4 April

Pick a Day

4 APRIL

In Music History

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2023 The first truly believable AI-generated song appears online, posted to TikTok by an anonymous user. It's called "Heart On My Sleeve," and mimics the voices of Drake and The Weeknd. It quickly spreads to streaming services and is continually taken down and reposted, raising the issue of copyright with AI music.

2022 Jack Harlow previews his song "First Class" on TikTok with an eight-second snippet four days before its official release. It quickly spreads on the platform and helps the song debut at #1, setting up a new paradigm for launching music.

2017 Pepsi posts a commercial featuring the Skip Marley protest song "Lions" that is pulled the next day amid controversy that it makes light of actual protests.More

2015 Marilyn Manson is sucker punched by a fellow patron at a Denny's in Alberta, Canada. The rocker, who stopped by the restaurant for a late-night meal after a show promoting his Pale Emperor album, denies claims that he insulted the assailant's girlfriend and spurred the incident.

2014 Richard Marx and Cynthia Rhodes announce the end of their 25-year marriage that included the birth of three sons. The pair met in 1983 when both were working on the film Staying Alive (Marx on the soundtrack, Rhodes as a dancer).

2012 The single "Boyfriend" by Justin Bieber debuts at #2 on the Billboard Hot 100. It's the third-highest first-week sale at 600,000 copies sold. Lots of teenage girls want to be Bieber's girlfriend.

2009 At the Public Hall in Cleveland, Jeff Beck, Little Anthony & The Imperials, Metallica, Run-DMC and Bobby Womack are inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

2008 The Martin Scorsese-directed Rolling Stones concert documentary Shine A Light hits theaters. The next week, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Jack White appear on the cover of Rolling Stone with the headline, "Blues Brothers."

2008 Procol Harum's Gary Brooker wins an appeal in London to an earlier ruling, which stated that Harum organist Matthew Fisher was entitled to 40 percent of the royalties from the band's 1967 smash "A Whiter Shade Of Pale." Though the new ruling notes that Fisher wrote the organ line and should be co-credited, it also overturns the royalty award by noting that Fisher waited 38 years to sue.

2008 New Kids on the Block announce their upcoming reunion tour during NBC's Today show in New York City.

2007 An article is published in New Musical Express quoting Keith Richards as saying, "I snorted my father." Richards later claims it was an April Fools' joke.

2005 A man who won an out-of-court settlement in 1994 against the singer for a similar charge testifies in Michael Jackson's current molestation trial.

2003 The Rolling Stones make their stage debut in India, performing at Bangalore Palace in the middle of a monsoon!

1996 More trouble for Wilson Pickett, who after serving a one-year jail sentence in 1994 is arrested at his New Jersey home and charged with possession of two grams of cocaine. Still on probation, he enters a rehab center in August.

1996 Grateful Dead leader Jerry Garcia's ashes are scattered in the Ganges river in India by Dead guitarist Bob Weir and Garcia's widow, Deborah.

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Martin Luther King Jr. Is Killed

1968

US civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. is killed after being shot on a Memphis motel balcony. King's life inspires a number of songs, including U2's "Pride (In The Name Of Love)."

Three days after King's assassination, Nina Simone performs a song written in tribute, "Why? (The King of Love Is Dead)." Further musical tributes are conflated with the death of Senator Robert Kennedy, who is killed two months later: The Rascals' "People Got to Be Free," inspired by King and Kennedy, goes to #1 in August; later in the year Dion has a hit with "Abraham, Martin and John," a song about King, Kennedy and Abraham Lincoln. Even Elvis gets in on it, with a King/Kennedy song called "If I Can Dream." The most trenchant tributes to King come more than a decade after his death, when his legacy is unbound from Kennedy's. Stevie Wonder leads a successful campaign to get King's birthday declared a national holiday, with his 1980 track "Happy Birthday" written in King's honor. U2 learns about King in 1983 when they visit the Chicago Peace Museum, leading to two songs on their album The Unforgettable Fire: "MLK" and "Pride (In The Name Of Love)" (Bono references the shooting as "Early morning, April 4" in the lyric, although it actually happened at 6 p.m.). In ensuing years, songwriters of all stripes lionize King. Public Enemy pleads his case in "By the Time I Get to Arizona"; Rage Against the Machine calls him a "Renegade of Funk." The folk music community, a powerful voice for King's work during his lifetime, also comes through, with Patty Griffin's "Up to the Mountain" reflecting on his famous speech. Hip-Hop is sprinkled with references to King, with the Game/Nas collaboration "Letter to the King" explaining how they came around after years of youthful indifference. "You the first real Braveheart, we miss you," Nas raps. Photo from the United States Library of Congress

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