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Friday, July 17, 2009

Pop music

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 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 are in general agreement that no single satisfactory definition of pop music exists. However, the following attributes are commonly identified:[4][2][6]

  • Orientated towards the singles market and individual songs
  • Emphasis on recording over live performance
  • Emphasis on technology over musicianship
  • Emphasis on artificiality or craftsmanship over artistic values
  • Tendency to deal with simple or trivial themes
  • Tendency to follow existing practice and fashionable trends over progressive developments
  • Appeal to the general population rather than a sub-culture or ideology

Pop songs

The major medium of pop music is the song, often only between two and a half and three and a half minutes in length, with a simple structure generally marked by a consistent and noticeable rhythmic element, a mainstream style and 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] Typically the beat of the music and the melodies tend to be very simple and "catchy" with limited harmonic accompaniment.[9] The lyrics of modern pop songs tend to focus on love and romantic relationships, although there are notable exceptions.[2]

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.[10] Some of these trends, like the Europop of groups like ABBA, have had a significant impact of the development of the genre.[2]

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