title: Album era

text: The track listings on these antecedents, however, typically consisted of material that was not written by the artist. With their hot rod-themed 1963 release "Little Deuce Coupe", the Beach Boys became the first act to release a concept album that consisted almost entirely of original songwriting. In his 2006 book "American Popular Music: From Minstrelsy to MP3", academic Larry Starr credits the Beach Boys' 1964 concept albums "Shut Down Volume 2" and "All Summer Long" with marking "the beginnings of ... the increasing importance of album tracks, and eventually of albums themselves". Music journalist Gary Graff points to Bob Dylan's "Highway 61 Revisited" (released in August 1965) as another possible starting point to the album era, as it constituted "a cohesive and conceptual body of work rather than just some hit singles... with filler tracks."


title: Album era

text: Danesi cites the Beatles' December 1965 release "Rubber Soul" as one of the era's first concept albums. According to music historian Bill Martin, "Rubber Soul" was the "turning point" for popular music, in that for the first time "the "album" rather than the song became the basic unit of artistic production." Author David Howard agrees, saying that "pop's stakes had been raised into the stratosphere" by "Rubber Soul" and that "suddenly, it was more about making a great album without filler than a great single." In January 1966, "Billboard" magazine referred to the opening sales of "Rubber Soul" in the US (1.2 million copies over nine days) as proof of teenage record-buyers gravitating towards the LP format. While it was in keeping with the industry norm in the UK, the lack of a hit single on "Rubber Soul" added to the album's identity in the US as a self-contained artistic statement.


title: Album era

text: Following the Beatles' example, several rock albums intended as artistic statements were released in 1966, including the Rolling Stones' "Aftermath", the Beach Boys' "Pet Sounds", Dylan's "Blonde on Blonde", the Beatles' own "Revolver", and the Who's "A Quick One". Music journalist Mat Snow cites these five releases, together with Otis Redding's 1965 LP "Otis Blue", as evidence that "the album era was here, and though hit singles still mattered, they were no longer pop's most important money spinners and artistic statements." According to Jon Pareles, the music industry profited immensely and redefined its economic identity because of the era's rock musicians, who "started to see themselves as something more than suppliers of ephemeral hit singles". In the case of the British music industry, the commercial success of "Rubber Soul" and "Aftermath" foiled attempts to re-establish the LP market as the domain of wealthier, adult record-buyers. From early 1966, record companies there ceased their policy of promoting adult-oriented entertainers over rock acts, and embraced budget albums for their lower-selling artists to cater to the increased demand for LPs.


title: Album era

text: The Beatles' 1967 album "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" is identified by "Rolling Stone" assistant editor Andy Greene as marking "the beginning of the album era", a reference echoed by Scott Plagenhoef of "Pitchfork";<ref name="Plagenhoef/Pitchfork"></ref> Greene adds that "it was the big bang of albums". Chuck Eddy refers to the "high album era" as beginning with "Sgt. Pepper". Its release in May 1967 coincided with the emergence of dedicated rock criticism in the US and intellectuals seeking to position pop albums as valid cultural works.<ref name="Hamilton/Slate"></ref> Music historian Simon Philo writes that, aside from the level of critical acclaim it received, "the record's [commercial] success ushered in the era of album-oriented rock, radically reshaping how pop music worked economically." Reinforcing its creative ambition, "Sgt. Pepper" was packaged in a gatefold sleeve with a lyric sheet, typifying a trend whereby musicians now commissioned associates from the art world to design their LP sleeves and presented their albums to the record company for release. Greg Kot said "Sgt. Pepper" introduced a template for both producing album-oriented rock and consuming it, "with listeners no longer twisting the night away to an assortment of three-minute singles, but losing themselves in a succession of 20-minute album sides, taking a journey led by the artist." Because of its cohesive musical aesthetic, it is often regarded as a concept album.


title: Album era

text: Spearheaded by "Sgt. Pepper", 1967 saw a greater output of artistically innovative and renowned rock albums from flourishing music scenes in both the US and the UK. These were often accompanied by popular singles and included the Stones' "Between the Buttons" (with the two-sided single "Ruby Tuesday"/"Let's Spend the Night Together"), Cream's "Disraeli Gears" (featuring the band's most well-known song "Sunshine of Your Love"), and the Who's "The Who Sell Out", which included hits like "I Can See for Miles" in the framework of a concept album satirizing commercialism and radio. Meanwhile, Jimi Hendrix's "Purple Haze" (1967) was released as the "debut single of the Album Rock Era", according to Dave Marsh. Danesi cites the Beatles' 1968 White Album alongside "Sgt. Pepper" as part of the era's emergence. Shuker cites "We're Only in It for the Money" (1967) by the Mothers of Invention and "Arthur, or Decline of the British Empire" (1969) by the Kinks as subsequent concept albums, while noting a subset of the form in rock operas such as Pretty Things' "S.F. Sorrow" (1968) and the Who's "Tommy" (1969).


title: Album era

text: According to Neil Strauss, the "album-rock era" began in the late 1960s and ultimately encompassed LP records by both rock and non-rock artists. According to Ron Wynn, the singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Isaac Hayes helped bring soul music into "the concept album era" with his 1969 album "Hot Buttered Soul", which succeeded commercially and introduced more experimental structures and arrangements to the genre. Also among soul singers, Robert Christgau cites Redding as one of the genre's "few reliable long-form artists" (with "Otis Blue" being his "first great album"), as well as Aretha Franklin and her series of four "classic" LPs for Atlantic Records, from "I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You" (1967) to "Aretha Now" (1968), which he says established an "aesthetic standard" of "rhythmic stomp and catchy songs". This series is compared by Christgau to similarly "prolific" runs from the Beatles, the Stones, and Dylan in the same decade, as well as subsequent runs by Al Green and Parliament-Funkadelic. The Rolling Stones' four-album run beginning in the late 1960s with "Beggars Banquet" (1968) and "Let It Bleed" (1969) – and concluding with "Sticky Fingers" (1971) and "Exile on Main St." (1972) – is also highly regarded, with the cultural historian Jack Hamilton calling it "one of the great sustained creative peaks in all of popular music".


title: Album era

text: The period from the mid 1960s to the late 1970s was the era of the LP and the "golden era" of the album. According to BBC Four's "When Albums Ruled the World" (2013), "These were the years when the music industry exploded to become bigger than Hollywood." "The album era had ushered in the notion of the rock singer as an artist who is worth paying attention to for more than the length of a hit", Pareles later observed. "Performers could become vivid presences to their fans even when they weren't ubiquitous on the Top 40, and loyalties were formed that continue[d] to the [1990s] for some performers of the 1960s and 1970s, from the Kinks to Michael Jackson to Sting." Among those who emerged in the 1970s was Bruce Springsteen, whom Powers calls "the quintessential album-era rock star" for how he "used the long-player form itself more powerfully over the arc of a career, not only to establish a world through song, but to inhabit an enduring persona".


title: Album era

text: Progressive rock and soul musicians utilized highly conceptual album-oriented approaches in the 1970s. Pink Floyd released thematically conceptual and intricately produced LPs that reinvented standards in rock through the next decade, particularly with their 1973 album "The Dark Side of the Moon". The musician-producer Brian Eno emerged through prolific work that thoroughly utilized the format with progressively experimental approaches to rock, peaking throughout the album era with his solo recordings as well as albums produced for Roxy Music, David Bowie, Talking Heads, and U2. Under Berry Gordy's leadership at the soul label Motown, the singer-songwriters Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder were given creative control to approach their albums more seriously in what had generally been a single-focused genre, leading to a series of innovative LPs from the two as the decade ensued. For their innovative work, Gaye and Wonder were the few exceptions in what Marc Hogan of "Pitchfork" observes would become a predominantly white-male "rock-stuffed canon" during the album era, one that largely excluded works by female and African-American musicians.


title: Album era

text: According to Eric Olsen, Pink Floyd was "the most eccentric and experimental multi-platinum band of the album rock era", while the reggae artist Bob Marley was "the only towering figure of the rock era not from America or the U.K." The 1970 Joni Mitchell LP "Ladies of the Canyon" is commonly regarded as one of the album era's most important records. The productions of Bob Ezrin – who worked on 1970s albums by Alice Cooper and Kiss' "Destroyer" (1976) – are also highlighted from this era. As music journalist James Campion writes, "The 1970s album era was perfectly suited to his cinematic approach. Its format, with its two sides, as if two acts in a play with an intermission, allows for a crucial arc in the storytelling." Along with the LP record, the 8-track tape was another format popular in the US in this period.


title: Album era

text: Elaborating on the 1970s LP aesthetic, Campion identifies cultural and environmental factors that, in his mind, made the format ideal for young people during the decade. He describes the "solitary ambience" offered to listeners by the turntable and headphones, which "enveloped [them] in intricate stereo panning, atmospheric sounds, and multilayered vocal trickery". Warren Zanes regards the shrewd sequencing of LP tracks as "the album era's most under-recognized art". The popularity of recreational drugs and mood lamps at the time provided further settings for more focused listening experiences, as Campion notes: "This kept the listener rapt to each song: how one flowed into the other, their connecting lyrical content, and the melding of instrumentation."


title: Album era

text: In comparison to future generations, Campion explains that people growing up in the 1970s found greater value in album listening, in part because of their limited access to any other home entertainment appliance: "Many of them were unable to control the family television or even the kitchen radio. This led to prioritizing of the bedroom or upstairs den". Campion describes this setting as an "imagination capsule" for the era's listeners, who "locked away inside the headphone dreamscape, studying every corner of the 12-inch artwork and delving deeper into lyrical subtext, whether in ways intended by the artist or not". Other cultural influences of the time also informed the listening experiences, according to Campion, who cites the horror and science fiction fantasies and imagery of comic books, as well as advertising, propaganda, and "the American promise of grandeur". In his analysis, Campion concludes: "As if sitting in their own theater of the mind... they were willing participants in the playful meandering of their rock-and-roll heroes." Adding to this observation, Pareles says, "Successive songs become a kind of narrative, held together by the image of and fantasies about the performer." As "listeners' affection and fascination... transferred from a hit song, or a string of hits, to the singer", particularly successful recording artists developed a "staying power" among audiences, according to Pareles.


