The rock and roll history podcast that’s an ongoing course in journalism ethics
By Samuel G. Freedman
Midway through the summer of 2025, I rented a car to make a one-day visit to an aging friend. The round-trip between my part-time home in Minneapolis and his apartment in an assisted-living facility near Iowa City would take at least nine hours, especially if I wanted to avoid getting two speeding tickets, as I had on my last drive there and back.
Much as I cherish National Public Radio, I knew from experience that “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered” would only cover about half my listening time. So I went to Facebook to solicit recommendations for podcasts. One program was repeatedly mentioned,“A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs,” created and hosted by Andrew Hickey. Though the series had already been running for almost seven years, and though I’m a devotee of jazz, blues, and rock, I hadn’t yet checked it out. Now I would have my chance.
Crossing from Minnesota into Iowa as the morning’s ground fog dissipated, I started streaming the first episode. To my fascination, it didn’t have to do with the rock-and-roll era at all, but rather a swing song from the late 1930s, “Flying Home” by the Benny Goodman Sextet. I was professionally intrigued, because Goodman and the song happened to figure into my book-in-progress. And then, in a way for which I was totally unprepared, Hickey spoke directly to the journalist and historian in me. To be even more specific, he seemed to be addressing me as the professor who had taught and tried to embody journalism ethics during my 35 years in the classroom.
Hickey was discussing the fact that, in hiring the Black pianist Teddy Wilson for his group, Goodman had become the first white jazz musician to maintain an ongoing, racially integrated band. Hickey referred to another Black jazz musician, Lionel Hampton, who played in the group, recalling that Goodman would say that you need both white keys and black keys to play music. Then Hickey historicized the statement. By 2018 standards, he acknowledged, it might be “the sort of facile comparison well-meaning liberals make.” Yet in the context of America in 1938, a time of encompassing segregation in the North as well as the South, Goodman had made “a genuinely progressive statement for the times.”
In the months since my belated discovery of Hickey’s podcast, I have listened to upwards of seventy five hours of it. I’ve listened in the gym, in the car, fidgeting through a flight delay at an O’Hare airport gate. For his part, Hickey is now at Song 182 (“Many Rivers to Cross” by Jimmy Cliff, if you’re interested) and a total of more than 250 episodes, some of them two or three hours long. And my regard for the podcast has only grown through this immersion. As impressive as “A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs” is in terms of historical narrative, musical analysis and production aesthetics, it also distinguishes itself as an ongoing course in journalism ethics.
Whether Hickey is untangling the provenance of songs claimed by various writers or delving into periods of the past when now-repugnant ideas about race, gender and sexual orientation were normative, he devotes painstaking effort to determining veracity and providing historical context. If the podcast has a mantra, then it is Hickey’s recurrent reminder, “There is no ‘first’ anything.” Any working journalist or author would do very well to adopt Hickey’s skepticism about absolutes, assumptions and received wisdom. That his website lists the source materials for each episode is welcome, of course, but his palpable commitment to abiding by a heightened ethical standard goes way beyond supplying a bibliography.
Frankly, I have no idea what experience or training endowed Hickey with such ethical rigor. I am fairly skillful at online research, and my efforts to find even a biography of Hickey came up empty. (No, not even a Wikipedia entry.) On the podcast’s website, he bluntly states:
I am a very private person, and will not under any circumstances do interviews for any print publication. Please do not attempt to contact me to ask for such an interview. Also please in general respect my right to privacy. If you are writing about the show, please do not include any biographical information apart from my name and that I am from England.
One piece of information that Hickey does share occasionally in the podcast is that he’s often received pushback on social media for his habit of stating early in a given episode an alert about the potentially disturbing content to follow. Given the reckless saga of rock music, it is sadly common for that content to involve substance abuse, mental illness and domestic violence, as well as the use of bigoted slurs.
Presumably, Hickey’s critics want to mock him as just another P.C. snowflake clutching his pearls with his trigger warnings. (Cliches invoked deliberately.) In fact, the online claque gets what Hickey does and the way he does it entirely wrong. He does not self-censor or elide disturbing facts or airbrush the many musicians in the podcast who produce brilliant work while behaving abominably. He simply makes the compassionate choice to give his listeners the option of steering clear of some passages. For those who follow all the way along, he parses the messy line between art and life in a discerning way.
