Chapter 01 — Today in music
On a day like today July 20
1965
'Like a Rolling Stone' meets the world: six minutes that broke every rule
On July 20, 1965, 'Like a Rolling Stone' was released — the six-minute single with which Bob Dylan pulverized radio formats and raised rock lyrics to combat literature. Al Kooper's organ, smuggled into the session almost by accident, became immortal. For many, it remains the most important song ever recorded. Hard to argue otherwise.
Bob Dylan
1940
Tony Allen is born: the drummer who invented half of afrobeat
On July 20, 1940, Tony Allen was born in Lagos. He taught himself to play by listening to jazz records on the radio and ended up as the engine of Fela Kuti's band for fifteen years. Afrobeat came out of that meeting: Fela supplied the politics and the horns, Allen invented an impossible pattern that sounded like four drummers at once. Fela himself admitted the genre would not exist without him. Brian Eno called him the greatest drummer who ever lived.
Tony Allen
Fela Kuti
1947
Carlos Santana is born, the guitar that taught rock to speak Spanish
On July 20, 1947, Carlos Santana was born in Autlán, Mexico — the guitarist who fused blues, psychedelic rock and Afro-Latin rhythms into a new language. His Woodstock performance, when almost nobody knew him, is among the festival's most legendary. From 'Oye Como Va' to 'Supernatural', his sustained, unmistakable tone is a signature recognizable from a single note.
Carlos Santana
1964
Chris Cornell is born, the voice that gave grunge its vertigo
On July 20, 1964, Chris Cornell was born in Seattle, owner of one of the most powerful and expressive voices rock ever produced. Fronting Soundgarden he turned his city's scene into a worldwide phenomenon, and with Audioslave and his solo career he proved his nearly four-octave range fit any territory. Songs like 'Black Hole Sun' or 'Like a Stone' carry his unmistakable stamp: intensity, melody and a melancholy that ran through everything. Grunge had many faces, but few throats like his.
Chris Cornell
Soundgarden
1968
Kool G Rap is born: the rapper's rapper hardly anyone heard on the radio
On July 20, 1968, Nathaniel Wilson was born in Queens. As Kool G Rap he pushed rhyming onto another technical level in the late eighties, stacking several rhymed syllables inside a single line when everyone else was still rhyming only the last word. He never had a big hit, but Nas, Jay-Z, Eminem and Big Pun all cite him as the starting point. His crime narratives founded a whole subgenre that others sold by the million.
Kool G Rap
1924
Mort Garson is born, and his synthesizer plays on television as men walk on the Moon
On July 20, 1924, Mort Garson was born in Canada — an arranger of commercial songs who bought one of the first Moog synthesizers and set about using it for everything nobody else had thought of. In 1969, CBS broadcast his music during the Moon landing coverage, on his own birthday. Years later he recorded "Mother Earth's Plantasia", an album composed explicitly to be played to houseplants.
Mort Garson
1956
Paul Cook is born, the rhythmic engine of the Sex Pistols
On July 20, 1956, Paul Cook was born in London, drummer and founding member of the Sex Pistols. Together with Steve Jones he formed the engine room of the band that blew up British music in 1977 with 'Never Mind the Bollocks'. While Rotten and Vicious grabbed the headlines, Cook held the chaos together with a dry, precise punch that defined the sound of punk. He was also one of the few who walked out of that fire with his head still on his shoulders.
Paul Cook
Sex Pistols
1971
DJ Screw is born: the man who slowed rap down and created a city's sound
On July 20, 1971, Robert Davis was born in Texas. He discovered by accident that slowing a record down until it dragged made it hypnotic. He started selling tapes made that way out of his Houston house, five dollars each, and the whole city ended up hearing rap at that speed. Chopped and screwed went from local habit to global production technique. He died in 2000, aged 29, of an overdose linked to codeine syrup.
DJ Screw
1999
Pop Smoke is born: the deep voice that put Brooklyn drill on the map
On July 20, 1999, Bashar Jackson was born in Brooklyn. He started rapping at nineteen over drill beats imported from London and in under two years turned the genre into the sound of New York. His voice, a growl that seemed to come from someone thirty years older, was impossible to mistake. He was murdered in February 2020 during a home invasion in Los Angeles, aged 20, three months before his album reached number one.
Pop Smoke
2017
Farewell to Chester Bennington, the scream that united a generation
On July 20, 2017, Chester Bennington, Linkin Park's vocalist, died in Los Angeles at 41. His voice, able to shift from a wounded whisper to a cathartic howl within a single verse, had turned 'Hybrid Theory' into one of the best-selling debuts in history. The date carried a painful weight: it was the birthday of his friend Chris Cornell, who had died two months earlier. His passing opened a necessary conversation about mental health in rock that remains alive today.
Chester Bennington
Linkin Park
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