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cool History of...
The primary source of rock ‘n roll was RHYTHM AND BLUES, an idiom popular among black audiences that combined elements of urban BLUES (in the structure, vocal style, and use of amplified guitar), GOSPEL MUSIC (in the piano accompaniments and vocal harmonizing), and JAZZ (in the saxophone solos). Rhythm and blues began to gain a wider audience during the late 1940’s, and in 1951 the disc jockey Alan Freed, who played an important role in attracting white teenagers to the music, substituted the term "rock ‘n roll," previously used as a sexual reference in lyrics. Major record producers, observing the success of rhythm and blues and rock '‘ roll songs distributed on ""ace records""(i.e., record labels marketed to black audiences), issued "covers"—competing, "sanitized" versions of the same songs, but recorded by white artists. Covers—whatever their artistic quality—brought new stylistic influences to rock ‘n roll (white Country and Western and popular music) and eased the transition for white audiences. This audience, still hesitant at accepting black music, made Bill Haley’s "Rock Around the Clock" (1955) the first important breakthrough for white rock ‘n roll. What appealed to this new audience, accustomed to the relatively bland TIN PAN ALLEY brand of popular music, was rock ‘n roll’s driving dance rhythms, its direct, adolescent-level message, and its suggestion of youthful rebellion. Rock ‘n Roll’s first superstar was Elvis Presley. With his country-and-western background, Presley led the way for other "rockabilly" (rock plus hillbilly) artists; with his spasmodic hip gyrations, he introduced a sexual suggestiveness that outraged conservative adults; with his legions of teenage fans, he brought to rock ‘n roll the cult of personality and became the archetype of the rock star as cultural hero. Other popular figures, while commanding a smaller audience, also made significant contributions to the style; among them, Chuck Berry nourished the music’s basic roots, Jerry Lee LEWIS expanded its country branch, and Little Richard provided frantic showmanship. Despite the dynamism of such figures, by the late 1950’s a malaise had set in; the sentimental, and often—as in love-death ballads like "Teen Angel"—distinctly maudlin. Seeking a more honest expression, a significant segment of the adolescent and young adult audiences transferred their allegiance to Folk Music, as sung by such groups as Peter, Paul, and Mary, a folk trio; to traditional balladeers like the Kingston Trio; and to the prophets of modern folk/social commentary, Joan Baez and Bob Dylan. RHYTHM AND BLUES
The term rhythm and blues (R&B) began as a music industry designation for records by black musicians for black audiences. Beginning as a replacement for the industry term "race records", it eventually came to denote the styles of music created by black, urban musicians since the 1940’s. In the late 1940’s, when many jazz musicians began to play the rhythmically complex style known as BEBOP, black dancers turned to big bands playing a blues-derived, saxophone-dominated music with a heavy beat. It was louder, larger-scaled, and less subtle than the older blues and jazz styles, and it was soon supplemented by other styles: small sax-and-piano "jump bands" using boogie-woogie rhythms; country-blues bands featuring electric guitars and harmonicas; and black teenage vocal groups. Rock Music, in its beginnings a white-produced music, borrowed the form, the beat, and the sound of rhythm and blues. While many black R&B performers became rock musicians, many others expanded their R&B styles. In the mid-1950’s, Ray Charles and James Brown combined the emotional, vocally complex style derived from Gospel Music with R&B, creating what came to be known as Soul Music, R&B, recorded with strings and adolescent lyrics by such groups as the Supremes, became "uptown" or Motown R&B. Aretha Franklin sang in an R&B style that was simpler, harder, and closer to blues roots. In the 1970’s, R&B became more eclectic, Musical modes like Salsa
was added, and new complexities of beat, instrumentation, and
production emerged. Much of the Disco Music of the 1970’s is
formularized Rhythm & Blues.