title: Album era

text: According to Hogan, with "Sgt. Pepper" having provided the impetus, the idea of a "concept album" became a marketing tool by the 1970s, as "no shortage of bands used the pretense of 'art' to sell tens of millions of records." Citing hugely successful albums like "The Dark Side of the Moon" for leading the trend, Hogan says "record sales spiraled upward" through the mid 1970s. In 1974, "dollar sales of records and tapes in the United States reached an all-time high of $2.2 billion", according to the "World Book Encyclopedia", with pop and rock recordings making up two-thirds of all recorded music sales. However, the book attributes this partly to an increase in record prices over the year, while estimating the actual number of net LP sales had decreased from 280 million to 276 million copies and noting an increase in tape sales from 108 million to 114 million. As record companies concentrated their efforts toward pop and rock, releases in other genres like classical, jazz, and easy listening were marginalized in the market. Many jazz artists during this period recorded crossover LPs with pop-friendly songs in order to increase their record sales.


title: Album era

text: By 1977, album sales had begun "ticking downward", according to Hogan. Pareles attributes this decline to the developments of punk rock and disco in the late 1970s: "Punk returned the focus to the short and noisy song. Disco concentrated on the physical moment when a song makes a body move." Christgau similarly notes that "the singles aesthetic began to reassert itself with disco and punk", suggesting this ended the "High Album Era". In a different analysis, historian Matthew Restall observes in this period popular acts struggling to sustain the high level of success afforded to their previous albums. Citing the disappointing receptions of Elton John's "Blue Moves" (1976) and Fleetwood Mac's "Tusk" (1979), Restall says, "[These] are dramatic examples of how the recording artists of the great album era... suffered the receiving end of a horizon of expectations."


title: Album era

text: The fall of LP record sales at the end of the 1970s marked the end of the LP-driven "golden age", as the music industry faced competition from a commercial resurgence in the film industry and the popularity of arcade video games. The success of MTV's music video programming also reemphasized the single format in the 1980s and early 1990s. According to Pareles, it soon became apparent that, "after the album-rock era of the 1970s, MTV helped return the hit single to prominence as a pop marketing tool" and influenced record buyers' consuming habits toward more "disposable hits".


title: Album era

text: Pop stars of the 1980s, such as Michael Jackson and Madonna, were able to galvanize interest in their albums by releasing a single or music video to MTV. This led to the development of the modern album launch, intended to drive an album's marketing momentum for an extended period of time, ranging from many weeks and months to more than a year. "Over time, there became an unspoken (and, eventually, baked into the budget) checklist to releasing a major-label pop album", writes "Vulture" journalist Justin Curto, who cites elements in this model to be an upbeat lead single, an attention-grabbing music video, press coverage, novel merchandise, and the announcement of a supporting concert tour. Dependent on outlets like MTV that exclusively played hit songs, record companies placed more pressure on recording acts to achieve instant commercial success and marketability. "The 1980s and 1990 brought record sales to new peaks while the performers themselves tended to flash and burn out", as Pareles chronicles.


title: Album era

text: At the turn of the 1980s, critics initially struggled to reconcile the rise of punk singles in their conceptions of the hierarchical LP canon. However, The Clash's "London Calling" (1979) and other punk LPs soon earned recognition in rankings of the greatest albums. As the decade ensued, Prince, Kate Bush, and Public Enemy emerged as further exceptions in the predominantly white-male and rock-oriented canon of the album era. Hip hop artists also achieved a corresponding critical stature through a series of successful albums later in the decade. Starting with the May 1986 release of Run-DMC's "Raising Hell", which sold more than three million copies, these included the Beastie Boys' "Licensed to Ill" (1986), Boogie Down Productions' "Criminal Minded" (1987), Public Enemy's "Yo! Bum Rush the Show" (1987), and Eric B. & Rakim's "Paid in Full" (1987). According to "The Boombox" writer Todd "Stereo" Williams, this initiated hip hop's "golden age" as well as the genre's own "album era" from the late 1980s to the late 1990s, during which "hip-hop albums would be the measuring stick by which most of the genre's greats would be judged". In response to rapidly developing trends in these latter decades of the album era, genres and formats were often renamed or regrouped, such as the categorization of earlier "pop/rock" music into the "classic rock" format.


title: Album era

text: During the 1980s, the album format consolidated its domination of the recorded music market, first with the emergence of the cassette. According to "PC Mag" columnist John C. Dvorak, "the album era had resulted in too many albums with only one good song on each of them, so cassettes let users do their own mixes", a trend expedited by the introduction of the Sony Walkman in 1979. The introduction of the CD, along with the portable Discman player in 1984, began the displacement of LPs in the 1980s as the standard album format for the music industry. According to Hogan, "the spread of cassettes and CDs in the '80s broke up the album with home taping and easier song skipping". In 1987, the music industry experienced its most profitable year yet due to the CD's increased popularity, highlighted by marketing successes such as Jackson, U2, Bruce Springsteen, Prince, Paul Simon, Whitney Houston, Sting, Bon Jovi, and Def Leppard, the latter two of whom represented a pop metal boom in the industry. While net unit sales had actually declined, Christgau reported in September 1987 that CDs were outpricing LP records and cassettes were outselling them, although the cassette would also eventually be displaced by the CD. In 1988, responding to the decade's developments, sociomusicologist Simon Frith predicted an imminent end to "the record era" and perhaps "pop music as we know it".


title: Album era

text: In the transition to CDs, well-regarded albums of the past were reissued on the format by their original record labels, or the label to whom the album's ownership had been transferred in the event of the original's closure, for instance. In 1987, the reissue of the Beatles' complete studio catalog was especially popular among consumers from the baby boomer generation, who were also the target audience of two classic-rock films – the Chuck Berry tribute "Hail! Hail! Rock 'n' Roll" and the Ritchie Valens biopic "La Bamba" (with its accompanying soundtrack) – and Elvis Presley compilations commemorating the 10th anniversary of his death. However, many older works were overlooked for digital rerelease "because of legal and contractual problems, as well as simple oversight", Strauss explains. Instead, such records were often rediscovered and collected through the crate digging practices of North American hip hop producers seeking rare sounds to sample for their own recordings. In her account of the 1980s hip hop crate-diggers, media and culture theorist Elodie A. Roy writes, "As they trailed second-hand shops and car boot sales – depositories of unwanted capitalist surplus – diggers were bound to encounter realms of mainstream, mass-produced LP records now fallen out of grace and fashion." This development also contributed to the phenomenon of the "popular collector", which material culture scholar Paul Martin describes as those generally interested in "obtainable, affordable and appealing" items – such as music releases – and attributes to mass production.


title: Album era

text: According to Pareles, after "the individual song returned as the pop unit" through the 1980s, record companies at the end of the decade began to abstain from releasing hit singles as a means of pressuring consumers to purchase the album on which the single featured. By the end of the 1980s, seven-inch vinyl single sales were dropping and almost entirely displaced by cassette singles, neither of which ultimately sold as well as albums. Album production proliferated in the 1990s, with Christgau approximating 35,000 albums worldwide were released each year during the decade. In 1991, Nirvana's album "Nevermind" was released to critical acclaim and sold more than 30 million copies worldwide, leading to an alternative rock boom in the music industry. A simultaneous country music boom led by Garth Brooks and Shania Twain culminated with more than 75 million country albums sold in each of 1994 and 1995, by which time the rap market was also increasing rapidly, particularly through the success of controversial gangsta rap acts such as Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg. Meanwhile, single-song delivery of music to the consumer was almost nonexistent, at least in the US, and in 1998, "Billboard" ended the requirement of a physical single for inclusion on its Hot 100 singles chart after several of the year's major hits were not released as singles to consumers. In 1999, the music industry as a whole reached a commercial peak with $15 billion in record-sale revenue, mostly from CDs.


title: Album era

text: Nirvana's "Nevermind" is cited by Eddy as roughly the end of the "high album era", although Strauss wrote in 1995 that the "album-rock era" was still in effect. As another "ending point", Hogan says critics have often named Radiohead's electronic-influenced 1997 album "OK Computer", which progressed the boundaries of rock music while achieving a dual level of mainstream and critical success unmatched by any "guitar-based full-length" work in subsequent decades. Kot, meanwhile, observed a decline in integrity among the industry and artists. He suggested that consumers had been exploited through the 1990s by increasing prices of CD albums, which were less expensive to produce than vinyl records, and had longer run times with considerably lower-quality music. While acknowledging some recording acts still attempted to abide by ideals from earlier in the album era, he said most had renounced their responsibilities as artists and storytellers and embraced indulgent recording practices in order to profit from the CD boom.


title: Album era

text: At the turn of the 2000s, Kot published a faux obituary for the 33⅓ rpm LP form in the "Chicago Tribune". In it, he argued that the LP had "been made obsolete by MP3 downloads, movie soundtracks and CD shufflers – not to mention video games, cable television, the Internet and the worldwide explosion of media that prey upon the attention spans of what used to be known as album buyers." In 1999, the Internet peer-to-peer file sharing service Napster allowed Internet users to easily download single songs in MP3 format, which had been ripped from the digital files located on CDs. Amidst Napster's rise in 2000, David Bowie predicted in an interview that the album era would end with the music industry's unavoidable embrace of digital music files. By early 2001, Napster use peaked with 26.4 million users worldwide. Although Napster was shut down later that year for copyright violations, several other music download services took its place.


title: Album era

text: In 2001, Apple Inc.'s iTunes service was introduced, and the iPod (a consumer-friendly MP3 player) was released later that year, soon to be joined by similar legal alternatives. This, along with a continued rise in illicit file sharing, led to a steep decline in the sales of recorded music on physical formats over the next three years. Sales briefly recovered by the end of 2004 when the industry registered approximately 667 million albums sold, led with 8 million from "Confessions" by Usher, whose success exemplified urban music's commercial dominance of pop in the decade. Eminem and 50 Cent were among the major-label successes of the rap boom that had continued from the previous decade. "Confessions" and Eminem's "The Eminem Show" (2002) would both be certified Diamond by the Recording Industry Association of America, reaching 10 million copies sold each by the end of the decade.


title: Album era

text: The most innovative and culturally relevant records were also being produced in the urban genres of R&B, hip hop, and pop, including albums by Kanye West and D'Angelo as well as the productions of Timbaland and the Neptunes. For critics, these works became another form of the full-length art pop records that had defined the album era with a rock guitar-based tradition, which was complicated further by the canonical acclaim afforded to Radiohead's electronic post-rock album "Kid A" (2000). Failing to match the landmark sales of "OK Computer", the most acclaimed rock albums of the early 2000s often revisited older sounds, as with the Strokes' "Is This It" (2001), the White Stripes' "White Blood Cells" (2001), and Interpol's "Turn on the Bright Lights" (2002), or simply lacked Radiohead's extensive production and marketing budget, as in the case of Arcade Fire's "Funeral" (2004). These developments led to rock's commercial and cultural prestige diminishing and the critical paradigm shifting from rockism to poptimism in subsequent years.


