was washed up by the mid 1990s. The Man In Black had lost his edge. His record company didn’t care about him any more, and he was playing small venues for a few hundred people. Then, he met...

Bob Marley was more than just a musician. He was a musical pioneer. An ambassador of Jamaican culture. A humanitarian, an activist, and a really competitive soccer player. He grew up in one of the poorest neighborhoods of Kingstown, Jamaica, but thought music could change the world. His songs talk...

Motown Records is one of the most successful and influential record labels in music history. Between 1961 to 1971, they produced a staggering 110 top 10 hits from artists like Smokey Robinson, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, The Temptations, the Four Tops, Gladys Knight and the Pips, and Martha Reeves...

MTV did a lot for music before they went off the rails and became a carousel of crappy reality shows, and their greatest contribution might have been MTV Unplugged. On today's episode, we're unplugging the mics and talking about some of the most memorable episodes of the show: Eric...

Exile on Main Street by the Rolling Stones is one of the greatest albums by the greatest bands in rock and roll. The story of how this record was made is a wild one. The band had fled the UK to avoid a huge tax bill, and they recorded most of it in the basement of a villa Keith Richards rented in...

We love our drummers and bass players, but the guitar is the backbone of rock and roll. It’s a relatively simple instrument that can sound so incredibly different in the hands of different people. Slash, Carlos Santana, Duane Allman, Bonnie Raitt, Joe Satriani, Hendrix, Jeff Beck, BB King. All...

The Ramones and The Clash are two of the most important bands in punk rock, and they put out two of the greatest punk rock albums of all time. In this episode of Prisoners of Rock and Roll, we’re debating their masterpieces -- the self-titled album from The Ramones versus London Calling by the...

Summertime is the right time for taking road trips, and whether you’re taking a day trip or loading up the car for a cross country adventure, you gotta have some tunes. On today’s episode of Prisoners of Rock and Roll, we’ve put together the ultimate road trip playlist. We’re going to play some...