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 is the steady bass-drum pulse under nearly every disco record. It is usually paired with a hissing hi-hat and a syncopated bass line...

Q 02/05

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

A) Drunkenness

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. Several sources trace his find to '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 was Hilly Kristal's plan for a roots-music bar at 315 Bowery, but the Ramones, Television, Patti Smith, Blondie and Talking Heads turned it into ...

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 noisy factories and metalworking are credited with shaping the chugging, metallic sound of Black Sabbath and of heavy metal in general. U...