title: Album era

text: Meanwhile, the music industry's ability to sell albums still faced threats from piracy and competing media, such as DVDs, video games, and single-song downloading. According to Nielsen SoundScan's data for 2004, digital tracks had sold more than 140 million copies at around 99 cents each from online vendors like iTunes, indicating that consumers preferred to download individual songs over the higher-priced album in its entirety. In 2006, CD sales were outnumbered for the first time by single downloads, with digital music consumers buying singles over albums by a margin of 19 to 1. By 2009, album sales had more than halved since 1999, declining from a $14.6 to $6.3 billion industry. Also by this time, dance-pop had succeeded urban music as the dominant genre on top 40 radio, with pop artists like Rihanna emerging during this period basing their careers on digital singles instead of album sales. Veteran rock acts like U2 prospered through the fall of album sales better than younger acts because of a loyal following that still held an attachment to the format. "Children of the album era as they were, U2 would never stop regarding the album as the core statement of their creativity" despite progressively lower sales, says Mat Snow, noting that live shows consequently became their greatest source of revenue.


title: Album era

text: With the rise of digital media in the 2000s, the "popular collector" of physical albums had transitioned to the "digital" and "electronic" collector. Of such collectors, Roy says it can be argued they are "not equipped with sufficient archiving knowledge or tools to preserve his/her collection in the long run", citing the vulnerable shelf life of digital files. Concurrently, the demise of physical music stores allowed for websites to emerge as domains for album collecting, including the music review database AllMusic, the streaming service Spotify, and Discogs, which began as a music database before developing into an online marketplace for physical music releases.


title: Album era

text: The phrase "death of the album" was used in the media during the decline, usually attributing it to Internet sharing and downloading, and the changing expectations of music listeners. Capitol-EMI's COO Jeff Kempler said in 2007 that fewer artists will pursue album-oriented campaigns, while media researcher Aram Sinnreich bluntly predicted the album's death with consumers listening to playlists on their MP3 players instead. In an interview several years later, Lee Phillips of the Californian entertainment law firm Manatt, Phelps & Phillips believed the album era had ended and blamed record companies for failing to recognize the inevitability of streaming as the favored means of music distribution and for not working with Napster on a solution.


title: Album era

text: Music industry insiders and writers in the 2010s, such as Jon Caramanica and Kevin Whitehead, have described this period in the album's history as the "post-album era". Over the course of the decade, record labels generally invested in streaming platforms such as Spotify and Pandora Radio, with strategies focused on curated playlists and individual tracks rather than albums. Spotify in particular became a dominant and redefining platform for music consumption during the 2010s. Reporting later in the decade for "Deseret News", Court Mann said that "services like Spotify and Apple Music have moved our [music] libraries off personal hard drives, iPods and CDs, and into the cloud. Our music is decreasingly self-contained and private." In 2011, net album sales in the US rose for the first time since 2004 – with some writers attributing it to Adele's 2011 sleeper hit "21" (at 5.8 million units and more than three million CDs sold by January 2012) – but continued to fall again the next year. With consumers abandoning albums, more performers focused on releasing singles, a trend which critics felt undermined their artistic potential and produced many one-hit wonders. However critics, who had primarily written reviews of albums during the format's era of dominance, had also begun reviewing single songs.


title: Album era

text: While the album format was "dead" commercially, high-profile artists such as U2, the 1975, Taylor Swift, and Katy Perry still presented their work within a self-defined "album era", says Peter Robinson of "The Guardian". Such artists presented their project's aesthetic lifetime in the style of themed album campaigns by past acts like Bowie, Madonna, and Pet Shop Boys. Albums were marketed in extravagant, performance art-like product launches that reached "a nadir" in 2013, according to "Vulture" writer Lindsay Zoladz, who cites the failed attempts of acts such as Kanye West, Arcade Fire, and Lady Gaga at using visual art and public settings in the strategy: "Gaga's comically excessive "ARTPOP" campaign featured a Jeff Koons sculpture and a press conference in which she unveiled 'VOLANTIS, the world's first flying dress'; Daft Punk recorded endless "VH1 Classic Albums"–esque promotional spots that memorialized "Random Access Memories" before anybody had even heard it... and then who could forget [Perry] driving through the streets of L.A. in a gilded 18-wheeler that screamed KATY PERRY PRISM 10-22-13 and looked, uncannily, like a ten-ton brick of Cracker Barrel cheese?" Despite this, Swift remained the music industry's leading adherent and meticulous planner of album-era campaigns through the decade, creating a distinctive art of the strategy, in Curto's opinion.


title: Album era

text: By the mid 2010s, popular recording artists had embraced the surprise album as a release strategy, issuing their albums with little or no prior announcement and promotion, in part as a way of combatting Internet leaks. This strategy was predated by Radiohead and Bowie but popularized by Beyoncé with her self-titled album in 2013, leading to what Zoladz in 2015 called the "current surprise-album era". The following year, the singer repeated the strategy with her "Lemonade" album and again proved "the "Zeitgeist" could be captured and held in just one night", as Curto explains. However, Zoladz went on to report a "collective fatigue" among professional critics and casual listeners from staying connected with surprise releases and the social-media news cycle surrounding them. She also noted Drake's ability to sustain his popular appeal over time more with single-track releases and thus mastering the digital age's "desire for both instant gratification and long-term anticipation". The latter half of the 2010s trended toward similarly minimal marketing for hip hop album releases, with announcements in the form of social media posts unveiling only the cover art, track listing, or release date a few weeks prior at the most.


title: Album era

text: Other critics still believed in the album as a viable concept in the 21st century. In 2003, "Wired" magazine had assigned Christgau to write an article discussing if the album was "a dying art form", to which he concluded: "For as long as artists tour, they'll peddle song collections with the rest of the merch, and those collections will be conceived as artfully as the artists possibly can." In 2019, as CD and digital download sales plummeted and theories still persisted about the "death" of the physical album format, Christgau found his original premise even more valid. "Because the computer giveth as the computer taketh away", he wrote in an essay accompanying the Pazz & Jop music poll that year, explaining that the current affordability of adequate recording equipment makes album production accessible to musicians of various levels of competence. Regarding professional acts, he said, "Writing songs is in their DNA, and if said songs are any good at all, recording them for posterity soon becomes irresistible."


title: Album era

text: In a year-ending essay on the album in 2019, Ann Powers wrote for "Slate" that the year found the format in a state of "metamorphosis" rather than dead. In her observation, many recording artists had revitalized the concept album around autobiographical narratives and personal themes, such as intimacy, intersectionality, African-American life, boundaries among women, and grief associated with death. She cited such albums as Brittany Howard's "Jaime", Raphael Saadiq's "Jimmy Lee", Rapsody's "Eve", Jenny Lewis' "On the Line", and Nick Cave's "Ghosteen". Writing contemporaneously, arts and culture journalist Michelle Zipkin believed albums are still "an integral, relevant, and celebrated component of musical creation and artistry". She cited the review aggregator Metacritic's tabulation of the most acclaimed albums from the 2010s, which showcased musicianship from a diverse range of artists and often serious themes, such as grief, race relations, and identity politics, while adding that, "Albums today offer a fresh way of approaching a changing industry".


title: Album era

text: By 2019, Swift remained the only artist "who still sells CDs" and had yet to embrace streaming services because they had not compensated recording artists fairly, according to "Quartz". Elaborating on this point, "Los Angeles Times" critic Mikael Wood said, "Yet as she kept her music off Spotify – conditioning her loyal audience to think of buying her songs and albums as an act of devotion – younger artists like <nowiki>[Ariana]</nowiki> Grande emerged to establish themselves as streaming favorites." However, Swift used all major streaming services to release her 2019 album "Lover", which "Quartz" said "might be the last CD we buy" and was "perhaps a final death note for the CD".


title: Album era

text: By the mid 2010s, physical CD and vinyl sales made up 39% of global music sales. Out of total music sales in the US (the world's largest music market in terms of revenue), less than 25% were physical copies, while France and the UK both registered around 30–40% in this same statistic. However, that figure was approximately 60% for Germany and 75% for Japan, which had the world's second largest market with more than ¥254 billion (or $2.44 billion) sold per year in music recordings, most of them in the form of CDs. Both countries led the world in physical music sales partly because of their cultures' mutual affinity for "physical objects", according to "Quartz" journalist Mun Keat Looi.


title: Album era

text: The Japanese industry had especially favored the CD format, due in part to its ease of manufacturing, distributing, and pricing control. In 2016, Japan had 6,000 physical music stores, leading the US (approximately 1,900) and Germany (700) for most in the world. Despite broadband Internet being available in Japan since 2000, consumers had resisted the change to downloaded and streamed consumption, which made up 8% of the country's total music revenue, compared to 68% in the US market. While singles in Western countries had been antiquated for more than a decade, Japan's market for them endured largely because of the immense popularity of idol entertainers, boy bands, and girl groups. Capitalizing on the fandom surrounding these performers, record companies and marketing agencies exploited the merchandising aspect of CDs with promotional gimmicks, such as releasing various editions of a single album, including them with tickets to artist events, and counting CD-single purchases as fan votes toward popularity contests for artists. The focus went away from the music and toward the fan experience of connectivity with a favorite idol, according to "The Japan Times" correspondent Ronald Taylor.


title: Album era

text: Japan's unusual consumer behavior in the recorded music market was an example of the Galápagos syndrome, a business concept framed after Charles Darwin's evolutionary theory. According to Looi, it explains how the country's innovative but isolationist character had resulted in "a love for a technology that the rest of the world has all but forgotten". On the enduring commercial popularity of CDs there, global music analyst Mark Mulligan explained that Japan's purchasing power and consumer demand had been concentrated among its rapidly aging population who were more likely to follow veteran idols like the boy band Arashi and the singer-songwriter Masaharu Fukuyama, while less concentrated among young people attuned to digital and streaming services. However, the mid 2010s also saw an increase in digital music and subscription sales, indicating a trend away from physical purchases in the country.


