Austin, Minnesota
Austin is a city in Mower County, United States. The population was 24,718 at the 2010 census, it is the county seat of Mower County. The town was settled along the Cedar River and has two artificial lakes, East Side Lake and Mill Pond, it was named for the first settler in the area. Hormel Foods Corporation is Austin's largest employer, the town is sometimes called "SPAM Town USA". Austin is home to Hormel's corporate headquarters, a factory that makes most of North America's SPAM tinned meat, the Spam Museum. Austin is home to the Hormel Institute, a leading cancer research institution operated by the University of Minnesota with significant support from the Mayo Clinic. Austin has been named one of the "Top 10 Affordable Small Towns Where You'd Actually Want to Live," as well as one of the "Best Small Cities in America" for 2015. Fertile land and ease of access brought first trappers and the early pioneers to this region; the rich gameland attracted Austin Nichols, a trapper who built the first log cabin in 1853.
At that time there were "about twenty families in the area." More settlers began to arrive by wagon train in 1855, by 1856, enough people were present to organize Mower County. In 1856 the settlement adopted the name Austin, in honor of its first settler; that year the first hotel opened to travelers and the first physician moved to town, Dr. Ormanzo Allen; the first newspaper, the Mower County Mirror, was started in 1858. Mills, powered by the Cedar River, were the first industries in Austin, they provided much-needed lumber for the growing village. Growth was slow during the first two decades, but the Chicago, St. Paul railroad arrived in the late 1860s, hastening economic development; the town's first schoolhouse was constructed in 1865 and the first bank opened its doors the following year. In 1891, George A. Hormel opened a small family-owned butcher shop in Austin, which grew into today's Fortune 500 company, Hormel Foods. By 1896, area doctors, with the help of local Lutheran congregations, formed the Austin Hospital Association becoming St. Olaf Hospital, part of Mayo Clinic Health System.
Austin received its first college in 1897 when the Southern Minnesota Normal College and Austin School of Commerce were opened by Charles Boostrom. The college closed in 1925 and the city was without an institution of higher education until Austin Junior College opened in 1940. A 50-acre parcel of land was made into Horace Austin State Park by the Minnesota Legislature in 1913. At the time, the land was "one of the beauty spots of Southern Minnesota, but of late years has not been cared for and in places the banks have been disfigured by dumping along the shore of the stream," according to the bill's author, Senator Charles F. Cook; the park was converted to a state "scenic wayside" in 1937 transferred to city ownership in 1949. In the 1930s, Austin Acres was built with funding from the Subsistence Homesteads Division of the Department of the Interior, the Austin Parks Board was formed in the 1940s to oversee the growing number of green spaces within the city; the Jay C. Hormel Nature Center, established in 1971, a 500-acre nature preserve including the 60 acre Hormel Arboretum, purchased from Geordie Hormel with a state grant.
In 1973, the city opened Riverside Arena, the city's first indoor ice arena, now home to a variety of ice activities including the Austin Bruins junior ice hockey team. In August 1985, 1,500 Hormel meatpackers went on strike at the Austin plant after management demanded a 23% cut in wages. A protracted battle between union employees and Hormel continued until June 1986, one of the longest labor struggles of the 1980s. In January 1986, some workers crossed the picket lines; the strike received media attention on a national level and a documentary film, American Dream, was made during the ten-month long conflict. The movie won Best Documentary Feature at the 63rd Annual Academy Awards. A song about the strike, "P-9", was written by Dave Pirner of the Minneapolis band Soul Asylum, it is on their 1989 album Clam Other Delights. Hormel never gave in to the workers' demands, when the strike ended in June 1986, 700 employees were left without work. Austin has undergone several notable developments: a new $28 million courthouse and jail were completed in 2010, a new intermediate school opened in 2013, a major redevelopment project is taking place at the site of the former Oak Park Mall.
