Happy Thursday, everybody! This year, the Hawks Library staff decided to put out a couple posts each week to celebrate Black History Month. We will be posting every Thursday and Friday throughout this month. On Thursdays (like today), we will share a profile of an artist, musician, actor, author, etc. that is outside of the normal/boring textbook curriculum. Fridays will be a day that we share a book from a Black author that you can find on one of our ebook platforms.
Today's profile is about one of my favorite bands from my youth, Living Colour. Back when I had hair and was able to enjoy rock music without everything being too loud, there was nothing that I enjoyed more than jamming out to some heavy metal, punk, or other forms of hard rock (see the mid-90s ska movement...Steve from Steve's Hot Dogs used to be in a kick-a** group called The Urge). What set Living Colour apart was not just that they had some of the best-composed music or that their debut album Vivid is on my Mount Rushmore of great albums, but that the members of the band were all young Black men, something unheard of in hard rock circles back in the 1980s. The music industry was (and in many instances, still is) notorious for racial profiling and pigeon-holing artists of color. Living Colour, fronted by one of the greatest vocalists of the late-80s and early-90s in Corey Glover, lit the music scene on fire and some of their hits live on today. You've probably heard this number in video games like Guitar Hero or as the entrance music for WWE star C.M. Punk -
If interested in listening to more from this awesome group, look into some of their videos on YouTube. Also, since we are an information center here at the Hawks Library, we wouldn't be doing our jobs if we didn't give you a material to look over to learn more (I managed to use all the words in the acronym IMC...did you catch that?). To find out more about Living Colour and their breaking of the hard rock color barrier, read this article from The Ringer -