A term applied to a particular group of popular music styles. Originating mostly in the USA and Britain, from the 1950s on, these styles have subsequently spread to most parts of the world. In Western countries, and in many others too, they became the predominant popular music styles of the second half of the 20th century. Closely connected with the development of new media and music technologies, and with the growth of large-scale recording and broadcasting industries, mostly based in the West, pop music has generally been associated with young people. However, audiences have tended to broaden in the later part of the period. At the same time, new centres of production have emerged, including Japan, Africa and Australasia. By this time, in many parts of the world, pop music styles, derivatives and hybrids, could be regarded as the vernacular lingua franca.
II. Implications of technology
RICHARD MIDDLETON (I; IV, 1), DAVID BUCKLEY (II), ROBERT WALSER (III), DAVE LAING (IV, 2), PETER MANUEL (V)
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, and 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. The etymology is less important than the sense, widespread at the time on both sides of the Atlantic, that in both musical styles and cultural patterns a decisive break was taking place. Indeed, in the early 1960s ‘pop music’ competed terminologically with Beat Music, while in the USA its coverage overlapped (as it still does) with that of ‘rock and roll’. Complications increased when, in the later 1960s, the term rock music emerged, to cover further new developments in musical style. Ever since, ‘pop’ and ‘rock’ have performed a confusing dialogue. The relationship is discussed in more detail elsewhere (see Popular music, §I, 3). Briefly, though the distinction – as made in particular contexts – often has stylistic validity (‘rock’ is generally thought of as ‘harder’, more aggressive, more improvisatory and more closely related to black American sources, while ‘pop’ is ‘softer’, more ‘arranged’ and draws more on older popular music patterns), the boundary is fuzzy, moveable and controversial. Fundamentally, it is an ideological divide that carries more weight: ‘rock’ is considered more ‘authentic’ and closer to ‘art’, while ‘pop’ is regarded as more ‘commercial’, more obviously ‘entertainment’. Because of these definitional difficulties, the whole spectrum of styles commonly grouped under both ‘pop’ and ‘rock’ is considered together here.
The focus here is on the pop/rock mainstream. The boundaries of ‘pop music’ are as difficult to determine as those of Popular music as a whole, and the decision to provide detailed coverage of some subsidiary pop genres elsewhere was purely pragmatic. Thus, even though the formative influence of black American music on pop has been enormous, its own genres have at the same time maintained a substantially separate existence, and hence merit self-contained entries (see Disco, Doo-wop, Funk, Hip hop, Motown, Rap, Rhythm and blues and Soul music); much the same is true of the 1980s and 90s pop styles grouped under the term ‘dance music’, all of which have black American roots (see Dance music). A similar policy has been applied to Afro-Caribbean music (see Dub (ii), Reggae, Ska), to Latin-based genres, to Country music (see Bluegrass music, Country music, Country rock) and to folk-music derivatives (see Folk Music Revival, Folk-rock), all of which have not only influenced mainstream pop but have been influenced in return. There is also separate treatment for the Singer-songwriter, who often stands as close to folk, country, blues and cabaret styles (and even, on occasion, art-song models) as to pop.
The impact of the social and technological changes to which pop music is related would no doubt have ensured that something like pop would have emerged in many areas of the world, whatever the state of the actual economic and cultural geography (indeed, pop-like styles were arguably already evolving, before rock and roll arrived, in parts of Latin America, Africa, the Caribbean and India). However, in practice Western economic and cultural hegemony during the period since World War II made it unavoidable that the major historical trends would be the spread of English-language styles – especially those originating in the USA and Britain – and responses to them. While this process has been continuous and to some extent pre-dates rock and roll, three particularly important phases can be identified. In the mid- to late 1950s, rock and roll, following its emergence in the USA, spread to Europe. Even in America, it was still just one popular music style among many. In the early and mid-1960s, adaptations of the new style by British groups, headed by the Beatles, ‘invaded’ the USA; the range of pop/rock hybrids that resulted spread widely throughout Europe and, to significant if varying extents, beyond. In these areas pop was now, or was well on the way to becoming, the dominant popular music style. Then, in the 1970s, a further leap in the Western music industry's global reach, together with the impact of new technology (digitization) and new sound-carriers (cassettes, CDs), virtually completed the world-wide dissemination of Western pop but at the same time stimulated the development of innumerable indigenous hybrid styles.
As this sketch implies, pop music is inseparable from certain developments in technology. These have affected musical production (for example, through multi-track recording, with the studio increasingly replacing notation as a compositional resource), dissemination (recorded rather than live forms becoming the norm, for instance), and reception (which increasingly can take place anywhere and at any time). The technological changes are so important that they receive separate discussion below. Pop is also generally associated with a bundle of social changes, all of which are often considered aspects of a certain phase of ‘modernization’. On the whole pop music is a leisure product or practice taking commodity forms. It also often presents itself as culturally and socially iconoclastic. Its typical context is a society, urban and secular in sensibility, which is changing quickly in structure, where wealth is growing (and especially is spreading into previously less-favoured parts of the social hierarchy), and where information and culture are increasingly mass-mediated. The forms, themes and pleasures of most pop, then, are marked both by the effects of ‘consumerism’ and by the tensions resulting from a tilt in the structure of social feeling towards ‘youth’, ‘change’ and ‘modernity’. The pattern was set by the context within which pop originated, that of the post-war ‘long boom’ in North America and Western Europe, with its shifts in gender and class relations, its youth movements, its myriad subcultures and its upheavals in social morality.