BLUES
The blues is a distinctive black-American song form, important not only in its own right but because it was a major element in the evolution of JAZZ. Music with the melodic and structural qualities that came to characterize the blues began to emerge late in the 19th century, and was sung and played by rural musicians. BLUES FORM The most distinctive melodic characteristic of the blues is the use of microtones (intervals smaller than a halfstep), commonly called bent pitches. Although these pitch inflections may occur on any tone, they are used most often on the third and seventh notes of the scale-—he blue notes that give the blues their poignant character. Most scholars believe that the practice of bending pitches was carried over from African melodic practice. In the United States, bent pitches were frequently used in field hollers, shouts, and street cries—all ancestors of the blues. As the blues became formalized, a consistent rhythmic and vocal progession developed. Although many blues are based on an 8-bar pattern, the 12-bar blues became the most common type. The classic 12-bar pattern consists of three vocal lines, each of four bars, with a music accompaniment that echoes, answers, and completes the vocal part. This characterizing "call and response" pattern has also been derived from African vocal forms; it provided the opportunity for a great range of instrumental improvisation. COUNTRY BLUES The earliest blues, country blues, were a product of the 19th century black rural experience, especially after emancipation. Itinerant performers traveled from one black community to another, playing the guitar while singing about the loss of love, the pain of poverty, the burden of hard work. Like much folk expression, many songs spoke of the delights and torments of sex. Early country blues still may be heard on records made by Leadbelly, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Jelly Roll Morton and others. Some of the earliest blues published as sheet music were those of W. C. Handy. They included "Memphis Blues" (1912) and "The St. Louis Blues" (1914). CITY BLUES Stimulated b the recording industry, city blues flourished in the 1920’s. Singers were often accompanied by a piano and other instruments. The opportunity for responsive improvisation during the instrumental interludes attracted some of the most respected jazz musicians. "Race records," produced for sale in black communities, were hugely successful. Mamie Smith, a New York vaudeville singer, made the first blues recording in 1920. Soon the best known was Bessie Smith, "Empress of the Blues." The blues flourished as dance music in small dance halls, barrooms, and juke joints. Boogie-Woogie piano, an outgrowth of the blues, was developed in a dance context. After World Ware II, Rhythm and Blues recordings became commercially successful. Many of the earliest Rock Music hits were simply re-recordings by white musicians of pieces previously recorded as rhythm-and-blues numbers by black performers. Some good sources of information: Baraka, Amiri, Blues People (193; repr. 1987); Evans, David, Big Road Blues: Tradition and Creativity in the Folk Blues (1981); Finn, J., the Bluesman (1984); Hatch D., and Millword. S., From Blues to Rock (1987); Palmer, Robert, Deep Blues (1981); Ivey, Donald J.
GOSPEL MUSIC
The term gospel music embraces several types of song, all of which share an emotional, personal identification with the biblical text and a rich musical vocabulary. Of the various types, the gospel music sung in black Baptist churches is perhaps the most important, because it has influenced not only white gospel forms but also certain styles of popular music. Unlike the SPIRITUAL, which is rooted in the formal Protestant hymn, black gospel music is extemporaneous, highly emotional, and joyful. Based on a sung dialogue between congregation and preacher, with the preacher setting the text and the congregation supplying musical affirmation, gospel music inspires a "fire and excitement that sometimes, without warning, fill a church, causing (it) to "rock" (James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time). In the 1940’s, Mahalia Jackson, Clara Ward, and Sister Rosetta Tharpe began recording gospel-style music. In the 1950’s and ‘60s, church-trained musicians took the style into popular music. Singers like Aretha Franklin and James Brown recorded what came to be known as SOUL, a style that reproduces the vocal devices of gospel: use of falsetto, bent and sliding tones, shouts, and the stretching-out of a single sung syllable over many notes. White gospel music, sung at Protestant revival meetings, was similar to black gospel music in its spontaneity and emotional fervor. A popular offshoot of white revivals was the gospel hymn, which can be traced to evangelists Dwight L. Moody and Ira D. Sankey, who exposed large audiences to such hymns and composed many others. White quartet and family gospel groups now dominate this genre; in addition, a youth-music movement, largely in the South has developed a repertoire of pop-gospel music. Good Sources of Information: Blackwell, Lois S., Wings of the Dove: The Story of Gospel Music in America (1978); Heilbut, Tony, The Gospel Sound (1971); Sankey, Ira D., et al., Gospel Hymns (repr. oF 1895 ed.); Shaw, Arnold, The World of Soul (1970); Warrick, Mancel, and Hillsmand, Joan R., The Progress of Gospel Music (1977).
