Q 01/05

Disco's defining drum pattern, a bass-drum thump on every beat of the bar, is known by what name?

A) Heavy backbeat

B) Four-on-the-floor

C) Half-time shuffle

D) Syncopated breakbeat

Answer · why

B) Four-on-the-floor

Four-on-the-floor was not disco's invention: it was common in jazz drumming until bebop arrived in the 1940s, and the name refers to the drum kit's pe...

Q 02/05

By one account the blues is named for 'the blue devils', an old English phrase meaning what?

A) Jealousy

B) Melancholy

C) Poverty

D) Homesickness

Answer · why

B) Melancholy

Melancholy and sadness were 'the blue devils' in a 1798 George Colman farce of that title, decades before the music existed. The same phrase once desc...

Q 03/05

Which Cleveland disc jockey started calling the R&B he played 'rock and roll' on air in 1951?

A) Alan Freed

B) Dick Clark

C) Wolfman Jack

D) Murray the K

Answer · why

A) Alan Freed

Alan Freed picked up a phrase that already existed as R&B slang for sex and made it the name of a genre; he is thought to have found it on 'Sixty Minu...

Q 04/05

Which Bowery club, opened by Hilly Kristal in 1973 as a roots-music bar, became New York punk's cradle?

A) Mudd Club

B) Max's Kansas City

C) The Bitter End

D) CBGB

Answer · why

D) CBGB

CBGB stood for Country, Bluegrass and Blues, the music Hilly Kristal meant to book, until the Ramones, Television, Patti Smith and Blondie made 315 Bo...

Q 05/05

Which industrial English city produced Black Sabbath, whose guitarist lost fingertips at a factory?

A) Sheffield

B) Manchester

C) Birmingham

D) Newcastle

Answer · why

C) Birmingham

Birmingham's Black Sabbath owe part of their heavy sound to that accident: unable to fret normally, Tony Iommi tuned his guitar down and leaned on pow...