It didn’t change meaning that much. Michael Jackson, as noted in the thread, was making what is clearly pop music in the 70s and 80s.
To me, what you’re saying is “pop can’t possibly be a real style because the music industry keeps redefining what it is.”
I’ll go along with the two genres idea, but I’d point out that composers are still writing “classical music.” A couple of 20th Century examples are Aaron Copland (who described his own work as being a “vernacular” style) and Edward Elgar, whose works might have been “pop” at the time but are now “classical” with no * behind the word.
I’d also wager just about everyone ever who makes a living writing film scores has a “classical” composition sitting in their file cabinet.
No? Tell themthat :D.
It’s the most popular subgenres repackaged for mass appeal. As the most popular subgenres change so does pop. Popular rap, country or metal artists might sell 10-15 millions albums, but if they can repackage it for the masses they can sell 30-40 million albums. You have to sand off the rough edges, guarantee it can be played on the radio, and sell it to suburban white people.
But as NAF1138 has pointed out there some hip-hop artists that are considered ‘pop’, even though they do similar as those considered ‘hip-hop’.
An example, on Apple Music Beyoncé is listed at Pop. While Solange is listed as R&B/Soul. How does one determine that difference simply based on music styles?
Popular music, or “Pop” is a broad category of music designed and written for consumption by the masses for the purposes of fun and leisure. Distinct from “classical” music written for worship, or to glorify the state, or to make the nobility feel superior to everyone else. Originally pop music was synonymous with folk music, but jazz and then recording technology put folk music into a particular lo-fi category of its own, while introducing many other non-folk genres of pop music throughout the 20th Century.
Nowadays, we tend to mean “Top 40” when we say “pop”, but in reality almost all music is pop music today, with very little being written or performed for non-popular reasons. The Army Band, most movie scores, symphony orchestras (more a historical reenactment than popular entertainment), the list of non-pop music still written and played today is very short.
It seems to me that pop is kind of a twofold concept.
First, there’s the pop style, which is basically a sort of upbeat, relatively bland sort of music. There’s a kind of hard-to-describe common thread between the pop acts through the decades.
Then there are the more defined genre acts that either release songs, or entire albums that straddle their own genre and that “you know it when you hear it” pop aesthetic.
For example, Katy Perry has always been straight up pop, as has Taylor Swift. Same for pre-crazy Britney Spears, most 80s Madonna, Maroon 5, etc…
Will Smith has always been poppy rap, just like Bon Jovi has typically been poppy rock. Other acts like Def Leppard have released poppy albums, but aren’t strictly pop-rock acts.
But pop isn’t simply “what’s popular” Nobody would call Guns 'n Roses “pop”, nor would they call Metallica pop, but they’re both bands who had multiple top 40 hits.
I would most definitely call “Sweet Child o’ Mine” pop. It’s guitar-based pop, but still pop. Hell, the genesis of this thread idea was me thinking that SCoM was the greatest pop-rock tune of all time, then wondering “well, it’s pop… but what makes it pop? What is pop, anyway?”
But that’s the whole issue: Is “pop” just short for “popular,” and “pop music” therefore synonymous with “popular music”; or does it have its own separate meaning? That’s how I understand the issue.
I think—and this thread seems to back me up—that some people use the terms more or less interchangeably while others do not. (And maybe the same people use the word in different senses at different times. WOrds can have multiple meanings and connotations.) As far as I know, there isn’t an authoritative definitive answer. But some people, including the Wikipedia page I quoted upthread, and this article, do take them to be two separate things.
Certainly the word “pop” derives from a shortening of the word “popular” (much as “fan” derives from “fanatic”); but that does not necessarily mean the words are interchangeable as they have come to be used now.
Carly had a #1 hit. Nirvana did not. Album sales aren’t really as good a representation of what is popular as the singles charts.
Sure, but the band, and most of their songs aren’t pop.
Pop is a real style, it’s just unique in that it tends to be directed by big money players rather than bubbling up from the underground, and like anything centrally planned it sometimes completely fails to meet demand. I mean, I can’t go to a local club to hear a pop artist very often. It’s almost all rock, hip hop, and singer songwriter lite pop at best. Youtube could potentially fix that problem, but unfortunately almost all Youtube stars just like to do whatever is popular at the moment, which doesn’t get you very far and contributes to stagnation.
It’s called “crossover success” when a rock or hip hop artist gets a big hit with pop audiences. Of course, the greatest crossover success of all time is “Another One Bites the Dust”, which was not only a #1 rock song, a #1 pop song, but also a #1 R&B song. No one will ever pull that off again.
I suspect “pop” means many things to many people. When my kids took dancing, one of the categories was “Jazz,” but that dance-jazz was nothing like jazz as I’d come to know it. In fact that “jazz” may have been much closer to what some people call “pop.” And then there’s the whole other category of pop/rock, which is how I would tend to categorize the Beatles if I had to.
Nirvana absolutely wrote pop songs. They may have been harder and more “alternative,” but Kurt would be the first to admit it (and he had a great admiration for pop.) Heck, his characterization of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was that it was his (jokey) attempt to write the ultimate pop song, and rip off the Pixies (and also Boston.)
Clearly, the definition of “pop” is very much contextual. I absolutely think Nirvana is a pop band, or, if you want to be more precise, a hard rock band that wrote pop songs, I suppose. No, it’s not Billy Joel pop, but it’s still pop to me.
ISWYDT. Good one!
Ehhh, if it was pop they’d have chart success. Plus Cobain was all over the place in his opinions, on one hand he said good things about pop but on the other criticized Pearl Jam for doing guitar solos? WTF?!
My classical-music-loving Hungarian father told me that all of Bela Bartok’s best music was borrowed from Zoltan Kodaly, and Kodaly’s best work was writing down and orchestrating traditional Magyar folk music. Bartok may have been a better composer, he said, but he preferred Kodaly because it was closer to the roots.
In other words, traditional Amish hymn Simple Gifts >> Copland’s Appalachian Spring >> Leonard Bernstein’s note to Copland >> “I can’t get the music out of my head.”
R&B? I never in a million years would have guessed that song would have charted as a R&B song, much less made #1.
Then again, that particular era in Top 40/Pop was weird in that it seems to have been ALL crossover stuff. It was roughly when I was in 2nd grade and when I started listening to radio music- I think I got a FM/AM only Walkman about that time.
I recall oddities like hearing Queen, Kenny Rogers, Linda Ronstadt and Eddie Rabbitt on the Top 40 station along with Billy Joel, the Eagles, Peaches and Herb, and Kool & the Gang.