Browsing: Music

A Brief History On Tuesday, November 17, 2020, a limited number of you have a chance at watching a virtual screening of Sound of Metal at 7:30PM.  The film is an awards-worthy drama from first-time director Darius Marder.  The film features both high-caliber performances and innovative craftsmanship, leading this film to be a major awards contender.  The film uses the specific story of a musician losing his hearing to tell a more universal, emotionally uplifting story of adapting to whatever life experiences may come our way. It stars Riz Ahmed and Olivia Cooke. Digging Deeper To reserve a spot for…

A Brief History On September 16, 1979, the Rap music trio The Sugarhill Gang released their groundbreaking hit, “Rapper’s Delight,” the first Rap song to land in the Billboard Top 40 as a mainstream hit song.  America was baptized into a new mainstream musical genre that has persisted over the years, a movement also called “Hip Hop.” Digging Deeper Finding its origins in New York City during the 1970’s, African American and to some extent Latino Americans developed the Rap style of talk music, which has evolved into the wider genre of Hip Hop which includes “beat box” singing, record…

A Brief History On August 5, 1914, the first electric traffic light in the world was installed at the corner of E. 105 Street and Euclid Avenue in Cleveland, Ohio, just one of the many “firsts” for the “Forest City.”  You may know of Cleveland as the butt of jokes since the 1960’s, frequently targeted by -standup comedians and on the Laugh-In television show, especially when the Cuyahoga River caught fire in 1969, just one of the several times the central river of Cleveland caught fire but probably the most memorable as it garnered so much national attention songs were…

A Brief History On April 23, 2005, the video world was treated to the first ever YouTube video, a video created by YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim, under the screen name of “jawed.”  The 18 second video was of the Elephant exhibit at the San Diego Zoo, and was so brief we can include the entire script here: “All right, so here we are in front of the, uh, elephants, and the cool thing about these guys is that, is that they have really, really, really long, um, trunks, and that’s, that’s cool, and that’s pretty much all there is to…

A Brief History On April 4, 1859, the familiar Southern anthem, “Dixie,” alternatively known as “Dixie Land,” “Dixie’s Land,” and “I Wish I Was in Dixie,” made its public debut performed by the blackface troupe Bryant’s Minstrels as the closing number of their show.  Not only was the song first publicly performed in New York, a decidedly NOT city in Dixie, it was written by a guy from Ohio, another place North of the Mason-Dixon Line. Digging Deeper The Mason-Dixon Line, the line symbolically separating the Northern from the Southern United States, dates back to a surveying job performed by…