title: Album era

text: In 2019, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) reported among the world's top-10 recorded music markets to be Japan, China, South Korea, and Australia, while noting an emergence of markets outside the West in general, including those in Latin America, Asia, and Africa. The report also observed a shift away from the global dominance of popular English-language acts and toward regional successes with cross-cultural appeal, such as BTS and J Balvin, due in part to a more open-minded consumer culture and social connectivity between artists and listeners. While top recording artists from the West continued to rely on traditional roles from major labels, others utilized digital service providers such as Spotify and Apple Music to either self-release their recordings or release them in partnership with an independent distributor.


title: Album era

text: In 2020, album launches were hindered by the COVID-19 pandemic and its related social distancing measures. Between March 6 and 12, physical album sales fell 6% due in part to the pandemic. Later that month, Amazon temporarily suspended incoming shipments of music CDs and vinyl records from US suppliers in an effort to prioritize items deemed more essential. The pandemic's closure of physical retailers and distribution systems impacted veteran recording acts especially, as their fans tended to be older and more likely to still purchase CDs and vinyl records. Consequently, many such acts who still adhered to a traditional rollout model, such as Willie Nelson and Alicia Keys, delayed their album releases. Reporting on the development in March, "Rolling Stone" journalist Elias Leight explained:


title: Album era

text: Some major pop stars reimagined their release strategies during the pandemic. Taylor Swift surprise-released her albums "Folklore" and "Evermore" in July and December 2020, respectively, abandoning a proper rollout campaign for the first time in her career, and setting several sales and streaming records. Ariana Grande, more inspired by rap release strategies, released her album "Positions" (2020) with similarly minimal announcement and promotion. The success of both artists during the pandemic came while more established pop stars had planned traditional album launches, including Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, and Dua Lipa. Keys also surprise-released her album "Alicia" after an indefinite delay due to the pandemic. Concurrently, rap albums benefited further from the period's more on-demand consumer and streaming culture, with rappers such as Lil Uzi Vert, Bad Bunny, and DaBaby topping album charts.


title: Album era

text: 2020 proved the most successful year for vinyl albums in MRC Data history (since 1991), with 27.5 million sold in the US. In June 2021, "Billboard" reported that net physical album sales had risen for the first time in years due to the pandemic. Pop and hip hop/R&B artists gained more sales than ever in the US vinyl market, while rock records experienced a decline despite accounting for more than half of the market's total sales. Among the year's top vinyl sellers were Harry Styles, Billie Eilish, Kendrick Lamar, and Swift, whose "Evermore" led sales of both CDs and vinyl albums released in 2021.


title: Album era

text: Reporting on music release trends during the pandemic, writers observed that they offered a greater connectivity for artists with their listeners during a paradigm-shifting period while empowering both groups at the expense of major labels. However, Oliver Tryon of the music webzine "CULTR" argues that the music industry remains one of the most profitable markets worldwide and has capitalized on changing trends in the streaming age, including the increasing brevity of songs, diminishing genre distinctions among artists, and innovations in electronic music technology, such as the application of artificial intelligence in music. On developments in 2021, Tryon predicted that regional releases from around the world would rise in the global market and "generative music" would "rise as a result of contextual playlists", while albums in general would "continue to decline as the post-album era is becoming more prominent".


title: Chopper (film)

text: Chopper is a 2000 Australian crime drama film written and directed by Andrew Dominik, in his feature directorial debut, based on the autobiographical books by criminal turned author Mark "Chopper" Read. The film stars Eric Bana as the title character and co-stars Vince Colosimo, Simon Lyndon, Kate Beahan and David Field. The film follows Read's life and time in prison. The film grossed $3.9 million worldwide and received positive reviews. It has since garnered a cult following.


title: Chopper (film)

text: In 1978 Victoria, Australia, Mark “Chopper” Read is an inmate at Pentridge Prison. Keithy George, another inmate, points to a line in the yard and tells Mark not to cross the line as it marks the Painters and Dockers territory. The next day, Mark rushes across the line and stabs Keithy multiple times.


title: Chopper (film)

text: The Painters and Dockers put out a $10,000 contract on Mark. Mark conscripts Bluey Barnes and Jimmy Loughnan to help him lead a siege on the Painters and Dockers. Wanting out of the suicide mission, Jimmy shanks Mark. Jimmy slashes his own arm so that he can claim self-defense. Mark recovers and is returned to a separate cell from Bluey and Jimmy. It's revealed that Mark is serving a 16 ½ year sentence for the attempted abduction of a judge in order to give Jimmy Loughnan freedom.


title: Chopper (film)

text: Mark meets with the Prison Board to negotiate a change of prisons for security. The board declines, so Mark has his ears cut off so that he can relocate to a mental health wing where he serves the remainder of his sentence.


title: Chopper (film)

text: When Mark is released from prison, he reunites with his old girlfriend Tanya. While out at a club, Mark flies into a jealous rage and fires several shots with a handgun. Back at Tanya’s house, Mark finds her on the phone with Neville Bartos (Vince Colosimo). He physically abuses both Tanya and her mother.


title: Chopper (film)

text: Mark goes to Neville’s house and learns that Neville supplies most of the cocaine to the western suburbs of Melbourne and is very wealthy. When Neville refuses to give Mark money, Mark shoots him in the abdomen.


title: Chopper (film)

text: Mark goes to Jimmy Loughnan’s apartment that he shares with his pregnant fiancée, Mandy, and their young daughter. Mark reveals that he’s working for the police, stating that he has a green light to shoot criminals and that he shot Neville. Mark tells Jimmy that he heard about the contracts out on his life and that Jimmy was meant to do them, and then holds a gun to Jimmy’s head. Eventually Mark apologizes and gives money to Jimmy.


title: Chopper (film)

text: In a parking lot at the Bojangles, Sammy the Turk, another affiliate, states that he wants to show Mark something. Mark produces a Sawed-off 410 Shotgun and after a brief argument, Mark shoots him in the eye. Mandy witnesses the murder from behind a parked car and tells Jimmy.


title: Chopper (film)

text: Mandy turns crown witness against Mark for the murder of Sammy the Turk. It’s revealed that Sammy took Mark out to the car park for Jimmy to cash in on the contract against Mark, but unknowingly took him to the wrong car park. Mark beats the murder charge but is convicted of malicious wounding of Neville Bartos, and is sentenced to 5 years.


title: Chopper (film)

text: Read himself suggested that Bana play him, after seeing the actor in the sketch comedy series "Full Frontal". Bana spent two days living with Read to help him practice for the role, and many of Read's friends, enemies, and old associates were interviewed. Several of Bana's meetings with Read can be viewed in the DVD Special Features.


title: Chopper (film)

text: The biggest production difficulty was being allowed to use the Pentridge Prison in Coburg, Victoria for the shooting. The prison was being closed down and while the negotiations were underway, the funding for production was delayed. This put off the starting of the shoot. Some extras were hired from former inmates and tattoo parlours.


title: Chopper (film)

text: To show the sterility of the prison and to contrast it with the world that Chopper encounters after leaving prison 16 years later, the production was split into two. The first part, filmed at the H Division of Pentridge Prison, one of the actual prisons that Chopper frequented, was as plain and sterile as could be and all the scenes in the second part, taking place in 1986, were overly coloured to achieve a paranoid and agoraphobic atmosphere called "visual overload" by the director Andrew Dominik. This was attained by lighting, choice of film stock used and colours chosen for set decoration. Part one of the production ran from 3 May until 26 May with part two continuing from 28 June until 21 July 2000. The month long break enabled Bana to put on the extra weight necessary to play the older Read.


title: Chopper (film)

text: "Chopper" was received with positive reviews. Review-based rating site Rotten Tomatoes gave the film a 76% "Fresh" rating from 80 critics, with its critical consensus stating "Eric Bana's performance as the charming but twisted Chopper is the highlight of this disturbing portrait about Australia's notorious author/criminal."


title: Chopper (film)

text: Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film 3 stars out of 4, praising Bana for his performance, saying, "He has a quality no acting school can teach and few actors can match." Margaret Pomeranz for SBS gave the film four-and-a-half stars out of five, commenting that what Dominik "achieved is extraordinary." David Stratton, in the same review, remarked "there's no doubting the intelligence of Andrew Dominik's direction" and declared Bana's performance as "astonishing."


title: Chopper (film)

text: Read later praised Bana's performance on the "20 to 1" episode "Great Aussie Films", where "Chopper" came 17th.


title: D2: The Mighty Ducks

text: D2: The Mighty Ducks (also known as The Mighty Ducks 2) is a 1994 American sports comedy-drama film directed by Sam Weisman. It is the second installment in "The Mighty Ducks" trilogy, and a sequel to the 1992 film "The Mighty Ducks" produced by Walt Disney Pictures, The Kerner Entertainment Company and Avnet–Kerner Productions. It was succeeded by the final film of the series, "", in 1996.


title: D2: The Mighty Ducks

text: Former Pee-Wee hockey coach Gordon Bombay is a star in the minor leagues, expected to reach the National Hockey League. However, a career-ending knee injury brings him back to the Blukeville district of Minneapolis. Bombay is offered a chance to coach a team representing the United States in the Junior Goodwill Games in Los Angeles. He manages to reunite most of his former Ducks players, while the Hawks try to enact revenge for their humiliating loss two years earlier. Their plans are foiled by Fulton, who leaves them tied up in their underpants. Team USA consists of many of the old Ducks, in addition to five new players with special talents.


title: D2: The Mighty Ducks

text: In Los Angeles, the lure of celebrity distracts Bombay, who begins to neglect the team for a luxurious lifestyle. The team wins easy victories over Trinidad and Tobago, and Italy in the double-elimination tournament. Fulton Reed and Dean Portman gain recognition for their enforcer skills, and are dubbed the "Bash Brothers". Backup goaltender Julie Gaffney asks Bombay for a chance to play, but is told to wait as goalie Greg Goldberg is on a hot streak.


title: D2: The Mighty Ducks

text: The team suffers an embarrassing 12–1 defeat against Iceland, coached by ex-NHL player Wolf "The Dentist" Stansson. USA plays badly, and star center Adam Banks is slashed in the wrist. Frustrated, Bombay drives his players even harder, but they begin to suffer from complete exhaustion. Realizing the children are too tired to complete their school work or even stay awake in class, the team's tutor Michelle McKay intervenes, cancelling practice and confronting Bombay over his thoughtlessness. Once better rested, the players encounter a street hockey team who teaches them to play like "the real Team USA".


title: D2: The Mighty Ducks

text: Bombay continues to suffer from the pressure until Jan, brother of Bombay's mentor Hans, visits and reminds him of his love for the game. In their match against Germany, Bombay fails to arrive on time, forcing Charlie to tell the referee Michelle is the team's assistant coach. The team struggles, entering the third period tied, until Bombay arrives and apologizes to the team for his behavior. Inspired by the true return of their coach, the players win the game with their signature "Flying V", and advance to the next round.