The city is embarking on a community development project called Vision 2020. This grassroots movement was chartered in 2011 to implement ten major new community initiatives that could be completed by 2020; the projects involve a variety of projects related to economic development and wellness, tourism. A community recreation center is in progress as well as a visitor center. One goal is to make the downtown business district more of a destination, aided in part by the Spam Museum's relocation to Main Street in 2016. In 2015, the National Association of Realtors named Austin one of the "Top 10 Affordable Small Towns Where You'd Actually Want to Live." Austin has a long history of flooding. The Cedar River, along with Dobbins Creek and Turtle Creek, flow through the community, many homes and businesses were constructed in flood plains. A series of floods between 1978 and 2010 resulted in a major flood mitigation program; this involved the purchase and demolition of buildings within the flood plain, converting low-lying areas of
Trouser Press
Trouser Press was a rock and roll magazine started in New York in 1974 as a mimeographed fanzine by editor/publisher Ira Robbins, fellow Who fan Dave Schulps and Karen Rose under the name "Trans-Oceanic Trouser Press". Publication of the magazine ceased in 1984. Trouser Press has continued to exist in various formats; the magazine's original scope was British artists. Initial issues contained occasional interviews with major artists like Brian Eno and Robert Fripp and extensive record reviews. After 14 issues, the title was shortened to Trouser Press, it transformed into a professional magazine with color covers and advertising; as the 1970s music scene transformed, so did the magazine's editorial focus. From 1976 on, Trouser Press centered on the growing punk movements in both London and New York; the magazine provided in-depth articles on bands such as the Sex Pistols, The Boomtown Rats, The Clash, The Damned, the Ramones and many other similar groups, long before other U. S. music publications did.
In 1980, the magazine introduced "America Underground", a recurring column devoted to local music scenes from different areas of the country. By the early 1980s, the magazine's focus was exclusively on new wave, alternative rock, underground rock from both sides of the Atlantic. Starting in 1982, flexi-discs were included with every issue. Although the magazine seemed to be thriving, with an ever-growing circulation, editor Robbins ceased publication after the April 1984 issue, citing a lack of interest in the continuing but stagnating new wave scene that left his writers with little to say; as a concept, Trouser Press continued to evolve. In 1983, The Trouser Press Guide to New Wave Records, edited by Robbins, was published by Charles Scribner's Sons; the book was sufficiently popular for four more updated editions, with varying titles and publishers, to be issued over the years, culminating in 1997's The Trouser Press Guide to'90s Rock. This final edition featured all-new entries on over 2,000 bands and reviews of 8,500 records and CDs.
The contents of all five volumes are available on the Trouser Press website, updated with entries on new bands, as well as revisions/expansions of old articles, by Robbins and other writers. TrouserPress.com went online in August 2002. Album era Christgau's Record Guide: Rock Albums of the Seventies Christgau's Record Guide: The'80s Rockism and poptimism Spin Alternative Record Guide Official website
Gear Daddies
The Gear Daddies are a rock band from Austin, Minnesota. Randy Broughten, Nick Ciola, Billy Dankert, Martin Zellar played their first shows together in 1984, they released singles and albums between 1986 and 1992 and became an important part of the Twin Cities music scene. Most songs were written by Zellar, though Dankert had several of note, including crowd favorite "Time Heals". In 1991, Zellar and Broughten played "Stupid Boy" on Late Night with David Letterman. Ciola and Dankert did not play on the show because, at the time, many bands sat in with The World's Most Dangerous Band. Zellar said of the experience: "I was so nervous, it happened so quick. I couldn't tell you. I got done, I was walking back and said to Randy,'Did I sing all the words? Did I do that?' When I watched it that night in the hotel room I had no recollection of having lived it." Although their song "Zamboni" was a hidden track on their album Billy's Live Bait, it became one of their best-known songs, as it was played during intermissions at hockey games throughout North America.
It was featured in the movies D2: The Mighty Ducks and Mystery, Alaska, as well as on television program Malcolm in the Middle. After the dissolution of the band, Zellar began an active career of performing and recording with the band that became known as Martin Zellar and the Hardways, taking with him long-time friend and bassist Nick Ciola. Electric guitarist Randy Broughten is a physical education teacher in Eagan, Minnesota; as well as being a member of The Cactus Blossoms, he has been the steel guitar player for many years with Minneapolis country band Trailer Trash, who are known for their annual Christmas shows, who had a cameo in the mockumentary film Dill Scallion. Drummer James "Billy" Dankert is a professional visual artist as well as a musician; as of the present, all four members of the Gear Daddies reunite several times a year to perform throughout the Midwest. The Gear Daddies were an influence on a number of bands that emerged in the upper Midwest in the late 1980s through the 1990s, including Johnny Clueless, The Billy's, Steve's Piece, Shoot Lucy, Dazy Head Mazy and Six Mile Grove.