Generalization about the musical characteristics of pop is difficult except at the most basic level. It is equally hard to separate what is specific to pop (amplified and electronic sounds, for instance) from features that are typical of popular musics generally: for example, a focus on dance genres on the one hand, and short songs on secular themes (often to do with love), on the other (and often both at once). Some commentators argue that, on a certain level, all the essential musical characteristics of pop were in existence (if only embryonically) by the early 20th century; others lay more stress on elements that they see as radically new. What is clear is that the single most important pop music sources lie in black American vernacular music genres, and that consequently the success of Western pop represents in one sense a remarkable cultural triumph of the African diaspora. It is possible to explain this as a historical ‘accident’ resulting from the economic hegemony of the USA. But this does not seem to answer the question why black American styles should be so favoured. To account for this may require note to be taken of the compatibility of these styles with production and dissemination through recordings, their amenability to syncretic relationships with other vernacular music styles, and perhaps thirdly their capacity to address themes, feelings and desires that may be widespread in late-modern capitalist societies. The central role played in the development of pop by the influence of black American practices has imposed considerable demands on pop music scholars, for analytic methodologies drawn from mainstream musicology have needed to be modified in an attempt to cope with music that is often difficult or impossible to notate, and that features new sorts of timbre (including non-standard singing styles), complex rhythms, varied types of pitch inflection, and an insistence on socially grounded (rather than purely musical) meanings. (More detailed discussion of aspects of the social and aesthetic significance of pop music can be found in the article on popular music.)
From the advent of recorded sound in 1877 to sampling in the 1990s, technological developments, mainly originating from within the Anglo-American and European pop markets, have had a crucial impact on the practice of popular music. This is not to say that technological innovations have always determined the production and consumption of popular music on a global scale: certain styles of popular music, particularly those operating on a grass-roots level (such as the community choir, the brass band or the folk concert), have remained relatively unaffected by technological changes; likewise, local traditional music scenes throughout the world have developed at a slower pace. But, on a more basic level, technological changes (for example innovations within instrumentation, the rise of amplification and increasingly sophisticated recording techniques) and changes in patterns of consumption (the development of the phonograph from a breakable shellac 78 r.p.m. disc to the CD) have revolutionized the manner in which pop has been disseminated. The basic structure of what we would now recognize as the modern music industry was in place by the end of World War II. Records were made with radio in mind, singers began to replace bandleaders, and the relative demise of Tin Pan Alley music saw a shift ‘from the publisher/showman/song system to a record/radio/film star system’ (Frith, B1988, p.19). The advent of microphone technology heralded the era of crooners, such as Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra, who developed an intimate, conversational style of singing. Utilizing new recording technology, they became the first superstars of the radio era, and their voices were perfected to create the illusion of an intimate conversation. This new generation of singers was far more concerned with creating a private space for listening, rather than a public demonstration of vocal power. The beginnings of a teen-based, predominantly female mass market for recorded popular music centred on an individual male was established.
The rise of rock and roll in the 1950s bypassed the intermediate stage of written publication and transmission through records and radio (Hatch and Millward, A1987, p.72). Unlike classical music or that of Tin Pan Alley and ragtime, which was written down in the form of the score, popular music styles such as blues, country and rhythm and blues were improvised and only later written down and stored as sheet music. The musical event (a record or a performance) thus replaced the score as the defining moment of individual creation. Sounds could be stored on tape and be edited, multi-tracked and treated with effects. Introduced in 1948, this new technology revolutionized music-making and gave the producer a new pre-eminence in the recording process, leading to the appearance of producer-auteurs such as Sam Phillips, who discovered Elvis Presley, Phil Spector and Joe Meek, and gave each an instantly recognizable production technique. A second major development was the use of amplification and the rise of the electric guitar, as pioneered by Les Paul and others.
Technological advances fundamentally altered the distribution and consumption of popular music and these advances had a huge effect on the music being produced. The late 1940s witnessed the ‘battle of the speeds’, which resulted in the new 12-inch, 33 r.p.m. format, developed by Columbia, becoming the primary medium for classical music, and the 7-inch, 45 r.p.m. format, developed by rivals RCA, becoming the medium for popular music. The new 45s were far more durable than the existing 78s, which meant that music could be distributed far more easily, thus helping the new independent labels such as Sun from Memphis and Chess from Chicago to become the major conduits for the dissemination of race records and rhythm and blues in the 1950s. The mid-1950s witnessed the beginnings of a bifurcation between a market led by pop singles and one based on rock albums.
The impact of new technologies such as television (by 1955 65% of all American homes had a set) and the transistor radio, imported from Japan, challenged the ways in which music was consumed. Pop stars had to have a visual presence and be able to project a distinct identity through radio. Transistor radios made the consumption of sounds portable, thus helping create the space for teenagers to be outside the parent culture in a physical sense and to claim the new forms of music as their own. Some cultural critics at the time bemoaned these changes and argued that new mass culture was weakening the traditional ties of family and class. Entertainment was no longer centred on home life or even town or village life. Television, radio, cinema, recorded music and mass-circulated newspapers and magazines created a network of individuals with common interests and ideas who, however, began to find themselves ‘atomized’, alone within the mass (Bradley, A1992, p.94). The rise of new technologies, therefore, defined a new and distinctive baby-boom youth market for popular music.
In the 1960s recording technique became increasingly sophisticated. Multi-track recording meant that individual tracks could be recorded simultaneously or individually, allowing more flexibility for musicians who could now perform separately. The producer, whose role became increasingly pre-eminent, could then treat tracks with a number of effects such as reverberation and delay. Landmark recordings were the Beach Boys' single Good Vibrations (1966) and the Beatles' Sgt Pepper album (1967). Certain psychedelic rock groups such as the Jimi Hendrix Experience further widened the sonic palette of rock through the use of volume and intricate layering of sound. By the late 1960s mono was being phased out, and the early 1970s were characterized by intricate stereo sound recordings on 16-track studios. Landmark recordings from this era include Mike Oldfield's largely instrumental Tubular Bells and Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon (both 1973). By the mid-1970s 32-track recording was possible, and the late 1970s saw artists such as Stevie Wonder record totally digitally with his album Journey through the Secret Life of Plants (1979).
