EPISODE · Oct 19, 2022 · 37 MIN

Rock's Greatest Disasters

from Ongoing History of New Music · host Curiouscast

Humanity has always been set by disasters, whether they’ve been acts of god or something we somehow brought on ourselves...war, disease, earthquakes, famine, floods, volcanic eruptions, fire, plane crashes, industrial accidents, sinking ships, extreme weather... The worst disaster of all time?...probably the influenza epidemic of 1918 to 1920...it’s possible that up to 100 million died during that three-year period... Then again, world war ii was worse....by some estimates, the death toll was 120 million...and the black death of the 14th century was bad...it may have claimed up to 200 million lives or about 20% of the population of the planet... Then there the kinds of things that happen when people are supposed to be having fun...on February 14, 2004, the roof of an indoor waterpark in Moscow collapsed, killing 28 people... On December 8, 1863, up to 3,000 people were killed in a fire at a church celebration in Santiago, Chile... Or how about this: sometime around the year 283, a wall at Circus Maximus, the chariot-racing stadium in Rome collapsed...it’s said that 13,000 spectators died...and that happened about 150 years after a previous collapse where there were around 1500 deaths... The universe is gonna do what the universe is gonna do...you can be as careful as humanly possible yet still get caught up in something awful... This applies to the world of rock, too...it has seen its own situations where there has been loss of life...they need to remembered and memorialized to we can minimize the chances of these things ever happen again... This is a list of rock’s greatest disasters... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices