Pop music

Pop music (a term that originally derives from an abbreviation of "popular") is usually understood to be commercially recorded music, often oriented towards a youth market, usually consisting of relatively short, simple songs utilizing technological innovations to produce new variations on existing themes. Pop music has absorbed influences from most other forms of popular music, but as a genre is particularly associated with the rock and roll and later rock style.

Definitions

Hatch and Millward define pop music as "a body of music which is distinguishable from popular, jazz and folk musics". Although pop music is often seen as oriented towards the singles charts it is not the sum of all chart music, which has 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. Thus "pop music" may be used to describe a distinct genre, aimed at a youth market, often characterized as a softer alternative to rock and roll. Hatch and Millward indicate that many events in the history of recording in the 1920s can be seen as the birth of the modern pop music industry, including in country, blues and hillbilly music.

According to Grove Music Online, the term "pop music" "originated in Britain in the mid-1950s as a description for Rock and roll and the new youth music styles that it influenced ...". The Oxford Dictionary of Music states that while pop's "earlier meaning meant concerts appealing to a wide audience ...[,] since the late 1950s, however, pop has had the special meaning of non-classical mus[ic], usually in the form of songs, performed by such artists as the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, ABBA, etc." Grove Music Online also states that "... in the early 1960s [the term] ‘pop music’ competed terminologically with Beat music [in England], while in the USA its coverage overlapped (as it still does) with that of ‘rock and roll’." Grove Music Online'' states that the "term pop music ... seems to have been a spin-off from the terms pop art and pop culture, coined slightly earlier, and referring to a whole range of new, often American, media-culture products". Whereas rock aspired to authenticity and an expansion of the possibilities of popular music, 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".

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, country, and rock music, orchestration from classical music, tempo from dance music, backing from electronic music, rhythmic elements from hip-hop music, and has recently appropriated spoken passages from rap. is one of the most recognizable figures in music; various artists of the 2000s, such as Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Lady Gaga and Rihanna have named her as one of their influences.]] It has also made use of technological innovation. In the 1940s improved microphone design allowed a more intimate singing style Another technological change was the widespread availability of television in the 1950s; with televised performances, "pop stars had to have a visual presence". Some of these trends (for example Europop) have had a significant impact of the development of the genre.

According to Grove Music Online, "Western-derived pop styles, whether coexisting with or marginalizing distinctively local genres, have spread throughout the world and have come to constitute stylistic common denominators in global commercial music cultures". Some non-Western countries, such as Japan, have developed a thriving pop music industry, most of which is devoted to Western-style pop, has for several years has produced a greater quantity of music of everywhere except the USA. 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. The beat and the melodies tend to be simple, with limited harmonic accompaniment. The lyrics of modern pop songs typically focus on simple themes – often love and romantic relationships – although there are notable exceptions. Clichés include the barbershop harmony (i.e. moving from a secondary dominant harmony to a dominant harmony, and then to the tonic) and blues scale-influenced harmony. "The influence of the circle-of-fifths paradigm has declined since the mid-1950s. The harmonic languages of rock and soul have moved away from the all-encompassing influence of the dominant function. ...There are other tendencies (perhaps also traceable to the use of a guitar as a composing instrument) – pedal-point harmonies, root motion by diatonic step, modal harmonic and melodic organization – that point away from functional tonality and toward a tonal sense that is less directional, more free-floating."

See also

Origins of rock and roll

Popular music pedagogy

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 1-57999-100-9

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 0-521-55660-0.

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.

Hatch, David and Stephen Millward, (1987), From Blues to Rock: an Analytical History of Pop Music, Manchester University Press, ISBN 0-7190-1489-1

Johnson, Julian, (2002) Who Needs Classical Music?: Cultural Choice and Musical Value, Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19-514681-6.

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 0-415-17399-X.

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 0-415-28425-2.

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 Soul of a Movement, Beacon Press, ISBN 0-8070-0982-2.

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

Category:Western culture