Albums Let's Go Scare Al Billy's Live Bait Can't Have Nothin' Nice EPs Color Of Her Eyes Miscellaneous The song "Zamboni" appeared on the soundtracks for the Disney movies: D2: The Mighty Ducks Mystery, Alaska Gear Daddies video playlist Martin Zellar website Gear Daddies on Letterman video Gear Daddies at AllMusic Star Tribune Gear Daddies Video produced by Twin Cities PBS
Rock music
Rock music is a broad genre of popular music that originated as "rock and roll" in the United States in the early 1950s, developed into a range of different styles in the 1960s and particularly in the United Kingdom and in the United States. It has its roots in 1940s and 1950s rock and roll, a style which drew on the genres of blues and blues, from country music. Rock music drew on a number of other genres such as electric blues and folk, incorporated influences from jazz and other musical styles. Musically, rock has centered on the electric guitar as part of a rock group with electric bass and one or more singers. Rock is song-based music with a 4/4 time signature using a verse–chorus form, but the genre has become diverse. Like pop music, lyrics stress romantic love but address a wide variety of other themes that are social or political. By the late 1960s "classic rock" period, a number of distinct rock music subgenres had emerged, including hybrids like blues rock, folk rock, country rock, southern rock, raga rock, jazz-rock, many of which contributed to the development of psychedelic rock, influenced by the countercultural psychedelic and hippie scene.
New genres that emerged included progressive rock. In the second half of the 1970s, punk rock reacted by producing stripped-down, energetic social and political critiques. Punk was an influence in the 1980s on new wave, post-punk and alternative rock. From the 1990s alternative rock began to dominate rock music and break into the mainstream in the form of grunge and indie rock. Further fusion subgenres have since emerged, including pop punk, electronic rock, rap rock, rap metal, as well as conscious attempts to revisit rock's history, including the garage rock/post-punk and techno-pop revivals at the beginning of the 2000s. Rock music has embodied and served as the vehicle for cultural and social movements, leading to major subcultures including mods and rockers in the UK and the hippie counterculture that spread out from San Francisco in the US in the 1960s. 1970s punk culture spawned the goth and emo subcultures. Inheriting the folk tradition of the protest song, rock music has been associated with political activism as well as changes in social attitudes to race and drug use, is seen as an expression of youth revolt against adult consumerism and conformity.
The sound of rock is traditionally centered on the amplified electric guitar, which emerged in its modern form in the 1950s with the popularity of rock and roll. It was influenced by the sounds of electric blues guitarists; the sound of an electric guitar in rock music is supported by an electric bass guitar, which pioneered in jazz music in the same era, percussion produced from a drum kit that combines drums and cymbals. This trio of instruments has been complemented by the inclusion of other instruments keyboards such as the piano, the Hammond organ, the synthesizer; the basic rock instrumentation was derived from the basic blues band instrumentation. A group of musicians performing rock music is termed as a rock group. Furthermore, it consists of between three and five members. Classically, a rock band takes the form of a quartet whose members cover one or more roles, including vocalist, lead guitarist, rhythm guitarist, bass guitarist and keyboard player or other instrumentalist. Rock music is traditionally built on a foundation of simple unsyncopated rhythms in a 4/4 meter, with a repetitive snare drum back beat on beats two and four.
Melodies originate from older musical modes such as the Dorian and Mixolydian, as well as major and minor modes. Harmonies range from the common triad to parallel perfect fourths and fifths and dissonant harmonic progressions. Since the late 1950s and from the mid 1960s onwards, rock music used the verse-chorus structure derived from blues and folk music, but there has been considerable variation from this model. Critics have stressed the eclecticism and stylistic diversity of rock; because of its complex history and its tendency to borrow from other musical and cultural forms, it has been argued that "it is impossible to bind rock music to a rigidly delineated musical definition." Unlike many earlier styles of popular music, rock lyrics have dealt with a wide range of themes, including romantic love, rebellion against "The Establishment", social concerns, life styles. These themes were inherited from a variety of sources such as the Tin Pan Alley pop tradition, folk music, rhythm and blues.