title: D2: The Mighty Ducks

text: The renewed Bombay finally realizes Adam's wrist injury and benches him despite his complaints. To fill the open roster spot, Charlie recruits street hockey player Russ Tyler, whose unique "knucklepuck" – which rotates end over end rather than spinning around its centerline – secures USA's victory over Russia, advancing them to the championship game for a rematch against Iceland. Adam's injury is healed only to find Team USA with a full roster. Knowing the team needs Russ's knucklepuck and Adam's skill against Iceland, Charlie gives up his own spot, cementing his leadership as true team captain.


title: D2: The Mighty Ducks

text: In the final game, the physically imposing Iceland initially dominates as the Ducks incur penalties: Ken picks a fight with an opposing player, the Bash Brothers fight the entire Iceland bench and Dwayne lassos an opposing player before he can check Connie. An annoyed Bombay observes, "this isn't a hockey game, it's a circus."


title: D2: The Mighty Ducks

text: After a rousing locker room speech from Bombay and new Duck jerseys from Jan, the team emerges rejuvenated. The Ducks tie the game with goals from Connie, Banks, Luis, and finally Russ, who was targeted by Iceland but disguised himself as Goldberg to pull off a successful "knucklepuck". The game is forced to go to a five-shot shootout. With a 4–3 score in favor of the Ducks, Gunnar Stahl, the tournament's leading scorer, is Team Iceland's final shooter. Bombay replaces Goldberg with Julie, who has a faster glove. Gunnar fires a hard slapshot, and Julie falls to the ice. The entire stadium waits in breathless anticipation as she opens her glove and drops the puck, revealing the game-winning save and the Ducks’ triumph over Iceland to win the tournament.


title: D2: The Mighty Ducks

text: The filming of the final game was the very first event to take place at the then brand new Arrowhead Pond, which attracted approximately 15,000 people. As the filming would span over several days, the production team was aware that the crowd would not be as consistent. To accommodate the dwindling crowd, cardboard stand-ups were brought in and moved around to fill-in shots.


title: D2: The Mighty Ducks

text: Like its predecessor, the film received negative reviews. It has a 21% rating on Rotten Tomatoes with an average rating of 3.9/10. Desson Howe of "The Washington Post" wrote: ""D2: The Mighty Ducks" reaches an extraordinary low – even for a Disney sequel. This unctuous barrage of flag-waving, message-mongering, counterfeit morality, which contains the stalest kiddie-team heroics in recent memory, makes the original, innocuous 'Ducks' look like one of the Great Works."


title: D2: The Mighty Ducks

text: In its opening weekend, the film grossed $10,356,748 domestically. It was a financial success, with a final domestic box office total of $45,610,410.


title: D2: The Mighty Ducks

text: The film was released on VHS on August 17, 1994, on DVD on September 3, 2002 and was also released on Blu-ray Disc on May 23, 2017.


title: Basidiomycota

text: Basidiomycota () is one of two large divisions that, together with the Ascomycota, constitute the subkingdom Dikarya (often referred to as the "higher fungi") within the kingdom Fungi. Members are known as basidiomycetes. More specifically, Basidiomycota includes these groups: mushrooms, puffballs, stinkhorns, bracket fungi, other polypores, jelly fungi, boletes, chanterelles, earth stars, smuts, bunts, rusts, mirror yeasts, and "Cryptococcus", the human pathogenic yeast.


title: Basidiomycota

text: Basidiomycota are filamentous fungi composed of hyphae (except for basidiomycota-yeast) and reproduce sexually via the formation of specialized club-shaped end cells called basidia that normally bear external meiospores (usually four). These specialized spores are called basidiospores. However, some Basidiomycota are obligate asexual reproducers. Basidiomycota that reproduce asexually (discussed below) can typically be recognized as members of this division by gross similarity to others, by the formation of a distinctive anatomical feature (the clamp connection), cell wall components, and definitively by phylogenetic molecular analysis of DNA sequence data.


title: Basidiomycota

text: A recent classification adopted by a coalition of 67 mycologists recognizes three subphyla (Pucciniomycotina, Ustilaginomycotina, Agaricomycotina) and two other class level taxa (Wallemiomycetes, Entorrhizomycetes) outside of these, among the Basidiomycota. As now classified, the subphyla join and also cut across various obsolete taxonomic groups (see below) previously commonly used to describe Basidiomycota. According to a 2008 estimate, Basidiomycota comprise three subphyla (including six unassigned classes) 16 classes, 52 orders, 177 families, 1,589 genera, and 31,515 species.


title: Basidiomycota

text: Nonetheless these concepts continue to be used as two growth habit groupings, the "mushrooms" (e.g. "Schizophyllum commune") and the non-mushrooms (e.g. "Ustilago maydis").


title: Basidiomycota

text: The Agaricomycotina include what had previously been called the Hymenomycetes (an obsolete morphological based class of Basidiomycota that formed hymenial layers on their fruitbodies), the Gasteromycetes (another obsolete class that included species mostly lacking hymenia and mostly forming spores in enclosed fruitbodies), as well as most of the jelly fungi. This sub-phyla also includes the "classic" mushrooms, polypores, corals, chanterelles, crusts, puffballs and stinkhorns. The three classes in the Agaricomycotina are the Agaricomycetes, the Dacrymycetes, and the Tremellomycetes.


title: Basidiomycota

text: The class Wallemiomycetes is not yet placed in a subdivision, but recent genomic evidence suggests that it is a sister group of Agaricomycotina.


title: Basidiomycota

text: The Pucciniomycotina include the rust fungi, the insect parasitic/symbiotic genus "Septobasidium", a former group of smut fungi (in the Microbotryomycetes, which includes mirror yeasts), and a mixture of odd, infrequently seen, or seldom recognized fungi, often parasitic on plants. The eight classes in the Pucciniomycotina are Agaricostilbomycetes, Atractiellomycetes, Classiculomycetes, Cryptomycocolacomycetes, Cystobasidiomycetes, Microbotryomycetes, Mixiomycetes, and Pucciniomycetes.


title: Basidiomycota

text: The Ustilaginomycotina are most (but not all) of the former smut fungi and the Exobasidiales. The classes of the Ustilaginomycotina are the Exobasidiomycetes, the Entorrhizomycetes, and the Ustilaginomycetes.


title: Basidiomycota

text: There are several genera classified in the Basidiomycota that are 1) poorly known, 2) have not been subjected to DNA analysis, or 3) if analysed phylogenetically do not group with as yet named or identified families, and have not been assigned to a specific family (i.e., they are "incertae sedis" with respect to familial placement). These include:


title: Basidiomycota

text: Unlike animals and plants which have readily recognizable male and female counterparts, Basidiomycota (except for the Rust (Pucciniales)) tend to have mutually indistinguishable, compatible haploids which are usually mycelia being composed of filamentous hyphae. Typically haploid Basidiomycota mycelia fuse via plasmogamy and then the compatible nuclei migrate into each other's mycelia and pair up with the resident nuclei. Karyogamy is delayed, so that the compatible nuclei remain in pairs, called a dikaryon. The hyphae are then said to be dikaryotic. Conversely, the haploid mycelia are called monokaryons. Often, the dikaryotic mycelium is more vigorous than the individual monokaryotic mycelia, and proceeds to take over the substrate in which they are growing. The dikaryons can be long-lived, lasting years, decades, or centuries. The monokaryons are male nor female. They have either a () or a () mating system. This results in the fact that following meiosis, the resulting haploid basidiospores and resultant monokaryons, have nuclei that are compatible with 50% (if bipolar) or 25% (if tetrapolar) of their sister basidiospores (and their resultant monokaryons) because the mating genes must differ for them to be compatible. However, there are sometimes more than two possible alleles for a given locus, and in such species, depending on the specifics, over 90% of monokaryons could be compatible with each other.


title: Basidiomycota

text: The maintenance of the dikaryotic status in dikaryons in many Basidiomycota is facilitated by the formation of clamp connections that physically appear to help coordinate and re-establish pairs of compatible nuclei following synchronous mitotic nuclear divisions. Variations are frequent and multiple. In a typical Basidiomycota lifecycle the long lasting dikaryons periodically (seasonally or occasionally) produce basidia, the specialized usually club-shaped end cells, in which a pair of compatible nuclei fuse (karyogamy) to form a diploid cell. Meiosis follows shortly with the production of 4 haploid nuclei that migrate into 4 external, usually apical basidiospores. Variations occur, however. Typically the basidiospores are ballistic, hence they are sometimes also called ballistospores. In most species, the basidiospores disperse and each can start a new haploid mycelium, continuing the lifecycle. Basidia are microscopic but they are often produced on or in multicelled large fructifications called basidiocarps or basidiomes, or fruitbodies), variously called mushrooms, puffballs, etc. Ballistic basidiospores are formed on sterigmata which are tapered spine-like projections on basidia, and are typically curved, like the horns of a bull. In some Basidiomycota the spores are not ballistic, and the sterigmata may be straight, reduced to stubs, or absent. The basidiospores of these non-ballistosporic basidia may either bud off, or be released via dissolution or disintegration of the basidia.


title: Basidiomycota

text: In summary, meiosis takes place in a diploid basidium. Each one of the four haploid nuclei migrates into its own basidiospore. The basidiospores are ballistically discharged and start new haploid mycelia called monokaryons. There are no males or females, rather there are compatible thalli with multiple compatibility factors. Plasmogamy between compatible individuals leads to delayed karyogamy leading to establishment of a dikaryon. The dikaryon is long lasting but ultimately gives rise to either fruitbodies with basidia or directly to basidia without fruitbodies. The paired dikaryon in the basidium fuse (i.e. karyogamy takes place). The diploid basidium begins the cycle again.


title: Basidiomycota

text: "Coprinopsis cinerea" is a basidiomycete mushroom. It is particularly suited to the study of meiosis because meiosis progresses synchronously in about 10 million cells within the mushroom cap, and the meiotic prophase stage is prolonged. Burns et al. studied the expression of genes involved in the 15-hour meiotic process, and found that the pattern of gene expression of "C. cinerea" was similar to two other fungal species, the yeasts "Saccharomyces cerevisiae" and "Schizosaccharomyces pombe". These similarities in the patterns of expression led to the conclusion that the core expression program of meiosis has been conserved in these fungi for over half a billion years of evolution since these species diverged.


