Extremely sad news has come about in the world of United States concert venues today, as New York City’s historic Roseland Ballroom has announced that it will be shutting down in April 2014, cited by an internal email to Billboard.com today. As of right now, this is breaking news and there is no official statement to the public.

Originally held for all-white ballroom dancing in the 20’s, Roseland quickly changed its attitude to more jazz oriented artists, welcoming African Americans, eventually growing and captivating hearts around the globe with it’s ability for intriguing a wide variety of artist’s and charming concert goers. Fiona Apple had her infamous “break down” there during the Tidal days, Beyonce held 4 intimate nights at the venue in 2011 to promote her record 4, Nirvana took their music to the 3,500 seat venue, Madonna (pictured above, photo from justjared.com) and the list goes on and on…

Sharing a memory from Roseland; my only one – I saw Erykah Badu while she was under fire for her risque music video for “Window Seat” from New Amerykah Part 2: Return of the Ankh. Janelle Monae opened the show and since Badu was late, the audience received two DJ performances from ?uestlove, who took the attendees through a “History of Hip-Hop.” At one point in the show, Badu gave a musical queue to start the sociological video on the screens behind her as she began an ironic, and quite sexy cover of “More Bounce to the Ounce” by Zap & Roger.

After the performance? The Queen of neo-soul turned around to face the video, eventually turning around – giggling.

We’ll miss you, Roseland.