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Pop Bands
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Last updated 12 08 11
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What are
Pop Bands:
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.
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.
Pop Bands
The term
"pop song," is first recorded as being used in 1926
in the sense of a piece of music "having popular
appeal". 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 music, 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 ‘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’."
Chambers' Dictionary mentions the contemporary usage
of the term "pop art"; 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".
Pop Bands
From about 1967 the term was increasingly used in
opposition to the term rock music, a division that
gave generic significance to both terms. Whereas
rock aspired to authenticity and an expansion of the
possibilities of popular music, pop was more
commercial, ephemeral and accessible. 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".
Pop Bands
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.
American pop singer Madonna 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 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’. Another
technological change was the widespread availability
of television in the 1950s; with televised
performances, "pop stars had to have a visual
presence". In the 1960s, the introduction of
inexpensive, portable transistor radios meant that
teenagers could listen to music outside of the home.
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. 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".
Pop Bands
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. Some of
these trends (for example Europop) have had a
significant impact of the development of the genre.
Pop Bands
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. 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.
Pop Bands
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