As a reaction to this increasing studio sophistication, new wave and punk bands in Europe and America self-consciously made a more low-fidelity music. The advent of affordable recording equipment and cheap synthesizers in the late 1970s and early 80s further democratized music-making with the rise of electronic groups such as the Human League and Ultravox. However, the pioneers of electronic music were artists such as Brian Eno and Kraftwerk, who used the studio as an instrument in its own right, making it possible for musicians to work exclusively in the studio, creating sounds which could never be performed in the traditional live context. Indeed, when Kraftwerk toured in the 1990s they reassembled their recording studio on stage in order to perform.
The emergence of cheap cassette technology in the early 1970s allowed for the global dissemination of Anglo-American popular music. Although it was often still necessary for non-Anglo-American artists to sing in English to reach a global market (as with the success of Swedish bands Abba in the 1970s, Roxette in the 1980s and Ace of Bass in the 1990s), a new cultural diversity was created, shown by the end of the 1980s, with important music industries in, for example, Japan, Australasia and India.
By the early 1980s pop stars often found that it was not enough to be a talented musician. The promotion of pop music had been greatly affected by the rise of Music Television (MTV), which began broadcasting in the USA in 1981 and became a global phenomenon of the 1980s. Music video favoured those artists such as Michael Jackson, Madonna and Prince who had a strong visual appeal, and this industry innovation initially had an adverse effect on less telegenic performers.
A basic shift occurred in the mid-1980s when the technique of Sampling became widespread, allowing any sound to be stored digitally and manipulated. The rise of sampling therefore repositioned the role of pop artists who no longer created ‘new’ sounds, but could now be judged by their skill in assembling aural collages of ‘old’ music: they became curators rather than originators and their music-making depended on their appreciation of old musical forms. Sampling became a commonplace in rap, hip hop, ambient and rock styles throughout the 1990s. Sampling also led to some bizarre developments: in 1991, for example, Natalie Cole was able to sing a duet with her long-dead father, Nat ‘King’ Cole, on a cover of his recording of the standard Unforgettable. The advent of sampling therefore questioned notions of originality within popular music and engendered an ethical and economic debate within the music business concerning the ownership of recorded sound, which led to a set of guidelines determining what constituted musical theft.
Also in the 1980s the dominance of the CD as a form redefined the role of popular music and its audience. Just as sampling recombined the old and the new, so the rise of the CD saw the repackaging of old musical artefacts using a new technology and created a new, post-twenty-something market for popular music.
In the 1990s, the rise of new interactive technologies such as the CD-ROM and the World Wide Web put into question the existing power nexus within the recording industry. Artists such as David Bowie began bypassing record companies by making music available on the Internet only for a restricted fan base. In 1998 the same artist also put an unfinished song on the Internet and ran a competition inviting fans to finish the lyric, thus opening up new vistas of audience/fan co-operation for future generations of recording artists. In 1999 his album Hours… was released on the Internet two weeks before its retail release.
Midway through the 20th century, commercially-mediated, Southern-based music by black and white working-class musicians displaced Tin Pan Alley popular song to dominate national culture and lay the foundations of a new global lingua franca. ‘Untrained’ performers replaced the previously-dominant, professional network of composers, orchestrators, singers and studio orchestras; through the 1950s the major record labels lost nearly half their share of the popular music market to independent record labels. New cultural fusions were particularly encouraged by migrations from south to north and from country to city, as well as by new communications technologies that accelerated musical interactions and pushed music and musicians across geographical and cultural boundaries. Mass culture brought the views of marginalized groups to the mainstream, and previously separated groups discovered new identities and affinities through popular music. Such changes forced realignments of the genre categories that were in general use. The ways in which record companies separated artists and audiences by race, region and class (‘race records’, ‘hillbilly’ and ‘popular’, for example), hid the fact that such music had not developed from mutually exclusive sources, as genre labels have tended to reflect prevalent social, especially racial, categories more than differences of musical style. In addition, commercial success and monetary rewards have not always matched up with musical traditions and creativity: although rock and roll was primarily created by black Americans, its financial rewards have gone disproportionately to white singers and businessmen.
‘Rock and roll’ had been used in blues lyrics to celebrate sexuality and dancing long before its first print appearance (Billboard, 1946) to describe the rhythm and blues of Joe Liggins and his Honeydrippers. The phrase has been used ever since: sometimes narrowly, to describe the music made by black and white popular musicians of the late 1950s; sometimes as a means of disguising black origins or of distinguishing white-identified music from soul, funk, disco and hip hop; sometimes more broadly to label the whole range of popular styles that developed in the wake of the paradigm shift of the 1950s. Certain shared characteristics differentiated rock and roll, country music and rhythm and blues from Tin Pan Alley. Most notable were the blues influences, including forms derived from the 12-bar blues, amplified electric instruments and a rhythmic drive led by drums and bass. Yet the 32-bar verse-chorus forms of Tin Pan Alley persisted, as did a wide range of singing styles, and the new music’s characteristic rocking rhythms can be heard as far back as the late 1920s in blues recordings, especially during the piano boogie-woogie craze of the 1930s, which supplied the left-hand ostinato pattern that became one of the foundations of rock and roll guitar style. Moreover, driving straight-quaver note grooves appeared in recordings by white country musicians of the same period. Although it was called Hillbilly music until the mid-1940s, Country music did not develop exclusively from Anglo-American folk traditions, but rather incorporated the multicultural influences of Spain, Hawaii, Africa, Italy, Switzerland, Tin Pan Alley popular song, black and white gospel music and black-American blues.
