Pop music

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Pop music

Stylistic origins

R&B • Jazz • Doo-wop • Folk
• Dance • Classical • rock and roll

Cultural origins

1950s, United
Kingdom and United States

Typical instruments

Vocals • Electric guitar •
Bass guitar • Drums •
Keyboards • Acoustic Guitar •
Piano • Synthesizer • Drum machine • Sequencer • Sampler
• Occasional use of various other instruments

Mainstream popularity

Continuous worldwide since emergence

Subgenres

Baroque pop • Bubblegum pop • Christian pop • Dance-pop • Electropop • Europop • Indie pop • Operatic pop • Power pop • Soundtrack • Sophisti-pop • Synthpop • Space age pop • Sunshine pop • Traditional pop •
Teen pop

Fusion genres

Country pop • Disco • Dream pop • Jangle pop • Pop punk • Hip pop • Pop rock • Psychedelic pop •
Technopop • Urban
pop

This article is about a specific music genre. For popular
music in general, see Popular music. For other
uses, see Pop
music (disambiguation).

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.[citation
needed]

Contents

1 Definitions

2 Origin of the
term

3 Influences and
development

4 Characteristics

5 See also

6 Notes

7 Bibliography

8 External
links

Definitions

Hatch and Millward define pop music as "a body of music which is
distinguishable from popular, jazz and folk musics".[1]
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.[2]
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.[3]

Origin of the term

The term "pop song," is first recorded as being used in 1926 in the sense of
a piece of music "having popular appeal".[4]
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.[5]

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 ...".[6]
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."[7]
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’."[6]
Chambers' Dictionary mentions the contemporary usage of the term "pop art";[8]
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".[6]

From about 1967 the term was increasingly used in opposition to the term rock music, a division that
gave generic significance to both terms.[9]
Whereas rock aspired to authenticity and an expansion of the possibilities of
popular music,[9]
pop was more commercial, ephemeral and accessible.[10]
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".[11]

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.[3]

It has also made use of technological innovation. In the 1940s improved microphone design allowed a
more intimate singing style[12]
and ten or twenty years later inexpensive and more durable 45 r.p.m. records for
singles "revolutionized the manner in which pop has been disseminated" and
helped to move pop music to ‘a record/radio/film star system’.[12]
Another technological change was the widespread availability of television in
the 1950s; with televised performances, "pop stars had to have a visual
presence".[12]
In the 1960s, the introduction of inexpensive, portable transistor radios meant
that teenagers could listen to music outside of the home.[12]
Multi-track
recording (from the 1960s); and digital sampling (from
the 1980s) have also been utilized as methods for the creation and elaboration
of pop music.[3]
By the early 1980s, the promotion of pop music had been greatly affected by the
rise of Music Television channels like MTV, which "favoured those artists
such as Michael
Jackson, Madonna, and Prince who had a
strong visual appeal".[12]

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.[13]
Some of these trends (for example Europop) have had a significant
impact of the development of the genre.[3]

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".[14]
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.[14]
The spread of Western-style pop music has been interpreted variously as
representing processes of Americanization, homogenization, modernization,
creative appropriation, cultural imperialism, and/or a more general process of
globalization.[14]

Characteristics

Musicologists often identify the following characteristics as typical of the
pop music genre:

an aim of appealing to a general audience, rather than to a particular
sub-culture or ideology[3]

an emphasis on craftsmanship rather than formal "artistic" qualities[3]

an emphasis on recording, production, and technology, over live
performance[10]

a tendency to reflect existing trends rather than progressive
developments[10]

much pop music is intended to encourage dancing, or it uses dance-oriented
beats or rhythms[10]

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.[15]
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.[16]
The beat and the melodies tend to be simple, with limited harmonic
accompaniment.[17]
The lyrics of modern pop songs typically focus on simple themes – often love and
romantic relationships – although there are notable exceptions.[3]

Harmony in pop music
is often "that of classical European tonality, only more
simple-minded."[18]
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.[19]
"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."[20]

See also

Music
portal

Origins of
rock and roll

Popular
music pedagogy

Notes

^ D. Hatch
and S. Millward, From Blues to Rock: an Analytical History of Pop Music
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), ISBN
0-7190-1489-1, p. 1.

