Soundgarden

Soundgarden is an American rock band formed in Seattle, Washington, in 1984 by singer and rhythm guitarist Chris Cornell, lead guitarist Kim Thayil, and bassist Hiro Yamamoto. Matt Cameron became the band's full-time drummer in 1986, while bassist Ben Shepherd became a permanent replacement for Yamamoto in 1990.

Soundgarden was one of the seminal bands in the creation of grunge, a style of alternative rock that developed in Seattle, and was one of a number of grunge bands signed to the record label Sub Pop. Soundgarden was the first grunge band to sign to a major label (A&M Records, in 1988), though the band did not achieve commercial success until they popularized the genre in the early 1990s with Seattle contemporaries Pearl Jam, Nirvana, and Alice in Chains.

Soundgarden achieved its biggest success with the 1994 album Superunknown, which debuted at number one on the Billboard charts and yielded the Grammy Award-winning singles "Black Hole Sun" and "Spoonman". In 1997, the band broke up due to internal strife over its creative direction. After more than a decade of working on projects and other bands, Soundgarden reunited in 2010 and their sixth studio album, King Animal, was released two years later.

Music video

A music video or song video is a short film integrating a song and imagery, produced for promotional or artistic purposes. Modern music videos are primarily made and used as a marketing device intended to promote the sale of music recordings. There are also cases where songs are used in tie in marketing campaigns that allow them to become more than just a song. Tie ins and merchandising could be used in toys are marketing campaigns for food and other products. Although the origins of music videos date back to musical short films that first appeared in the 1920s, they came into prominence in the 1980s when MTV based their format around the medium. Prior to the 1980s, these works were described by various terms including "illustrated song", "filmed insert", "promotional (promo) film", "promotional clip", "promotional video", "song video", "song clip" or "film clip". Since the creation and increased popularity of YouTube, mainstream artists now promote new music videos by releasing trailers of short promos on the site for their upcoming song and music video. Consequentially, YouTube has been converted into a social media platform for celebrities and artists to market themselves to their fans and audiences.

Black Hole Sun

"Black Hole Sun" (sometimes referred to in the UK as "Black 'Ol Sun") is a song by the American rock band Soundgarden. Written by frontman Chris Cornell, "Black Hole Sun" was released in 1994 as the third single from the band's fourth studio album Superunknown (1994). It is arguably the band's most recognizable and most popular song, and remains a well known song from the 1990s. The song topped the Billboard Mainstream Rock Tracks chart, where it spent a total of seven weeks at number one. Despite peaking at number two on the Modern Rock Tracks, "Black Hole Sun" still finished as the number-one track of 1994 for that chart. It failed to hit the Billboard Hot 100 chart due to the rules of a physical/commercial release of the single at the time, but it still peaked at number 24 on the Hot 100 Airplay chart and number nine on the Mainstream Top 40 chart. The song was included on Soundgarden's 1997 greatest hits album A-Sides and appeared again on the 2010 compilation album Telephantasm.

Black hole

A black hole is a geometrically defined region of spacetime exhibiting such strong gravitational effects that nothing—including particles and electromagnetic radiation such as light—can escape from inside it. The theory of general relativity predicts that a sufficiently compact mass can deform spacetime to form a black hole. The boundary of the region from which no escape is possible is called the event horizon. Although crossing the event horizon has enormous effect on the fate of the object crossing it, it appears to have no locally detectable features. In many ways a black hole acts like an ideal black body, as it reflects no light. Moreover, quantum field theory in curved spacetime predicts that event horizons emit Hawking radiation, with the same spectrum as a black body of a temperature inversely proportional to its mass. This temperature is on the order of billionths of a kelvin for black holes of stellar mass, making it essentially impossible to observe.

Objects whose gravitational fields are too strong for light to escape were first considered in the 18th century by John Michell and Pierre-Simon Laplace. The first modern solution of general relativity that would characterize a black hole was found by Karl Schwarzschild in 1916, although its interpretation as a region of space from which nothing can escape was first published by David Finkelstein in 1958. Black holes were long considered a mathematical curiosity; it was during the 1960s that theoretical work showed they were a generic prediction of general relativity. The discovery of neutron stars sparked interest in gravitationally collapsed compact objects as a possible astrophysical reality.

A&M Records

A&M Records was an American historical record label. A&M was formerly an independent label founded by Herb Alpert and Jerry Moss (which the name A&M also stood for the last names of the label founders Alpert and Moss) in 1962.

Due to the success A&M released, the label garnered interest and was acquired by PolyGram in 1989 and began distributing releases from Polydor Ltd. from the UK. Throughout its operations, A&M housed well-known acts such as Captain & Tennille, Sting, Bryan Adams, Burt Bacharach, Liza Minnelli, The Carpenters, Paul Williams, Janet Jackson, Cat Stevens, Carole King, Amy Grant, Joan Baez, The Police, CeCe Peniston, Soundgarden, and Sheryl Crow.

As PolyGram was acquired by Seagram and dissolved into Universal Music Group in 1998, A&M's operations were ceased in January 1999 when it was merged with Geffen and Interscope Records to form the record company Interscope Geffen A&M Records. In 2007, Interscope announced that the A&M name was revived and was to be merged with Octone Records to form A&M Octone Records which operated until 2013, when A&M Octone was folded into Interscope.