JAZZ
Jazz was created by obscure black musicians in the late 19th century. Jazz was at first a synthesis of Western harmonic language and forms with the rhythms and melodic inflections of Africa. The African musical idiom present in black vocal music – Spirituals, the work song, the field holler, and blues – was the structure through which the more commercial and popular jazz genre evolved. TIN PAN ALLEY Originally, Tin Pan Alley referred to the popular songwriting trade centered in New York City, but eventually the phrase came to include the entire American pop-music industry from the 1880s to the 1950s. At its worst, Tin Pan Alley connotes the mass production of artless music; at its best, it represents America’s most original and characteristic musical expression. According to legend the term was coined between 1900 and 1903 by songwriter-journalist Monroe Rosenfeld, who was inspired by the clashing sounds of pianos and singing voices from countless open windows on New York City-s West 28th Street, once the site of dozens of music publishing companies. Aggressive marketing of popular sheet music began in the 1880s, and by the 1890s sales of hit songs had reached the millions. At first, most popular songs were introduced on the musical stage, but in the 1930s radio and sound movies began playing an increasing role, and phonograph records replaced sheet music as the measure of sales success. Despite the lessened importance of sheet music, control of America’s mainstream popular music remained with a few major corporations. This control was lost, signaling the end of Tin Pan Alley in the 1950s with the advent of Rock Music. Some good sources of information: Ewen, David, All the Years of American Popular Music (1977); Goldberg, Isaac, Tin Pan Alley (1930); Hamm, Charles, Yesterdays; Popular Song in American (1979); Berlin, Edward A.; Wilder, Alec, American Popular Song (1972); Witmark, I., and Goldberg, I., The Story of the House of Witmark: From Ragtime to Swingtime (1939). See also: Blake, Eubie; Gershwin, George and Ira; Music Hall Vaudeville, and Burlesque; Musical Comedy. BEBOP The black JAZZ movement known as bebop (or rebop or bop) flourished in the decade 1940-50. At that time, a few black jazz artists, increasingly bored and restricted by the elaborately scored and arranged music of the large dance bands in which they played, turned to small groups using loosely constructed scores, or no scores at all. The bop group usually comprised a saxophone, a trumpet, a piano, a string bass, and drums; and bop styles featured extended harmonies that were reminiscent of avant-garde classical music. Bebop emphasized faster tempos than were usual in jazz, uneven phrasing, and ensemble passages played in unison rather than in conventional harmonies. The piano supplied chordal punctuations, and the string bass assumed a new importance as the center of the rhythm section. The guitarist Charlie Christian, the trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, the saxophonist Charlie Parker, and the pianist Thelonious Monk (whose beret and horn-rimmed glasses became symbols of the movement) were major figures in bop. In the late 1940s a softer, more subtle brand of bop, or "cool jazz," was played by musicians like Miles Davis and Gerry Mulligan. Bop did not continue as a coherent movement beyond the early 1950s, but its idioms colored all branches of later JAZZ. Some sources of information: Collier, James L., The Making of Jazz (1978); Feather, Leonard, G., Inside Bebop (1949); Dance, S., ed., Jazz Era; The Forties (1961; repr. 1987); Gitler, Ira, Swing to Bop; An Oral History of the Transition in Jazz in the 1940s (1985); Williams, Martin, T., The Jazz Tradition rev. Ed. (1983); Bailey, Roger.
SOUL MUSIC
A successful popular music style, soul music is derived from black GOSPEL MUSIC, with its highly decorated emotional singing style, fervent backup choruses, and rhythmic instrumental backing. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, BLUES singers such as BOBBY BLAND, and vocal groups like the Ravens, used a gospel-tinged sound. Church singers and groups began to record popular music in the 1950s, among them The Dominoes, led by Clyde McPhatter, and Sam Cooke, who was well known as a gospel singer before he "crossed over" to popular music. The most important names in the 1950s soul music, however, were James Brown, whose 1956 "Please, Please, Please" had all the raw urgency of black preaching, and Ray Charles, whose 1959 "What’d I Say?" took the new sound to a wide audience. The soul style was greatly popularized in the 1960s by the success of the Motown group of record labels, and by Aretha Franklin, the daughter of a well-known Detroit preacher, whose recordings – especially the 1967 "Respect" – became national hits. Other important soul singers of the 1960s included Otis Redding and Wilson Pickett. Throughout the 1960s the soul style was smoothed ad softened to make it more acceptable to mass audiences. This tendency continued during the 1970s when "soul music" became an accepted element of American popular music, growing increasingly sophisticated, but retaining its basic church elements: decoration, drive and verve. Good sources of information: Shaw, Arnold, The World of Soul (1970).