Here is one emblematic example, from a multi-part segment about the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil”:
This episode also features discussion of drug use, and of domestic abuse both physical and mental, and of mental illness and suicide attempts. Nobody comes out of this episode well.
Also, I would just like to say something here — these episodes on the Rolling Stones, by necessity, involve a little more talking about the group members’ personal lives than I am personally comfortable with. I try to avoid talking about the personal lives of the musicians I discuss, except insofar as it affects either the music they were making or the wider culture.
Sadly, in the case of the mid-sixties Rolling Stones, a lot of their impact on the culture, and a lot of the lyrics to their songs, require the airing of dirty laundry to explain properly and without giving an unrealistic picture. I have still, as always, tried to keep that to a minimum, and I hope it comes across as I intend — as a window on the music and the culture in which it was made, rather than tabloid prurience.
I can readily understand that few journalists or non-fiction authors would choose to make such a statement explicitly. Even if they did so, the statement would prove empty if their prose itself did not live up to the promise. But any ethical writer – whether covering politics, sports, culture, business, just about any topic or beat – would do well to wrestle against sensationalism and titillation in the way that Hickey manifestly does. That commitment takes on ever-greater urgency and difficulty in the current media landscape, when journalistic impact is too often equated with clicks alone.
Diving into the past presents different challenges and offers up another ethical lesson from Hickey. His episode on the Velvet Underground’s song “White Light/White Heat” centers on the gender-bending scene around Andy Warhol and the band led by Lou Reed and John Cale. And the episode takes place roughly 60 years ago, not only before the gay rights movement gained political and cultural traction, but in a different era of language about sexual orientation. In a principled way, Hickey refuses to alter the verbiage used in and around Warhol and the Velvet Underground. And in an equally principled way, he directly addresses the evolving connotation of certain unavoidably loaded words:
The term “queer” has certainly been used as a slur in the past, but so have terms like “lesbian”, “gay”, “homosexual” and others. In all those cases, the term has gone from a term used as a self-identifier, to a slur, to a reclaimed slur, and back again many times.
The reason for using that word, specifically, here is because the vast majority of people in this story have sexualities or genders that don’t match the societal norms of their times, but used labels for themselves that have shifted in meaning over the years. There are at least two men in the story, for example, who are now dead and referred to themselves as “homosexual”, but were in multiple long-term sexually-active relationships with women.
Would those men now refer to themselves as “bisexual” or “pansexual” — terms not in widespread use at the time — or would they, in the relatively more tolerant society we live in now, only have been in same-gender relationships? We can’t know. But in our current context using the word “homosexual” for those men would lead to incorrect assumptions about their behaviour.
The labels people use change over time, and the definitions of them blur and shift.
The territory that Hickey so thoughtfully assays here extends beyond glam rock, the Warhol demimonde, and what we’d now refer to as the LGBTQ+ community/communities. Any journalist or author dealing with race in American history, for instance, must contend with the shifting terms used preferentially by Black Americans at different points in their history – “Negro,” “Black,” “Afro-American,” “African American.” How can such an author remain true to the historical record without seeming unconcerned about the way that yesterday’s proud identifier has become today’s anachronism at best and disparagement at worst? What does an author, particularly a non-Black author, do about quoting others who have used the n-word? (In case you’re curious, Hickey will not speak it.)
“A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs” makes no pretense of being the ethical code for any newsroom or publishing house. I wonder if Andrew Hickey is even aware of how profoundly he addresses questions of journalism ethics. The great value of his podcast – setting aside how completely absorbing it is as a work of music history – is to remind us journalists and non-fiction authors of the necessity of ruminating over the ethical consequences, as Hickey so intensively does, of any work bearing our name.
Samuel G. Freedman, a professor emeritus at Columbia Journalism School, is the author of ten books. He serves on the advisory board of the Center for Journalism Ethics.
The Center for Journalism Ethics encourages the highest standards in journalism ethics worldwide. We foster vigorous debate about ethical practices in journalism and provide a resource for producers, consumers and students of journalism.