Growing reliance upon the electric guitar is in some ways an index of the shift to rock and roll, yet such central figures of the 1950s as Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard continued to base their ensembles around the piano, and the guitar was not a prominent feature of the ‘girl group’ performances of the early 1960s. New ways of drumming did most to unite the newer styles, but rock and roll still incorporated the crooning and song formats of previous popular song along with gospel, hillbilly, blues and boogie-woogie characteristics. The adoption of the pedal steel guitar in the early 1950s helped make country music sound different from other popular post-war genres, but the growing use of drums from the late 40s brought it closer to other popular styles. However important these genres were as marketing categories, they grew from shared origins in black American blues, jazz, gospel and white country music, and they reflected their technological moment in their use of electric amplification, mass mediation, magnetic tape technology that spread from Germany after World War II, and commercial distribution.
The jazz, jump blues and rhythm and blues of the 1930s and 40s established crucial conventions for later popular styles: the rhythmic energy and riff style of Count Basie’s band; the honking saxophone solos and sexual energy of Wynonie Harris; the small jazz-influenced combos of Los Angeles’s Central Avenue scene; the fusion of black and white styles that were heard in Louis Jordan’s music; the gospel ecstasy that singers such as Sister Rosetta Tharper, Little Richard and Ray Charles brought to secular music; T-Bone Walker’s creation of an electric blues guitar style that Chuck Berry would later develop into the foundation of rock guitar playing.
There are not enough differences between songs such as Wynonie Harris’s Good Rockin’ Tonight (1948) and Big Joe Turner’s Shake, Rattle, and Roll (1954) to justify the perception that a whole new style of music had emerged in the mid-1950s. Postwar cultural mixtures, migrations and technology brought Southern white and black working-class music to the attention of audiences that had previously not been exposed to its techniques and sensibilities. But earlier mixings have been too little acknowledged as well, such as the black musicians who taught Hank Williams to play guitar and influenced his songwriting or the impact of country star Jimmie Rogers' yodelling on the blues howl of Howlin' Wolf. Although record companies and radio stations marketed music according to the race of the performers (presumed to match that of their audiences), white listeners increasingly sought out black music in the late 1940s. Mass culture established a common frame of reference among previously separate communities, making regional, class-based and ethnically-specific cultural forms increasingly attractive and relevant to new audiences. Country and rhythm and blues artists often recorded versions of each other’s songs, and the white team of Leiber and Stoller wrote many songs for black and Chicano artists that became hits on both the pop and rhythm and blues charts. Another important interaction was that of self-taught country and blues musicians with jazz-trained studio session players. As country music incorporated jump blues influences it became Rockabilly, just as blues had evolved into rhythm and blues by embracing influences from jazz, Tin Pan Alley and gospel; as the story is usually told, these two streams eventually united to produce rock and roll.
Some historians date the beginning of this era to June of 1955, when Bill Haley’s Rock around the Clock became the number one record on Billboard’s ‘best sellers’ chart and an icon of teenage rebellion. The early 1950s provide an alternative date, when white teenagers started to listen and dance to the rhythm and blues of black musicians, and the Cleveland disc jockey, Alan Freed, gained more and more white listeners for his rhythm and blues radio shows. By 1954, he was calling the music ‘Rock and roll’, a name that distracted attention from the cultural miscegenation that was taking place. Records, jukeboxes and especially radio were particularly important for breaking down racial barriers still maintained in public spaces, and rock and roll concerts were the first integrated public events in many communities. Despite the emphasis on youth culture in rock and roll, the musics out of which it developed had been adult. Over-emphasis of teenage rebellion disguises the role of the music in breaking down racial boundaries, proposing new ideals of gender and sexuality, and promoting working-class perspectives through lyrics that criticized hierarchy and celebrated freedom, leisure and community.
Most white rock and roll performers were Southern country musicians who adapted some of the features of rhythm and blues, and many of the best (such as Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis Presley and Carl Perkins) had grown up learning from black musicians. Bill Haley, Buddy Holly and others kept their country instrumentation but developed rhythmic swing and blues inflections under the influence of jump blues artists such as Louis Jordan. Many of the most successful black rock and roll musicians (Fats Domino and Ruth Brown, for example) were established within rhythm and blues before they were redefined as part of a new cultural and commercial movement. The whole idea of rock and roll was ‘that Fats Domino had more in common with Bill Haley than he did with Wynonie Harris, that Elvis Presley had more in common with Ray Charles than he did with Ernest Tubb’ (Ward, Stokes and Tucker, A1986, p.97).
Chuck Berry drew upon blues, country and the jump blues of Louis Jordan to produce some of the founding conventions of rock and roll, including lyrics that celebrated mobility, play and youth, as well as the double-string riffs that made him one of the most influential guitarists of the 20th century. His first record was a version of a country song, and he might have been categorized as a country singer if he had been white. Although tenor saxophone solos and rolling piano triplets continued to be used in rock and roll, the dominant trend was to move from horns, piano and swing rhythms to guitars and straight quaver-note grooves. Berry’s Rock and Roll Music (1957) records a transitional moment, as some of the musicians swing the beat while others evenly subdivide it.