MOTOWN
Motown (moh’-town) Motown, the most successful black-owned American record company, was founded in 1960 in Detroit by BERRY GORDY, JR. Derived from "Motor Town," the name also denoted the company’s musical style, which featured unusual song structures, heavy rhythms, and large orchestras. Live performances by Motown artists required carefully controlled choreography, set routines, and elaborate costumes and grooming, to produce what was in effect a Motown-style package. Popular stars during the 1960s were Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, Diana Ross and the Supremes, and in the 1970s, The Jackson Five. At the peak of its success, Motown represented the best of mass-produced, black-derived pop music. Although its later productions were less inspired and more obviously the products of a musical assembly line, Motown was largely responsible for introducing the sounds of contemporary black music to a large white audience. Some good sources of information: Morse, David, Motown and the Arrival of Black Music (1972); The Rolling Stone’s Illustrated History of Rock and Roll (1976).
DISCO MUSIC
A popular dance music, disco is a combination of a fast JAZZ tempo with a heavy ROCK MUSIC beat, often spiced by Latin percussion instruments. It is heard primarily in discotheques, nightclubs that attract dancers by featuring nonstop recorded music and elaborate lighting. Disco dance styles derive from the twist, a solo dance popular in the early days of rock and roll, although disco dancing – more formal and far more complex than the twist – usually requires a partner. Th3 1977 movie "Saturday Night Fever" created a nationwide enthusiasm for disco dancing, which had until then been largely a big-city fad. Diana Ross, Donna Summer and Gloria Gaynor are among the many successful disco artists.
SALSA
(sal’-suh) Salsa (Spanish for "hot sauce") is a style of popular music that emerged from New York City’s Hispanic community during the mid-1970s, developing from a blend of Afro-Cuban and Puerto Rican music with rock and jazz. At its core are the Latin dance rhythms that have had varying degrees of popularity for decades – for example, rhumba, mambo, and cha-cha. Overlayed are electronic techniques developed in rock, and the instrumentation and improvisational skills of jazz. Salsa has become an influence on both rock and jazz, and the Latin rhythms and percussion instruments can now be heard accompanying English lyrics. Salsa outsells jazz on records and has spread to Latin American communities throughout the United States.
ROCK MUSIC
Rock music emerged during the mid-1950s to become the major popular musical form of young audiences in the United States and Western Europe. Its stylistic scope is too broad to be encompassed by any single definition; the only feature common to all rock music is a heavy emphasis on the beat.
ROCK, 1963-69 The renewal of rock ‘n roll came from the unlikely locale of Liverpool, England. Here, the Beatles made their start in 1960, at first imitating American styles and then weaving from the various strands of American rock ‘n Roll an individual style marked – in both music and lyrics – by wit and a sense of fun. Their successes came quickly during 1963 and ’64, and their domination of the record market was complete and unprecedented. Then, rather than repeat the formulas of their initial triumphs, they chose the more precarious route of experimentation and growth. From 1965 to 1969 they introduced new sonorities, textures, forms, rhythms, melodic designs, and lyric conceptions, and were at the forefront of a revolutionary epoch in popular music. Rock ‘n roll had evolved into an expression of greater sophistication, complexity, and breadth. It had become a new idiom: rock. Other English groups also came into prominence around 1964, taking their places as equals with American artists in the development of rock. The Rolling Stones, the most prominent and durable of these groups, presented yet another image of rock – one of anger, alienation, and sensuality. Other trends of the 1960s included the merging of rhythm and blues with black gospel styles to create Soul Music; the beginnings of jazz-rock, as originally synthesized by the band Blood, Sweat and Tears; folk-rock, a blending of folk with rock; and the emergence of the "California sound." The folk-rock style, first suggested by Bob Dylan at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, brought to folk music a hard new poetic sensibility and social consciousness. A deeper significance of the blending was its demonstration of rock’s tendency to absorb all challenging idioms. The "California sound," despite its name, was not a uniform style, but a term that reflected the rise of California as a major center of rock activity and experimentation. In the early 1960s, California was the scene of "surfing music" (popularized by the BEACH BOYS), but over the course of the decade the music changed to parallel the trends of hippies (the Mamas and the Papas), student protest (Country Jose and the Fish), and a countercultural affair with drugs. Widespread popularity of hallucinogenic drugs (particularly LSD, or "acid") produced psychedelic Acid Rock, whose apostles included JEFFERSON AIRPLANE and the Grateful Dead. Rock’s first major effort in musical theater was the hippie revue Hair (1967). A spectacularly successful pageant celebrating youth, love, and drugs. Closely following were such rock-opera success as Tommy and Jesus Christ Superstar. By the end of the 1960s the distinctions between rock ‘n roll and rock were evident. The earlier instrumentation of saxophone, piano, amplified guitar, and drums had been replaced by several amplified guitars, drums, and an ever-increasing reliance on electronic technology. To the standard patterns of 12-bar blues and 32-bar song form were added extended, unique forms, sometimes encompassing the "entire side of a record album. To the lyrics of teenage love and adolescent concerns were added social commentary, glorification of drugs, and free-association poetry. Descriptive group names (Crew Cuts, Everly Brothers, Beach Boys) were replaced by nondescriptive, enigmatic names (The WHO, Jefferson Airplane, Big Brother and the Holding Company). Finally the separation between performer and composer seemed to vanish as the two merged in a single performer-composer. As demonstrated by the Woodstock Festival in August 1969, rock music was by this time an intrinsic element in the life of American youth and a powerful articulation of their moods, hopes and fears.
