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Movements, leaders, victories and the continuing fight for equality.
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In 1968 Shirley Chisholm became the first Black woman elected to the United States Congress. In 1972 she launched a campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, breaking another political barrier.
MORE →Reflects the personal views, recollections, and perspective of the author, Mike Davis.
This is a personal recollection on the Move fire on May 13, 1985
Shoegaze (originally shoegazing and also known as dream rock) is a subgenre of indie and alternative rock characterised by ethereal soundscapes, obscured vocals, and extensive use of guitar effects and distortion. Rooted in Phil Spector's Wall of Sound, the Velvet Underground, and psychedelic pop of the 1960s, the genre originated in the late 1980s and early 1990s mainly among British acts who based their sound on groups such as Cocteau Twins, the Jesus and Mary Chain, and My Bloody Valentine. "Shoegazing" was coined in 1991 by music executive Andy Ross when describing Moose and first used by the British music press as a pejorative for bands with a motionless stage presence and guitarists who directed their look down towards their effects pedals. It was sometimes used interchangeably with "dream pop". The original scene developed after the introduction of Kevin Shields' glide guitar technique on My Bloody Valentine's 1988 records You Made Me Realise and Isn't Anything. Concentrated in London and the greater Thames Valley region, its core acts included Ride, Swervedriver, Slowdive, Chapterhouse, Lush, and Moose; they often attended each other's concerts, shared producers and labels (Creation and 4AD), and adopted similarly abstract approaches to album artwork. Another journalists' term of derision, "The Scene That Celebrates Itself", was applied to these musicians and adjacent non-shoegaze acts such as Stereolab. Shoegaze reached its peak in 1991 with the release of My Bloody Valentine's second album, Loveless, but was overshadowed by the rise of the American grunge scene and the following Britpop movement. In subsequent years, a gradual critical reassessment was driven by new listeners discovering the genre through the Internet. Numerous revivals have since emerged in the form of nu gaze (sometimes "second-wave shoegaze") and blackgaze in the 2000s, grungegaze in the 2010s, and zoomergaze in the 2020s. Other music styles, such as witch house, have reconfigured aspects of the genre.
Thomas Baptist Morello (born May 30, 1964) is an American guitarist, singer, songwriter, and political activist. He is known for his tenure with the rock bands Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave. Between 2016 and 2019, Morello was a member of the supergroup Prophets of Rage. Morello's other work includes several solo albums under his own name and the moniker the Nightwatchman, as well as work with the band Street Sweeper Social Club, which he formed with Boots Riley in 2006. Morello is also an occasional touring musician with Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. Morello co-founded Axis of Justice, which airs a monthly program on Pacifica Radio station KPFK (90.7 FM) in Los Angeles. Born in Harlem, New York City and raised in Libertyville, Illinois, Morello became interested in music and politics while in high school. He attended Harvard University and earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from the Committee on Degrees in Social Studies. After his previous band Lock Up disbanded, Morello met Zack de la Rocha. The two founded Rage Against the Machine, going on to become one of the most popular and influential metal acts of the 1990s. He is best known for his unique and creative guitar playing style, which incorporates feedback noise, unconventional picking and tapping as well as heavy use of guitar effects. Morello is also known for his socialist political views and activism, creating the solo project The Nightwatchman as an outlet for those views while playing apolitical music with Audioslave. He was ranked number 18 in Rolling Stone magazine's list of greatest guitarists of all time. As a member of Rage Against the Machine, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2023.