title: Basidiomycota

text: "Cryptococcus neoformans" and "Ustilago maydis" are examples of pathogenic basidiomycota. Such pathogens must be able to overcome the oxidative defenses of their respective hosts in order to produce a successful infection. The ability to undergo meiosis may provide a survival benefit for these fungi by promoting successful infection. A characteristic central feature of meiosis is recombination between homologous chromosomes. This process is associated with repair of DNA damage, particularly double-strand breaks. The ability of "C. neoformans" and "U. maydis" to undergo meiosis may contribute to their virulence by repairing the oxidative DNA damage caused by their host's release of reactive oxygen species.


title: Basidiomycota

text: Many variations occur: some variations are self-compatible and spontaneously form dikaryons without a separate compatible thallus being involved. These fungi are said to be homothallic, versus the normal heterothallic species with mating types. Others are secondarily homothallic, in that two compatible nuclei following meiosis migrate into each basidiospore, which is then dispersed as a pre-existing dikaryon. Often such species form only two spores per basidium, but that too varies. Following meiosis, mitotic divisions can occur in the basidium. Multiple numbers of basidiospores can result, including odd numbers via degeneration of nuclei, or pairing up of nuclei, or lack of migration of nuclei. For example, the chanterelle genus "Craterellus" often has six-spored basidia, while some corticioid "Sistotrema" species can have two-, four-, six-, or eight-spored basidia, and the cultivated button mushroom, "Agaricus bisporus". can have one-, two-, three- or four-spored basidia under some circumstances. Occasionally, monokaryons of some taxa can form morphologically fully formed basidiomes and anatomically correct basidia and ballistic basidiospores in the absence of dikaryon formation, diploid nuclei, and meiosis. A rare few number of taxa have extended diploid lifecycles, but can be common species. Examples exist in the mushroom genera "Armillaria" and "Xerula", both in the Physalacriaceae. Occasionally, basidiospores are not formed and parts of the "basidia" act as the dispersal agents, e.g. the peculiar mycoparasitic jelly fungus, "Tetragoniomyces" or the entire "basidium" acts as a "spore", e.g. in some false puffballs ("Scleroderma"). In the human pathogenic genus "Cryptococcus", four nuclei following meiosis remain in the basidium, but continually divide mitotically, each nucleus migrating into synchronously forming nonballistic basidiospores that are then pushed upwards by another set forming below them, resulting in four parallel chains of dry "basidiospores".


title: Basidiomycota

text: Other variations occur: some as standard lifecycles (that themselves have variations within variations) within specific orders.


title: Basidiomycota

text: Rusts (Pucciniales, previously known as Uredinales) at their greatest complexity, produce five different types of spores on two different host plants in two unrelated host families. Such rusts are heteroecious (requiring two hosts) and macrocyclic (producing all five spores types). Wheat stem rust is an example. By convention, the stages and spore states are numbered by Roman numerals. Typically, basidiospores infect host one, also known as the alternate or sexual host, and the mycelium forms pycnidia, which are miniature, flask-shaped, hollow, submicroscopic bodies embedded in the host tissue (such as a leaf). This stage, numbered "0", produces single-celled spores that ooze out in a sweet liquid and that act as nonmotile spermatia, and also protruding receptive hyphae. Insects and probably other vectors such as rain carry the spermatia from spermagonium to spermagonium, cross inoculating the mating types. Neither thallus is male or female. Once crossed, the dikaryons are established and a second spore stage is formed, numbered "I" and called aecia, which form dikaryotic aeciospores in dry chains in inverted cup-shaped bodies embedded in host tissue. These aeciospores then infect the second host, known as the primary or asexual host (in macrocyclic rusts). On the primary host a repeating spore stage is formed, numbered "II", the urediospores in dry pustules called uredinia. Urediospores are dikaryotic and can infect the same host that produced them. They repeatedly infect this host over the growing season. At the end of the season, a fourth spore type, the teliospore, is formed. It is thicker-walled and serves to overwinter or to survive other harsh conditions. It does not continue the infection process, rather it remains dormant for a period and then germinates to form basidia (stage "IV"), sometimes called a promycelium. In the Pucciniales, the basidia are cylindrical and become 3-septate after meiosis, with each of the 4 cells bearing one basidiospore each. The basidiospores disperse and start the infection process on host 1 again. Autoecious rusts complete their life-cycles on one host instead of two, and microcyclic rusts cut out one or more stages.


title: Basidiomycota

text: The characteristic part of the life-cycle of smuts is the thick-walled, often darkly pigmented, ornate, teliospore that serves to survive harsh conditions such as overwintering and also serves to help disperse the fungus as dry diaspores. The teliospores are initially dikaryotic but become diploid via karyogamy. Meiosis takes place at the time of germination. A promycelium is formed that consists of a short hypha (equated to a basidium). In some smuts such as "Ustilago maydis" the nuclei migrate into the promycelium that becomes septate (i.e., divided into cellular compartments separated by cell walls called "septa"), and haploid yeast-like conidia/basidiospores sometimes called sporidia, bud off laterally from each cell. In various smuts, the yeast phase may proliferate, or they may fuse, or they may infect plant tissue and become hyphal. In other smuts, such as "Tilletia caries", the elongated haploid basidiospores form apically, often in compatible pairs that fuse centrally resulting in "H"-shaped diaspores which are by then dikaryotic. Dikaryotic conidia may then form. Eventually the host is infected by infectious hyphae. Teliospores form in host tissue. Many variations on these general themes occur.


title: Basidiomycota

text: Smuts with both a yeast phase and an infectious hyphal state are examples of dimorphic Basidiomycota. In plant parasitic taxa, the saprotrophic phase is normally the yeast while the infectious stage is hyphal. However, there are examples of animal and human parasites where the species are dimorphic but it is the yeast-like state that is infectious. The genus "Filobasidiella" forms basidia on hyphae but the main infectious stage is more commonly known by the anamorphic yeast name "Cryptococcus", e.g. "Cryptococcus neoformans" and "Cryptococcus gattii".


title: Basidiomycota

text: The dimorphic Basidiomycota with yeast stages and the pleiomorphic rusts are examples of fungi with anamorphs, which are the asexual stages. Some Basidiomycota are only known as anamorphs. Many are yeasts, collectively called basidiomycetous yeasts to differentiate them from ascomycetous yeasts in the Ascomycota. Aside from yeast anamorphs, and uredinia, aecia and pycnidia, some Basidiomycota form other distinctive anamorphs as parts of their life-cycles. Examples are "Collybia tuberosa" with its apple-seed-shaped and coloured sclerotium, "Dendrocollybia racemosa" with its sclerotium and its "Tilachlidiopsis racemosa" conidia, "Armillaria" with their rhizomorphs, "Hohenbuehelia" with their "Nematoctonus" nematode infectious, state and the coffee leaf parasite, "Mycena citricolor" and its "Decapitatus flavidus" propagules called gemmae.


title: Chinatown, Manhattan

text: Manhattan's Chinatown () is a neighborhood in Lower Manhattan, New York City, bordering the Lower East Side to its east, Little Italy to its north, Civic Center to its south, and Tribeca to its west. With an estimated population of 90,000 to 100,000 people, Chinatown is home to the highest concentration of Chinese people in the Western Hemisphere. Manhattan's Chinatown is also one of the oldest Chinese ethnic enclaves. The Manhattan Chinatown is one of nine Chinatown neighborhoods in New York City, as well as one of twelve in the New York metropolitan area, which contains the largest ethnic Chinese population outside of Asia, comprising an estimated 893,697 uniracial individuals as of 2017.


title: Chinatown, Manhattan

text: Historically, Chinatown was primarily populated by Cantonese speakers. However, in the 1980s and 1990s, large numbers of Fuzhounese-speaking immigrants also arrived and formed a sub-neighborhood annexed to the eastern portion of Chinatown east of The Bowery, which has become known as Little Fuzhou (小福州) subdivided away from the primarily Cantonese populated original longtime established Chinatown of Manhattan from the proximity of The Bowery going west, known as Little Hong Kong/Guangdong (小粵港). As many Fuzhounese and Cantonese speakers now speak Mandarin—the official language in Mainland China and Taiwan—in addition to their native languages, this has made it more important for Chinatown residents to learn and speak Mandarin. Although now overtaken in size by the rapidly growing Flushing Chinatown (法拉盛華埠) (located in the New York City borough of Queens) and Brooklyn Chinatown (布魯克林華埠), the Manhattan Chinatown remains a dominant cultural force for the Chinese diaspora, as home to the Museum of Chinese in America and as the headquarters of numerous publications based both in the U.S. and China that are geared to overseas Chinese.


title: Chinatown, Manhattan

text: Chinatown is part of Manhattan Community District 3, and its primary ZIP Codes are 10013 and 10002. It is patrolled by the 5th Precinct of the New York City Police Department.


title: Chinatown, Manhattan

text: Although a New York Business Improvement District has been identified for support, Chinatown has no officially defined borders. The following streets are commonly considered the approximate borders:


title: Chinatown, Manhattan

text: The historic core of Chinatown is bounded by Chatham Square/Bowery, Worth, Baxter, and Canal. Mott (south of Canal), Mulberry, Bayard, Pell, Doyers, and Worth were settled by Chinese immigrants starting in the 1870s. The local branch of the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association was founded at 10 Chatham Square in 1883 and later moved to the building at 16 Mott Street, now considered the "City Hall of Chinatown".


title: Chinatown, Manhattan

text: The Manhattan Chinatown is one of nine Chinatown neighborhoods in New York City, as well as one of twelve in the New York metropolitan area, which contains the largest ethnic Chinese population outside of Asia, enumerating an estimated 779,269 individuals as of 2013; the remaining Chinatowns are located in the boroughs of Queens (up to four, depending upon definition) and Brooklyn (three) and in Nassau County, all on Long Island in New York State; as well as in Edison and Parsippany-Troy Hills in New Jersey. In addition, Manhattan's Little Fuzhou (小福州, 紐約華埠), an enclave populated primarily by more recent Chinese immigrants from the Fujian Province of China, is technically considered a part of Manhattan's Chinatown, albeit now developing a separate identity of its own.


title: Chinatown, Manhattan

text: A new and rapidly growing Chinese community is now forming in East Harlem (東哈萊姆), Uptown Manhattan, nearly tripling in population between the years 2000 and 2010, according to U.S. Census figures. This neighborhood has been described as the precursor to a new satellite Chinatown within Manhattan itself, which upon acknowledged formation would represent the second Chinese neighborhood in Manhattan, the tenth large Chinese settlement in New York City, and the twelfth within the overall New York City metropolitan region.