ROCK 1970-79 This decade saw the fragmentation of rock into subdivisions beyond the general categories of hard rock (extremely loud and electronically amplified) and mellow rock (softer, sometimes with acoustic instruments). The terms identifying these subdivisions are not firm definitions, but merely guides, tenuous and fluid, with much stylistic overlapping. Some styles are blendings of rock with other established idioms, the rock contribution invariably being a heavy beat and electronic technology. Thus, folk-rock and country-rock each retain the character of folk and country music. Reggae, which emerged from Jamaica around 1972, is an integration of rock, soul, calypso, and other Latin rhythms. Jazz-rock fusion, or simply fusion, is a meeting between rock instrumentalists, attracted to the broad creative opportunities and demanding musicianship of jazz, and jazz musicians, attracted to rock’s electronics and commercial potential. Other styles are more clearly based on rock principles and precedents and range from the benign bubble-gum rock of the Osmond Brothers, directed toward the youngest popular music fans, and the intentionally vile Punk Rock, which punctuates its strident denunciations with vulgarity. Heavy metal rock has continued the hallucinogenic approach of acid rock, but within a narrower musical dimension, relying upon the hypnotic power or repetitiveness, loud volume, and electronic distortion; among its leading exponents have been Iron Butterfly and Led Zeppelin. Glitter rock is more of a theatrical approach than a musical style; it offers glittering costumes as an alternative to the usual blue jeans, and bizarre –sometimes-androgynous – exhibitions (Alice Cooper, Dave Bowie, Kiss). New wave rock, which made its debut as the 1970s drew to a close, appeared to be something of an old wave, with its return to a more basic, unadorned metric emphasis and a greater lyricism. Most rock music of the period was intended almost solely for listening, not for dancing. The inevitable reaction was DISCO, a music first and foremost for dancing. With its thumping regularity of accented beats divided into accented minibeats, disco has been decried by hardline rock fans as mechanical, commercial, and unlyrical. Nevertheless, its following increased and recorded Saturday Night Fever (1977), disco became for a while a major sector of rock music.
The ECLECTIC 1980s
Rock music, by the mid-1980s, had presented no clear-cut new musical direction. Bands became more production oriented, in part because of the sudden explosion of "videos" on TV screens. Ranging from televised concerts to minutes-long acted-out versions of rock songs, videos have proven to be a powerful tool for introducing new groups (the Australian Men at Work, for example). With their emphasis on the visual, though, they encouraged the use of bizarre, grotesque "stories" and staging, while the music remained secondary. Heavy metal bands received a boost from videos. Although fading musically, punk remained a strong visual style. It was outshone, however, by the glittery, androgynous look of such immensely popular performers as Michael Jackson, Prince, and Boy George. Bruce Springsteen, whose "populist" explorations of the American experience in the 1970s earned him a wide following, achieved superstar status in the mid-1980s. The influence of British bands on the US rock scene remained strong. Their music was as eclectic as the work of their predecessors, the Beatles, but it drew from a far narrower range: punk, disco, pop-rock, reggae. At the same time, there was a nostalgic return to older, simpler rock and prerock idioms. British musician Elvis Costello’s songs harked back to rhythm and blues and country western styles, and Los Angeles based Los Lobos fused rock music with traditional Mexican music. Increasingly in the mid to late 1980s, artists such as Paul Simon (formerly of Simon and Garfunkel) and David Byrne (of the Talking Heads), extensively "borrowed" from styles outside rock music, particularly from African music. Concurrently, almost every country in the world has begun to develop and support various forms of rock music. The scope and significance of rock remains without precedent in the history of popular music. Beginning as a minority expression on the fringe of American society, it developed into a distinct counterculture during the 1960s, and a decade later had become a dominant cultural force, affecting and reflecting the mores and moods of American youth and weaving itself into the very fabric of society. Some good resources: Edward A. Berlin; Bibliography: Baker, Glenn A., and Cope, Stuart, The New Music (1981); Belz, Carl, The Story of Rock, 2d ed. (1972); Clark, Dick, and Robinson, Richard, Rock, Roll and Remember (1976); Formento, Dan, The Source Book; Today in Rock History (1982); Makowr, Joel, Woodstock (1989): Marcus, Greil, Mystery Train (1982); Naha, Ed, comp., Lillian Roxon’s Rock Encyclopedia, rev. Ed. (1978); Nite, Norm N., Rock On, 3 vols., rev. Ed. (1982-85); Pareles, Jon, and Romanowski, Patria, The Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock ‘n Roll (1983); Rogers, Dave, Rock n’ Roll (1982); Rolling Stone Press, The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock and Roll (1976); Salamander Books, The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Rock (1982); Schaffner, Nicholas, The British Invasion; From the First Wave to the New Wave (1982); Shaw, Arnold, The Rockin’ 50’s (1974) and a Dictionary of American Pop-Rock (1982); Ward, Ed, Stokes, Geoffrey, and Tucker, Ken, Rock of Ages: The Rolling Stone History of Rock and Roll (1987).