Black vocal groups, mostly male (the Coasters and the Drifters, for example), were among the most popular musicians of the decade, and sang romantic ballads with smooth harmonies (often based on I–VI–IV–V progressions) that extended the legacy of the gospel quartets and of popular 1940s vocal groups such as the Mills Brothers and the Ink Spots, while their up-tempo numbers displayed more overtly the rhythmic drive of rock and roll. Such groups typically placed less emphasis on instrumental backing, but singers often imitated instrumental sounds and sang non-verbal syllables that caused their music to be known as Doo-wop. White groups such as Danny and the Juniors contributed to the style but succeeded on the pop charts without first having to prove themselves through rhythm and blues chart success, as was normally required of black artists.
The most successful performer of this period was Elvis Presley, a white singer who learned to sing in the Pentecostal Church and by imitating the blues and country music he heard on the radio. Presley's musical talents, charisma and sexiness soon made him the most successful figure in American music. His first commercial studio session yielded a cover of That’s all right, mama, which had been recorded by rhythm and blues artist Arthur ‘Big Boy’ Crudup, paired with a version of Bill Monroe’s Blue Moon of Kentucky – a white interpretation of a black song and a black-influenced performance of a white song. His commercial appeal, however, was still related to racial dynamics, as white audiences bought Presley’s versions of rhythm and blues songs instead of those by the original black performers. Still, he took as much from country as he did from rhythm and blues, and sales of country music suffered more from the popularity of rock and roll than did the rhythm and blues market.
The success of Presley and other rockabilly-styled artists helped undermine the music industry’s assumptions about race-based genres and separate audiences. At this moment ‘one strain of popular music cut across racial, social, and geographic lines in a way not seen in the USA since the days of Stephen Foster’ (Hamm, C1983, pp.62–3). By spreading elements of Southern working-class black and white culture to national and international audiences, Presley had a profound impact on music history.
Country music was divided by Presley’s success, however, with the rockabilly singers such as Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, Gene Vincent, the Everly Brothers, Eddie Cochran and Buddy Holly developing a style that reflected their absorption of black culture and that was distinct from the straight country singers who followed the example of Hank Williams. Country music expanded rapidly in the years after World War II and Nashville emerged as the centre of its recording business. In the 1950s, the dominant country style was Honky tonk music, but Chet Atkins developed a new, Tin Pan Alley-influenced Nashville sound, a country-pop fusion that was designed to attract larger audiences.
As white teenagers were increasingly moved by and moving like black entertainers, critics attempted to discredit rock and roll by linking it to racial conflicts, promiscuity and juvenile delinquency. With hindsight, such attacks are frequently dismissed as bigotry, misunderstanding and over-reaction, but censorship and other techniques for weakening rock and roll’s impact reflect accurate perceptions of its power to challenge and disrupt accepted behaviours. At the end of the decade, Congress conducted hearings into the practice of payola, whereby disc jockeys were bribed to play particular records (see DJ (i)). This practice had been common since the rise of the music industry in the 1890s, and was not in fact illegal, but persecution of Alan Freed and other prominent figures was partly driven by the feeling that the music threatened social order. Meanwhile, the large record companies were regaining their control of the industry and promoting white singers, such as Pat Boone, who could outsell black performers with Cover versions of the same songs; such adaptations served large white audiences who were attracted to rock and roll but resisted some of its cultural challenges. These events, along with the death of Buddy Holly and the disrupted careers of Presley, Chuck Berry, Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis (by the draft, jail, religion and scandal respectively), have been regarded by many as marking the end of the original era of rock and roll, although its musical and social precedents resonated throughout the rest of the century.
The rock and pop of the 1960s differed from rock and roll of the 50s in several respects. Musicians embraced solid-body electric guitars, powerful amplification with deliberate distortion effects, new recording techniques and greater use of keyboard instruments, including synthesizers. The longer playing time of the 331/3 r.p.m. album accommodated longer song forms that often included lengthy improvisations. Many song lyrics continued to be concerned with romance, but some now also participated overtly in political protest and the search for new identities and communities. Perceptions of a generation gap sharpened as 17-year-olds became the largest age cohort in 1964, and Rock music dominated the output of the record industry. The diversity of the decade, however, can be lost to a collective memory that emphasizes Woodstock, psychedelia, sexual freedom and transgression: the most popular musicians of the decade included not only the Beatles, Elvis Presley and Ray Charles, but also Connie Francis, Brenda Lee and Percy Faith. It was because 1960s’ rock resounded in an environment that resisted many of its challenges that it proved so explosive and transformative.
Historians often characterize the early part of the decade as a lull between the interrupted careers of the first rock and roll generation and the arrival of the ‘British Invasion’. Neil Sedaka, Carole King and other songwriters at the Brill Building in New York were moving popular music back towards the sentiments and production methods of Tin Pan Alley, while white ‘teen idols’, such as Dion, Ricky Nelson and Frankie Avalon, defused the dangerous sexuality of Presley, Little Richard and Chuck Berry. Yet the same period (1959–63) saw the rise of Soul music in Chicago and Memphis, the development of the Motown sound, and a doo-wop revival that included tremendous popularity for ‘girl groups’. The Shirelles, the Crystals, the Ronnettes and the Shangri-Las were among the most successful groups, and the most influential producer of such music was Phil Spector, who merged features of Tin Pan Alley song with the energy of rhythm and blues, and used innovative studio techniques to create his ‘wall of sound’. This golden age for female and black-American artists has been unjustly maligned by rock critics, who, until the 1990s, were almost all white men whose writings marginalized these groups. The most critically respected group of the early 1960s was probably the Beach Boys, who used virtuosic vocal lines in the style of doo-wop, a rock and roll rhythm section, and adventurous recording practices to produce successful vignettes of surfing and other romanticized features of middle-class Californian culture.