Music journalist Robert Christgau characterizes rock lyrics as a "cool medium" with simple diction and repeated refrains, asserts that rock's primary "function" "pertains to music, or, more noise." The predominance of white and middle class musicians in rock music has been noted, rock has been seen as an appropriation of black musical forms for a young and male audience. As a result, it has been seen to articulate the concerns of this group in both style and lyrics. Christgau, writing in 1972, said in spite of some exceptions, "rock and roll implies an identification of male sexuality and aggression". Since the term "rock" started being used in preference to "rock and roll" from the late-1960s, it has been contrasted with pop music, with which it has shared many characteristics, but from wh
Entertainment Weekly
Entertainment Weekly is an American magazine, published by Meredith Corporation, that covers film, music, Broadway theatre and popular culture. Different from celebrity-focused publications like Us Weekly, In Touch Weekly, EW concentrates on entertainment media news and critical reviews. However, unlike Variety and The Hollywood Reporter, which are aimed at industry insiders, EW targets a more general audience; the first issue was published on February 16, 1990. Created by Jeff Jarvis and founded by Michael Klingensmith, who served as publisher until October 1996, the magazine's original television advertising soliciting pre-publication subscribers portrayed it as a consumer guide to popular culture, including movies and book reviews, sometimes with video game and stage reviews, too.. In 1996, the magazine won the coveted National Magazine Award for General Excellence from the American Society of Magazine Editors. EW won the same award again in 2002. In September 2016, in collaboration with People, Entertainment Weekly launched the People/Entertainment Weekly Network.
The network is "a free, ad-supported online-video network carries short- and long-form programming covering celebrities, pop culture and human-interest stories". It was rebranded as PeopleTV in September 2017; the magazine features celebrities on the cover and addresses topics such as television ratings, movie grosses, production costs, concert ticket sales, ad budgets, in-depth articles about scheduling, showrunners, etc. It publishes several "double issues" each year; the magazine numbers its issues sequentially, it counts each double issue as "two" issues so that it can fulfil its marketing claim of 52 issues per year for subscribers. Entertainment Weekly follows a typical magazine format by featuring a letters to the editor and table of contents in the first few pages, while featuring advertisements. While many advertisements are unrelated to the entertainment industry, the majority of ads are related to up-and-coming television, film or music events; these beginning articles open the magazine and as a rule focus on current events in pop culture.
The whole section runs eight to ten pages long, features short news articles, as well as several specific recurring sections: "Sound Bites" opens the magazine. It’s a collage of media personalities. "The Must List" is a two-page spread highlighting ten things. "First Look", subtitled "An early peek at some of Hollywood's coolest projects", is a two-page spread with behind-the-scenes or publicity stills of upcoming movies, television episodes or music events. "The Hit List", written each week by critic Scott Brown, highlights ten major events, with short comedic commentaries by Brown. There will be some continuity to the commentaries; this column was written by Jim Mullen and featured twenty events each week, Dalton Ross wrote an abbreviated version. "The Hollywood Insider" is a one-page section. It gives details, in the separate columns, on the most-current news in television and music. "The Style Report" is a one-page section devoted to celebrity style. Because its focus is on celebrity fashion or lifestyle, it is graphically rich in nature, featuring many photographs or other images.
The page converted to a new format: five pictures of celebrity fashions for the week, graded on the magazine's review "A"-to-"F" scale. A spin-off section, "Style Hunter", which finds reader-requested articles of clothing or accessories that have appeared in pop culture appears frequently. "The Monitor" is a two-page spread devoted to major events in celebrity lives with small paragraphs highlighting events such as weddings, arrests, court appearances, deaths. Deaths of major celebrities are detailed in a one-half- or full-page obituary titled "Legacy"; this feature is nearly identical to sister publication People's "Passages" feature. The "celebrity" column, the final section of "News and Notes", is devoted to a different column each week, written by two of the magazine's more-prominent writers: "The Final Cut" is written by former executive editor and author Mark Harris. Harris' column focuses on analyzing current popular-culture events, is the most serious of the columns. Harris has written among other topics.