PUNK ROCK
Punk Rock, the unconventional, rebellious, and emotionally charged contemporary music genre, pushed beyond the accepted boundaries of rock n roll in the mid 1970s and caused a revolution within the recording industry. A new breed of musicians earned a place in rock history by defying industry standards and provided the impetus for a "new wave" of Rock Music. The development of punk music, and its outgrowth, New Wave, spans the decade of the 1970s in both the US and Britain. In Britain, lower-class youth, many of them unemployed, expressed their rejection of established society through music, with a sound and style that were violent, aggressive, and calculated to insult. Their counterparts in the US were disenchanted with the prevailing conservative mood of the nation and with the middle-of-the-road type of music that long-established rock groups were recording and performing. In both countries the attitude that anyone could be a punk band and become a rock star prompted creative ideas and new talent to spring up at a furious rate. The American group Velvet Underground, formed in 1966 by Lou Reed and John Cale, was among the forerunners of punk. This group was one of the first to gain media attention with its driven music and decadent lyrics glamorizing drugs and sex. It was the underlying emotional intensity of their music – not the musical talent – that attracted listeners. In Britain during the 1970s, "glitter rock" represented an important transition to new-wave music. Such performers as David Bowie and Gary Glitter used bizarre costumes and makeup, creating the androgynous image that is still often characteristic of new-wave performers. The exuberance and excitement of punk music attracted large followings in New York and London rock clubs by the mid 1970s. While major recording companies shunned punk artists and ridiculed their self-destructive and accosting image, independent companies realized their potential and began signing and promoting them. The pop-recording industry – which had enjoyed a spiral growth from the mid-1960s plummeted. Only after the commercial viability of this new wave of musicians had been proven by the independents did the major studios begin offering contracts. The first commercially successful punk group was the Sex Pistols, formed in England in 1976. In 1978-79 the Cars, Blondie (by the way we just saw her recently at the House of Blues and she was high energy and terrific), Devo, and Cheap Trick became the new American rock generation, Joe Jackson, the Police, and Elvis Costello were more of the most successful British new-wave groups. Punk and new-wave musicians were among the first to take advantage of video technology. In 1981, with the advent of MTV, the nationally syndicated 24 hour 7 day a week rock music television station, a multitude of new-wave groups burst into the rock music field, winning commercial and popular success.
JUKEBOX
The jukebox is a coin-operated phonograph that plays records of the customer’s choice. The first jukebox was installed in San Francisco’s Palais Royal Saloon in 1899. A converted Edison electric phonograph, it was equipped with four listening tubes and four coin slots. The modern jukebox offers a selection of up to 200 long-playing records, has a permanent stylus, and plays in stereophonic sound. The term jukebox was first used in the late 1930s. Jook, a word of African origin used by blacks in the American South, referred to brothels where nickel-in-the-slot machines were often found. The growing American enthusiasm for Swing music during the 1930s
led to a proliferation of jukeboxes in bars, diners, and drugstores,
and brought new prosperity to the recording industry, which had
languished during the previous two decades. OK, I'm curious by
nature...had to look up what has become an everyday work in
music Any opinions? Anyone
want to contribute articles? |
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