Throughout the decade, country music remained marked by the influence of rock and roll, as electric instruments and drums became routinely used. The Country Music Association (founded in 1957) helped promote both the music and the industry, and the music continued to grow in popularity, with three shows devoted to it appearing on network television by the end of the decade. Some of this increased popularity came from female stars who presented a new assertive image, such as Loretta Lynn and Tammy Wynette, and from singer-songwriters who crossed over to broader audiences, such as Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson.
The black artists on Berry Gordy's Motown record label developed gospel-influenced, sexy but polished, elegant music that successfully crossed over to large white audiences. Its writers and producers (such as Holland, Dozier and Holland) supplied songs and arrangements to a virtuosic house band and singers that included Stevie Wonder, the Temptations, the Four Tops, Diana Ross and the Supremes, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles and Marvin Gaye. The ‘southern soul’ of Stax Records in Memphis produced a more gritty and blues-derived style for mostly black audiences later in the decade, using an integrated house band to back singers that included Wilson Pickett, Aretha Franklin and Otis Redding. James Brown invented Funk and set the stage for subsequent dance music and rap by placing his rough, soulful vocals over instrumental grooves that suspended harmonic motion in favour of unprecedentedly percussive and polyrhythmic interlocking lines, including complicated, virtuosic bass lines.
Folk singers, many of whom were political activists, may have initially avoided the instrumentation and attitudes of rock and roll because of its location within commercial culture, but rock’s rhythmic and timbral energy made it well suited to protest, and it became increasingly associated with protest movements, alternative lifestyles and perspectives and the breakdown of social and attitudinal barriers. Bob Dylan became arguably the most influential American musician of the 1960s by creating lyrics that pushed folk music towards a more critical, personal and self-consciously poetic tone, and his rough voice and loose intonation established an influential model for performance. He blurred the line between rock and folk with his controversial decision to ‘go electric’ (1965), and brought rock and country closer together in 1968, just as the Byrds and the Band were also developing the Country rock fusions that would be followed by Buffalo Springfield, the Flying Burrito Brothers, the Grateful Dead, Neil Young and the Eagles. Rock criticism grew up around Dylan and the Beatles as the lyrics of both and the music of the latter provided material for complicated and serious analysis. Joan Baez, Tom Paxton and Phil Ochs were other protest singers who developed the poetic and political vocabulary of popular music and helped prepare for the boom, during the latter part of the decade, of personal, often confessional singer-songwriters such as Judy Collins, Joni Mitchell, Carole King and Paul Simon (see Singer-songwriter). For the most part, black audiences displayed little interest in Folk-rock or rock, despite the strong blues influences on the latter.
British bands were formed after the models set by US rock and roll musicians on recordings and tours. The extraordinary songwriting abilities of John Lennon and Paul McCartney helped earn the Beatles an extreme level of popular and critical success, and they produced catchy and memorable songs in a great range of styles, even as they explored unusual musical forms, harmonies, studio techniques and instrumentation, as exemplified on their influential album, Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967). Their success also helped establish an expectation that bands would write their own material, and their androgynous haircuts continued the rock and roll challenge to gender norms. Their string of number one singles in the USA in 1964 paved the way for the other bands of the ‘British Invasion’: the Rolling Stones, Herman’s Hermits, the Yardbirds, the Kinks, the Animals and others. For many, these bands revived the interrupted energy of 1950s rock and roll, and they quickly displaced girl groups (except the Supremes) and soul singers on the pop charts.
Hard rock developed as American and British musicians adapted and extended the blues, following such models as Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters, and the guitar became rock’s main solo instrument. Jimi Hendrix’s virtuosic technique reinvented the electric guitar, and Eric Clapton’s blues-style playing also inspired many followers. The Doors’ brooding music and the Who’s forceful ‘power chords’ (the interval of a 4th or 5th timbrally distorted by an amplifier to produce resultant tones) helped set crucial precedents for subsequent decades. Like the Beatles, the Rolling Stones made no secret of their debts to the black American musicians they had studied, although other bands, such as Led Zeppelin, took songwriting credit and royalties for music they had plainly copied.
Popular culture continued to be an important forum for challenges to dominant representations of identity and values in the late 1960s, reflecting the influences of civil rights struggles, global decolonization, the postwar diversity of higher education that made campuses an important site of activism, the working-class perspectives of many musicians, and a variety of disruptions of what had been taken to be ‘natural’ gendered and sexual behaviour. San Francisco became the main locus of the ‘counter-culture’ of young people who explored alternatives that were meant to increase individual freedom and collective harmony. Psychedelic light shows, artwork, and drugs such as marijuana and LSD joined extended improvisatory jams and experiments with drones (inspired by the sitar playing of Ravi Shankar and the jazz of John Coltrane and Miles Davis) as means to the transformation of consciousness. Social harmony and equality remained paramount ideals of the counter-culture, emblematized by rock festivals such as the Monterey Pop Festival during the 1967 ‘Summer of Love’.
The ideals of the Art Rock and Progressive rock of the late 1960s and 70s were often more elitist; taking their cue from Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, groups such as the Moody Blues, Deep Purple, Yes, Pink Floyd and Emerson, Lake and Palmer incorporated musical techniques and references from classical music and various non-Western traditions in pursuit of what they saw as greater seriousness, complexity and virtuosity. Another aesthetic development took place in the pages of such new magazines as Hit Parader, Rolling Stone and Crawdaddy, as writers such as Lester Bangs, Dave Marsh and Greil Marcus developed ways of arguing about the meanings and artistic significance of rock music, establishing the profession of the rock critic and furnishing influential models for subsequent criticism.
