The Ongoing History of New Music, episode 1092: Alt-rock's most important bass players (part 1)

Alan Cross Corus Radio

October 28, 2026 8:23 am

The universe loves bass. And yes, I do mean out there in the infinite vastness of space. Even though sound can’t travel through a vacuum, pressure waves can travel through the thin wisps of gas in interstellar and intergalactic space.

The biggest bass machine is a black hole somewhere in the centre of the Perseus Cluster of galaxies, 250 million light-years away. It’s pounding out a continuous B-flat thump 57 octaves below middle C. (I swear that’s only slightly lower than the kid with the Honda Civic down the block who still has things cranked when he’s coming home at four on a Sunday morning. But I digress…)

If you want to get really nerdy about it, it takes 10 million years for one note to oscillate just once. We can’t hear that, of course, but we can pitch-shift it up using a process called “sonification,” which translates astronomical data into sound. By shifting the pitch up about 288 quadrillion times, we get this.

Back here on Earth, we know that for any song to rock, there’s gotta be bass: those notes that start at about 250 Hz and go down until the sound waves are so long that the human ear can’t detect them.

Sometimes, we don’t hear the bass in a song as much as we feel it, as large volumes of air hit our bodies. It hits the chest first, making our lungs vibrate inside our rib cages… then our heads, as our eardrums try to process it. We might even get a little bit dizzy. Tthen our stomachs start to move in sympathy with the low notes. Bass is what gives rock depth, heaviness, and power. Without it, songs would sound tinny and be perceived with far less of a physical sensation. And this is why rock needs bass players.

But bassists don’t always get the recognition they deserve. The attention goes to the singer, the flashy guitarist, or the flamboyant drummer. But without a bass player, you just can’t rock or groove.

Let’s go through some of the most important and creative bass players in the history of alt-rock.

Songs heard on this show;