The Ventures are an American instrumental rock band formed in Tacoma, Washington, in 1958, by Don Wilson and Bob Bogle. The band, which was a quartet for most of its existence, helped to popularize the electric guitar across the world during the 1960s. While their popularity in the United States waned in the 1970s, the group remains especially revered in Japan, where they have toured regularly. The classic lineup of the band consisted of Wilson (rhythm guitar), Bogle (initially lead guitar, later bass), Nokie Edwards (initially bass, later lead guitar), and Mel Taylor (drums). Their first wide-release single, "Walk, Don't Run" (1960), brought international fame to the group, and is often cited as one of the top songs ever recorded for guitar. In the 1960s and early 1970s, 38 of the band's albums charted in the US, ranking them as the 6th best album chart performer during the 1960s, and the band had 14 singles in the Billboard Hot 100. With over 100 million records sold, the Ventures are the best-selling instrumental band of all time. The band was among the first to employ and popularize fuzz and flanging guitar effects, concept albums, and twelve-string guitars in rock music. Their instrumental virtuosity, innovation, and unique sound influenced many musicians and bands, earning the group the moniker "The Band that Launched a Thousand Bands". Their recording of "Walk, Don't Run" was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame for its lasting impact, and in 2008 the group was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
A bucket brigade or bucket-brigade device (BBD) is a discrete-time analogue delay line, developed in 1969 by F. Sangster and K. Teer of the Philips Research Labs in the Netherlands. It consists of a series of capacitance sections C0 to Cn. The stored analogue signal is moved along the line of capacitors, one step at each clock cycle. The name comes from analogy with the term bucket brigade, used for a line of people passing buckets of water. In most signal processing applications, bucket brigades have been replaced by devices that use digital signal processing, manipulating samples in digital form. Bucket brigades still see use in specialty applications, such as guitar effects. A well-known integrated circuit device around 1976, the Reticon SAD-1024 implemented two 512-stage analog delay lines in a 16-pin DIP. It allowed clock frequencies ranging from 1.5 kHz to more than 1.5 MHz. The SAD-512 was a single delay line version. The Philips Semiconductors TDA1022 similarly offered a 512-stage delay line but with a clock rate range of 5–500 kHz. Other common BBD chips include the Panasonic MN3002, MN3005, MN3007, MN3204 and MN3205, with the primary differences being the available delay time. Some examples effects units utilizing Panasonic BBDs are the Boss CE-1 Chorus Ensemble and the Yamaha E1010. In 2009, the guitar effects pedal manufacturer Visual Sound recommissioned production of the Panasonic-designed MN3102 and MN3207 BBD chip. The MN3208 (sometimes stylized as MN-3208) is a vintage 8-pin DIP (Dual In-line Package) integrated circuit from Panasonic (formerly Matsushita), introduced in the 1970s–1980s. It's a low-noise Bucket Brigade Device (BBD) designed for analog audio delay effects, such as chorus, flanger, vibrato, and echo in guitar pedals, synthesizers, and portable audio equipment. Specifically, it's a 2048-stage BBD, meaning it uses 2048 discrete "stages" (capacitor-transistor pairs) to sample and shift an analog signal, creating delays up to ~102 ms at a 10 kHz clock rate (down to ~2 ms at 500 kHz). It operates on low voltage (4–10 V, typically 5–9 V for pedal use) and boasts a high signal-to-noise ratio (~71 dB) with low insertion loss (~0 dB typical) and total harmonic distortion (~0.8% at 1 kHz). Despite being analog in their representation of individual signal voltage samples, these devices are discrete in the time domain and thus are limited by the Nyquist–Shannon sampling theorem; both the input and output signals are generally low-pass filtered. The input must be low-pass filtered to avoid aliasing effects, while the output is low-pass filtered for reconstruction. (A low-pass is used as an approximation to the Whittaker–Shannon interpolation formula.) The BBD shares a principle similar to the charge-coupled device (CCD), which was invented by Bell Labs for use in digital cameras. However, the idea of using capacitors to retain a voltage state has older origins than both BBD and CCD; dynamic random-access memory, invented by the American Robert H. Dennard in 1966, also uses capacitors to store charges, but these charges are not propagated, but refreshed, in place.
Before the 1921 destruction of Tulsa’s Greenwood District, Black residents had created a remarkable center of business and community life. The district included stores, professional offices, entertainment venues and homes owned by Black citizens. Understanding Greenwood means learning what was built—not only what was burned.
MORE →Madam C.J. Walker