The music industry doubled in size between 1973 and 1978, and increased the efficiency of its marketing by hardening genre categories and by relying upon more narrowly defined radio formats. These changes helped fragment the rock community and largely resegregated broadcasting, despite the continued appeal to a broad audience of such artists as Elton John, Fleetwood Mac and Stevie Wonder. FM-radio’s new ‘album-oriented rock’ format narrowed the popular definition of ‘rock’, excluding music made by women and black-Americans in favour of stadium rock bands such as Led Zeppelin, REO Speedwagon, Rush and Journey. Technological developments enabled some musicians, notably Stevie Wonder, Prince and John Fogerty, to perform most or all of the instrumental and vocal parts on their albums. In live performance, amplification of all instruments, with their balance and timbre controlled by a sound mixing specialist, became standard practice.
Protests against social injustice and violence remained a theme for rock groups such as Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, as well as the Motown artists Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder. Gaye’s What’s going on (1971) not only became Motown’s best-selling album but also established the idea of unifying a concept album through social criticism. The singer-songwriter style of personal confession and introspection was a stronger trend, however, led by albums such as James Taylor’s Sweet Baby James (1970), Carole King’s Tapestry (1970) and Joni Mitchell’s Court and Spark (1974), and work by Paul Simon, Neil Young, Jackson Browne and Billy Joel. The folk-based singers of ‘women’s music’, such as Cris Williamson and Meg Christian, created a gentle, acoustic alternative to mainstream rock and pop, even as all-women bands like the Runaways and Fanny claimed rock’s power for women. Bruce Springsteen began to make his prominent mark by combining the personal approach of the singer-songwriters, the grandeur of Spector’s ‘wall of sound’, lyrics that spoke to working-class concerns and experiences, a hard-edged rock sound and soul-inspired passionate, gritty vocals.
The continuing influence of Tin Pan Alley-styled pop, present in the 1960s music of the Lovin’ Spoonful and the Mamas and the Papas, expanded in the 1970s with the success of Elton John, Olivia Newton-John and Abba. Miles Davis brought jazz to the pop charts with his fusion of rock, funk and modal jazz in Bitches Brew (1969), and jazz-rock bands such as Chicago, and Blood, Sweat and Tears flourished. Jazz could also be heard in the complex harmonies of Steely Dan, and in the continuing impact of 1960s guitarists who had been influenced by saxophonist John Coltrane. Carlos Santana’s mixture of blues-based guitar virtuosity with Latin rhythms spoke from and to complex cultural identities. Blues and country influences were brought together by a number of rock bands that came from the South and emphasized their regional identity, most notably Lynyrd Skynyrd, the Allman Brothers Band and ZZ Top.
Country rock grew as a genre with the Byrds, the Eagles and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, all following in the wake of Dylan’s success, while the most prominent musicians of mainstream country included Dolly Parton, Conway Twitty, Merle Haggard, Loretta Lynn, and the only black American major country star, Charlie Pride. A group of musicians in Austin, Texas, brought country music to larger youth audiences through the ‘outlaw’ or ‘progressive’ style that was exemplified by Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings. The perspectives of marginalized peoples also entered pop music through Bob Marley, the only Jamaican reggae musician to achieve great success in the USA. Reggae influences, especially off-beat guitar chords and fragmented, melodic bass lines, eventually showed up all across American popular music.
The tendencies of many 1960s bands to explore greater volume, distortion and transgressive lyrics came to fruition in Heavy metal, established in 1970 by albums by Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath and Deep Purple. Drawing upon the world views and musical techniques of much earlier blues musicians like Robert Johnson and Howlin’ Wolf, these bands explored occult topics, mysticism and paranoia in their lyrics while developing heavier sounding drums, bass, distorted guitar and wailing vocals. Guitar and drum solos became increasingly virtuosic, culminating in Van Halen’s eponymous first album (1978), which revealed Edward Van Halen as the most innovative and influential guitarist since Hendrix, and established the level of technique to which most metal guitarists of the 1980s would aspire. The spectacular costumes and stage sets of heavy metal contributed to its aura of power, and the experience of live concerts became particularly important for this genre, both because of the communal experiences it offered and because it was rarely played on the radio. In 1973 Led Zeppelin broke the concert attendance record held by the Beatles, and Kiss became the most successful band of the decade, with 13 platinum albums. Grand Funk Railroad, Judas Priest, AC/DC and Aerosmith confirmed these heavy metal conventions; some bands followed the lead of Deep Purple in adapting riffs, harmonies and improvisatory styles from the music of Bach and Vivaldi, although this would become much more pronounced in the 1980s. Within heavy metal, Kiss, Alice Cooper and others appeared in gender-bending ‘glam’ clothes and make-up, just as David Bowie and other transgressive androgynes were doing in other musical styles.
Another spectacular genre, Disco dominated the latter part of the decade; the success of this often quite erotic style was in part due to advances in birth control methods, changes in the legal status and social position of women and sexual minorities, the laxity of US drug-enforcement policy and other demographic shifts. Although it eventually crossed over into mainstream pop and achieved international success, disco began as the music of marginalized peoples, especially gay and black urban audiences. A dance-floor music, initially developed outside of the music industry, disco arose from the practices of New York and San Francisco DJs who cut and mixed records on two separate turntables, managing an uninterrupted flow of music and dancing all night. Using many of the soft soul techniques of the O’Jays and other groups on the Philadelphia International label, disco added an invariably fast (100–130 beats per minute) and heavy rhythmic pulse. It also drew upon salsa and funk, which was built on James Brown's rhythmic innovations but was expanded technologically and psychedelically by Earth, Wind, and Fire, George Clinton and Sly and the Family Stone; the latter group presented in every performance a microcosm of a society free of racism and sexism. Disco used few polyrhythms, however, and it even moved away from the dialectical bass drum-snare drum alternation of most rock and pop in favour of a rhythmic framework of regular, quaver-note thumping. It was a singer’s music, often overtly incorporating the ecstatic techniques of gospel music, and ‘disco divas’ such as Donna Summer were among its biggest stars. It was also a producer’s music, with backing tracks often created in the studio by solo figures like Georgio Moroder. Sometimes using open grooves and accretionary structures rather than verse-chorus form, disco songs celebrated sustained pleasure in various forms: dance, sex and communal identity.
