Horatio Hellpop (excellent name for posting in this thread btw) used the term “bubblegum” which also applied to some music produced in the 80s (we were using the term round these parts during the 80s anyway) it seems to me that pop is a classification of music aimed at teens primarily with some overlap into pre and post teen demographics. Style of presentation of the music and performers factors heavily into this as well.
It’s whatever’s popular at the time. Beethoven & Mozart wrote pop music.
In and of itself, the label of pop doesn’t say much, it just likely rules out some possibilities of complex and less accessible song structural elements and nonsecular music. The subgenre of synth-pop is widely acknowledged. Many acts would accept this as a primary label, many others could be said to feature elements of synth-pop even if they aren’t considered overall within a pop music niche. There’s often not a clear either/or. A newer and more controversial in definition subgenre is hypnagogic pop, and maybe there is a better example somewhere out there, I don’t envision a subgenre like that ever drawing a mass audience.
I have watched some videos from those who study music theory extensively treating pop music with identifiable characteristics, so I put a certain amount of stock in that.
Whatever the pretentious don’t listen to.
For what it’s worth, Wikipedia votes for the first option.
To me, that second sentence is so obviously wrong that it disproves the first sentence.
Eine Kleine Nachtmusik and the Moonlighting Sonata were unquestionably pop music. I’m surprised anyone would argue this.
À propos of not much, remember that newspaper thing packaged with Thick as a Brick? It contained an article about the record itself, headlined “Major Beat Group Records Gerald’s Poem.” (Why “beat group” instead of “rock band”? Poking fun at the provincial newspaper as out of touch with current terminology, I guess.) The pretense is that the lyrics were a poem by some kid named Gerald Bostock. The paper says “One-legged pop flautist Ian Anderson was so enthused by it he wrote forty-five minutes of pop music to go with it.” This pseudo-article (written by Anderson himself, of course) uses “pop music” in an abnormally broad sense. The irony is that Thick as a Brick is dense, challenging progressive rock—which is cast in opposition to pop music as generally understood.
It’s not that unusual a definition. There is one dichotomy in which there’s “serious classical music” and then the rest is just “popular music.” So even though Tull may be on the more experimental side of a non-classical music genre, it’s still seen by some musical elitists as being just popular fluff, as it’s rock music played with distorted guitars and drums, and not a string quartet or an orchestral piece, etc.
Note that I do not agree with this definition, but this also fits why musicians like Beethoven and Mozart are not seen as “pop” by very many people, as the “pop” music of the day would be something more like traditional folk music.
“Pop” is just such an overly broad term that can be used in so many different ways that you really need to know the context in which it is being used. For me, a lot of it has to do with the song structure, the melody, the emphasis on “hooks” and catchiness, such that I would consider bands like Nirvana and the Pixies great examples of pop, even though they’re not particularly light and fluffy. But they wrote great pop songs in their respective genres.
Why would a 18th Century definition be the same as a 21st?
Right. It’s whatever’s popular at the time.
Except Mozart and Haydn didn’t write pop music, because they were employed by royalty, the aristocracy, or the high clergy to make music specifically for those audiences.
The guy shoveling horseshit in the street and the woman boiling her arms in hot wash water didn’t get to hear any of that music.
Pop music in those days was provided by local or itinerant fiddlers, flute players, drum bangers, etc., who played music for all the poor bastards to dance and fuck to.
Jazz was exciting and new in the 1920s, so popular singers incorporated jazz players into their recordings and performances. Swing music was the dancers’ pop in the 1930s. Bop killed jazz popularity in the 40s, because you were supposed to sit down, shut up, and listen to it. It wasn’t until the 1950s that musicologists decided that 20s jazz, 30s swing, and 40s bop were all part of the jazz timeline…before that, everybody considered them three different kinds of music.
Pop is definitely a style. Other genres are actually more popular now (e.g. hip hop), but they still are not called pop.
Yes, the term originated as a shortening of “popular music,” but, as various other popular types came out, it become increasingly restricted. It still moved around a bit, but it can’t really move much more, since anything it would move to has another name.
Defining pop to be synonymous with hip hop would make the term redundant, so it hasn’t changed. Pop means that which descended from what was called pop in the 1990s.
On the other hand, widening it to include more would leave us without a name for a certain style of music.
Well this is clearly silly because pop music charts existed and the term pop music was widely used well before 1990. You can make an argument that pop didn’t exist before recording technology but it’s existed for at least as long as recorded music has been popular. The term has been around since the 50s at least.
Pop is a real style, and we know this because when pop goes through a shitty period, hip hop, country, and R&B dominate the charts until the industry figures out that what they are doing isn’t working. You also tend to see more foreign groups having hits when pop sucks. We saw this with ABBA before the New Wave hit in the early 80s, we saw it during the grunge years(grunge didn’t just kill hair metal, it killed pop for awhile too), and we’re seeing it now. If Americans won’t make good pop, American pop fans will look overseas for good pop.
Whatever it is, Michael Jackson has been declared the king of it.
Self-declared.
Tell that to the Boston Pops …
Here’s the way I look at it. IMHO Western music has two broad genres, those being “classical” and “pop.” I put those both in quotes because I’m using them broadly. Classical includes not just composers from the classical era such as Mozart and Hayden, but also baroque composers such as Vivaldi and Bach as well as romantic era composers like Chopin and Liszt. Pop has a similar issue with the way I define it. It’s not just the pop genre and the artists from the genre such as Michael Jackson. I also include most vocal music written in chorus and verse form. By this definition George Strait and Tupac qualify pop artists just as much Michael Jackson. I also include musicians such as Frank Sinatra whose music predates the term pop music.
That being said, there are a few types of music that are challenging to categorize using just those two large umbrella terms. Jazz in particular doesn’t fall nearly into either category, and I think some types of metal probably also don’t fit in under pop music. Most music from the Weatern musical tradition, however, fits into one or the other of these two categories.
I assume BigT is describing what pop means today, which encompasses stuff that would probably not have been classified as pop by someone in the 60s, if we could play it to them, while some 60s pop will today be stuffed into some “classic X” genre rather than pop.
Your argument is clearly silly because it assumes terms never change in meaning.
It has elements of both, but it’s definitely a style of music. Katy Perry is pop music. U2 has had several number 1 hits but they are not pop music.
Nirvana sold more records than Carly Rae Jepsen, and so are more “popular,” but Carly Rae Jepsen is pop music and Nirvana is not.
We have both kinds of music; country and western. 