^ R. Serge
Denisoff and William L. Schurk, Tarnished Gold: the Record Industry
Revisited (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 3rd edn., 1986), ISBN
0-88738-618-0, pp. 2–3.

^ a
b
c
d
e
f
g
S. Frith, W. Straw, and J. Street, eds, The Cambridge Companion to Pop and
Rock, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), ISBN
0-521-55660-0, pp. 95-6.

^ J.
Simpson and E. Weiner, Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1989), ISBN
0-19-861186-2, cf pop.

^ D. Hatch
and S. Millward, From Blues to Rock: an Analytical History of Pop
Music, ISBN
0-7190-1489-1, p. 49.

^ a
b
c
R. Middleton, et al, "Pop", Grove music online, retrieved 14 March 2010.
(subscription
required)

^ "Pop",
The
Oxford Dictionary of Music, retrieved 9 March 2010.(subscription
required)

^ A. M.
Macdonald, ed., Chambers' Twentieth Century Dictionary (Edinburgh:
Chambers Harrap, 1977), ISBN
0-550-10231-0, cf. pop.

^ a
b
Kenneth Gloag in The Oxford Companion to Music, (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2001), ISBN
0-19-866212-2, p. 983.

^ a
b
c
d
T. Warner, Pop Music: Technology and Creativity: Trevor Horn and the
Digital Revolution (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), ISBN
0-7546-3132-X, pp. 3-4.

^
S. Frith, "Pop music", in S. Frith, W. Straw and J. Street, eds, The
Cambridge Companion to Pop and Rock (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press), ISBN
0-521-55660-0, pp. 95–6.

^ a
b
c
d
e
D. Buckley, "Pop" "II. Implications of technology", Grove Music Online,
retrieved 15 March 2010.

^ J. Kun,
Audiotopia: Music, Race, and America (Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press, 2005), ISBN
0-520-24424-9, p. 201.

^ a
b
c
P. Manuel, "Pop. Non-Western cultures 1. Global dissemination", Grove Music
Online, retrieved 14 March 2010.

^ W.
Everett, Expression in Pop-rock Music: A Collection of Critical and
Analytical Essays (London: Taylor & Francis, 2000), p. 272.

^ J.
Shepherd, Continuum Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World: Performance
and production (Continuum, 2003), p. 508.

^ V.
Kramarz, The Pop Formulas: Harmonic Tools of the Hit Makers (Mel Bay
Publications, 2007), p. 61.

^ Winkler,
Peter (1978). "Toward a theory of pop harmony", In Theory Only, 4, pp.
3-26.

^ Sargeant,
p. 198. cited in Winkler (1978), p. 4.

^ Winkler
(1978), p. 22.

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

v ·
d ·
ePop
music

By style

Adult
contemporary · Adult
oriented · Baroque · Blue-eyed
soul · Bubblegum · Christian · Country · Dance · Pop
soul · Pop rock · Psychedelic · Sophisti-pop · Synthpop / Electropop · Sunshine · Swamp · Teen · Traditional · Yé-yé

By
region/country

American · Arabic · Balkan · Canada · Chinese (Cantopop · Mandopop · Hokkien
pop) · HK
English · Europop (Austropop · French · Nederpop · Swedish) · Greek · Indian (Filmi) · Japanese (Picopop · Shibuya-kei) · Korean · Laotian · Latin (Brazilian · Mexican) · Pakistani · Persian · Philippine · Russian · Ukraine · SFR
Yugoslavia · Taiwanese · Thai · Turkish · United
Kingdom

Other topics

Boy
band · Girl
group · List
of pop music terms ·
Pop
culture · Pop icon · Popular
music · Pop music
automation

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pop_music"

Categories: Pop music |
Western
culture

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