title: Chinatown, Manhattan

text: As the city proper with the largest ethnic Chinese population outside of Asia by a wide margin, estimated at 628,763 as of 2017, and as the primary destination for new Chinese immigrants, New York City is subdivided into official municipal boroughs, which themselves are home to significant Chinese populations, with Brooklyn and Queens, adjacently located on Long Island, leading the fastest growth. After the City of New York itself, the boroughs of Queens and Brooklyn encompass the largest Chinese populations, respectively, of all municipalities in the United States.


title: Chinatown, Manhattan

text: Ah Ken is claimed to have arrived in the area during the 1850s; he is the first Chinese person credited as having permanently immigrated to Chinatown. As a Cantonese businessman, Ah Ken eventually founded a successful cigar store on Park Row. He first arrived around 1858 in New York City, where he was "probably one of those Chinese mentioned in gossip of the sixties [1860s] as peddling 'awful' cigars at three cents apiece from little stands along the City Hall park fence – offering a paper spill and a tiny oil lamp as a lighter", according to author Alvin Harlow in "Old Bowery Days: The Chronicles of a Famous Street" (1931).


title: Chinatown, Manhattan

text: In the 1850s, the California Gold Rush brought a wave of Chinese immigration to the United States. Approximately 25,000 Chinese immigrants left their homes in search for "gam saan" ("gold mountain") in California. In New York, immigrants found work as "cigar men" or carrying billboards, and Ah Ken's particular success encouraged cigar makers William Longford, John Occoo, and John Ava to also ply their trade in Chinatown, eventually forming a monopoly on the cigar trade. It has been speculated that it may have been Ah Ken who kept a small boarding house on lower Mott Street and rented out bunks to the first Chinese immigrants to arrive in Chinatown. It was with the profits he earned as a landlord, earning an average of $100 per month, that he was able to open his Park Row smoke shop around which modern-day Chinatown would grow.


title: Chinatown, Manhattan

text: In 1873, the United States entered a period of economic difficulty known as the Long Depression. As a result, Americans increasingly competed for professions that were typically performed by Chinese immigrants. The period was marked by increased racial discrimination, anti-Chinese riots (particularly in California), and new laws that prevented participation in many occupations on the U.S. West Coast. Consequently, some Chinese immigrants moved to the East Coast cities in search of employment.


title: Chinatown, Manhattan

text: Early businesses in East Coast cities included hand laundries and restaurants. Chinatown started on Mott, Park (now Mosco), Pell, and Doyers Streets, east of the notorious Five Points district. By 1870 there was a Chinese population of 200. By 1882, when the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed, the population was up to 2,000 residents. In 1900, the US Census reported 7,028 Chinese males in residence, but only 142 Chinese women. This significant gender inequality remained until the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1943. Wenfei Wang, Shangyi Zhou, and C. Cindy Fan, authors of "Growth and Decline of Muslim Hui Enclaves in Beijing", wrote that because of immigration restrictions, Chinatown continued to be "virtually a bachelor society" until 1965.


title: Chinatown, Manhattan

text: The early days of Chinatown were dominated by Chinese "tongs" (now sometimes rendered neutrally as "associations"), which were a mixture of clan associations, landsman's associations, political alliances (Kuomintang (Nationalists) vs Chinese Communist Party), and more secretly, crime syndicates. The associations started to give protection from anti-Chinese harassment. Each of these associations was aligned with a street gang. The associations were a source of assistance to new immigrants, giving out loans, aiding in starting businesses, and so forth. The associations formed a governing body named the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association (中華公所). Though this body was meant to foster relations between the Tongs, open warfare periodically flared between the "On Leong" (安良) and "Hip Sing" (協勝) tongs. Much of the Chinese gang warfare took place on Doyers street. Gangs like the "Ghost Shadows" (鬼影) and "Flying Dragons" (飛龍) were prevalent until the 1990s. The Chinese gangs controlled certain territories of Manhattan's Chinatown. The "On Leong" (安良) and its affiliate "Ghost Shadows" (鬼影) were of Cantonese and Toishan descent, and controlled Mott, Bayard, Canal, and Mulberry Streets. The "Flying Dragons" (飛龍) and its affiliate "Hip Sing" (協勝) also of Cantonese and Toishan descent controlled Doyers, Pell, Bowery, Grand, and Hester Streets. Other Chinese gangs also existed, like the Hung Ching and Chih Kung gangs of Cantonese and Toishan descent, which were affiliated with each other and also gained control of Mott Street. "Born to Kill", also known as the "Canal Boys", a gang composed almost entirely of Vietnamese immigrants from the Vietnam War under the leadership of David Thai had control over Broadway, Canal, Baxter, Centre, and Lafayette Streets. Fujianese gangs also existed, such as the Tung On gang, which affiliated with Tsung Tsin, and had control over East Broadway, Catherine and Division Streets and the Fuk Ching gang affiliated with Fukien American controlled East Broadway, Chrystie, Forsyth, Eldridge, and Allen Streets. At one point, a gang named the Freemasons gang, which was of Cantonese descent, had attempted to claim East Broadway as its territory.


title: Chinatown, Manhattan

text: Columbus Park, the only park in Chinatown, was built in 1897 on what was once the center of the infamous Five Points neighborhood. During the 19th century, this was the most dangerous ghetto area of immigrant New York, as portrayed in the book and film "Gangs of New York".


title: Chinatown, Manhattan

text: In the years after the United States enacted the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, allowing many more immigrants from Asia into the country, the population of Chinatown increased dramatically. Geographically, much of the growth occurred in neighborhoods to the north. The Chinatown grew and became more oriented toward families due to the lifting of restrictions. In the earliest years of the existence of Manhattan's Chinatown, it had been primarily populated by Taishanese-speaking Chinese immigrants and the borderlines of the enclave was originally Canal Street to the north, Bowery to the east, Worth Street to the south, and Mulberry Street to the west.


title: Chinatown, Manhattan

text: After 1965, there came a wave of Cantonese speakers from Hong Kong and Guangdong province in Mainland China, and Standard Cantonese became the dominant tongue. With the influx of Hong Kong immigrants, it was developing and growing into a Hong Kongese neighborhood, however the growth slowed down later on during the 1980s-90s.


title: Chinatown, Manhattan

text: Through the 1970s and 1980s, the influx of Guangdong and Hong Kong immigrants began to develop newer portions of Manhattan's Chinatown going north of Canal Street and then later the east of the Bowery. However, until the 1980s, the western section was the most primarily fully Chinese developed and populated part of Chinatown and the most quickly flourishing busy central Chinese business district with still a little bit of remaining Italians in the very northwest portion around Grand Street and Broome Street, which eventually all moved away and became all Chinese by the 1990s. Although the portion of Chinatown that is east of the Bowery—which is considered part of the Lower East Side already started developing as being part of Chinatown since the influx of Chinese immigrants started spilling over into that section since the 1960s, however until the 1980s, it was still not developing as quickly as the western portion of Chinatown because the proportion and concentration of Chinese residents in the eastern section during that time was comparatively growing at a slower rate and being more scattered than the western section in addition to the fact that there was a higher proportion of remaining non-Chinese residents consisting of Jewish, Puerto Ricans, and a few Italians and African Americans than Chinatown's western section.


title: Chinatown, Manhattan

text: During the 1970s and 1980s, the eastern portion of Chinatown east of the Bowery was a very quiet section, and despite fears of crime, it was seen as attractive because of the availability of vacant affordable apartments. Chinese female garment workers were especially targets of crime and often left work together to protect each other as they were heading home. In May 1985, a gang-related shooting injured seven people, including a 4-year-old boy, at 30 East Broadway in Chinatown. Two males, who were 15 and 16 years old and were members of a Chinese street gang, were arrested and convicted.


title: Chinatown, Manhattan

text: Many Chinese Vietnamese, Laotian Chinese, Chinese Cambodians, and Malaysian Chinese immigrants also settled into the neighborhood as well.


title: Chinatown, Manhattan

text: Starting in the 1970s, Mandarin-speaking Taiwanese immigrants and then many other Non-Cantonese Chinese immigrants also were arriving into New York City. However, due to the traditional dominance of Cantonese-speaking residents, which were largely working class in Manhattan's Chinatown and the neighborhood's poor housing conditions, they were unable to relate to Manhattan's Chinatown and mainly settled in Flushing, creating a more middle class Mandarin Town (國語埠) and an even smaller one in Elmhurst. As a result, Manhattan's Chinatown and Brooklyn's emerging Chinatown were able to continue retaining its traditional, almost-exclusive Cantonese society. However, there was already a small and slow-growing Fuzhou immigrant population in Manhattan's Chinatown since the 1970s-80s in the eastern section of Chinatown east of the Bowery. In the 1990s, though, Chinese people began to move into some parts of the western Lower East Side, which 50 years earlier was populated by Eastern European Jews and 20 years earlier was occupied by Hispanics.


title: Chinatown, Manhattan

text: From the late 1980s through the 1990s, when a large influx of immigrants from Fuzhou, who largely also spoke Mandarin along with their native Fuzhou dialect began moving into New York City, they were the only exceptional group of Chinese that were non-Cantonese to largely settle into Manhattan's Chinatown. Due to the fact that the Chinatown area were mostly populated by Cantonese speakers, the Fuzhou speaking immigrants had a lot of trouble relating to the neighborhood linguistically and culturally and as a result, they settled on the eastern borderline of Manhattan's Chinatown east of The Bowery, which during that time was more of an overlapping population of Chinese, Puerto Ricans, and Jewish as well as had significant vacant apartment units and were more affordable than in the more Mandarin-speaking enclaves in Flushing and Elmhurst, and many Fuzhou immigrants had no legal status and being forced into the lowest paying jobs. As they settled in the eastern borderline of Chinatown along East Broadway and Eldridge Street, it became fully part of Chinatown and slowly through the 1990s it would develop into being Little Fuzhou. This has resulted in referring to East Broadway as Fuzhou Street No. 1, which emerged during the late 1980s and early 1990s, and Eldridge Street as Fuzhou Street No. 2, which developed during the mid-1990s and early 2000s. Little Fuzhou became known as a new Chinatown, separate from the older, more Cantonese-dominated Chinatown from The Bowery going west, though there are still a little bit of remaining long time Cantonese residents and businesses in and around what is now the Little Fuzhou enclave.