"Binge Thinking" was written by screenwriter Diablo Cody. After several profiles of Cody in the months leading up to and following the release of her debut film, she was hired to write a column detailing her unique view of the entertainment business. If You Ask Me..." Libby Gelman-Waxer was brought in to write his former Premiere column for Entertainment Weekly in 2011. There are four to six major articles within the middle pages of the magazine; these articles are most interviews, but there are narrative articles as well as lists. Feature articles tend to focus on movies and television and less on books and the theatre. In the magazine's history, there have only been a few cover stories devoted to authors. There are seven sections of reviews in the back pages of each issue (together enc
Album
An album is a collection of audio recordings issued as a collection on compact disc, audio tape, or another medium. Albums of recorded music were developed in the early 20th century as individual 78-rpm records collected in a bound book resembling a photograph album. Vinyl LPs are still issued, though album sales in the 21st-century have focused on CD and MP3 formats; the audio cassette was a format used alongside vinyl from the 1970s into the first decade of the 2000s. An album may be recorded in a recording studio, in a concert venue, at home, in the field, or a mix of places; the time frame for recording an album varies between a few hours to several years. This process requires several takes with different parts recorded separately, brought or "mixed" together. Recordings that are done in one take without overdubbing are termed "live" when done in a studio. Studios are built to absorb sound, eliminating reverberation, so as to assist in mixing different takes. Recordings, including live, may contain sound effects, voice adjustments, etc..
With modern recording technology, musicians can be recorded in separate rooms or at separate times while listening to the other parts using headphones. Album covers and liner notes are used, sometimes additional information is provided, such as analysis of the recording, lyrics or librettos; the term "album" was applied to a collection of various items housed in a book format. In musical usage the word was used for collections of short pieces of printed music from the early nineteenth century. Collections of related 78rpm records were bundled in book-like albums; when long-playing records were introduced, a collection of pieces on a single record was called an album. An album, in ancient Rome, was a board chalked or painted white, on which decrees and other public notices were inscribed in black, it was from this that in medieval and modern times album came to denote a book of blank pages in which verses, sketches and the like are collected. Which in turn led to the modern meaning of an album as a collection of audio recordings issued as a single item.
In the early nineteenth century "album" was used in the titles of some classical music sets, such as Schumann's Album for the Young Opus 68, a set of 43 short pieces. When 78rpm records came out, the popular 10-inch disc could only hold about three minutes of sound per side, so all popular recordings were limited to around three minutes in length. Classical-music and spoken-word items were released on the longer 12-inch 78s, about 4–5 minutes per side. For example, in 1924, George Gershwin recorded a drastically shortened version of the seventeen-minute Rhapsody in Blue with Paul Whiteman and His Orchestra, it ran for 8m 59s. Deutsche Grammophon had produced an album for its complete recording of the opera Carmen in 1908. German record company Odeon released the Nutcracker Suite by Tchaikovsky in 1909 on 4 double-sided discs in a specially designed package; this practice of issuing albums does not seem to have been taken up by other record companies for many years. By about 1910, bound collections of empty sleeves with a paperboard or leather cover, similar to a photograph album, were sold as record albums that customers could use to store their records.
These albums came in both 12-inch sizes. The covers of these bound books were wider and taller than the records inside, allowing the record album to be placed on a shelf upright, like a book, suspending the fragile records above the shelf and protecting them. In the 1930s, record companies began issuing collections of 78 rpm records by one performer or of one type of music in specially assembled albums with artwork on the front cover and liner notes on the back or inside cover. Most albums included three or four records, with two sides each, making six or eight compositions per album; the 12-inch LP record, or 33 1⁄3 rpm microgroove vinyl record, is a gramophone record format introduced by Columbia Records in 1948. A single LP record had the same or similar number of tunes as a typical album of 78s, it was adopted by the record industry as a standard format for the "album". Apart from minor refinements and the important addition of stereophonic sound capability, it has remained the standard format for vinyl albums.
