Pop music

Pop music Stylistic origins Rock and roll • Jazz • Doo-wop • Folk • Dance music Cultural origins 1950s, United States and United Kingdom Typical instruments Vocals • Electric guitar • Bass guitar • Drums • Keyboards • Synthesizer • Drum machine • Sequencer • Sampler Mainstream popularity Continuous worldwide since emergence Derivative forms Disco • Synthpop Subgenres Baroque pop • Bubblegum pop • Dance-pop • Electropop • Mashup • Operatic pop • Power pop • Sophisti-pop • Space age pop • Sunshine pop • Teen pop Fusion genres Country pop • Disco • Dream pop • Jangle pop • Pop punk • Pop rap • Pop rock • Psychedelic pop • Technopop • Urban pop

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Pop music is a music genre that developed from the mid-1950s as a softer alternative to rock 'n' roll and later to rock music. It has a focus on commercial recording, often orientated towards a youth market, usually through the medium of relatively short and simple love songs. While these basic elements of the genre have remained fairly constant, pop music has absorbed influences from most other forms of popular music, particularly borrowing from the development of rock music, and utilizing key technological innovations to produce new variations on existing themes.

Terminology

The term "pop song" is first recorded as being used in 1926 in the sense of a piece of music "having popular appeal".^[1] Starting in the 1950s the term "pop music" has been used to describe a distinct genre, aimed at a youth market, often characterized as a softer alternative to rock and roll.^[2][3] In the aftermath of the British Invasion, from about 1967, it was increasingly used in opposition to the term rock music, to describe a form that was more commercial, ephemeral and accessible.^[4] Although pop music is often seen as oriented towards the singles charts, as a genre it is not the sum of all chart music, which have always contained songs from a variety of sources, including classical, jazz, rock, and novelty songs, while pop music as a genre is usually seen as existing and developing separately.^[5]

Characteristics

Musicologists often identify the following characteristics as typical of the pop music genre:^[2][3][4][6]

• a focus on the individual song or singles, rather than on extended works or albums
• an aim of appealing to a general audience, rather than to a particular sub-culture or ideology
• an emphasis on craftsmanship rather than formal "artistic" qualities
• an emphasis on recording, production, and technology, over live performance
• a tendency to reflect existing trends rather than progressive developments

The main medium of pop music is the song, often between two and a half and three and a half minutes in length, generally marked by a consistent and noticeable rhythmic element, a mainstream style and a simple traditional structure.^[7] Common variants include the verse-chorus form and the thirty-two-bar form, with a focus on melodies and catchy hooks, and a chorus that contrasts melodically, rhythmically and harmonically with the verse.^[8] The beat and the melodies tend to be simple, with limited harmonic accompaniment.^[9] The lyrics of modern pop songs typically focus on simple themes – often love and romantic relationships – although there are notable exceptions.^[2]

According to Simon Frith pop music is produced "as a matter of enterprise not art...is designed to appeal to everyone" and "doesn't come from any particular place or mark off any particular taste." It is "not driven by any significant ambition except profit and commercial reward...and, in musical terms, it is essentially conservative." It is "provided from on high (by record companies, radio programmers and concert promoters) rather than being made from below...Pop is not a do-it-yourself music but is professionally produced and packaged." ^[10]

Influences and development

Throughout its development, pop music has absorbed influences from most other genres of popular music. Early pop music drew on the sentimental ballad for its form, gained its use of vocal harmonies from gospel and soul music, instrumentation from jazz and rock music, orchestration from classical music, tempo from dance music, backing from electronic music and has recently appropriated spoken passages from rap.^[2] It has also made use of technological innovation, being itself made possible by the invention of the electronic microphone and the vinyl record, and adopting multi-track recording and digital sampling as methods for the creation and elaboration of pop music.^[2] Pop music was also communicated largely through the mass media, including radio, film, TV and, particularly since the 1980s, video.^[2] Pop music has been dominated by the American (and from the mid-1960s British) music industries, whose influence has made pop music something of an international monoculture, but most regions and countries have their own form of pop music, sometimes producing local versions of wider trends, and lending them local characteristics.^[11] Some of these trends (for example Europop) have had a significant impact of the development of the genre.^[2]

Notes

Bibliography

• Adorno, Theodor W., (1942) "On Popular Music", Institute of Social Research.
• Bell, John L., (2000) The Singing Thing: A Case for Congregational Song, GIA Publications, ISBN 1579991009
• Bindas, Kenneth J., (1992) America's Musical Pulse: Popular Music in Twentieth-Century Society, Praeger.
• Clarke, Donald, (1995) The Rise and Fall of Popular Music, St Martin's Press. http://www.musicweb.uk.net/RiseandFall/index.htm
• Dolfsma, Wilfred, (1999) Valuing Pop Music: Institutions, Values and Economics, Eburon.
• Dolfsma, Wilfred, (2004) Institutional Economics and the Formation of Preferences: The Advent of Pop Music, Edward Elgar Publishing.
• Frith, Simon, Straw, Will, Street, John, eds, (2001), The Cambridge Companion to Pop and Rock, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0521556600.
• Frith, Simon, (2004) Popular Music: Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies, Routledge.
• Gillet, Charlie, (1970) The Sound of the City. The Rise of Rock and Roll, Outerbridge & Dienstfrey.
• Johnson, Julian, (2002) Who Needs Classical Music?: Cultural Choice and Musical Value, Oxford University Press, ISBN 0195146816.
• Lonergan, David F., (2004) Hit Records, 1950-1975, Scarecrow Press, ISBN 0-8108-5129-6.
• Maultsby, Portia K., (1996) Intra- and International Identities in American Popular Music, Trading Culture.
• Middleton, Richard, (1990) Studying Popular Music, Open University Press.
• Negus, Keith, (1999) Music Genres and Corporate Cultures Routledge, ISBN 041517399X.
• Pleasants, Henry (1969) Serious Music and All That Jazz, Simon & Schuster.
• Roxon, Lillian, (1969) Rock Encyclopedia, Grosset & Dunlap.
• Shuker, Roy, (2002) Popular Music: The Key Concepts, Routledge, (2nd edn.) ISBN 0415284252.
• Starr, Larry & Waterman, Christopher, (2002) American Popular Music: From Minstrelsy to MTV, Oxford University Press.
• Watkins, S. Craig, (2005) Hip Hop Matters: Politics, Pop Culture, and the Struggle for the Struggle for the Soul of a Movement, Beacon Press, ISBN 0807009822.

External links

• The pop genre on Allmusic
• The Consumption of Music and the Expression of Values: A Social Economic Explanation for the Advent of Pop Music, Wilfred Dolfsma, American Journal of Economics and Sociology, October 1999