title: Chinatown, Manhattan

text: Not only did the Fuzhou immigration influx establish a new portion of Manhattan's Chinatown, they contributed significantly in maintaining the Chinese population in the neighborhood. They also played a role in property values increasing quickly during the 1990s, in contrast to during the 1980s, when the housing prices were dropping. As a result, landlords were able to generate twice as much income in Manhattan's, Flushing's, and Brooklyn's Chinatowns.


title: Chinatown, Manhattan

text: However, since the 2010s, gentrification has been setting into the Chinatown neighborhood including the Little Fuzhou enclave. Large numbers of Fuzhou speakers have been rapidly moving out of Manhattan's Chinatown with large numbers of them shifting to Brooklyn's Chinatown in Sunset Park, which has now overwhelmingly taken over as the largest Fuzhou community of New York City. Many Fuzhou owned businesses have now closed with increasing numbers of storefronts becoming vacant in the enclave and is now increasingly becoming quieter with fewer and fewer consumers walking around. Non-Asian hipsters as well as hipster owned businesses have been increasing in the area as well.


title: Chinatown, Manhattan

text: The increasing Fuzhou influx had shifted into the Brooklyn Chinatown in the Sunset Park section of Brooklyn. This shift replaces the Cantonese population throughout Brooklyn's Sunset Park Chinatown significantly more rapidly than in Manhattan's Chinatown. Gentrification in Manhattan's Chinatown has slowed the growth of Fuzhou immigration as well as the growth of Chinese immigrants to Manhattan in general, which is why New York City's rapidly growing Chinese population has now shifted primarily to the boroughs of Queens and Brooklyn.


title: Chinatown, Manhattan

text: Some Chinese landlords in Manhattan, especially the many real estate agencies that are mainly of Cantonese ownership, were accused of prejudice against the Fuzhou immigrants, supposedly making Fuzhou immigrants feel unwelcome because concerns that they would not be able to pay rent or debt to gangs that may have helped smuggled them in illegally into the United States, and because of fear that gangs will come up to the apartments to cause trouble. There is also supposedly a concern that Fujianese are more likely to make the apartments too overcrowded by subdividing an apartment into multiple small spaces to rent to other Fuzhou immigrants. This could also be particularly seen on East Broadway.


title: Chinatown, Manhattan

text: Although Mandarin is spoken as a native language among only ten percent of Chinese speakers in Manhattan's Chinatown, it is used as a secondary dialect among the greatest number of them. Although Min Chinese, especially the Fuzhou dialect, is spoken natively by a third of the Chinese population in the city, it is not used as a lingua franca because speakers of other dialect groups do not learn Min.


title: Chinatown, Manhattan

text: As the epicenter of the massive Fuzhou influx has shifted to Brooklyn in the 2000s, Manhattan's Chinatown's Cantonese population remains viable and large and successfully continues to retain its stable Cantonese community identity, maintaining the communal gathering venue established decades ago in the western portion of Chinatown, to shop, work, and socialize—in contrast to the Cantonese population and community identity which are shifting from Brooklyn's original Sunset Park Chinatown to the satellite Chinatowns in Brooklyn.


title: Chinatown, Manhattan

text: Although the term Little Hong Kong (小香港) was used a long time ago to describe Manhattan's Chinatown relating to when an influx of Hong Kong immigrants was pouring in at that time and even though not all Cantonese immigrants come from Hong Kong, this portion of Chinatown has heavy Cantonese characteristics, especially with the Standard Cantonese, which is spoken in Hong Kong and Guangzhou, China being widely used, so it is in many ways a "Little Hong Kong".


title: Chinatown, Manhattan

text: A more appropriate term would be Little Guangdong-Hong Kong (小粵港) or Cantonese-Hong Kong Town (粵港埠) since the Cantonese immigrants do come from different regions of the Guangdong province of China including Hong Kong. The long-time established Cantonese Community, which can be considered Little Hong Kong/Guang Dong or known as the Old Chinatown of Manhattan lies along Mott, Pell, Doyer, Bayard, Elizabeth, Mulberry, Canal, and Bowery Streets, within Manhattan's Chinatown.


title: Chinatown, Manhattan

text: Newer satellite Little Guangdong-Hong Kong has started to emerge in sections of Bensonhurst and Sheepshead Bay/Homecrest in Brooklyn. However, there are more scattered and mixed in with other ethnic enclaves. This is a result of many Cantonese residents migrating to these neighborhoods. Bensonhurst carries the majority of Brooklyn's Cantonese enclaves/population. Originally, the Sunset Park Chinatown was a small satellite of Manhattan's Western Cantonese Chinatown, but since the 2000s, Cantonese speakers in Brooklyn have been largely shifting to and concentrating in Bensonhurst and Sheepshead Bay/Homecrest while the Sunset Park Chinatown has largely grown into being a very large Fuzhou speaking enclave.


title: Chinatown, Manhattan

text: The Fuzhou immigration pattern started out in the 1970s, like the Cantonese immigration during the late 1800s to early 1900s that had established Manhattan's Chinatown on Mott Street, Pell Street, and Doyers Street. The immigrants were initially mostly men who later brought their families over. The beginning influx of Fuzhou immigrants arriving during the 1980s and 1990s were entering into a Chinese community that was extremely Cantonese dominated. Due to the Fuzhou immigrants having no legal status and inability to speak Cantonese, many were denied jobs in Chinatown as a result, causing many of them to resort to crimes. There was a lot of Cantonese resentment against Fuzhou immigrants arriving into Chinatown.


title: Chinatown, Manhattan

text: In 2000, most of Chinatown's residents came from Asia. That year, the number of residents was 84,840, and 66% of them were Asian.


title: Chinatown, Manhattan

text: The census tabulation area for Chinatown is bounded to the north by Houston Street; to the east by Avenue B, Norfolk Street, Essex Street and Pike Street; to the south by Frankfort Street; and to the west by Centre Street and Bowery. Based on data from the 2010 United States Census, the population of Chinatown was 47,844, a change of -4,531 (-9.5%) from the 52,375 counted in 2000. Covering an area of , the neighborhood had a population density of . The racial makeup of the neighborhood was 16.3% (7,817) White, 4.8% (2,285) African American, 0.1% (38) Native American, 63.9% (30,559) Asian, 0% (11) Pacific Islander, 0.2% (75) from other races, and 1.3% (639) from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino of any race were 13.4% (6,420) of the population.


title: Chinatown, Manhattan

text: The racial composition of Chinatown changed substantially from 2000 to 2010, with the most significant changes being the increase in the White population by 42% (2,321), the decrease in the Asian population by 15% (5,461), and the decrease in the Hispanic / Latino population by 15% (1,121). The Black population decreased by 3% (62) and remained a small minority, while the very small population of all other races decreased by 21% (208).


title: Chinatown, Manhattan

text: Chinatown lies in Manhattan Community District 3, which encompasses Chinatown, the East Village, and the Lower East Side. Community District 3 had 171,103 residents as of NYC Health's 2018 Community Health Profile, with an average life expectancy of 82.2 years. This is higher than the median life expectancy of 81.2 for all New York City neighborhoods. Most residents are adults: a plurality (35%) are between the ages of 25–44, while 25% are between 45–64, and 16% are 65 or older. The ratio of youth and college-aged residents was lower, at 13% and 11% respectively.


title: Chinatown, Manhattan

text: As of 2017, the median household income in Community District 3 was $39,584, though the median income in Chinatown individually was $68,657. In 2018, an estimated 18% of Community District 3 residents lived in poverty, compared to 14% in all of Manhattan and 20% in all of New York City. One in twelve residents (8%) were unemployed, compared to 7% in Manhattan and 9% in New York City. Rent burden, or the percentage of residents who have difficulty paying their rent, is 48% in Community District 3, compared to the boroughwide and citywide rates of 45% and 51% respectively. Based on this calculation, , Community District 3 is considered to be gentrifying: according to the Community Health Profile, the district was low-income in 1990 and has seen above-median rent growth up to 2010.


title: Chinatown, Manhattan

text: The New York City Department of City Planning released updated 2020 census data on the Asian population of New York City. Manhattan's Chinatown has only 27,200 Asian residents, compared to the neighborhoods of Bensonhurst, Brooklyn (46,000); Sunset Park, Brooklyn (31,400); Flushing, Queens (54,200); and Elmhurst, Queens (55,800).


title: Chinatown, Manhattan

text: Despite the more recently emerged large Fuzhou population, many of the Chinese businesses in Chinatown are still Cantonese owned. The Cantonese dominated western section of Chinatown also continues to be the main busy Chinese business district. As a result, it has influenced many Fuzhounese to learn Cantonese for businesses, especially large businesses like the Dim Sum restaurants on what is known as Little Fuzhou on East Broadway (小福州). The Fuzhounese, the subgroup of non-Cantonese-speaking Chinese with the most interactions with Cantonese, also constitute the majority of non-native Cantonese-speaking Chinese. Many of the Fuzhou immigrants in the 1980s and early 1990s learned to speak Cantonese to maintain jobs and communicate with the Cantonese-speaking population in addition to the fact many of the earlier Fuzhou immigrants had lived in Hong Kong adapting into the Hong Kong culture and speaking Cantonese, which gave them better advantages to integrating into the Chinatown community as it was still very dominantly Cantonese speaking. However, since the 2000s, newer Chinese immigrants have largely spoken Mandarin Chinese, the national language of China.


title: Chinatown, Manhattan

text: A significant difference between the two separate Chinese provincial communities in Manhattan's Chinatown is that the Cantonese part of Chinatown not only serves Chinese customers but is also a tourist attraction. However, the Fuzhou part of Chinatown caters less to tourists. Bowery, Chrystie Street, Catherine Street, and Chatham Square encompass the approximate border zone between the Fuzhou and Cantonese communities in Manhattan's Chinatown.


title: Chinatown, Manhattan

text: Unlike most other urban Chinatowns, Manhattan's Chinatown is both a residential area as well as commercial area. Many population estimates are in the range of 90,000 to 100,000 residents. One analysis of census data in 2011 showed that Chinatown and heavily Chinese tracts on the Lower East Side had 47,844 residents in the 2010 census, a decrease of nearly 9% since 2000.


title: Chinatown, Manhattan

text: By 2007, luxury condominiums began to spread from SoHo into Chinatown. Previously, Chinatown was noted for its crowded tenements and primarily Chinese residents. While some projects have targeted the Chinese community, the development of luxury housing has increased Chinatown's economic and cultural diversity.