The term "album" was extended to other recording media such as Compact audio cassette, compact disc, MiniDisc, digital albums, as they were introduced. As part of a trend of shifting sales in the music industry, some observers feel that the early 21st century experienced the death of the album. While an album may contain as many or as few tracks as required, in the United States, The Recording Academy's rules for Grammy Awards state that an album must comprise a minimum total playing time of 15 minutes with at least five distinct tracks or a minimum total playing time of 30 minutes with no minimum track requirement. In the United Kingdom, the criteria for the UK Albums Chart is that a recording counts as an "album" i
Music genre
A music genre is a conventional category that identifies some pieces of music as belonging to a shared tradition or set of conventions. It is to be distinguished from musical form and musical style, although in practice these terms are sometimes used interchangeably. Academics have argued that categorizing music by genre is inaccurate and outdated. Music can be divided into different genres in many different ways; the artistic nature of music means that these classifications are subjective and controversial, some genres may overlap. There are varying academic definitions of the term genre itself. In his book Form in Tonal Music, Douglass M. Green distinguishes between form, he lists madrigal, canzona and dance as examples of genres from the Renaissance period. To further clarify the meaning of genre, Green writes, "Beethoven's Op. 61 and Mendelssohn's Op. 64 are identical in genre – both are violin concertos – but different in form. However, Mozart's Rondo for Piano, K. 511, the Agnus Dei from his Mass, K. 317 are quite different in genre but happen to be similar in form."
Some, like Peter van der Merwe, treat the terms genre and style as the same, saying that genre should be defined as pieces of music that share a certain style or "basic musical language." Others, such as Allan F. Moore, state that genre and style are two separate terms, that secondary characteristics such as subject matter can differentiate between genres. A music genre or subgenre may be defined by the musical techniques, the style, the cultural context, the content and spirit of the themes. Geographical origin is sometimes used to identify a music genre, though a single geographical category will include a wide variety of subgenres. Timothy Laurie argues that since the early 1980s, "genre has graduated from being a subset of popular music studies to being an ubiquitous framework for constituting and evaluating musical research objects". Among the criteria used to classify musical genres are the trichotomy of art and traditional musics. Alternatively, music can be divided on three variables: arousal and depth.
Arousal reflects the energy level of the music. These three variables help explain why many people like similar songs from different traditionally segregated genres. Musicologists have sometimes classified music according to a trichotomic distinction such as Philip Tagg's "axiomatic triangle consisting of'folk','art' and'popular' musics", he explains that each of these three is distinguishable from the others according to certain criteria. The term art music refers to classical traditions, including both contemporary and historical classical music forms. Art music exists in many parts of the world, it emphasizes formal styles that invite technical and detailed deconstruction and criticism, demand focused attention from the listener. In Western practice, art music is considered a written musical tradition, preserved in some form of music notation rather than being transmitted orally, by rote, or in recordings, as popular and traditional music are. Most western art music has been written down using the standard forms of music notation that evolved in Europe, beginning well before the Renaissance and reaching its maturity in the Romantic period.
The identity of a "work" or "piece" of art music is defined by the notated version rather than by a particular performance, is associated with the composer rather than the performer. This is so in the case of western classical music. Art music may include certain forms of jazz, though some feel that jazz is a form of popular music. Sacred Christian music forms an important part of the classical music tradition and repertoire, but can be considered to have an identity of its own; the term popular music refers to any musical style accessible to the general public and disseminated by the mass media. Musicologist and popular music specialist Philip Tagg defined the notion in the light of sociocultural and economical aspects: Popular music, unlike art music, is conceived for mass distribution to large and socioculturally heterogeneous groups of listeners and distributed in non-written form, only possible in an industrial monetary economy where it becomes a commodity and in capitalist societies, subject to the laws of'free' enterprise... it should ideally sell as much as possible.
Popular music is found on most commercial and public service radio stations, in most commercial music retailers and department stores, in movie and television soundtracks. It is noted on the Billboard charts and, in addition to singer-songwriters and composers, it involves music producers more than other genres do; the distinction between classical and popular music has sometimes been blurred in marginal areas such as minimalist music and light classics. Background music for films/movies draws on both traditions. In this respect, music is like fiction, which draws a distinction between literary fiction and popular fiction, not always precise. Country music known as country and western, hillbilly music, is a genre of popular music that originated in the southern United States in the early 1920s; the polka is a Czech dance and genre of dance music familiar throughout Europe and the Americas. Rock music is a broad genre of popular music that originated as "rock and roll" in the United States in the early 1950s, developed into a range of different styles in the 1960s and particular
