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Shea Stadium (126th St & Roosevelt Ave, Flushing, Queens)[]
The Beatles played their first big concert in the USA at Shea Stadium; the event was recorded for posterity in a grainy colour documentary. The stadium still shows live acts, and between April and September it is the home ground for the New York Mets baseball team.
Corona Park (Flushing Meadows, Queens)[]
In the middle of Corona Park is a huge sculpture of the Earth, which was included on the cover of the Beastie Boys' first album, Licensed To Ill. The sculpture was built for the 1964 Worlds Fair, along with other futuristic sculptures in the park. The movie The Wiz also used the park as a location. The multicultural borough of Queens is the home of the Ramones and hip-hop artists like Run DMC, A Tribe Called Quest, Salt 'N Pepa, and LL Cool J.
Sweet Mountain Studios (96 West St., Englewood New Jersey)[]
In the summer of 1979, a band called the Sugar Hill Gang recorded the first known Rap record, a song called Rappers Delight. Until then, rapping was very much an underground activity in New York, where DJs would experiment by mixing together pieces of records into seamless collages, and rappers would improvise over the top of the music, on a mike. Rappers Delight took this technique into the studio for the first time, and mixed a live band with a DJ, who used snatches of a disco hit by Chic. The song was a big hit world wide, and paved the way for hip-hop in the 80s and 90s.
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