4 Big Ideas from Chapter 5 about Music:
1) There were 2 major events combined to help shape American music in the first couple of decades in the 19th century, Prohibition and the Great Depression. Because the sale of alchohol became illegal in the United states in the 1920s, the vaudville shows died out. To make a living, performers either migrated to radio or went underground to peform in speakeasies (illegal saloons and dancehalls that were all over the country during prohibition). Speakeasies privided an opening for the birth of a new era known as the Roaring Twenties and also a brand new style of Music, Jazz. The 1920s is also known as the Jazz age because of how popluar and influential Jazz became during this time period. Jazz went on to influence American as well as European Music. However as popluar and influential Jazz was, it was looked down upon in the middle and upper class of America because of it's association with the morally wrong underground scene.
2) Emil Berliner's gramophone, the predecessor to the record player, is important to the story of modern music because it was the first to offers consumers interchangeable recording media in the form of a hard plastic disc, much better then Edison and Bell's inventions. Gramophone disc were also cheaper and sturdier then the other available products of its time, and were easily able to be mass-produced. This invention triggered a major shift in the music industry's focused and launched what we know today as the record industry. In the early 1900s, due to the increase in financial wealth of the average U.S. citizen, sales of home record players boomed. However, due to weak copyright laws, artists were scammed out of a lot of money in royalties.
3) The growth of the radio industry feared many artists in the beginning, because they lived off the money they made for their live performences, so if people could hear their music on the radio, then they would have no reason to come see them live. However the recording artists expectations couldn't have been more wrong. Due to radio, American folk singers and muscians reached vast audiences, and made the recording artists global stars, and the profited very well from it
4) By the mid-1960s while radio still served as America's "hit maker,"the major record labels had gained a tremendous amount of power over Americans' musical preferences, because of multitrack recording. This 1960s were a terbulant time, with high school students going of to war to fight in Vietnam, segregation and sexual discrimination. People were experimenting with drugs as a form of escapism in order to find a deeper meaning of life. Amist all the madness, underground and independent artists began to emerge, they had songs focusing on changing political and social consciousness. So the popluar genre of music shifted again to these "pshycodelic" sounding artists.

My parents wedding song was Here & Now by Luther Vandross and one of my grandparents wedding songs was Because of you by Tony Bennett

The question this week is "what do you do" for news. Me personally, I prefer to get my news from t.v. apposed too the newspaper or the internet. The news most relevent in my everyday life is sports news so I am constantly watching ESPN. I love their in depth coverage of every aspect of the sporting world. It is not just cut and dry news, they provide some entertainment and humor in their presentation of the current news. If I want to know what is going on I turn on ESPN and they are covering everything in the sports world and just in case I missed it, I can just follow the bottomline and see everything going on in the sports world that day in just a few minutes.

Al Jazeera

Aljazeeras homepage was very cut and dry. It was all about hard news, basically every important situation going on in the world, whether it be conflict between nations or economic or ethnic issues, that was basically it. There were no human interest stories here, well at least in the homepage. However without these this is a very good news source if you want to know everything going on in the world instead of another pop culture person going to rehab...again.

NY Post Screen Shot

The New York Post is known more as a tabloid newspaper. Their homepage is full of witty headlines on human interests stories to try and draw people in. It focuses a lot less to national and global headlines, kind of putting them underneath all of these witty headlined stories.

NY Times Screen Shot

In the New York Times screenshot, there homepage included relavent information about world situations and also situations with our own country. Then there was sort of a human interest piece about the neighborhoods of New York to grab the attention of local people buying the paper. In all the NY Times homepage was centered around important global issues but at the same time focused on the interests of the common person just wanting to enjoy the paper.

about me

Okay so my name is Peter Padovano. I am 18 years old, a graduate of St. Joseph by the Sea High School and currently a freshman at St. Johns University. I am a huge sports fan, or a die hard is what some people may call it. My favorite teams include the New York Jets, New York Yankees and the woeful New York Knicks. Baseball was a huge center of my life and was going to choose the college I was going to, until SJU came in and gave me so much money that they basically ended my baseball career and chose the college for me. Aside from baseball, my biggest goal in life is to be on tv. Broadcast journalism is my major and I am very confident in my abilities in the area, so that I will be able to get myself a job in the unfortunately near future.