These features helped make disco perhaps the most maligned genre of American popular music. Racism, homophobia and misogyny helped fuel a ‘disco sucks’ backlash at the end of the decade, alongside criticism of its studio creation and trademark beat, the characterization of dancing as mindless, comparisons with art rock’s complexity and live performance and with the introspection of singer-songwriters. Although disco’s biggest stars were more representative of the mainstream – the straight, white male group the Bee Gees broke all previous sales records with Saturday Night Fever (1977) – the genre brought together the most diverse fan base of any popular style since the rock and roll of the 1950s. From its peak in 1979, when 200 all-disco radio stations broadcast in the USA, it declined suddenly as a named genre, but its musical features remained a strong presence through subsequent decades, particularly in various forms of Dance music.
Punk rock contrasted in nearly every way with disco: deliberately crude rather than polished in its musical techniques and performance styles; a guitar-driven instrumentation in place of lavish soundscapes filled with strings, horns and synthesizers; stripped-down harmonies insistently strummed, instead of lush chords and counterpoint; short, simple songs rather than extended dance grooves; ripped clothes and other signifiers of alienation from dominant conventions, all in strong contrast to disco’s celebration of fantasy, attractiveness and opulence. Influenced by the 1960s cynicism of Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, punk musicians explored calculatedly offensive topics and noisiness, downplaying virtuosity because it seemed artificial and elitist. It extended the rebellious aspects of the rock and roll tradition, only differing in its inclusion of mainstream rock among its targets. After the first American punk rockers, including the Ramones and Iggy Pop, England followed with younger and more working-class bands, of whom the Sex Pistols and the Clash were among the most influential. Black Flag, the Dead Kennedys, the Plasmatics and others continued the harder style of punk, while others such as the Cars, Devo and Talking Heads developed New wave by subtracting some of punk’s anger and adding synthesizers and irony.
Drum machines, samplers, synthesizers, personal computers and sequencers became widely available in the 1980s, enabling musicians to create any imaginable sound, to use pre-existing music as compositional material, and to manipulate and store sounds as digital information. The worldwide spread of cassettes promoted more diversity in worldwide music production and distribution, reducing the dominance of American music from two thirds in the 1970s to one third in the 80s. The introduction of the compact disc (1983) raised the quality of audio playback and increased industry profits, since they cost no more to produce but were sold at much higher prices. Global marketing plans became essential to the growth of the music industry and, although five huge corporations gained control of two thirds of the world music markets, only one was American-owned, complicating debates over cultural imperialism.
Full-time cable television broadcasts of music videos began on MTV in 1981, increasing the popularity of bands and stars who had particular visual appeal and those whose audiences transcended narrow genre boundaries, including Madonna, Michael Jackson, Prince and Bruce Springsteen. Especially innovatory videos helped build the careers of Jackson, Madonna, and other artists such as Peter Gabriel. Despite MTV’s national scope and the expense of producing videos, it played a broader range of music than most radio stations and gave some artists easier access to audiences. Michael Jackson’s worldwide success with Thriller (1982), which sold an unprecedented 40 million copies worldwide, helped break down MTV’s initially racist programming policies and revive a slumping music industry. Prince’s fusions of rock and funk, particularly Little Red Corvette (1982) and Purple Rain (1984), helped break down some of radio’s racially-defined boundaries at the same time that he challenged conventional gender norms. MTV’s emphasis on spectacle had the effect of encouraging sexism and objectification in many videos, but several female performers, including Madonna, Tina Turner, Pat Benatar and Cyndi Lauper, effectively used the new medium to project images that were both sexy and powerful.
Despite an increasingly centralized music industry, musical sounds and experiences were diverse. Rock charity concerts such as ‘Live Aid’ and ‘USA for Africa’ publicized campaigns against injustice and raised money on their behalf. Whitney Houston, Janet Jackson, Lionel Richie and George Michael dominated the pop charts with songs about love and dance, along with the male vocal groups who developed ‘new jack swing’ by combining smooth vocals with Hip hop rhythms. U2’s passionate vocals and polyrhythmic accompaniments, and REM’s fusion of country and punk influences, made them two of the most influential bands of the decade. Billy Joel and Paul Simon continued to extend the singer-songwriter tradition. Differing interpretations often add to the popularity of mass-mediated texts, as when Bruce Springsteen found that many listeners, including both major presidential candidates in 1984, heard only the celebratory music of his Born in the USA, missing the lyrics’ bitter indictment of America’s involvement in the Vietnam War and treatment of that war’s veterans.
A revival of ‘traditional’ elements was prominent in country music in the 1980s, with Randy Travis, Reba McEntire, Dwight Yoakam, George Strait, and Ricky Skaggs drawing upon earlier honky tonk, rockabilly, western swing and bluegrass styles; many of the country stars of the 1970s continued their success in the 80s. Alabama, the Statler Brothers and others revived gospel influences and vocal harmonies within country music, and the film Urban Cowboy (1980) made ‘Western’ dancing and clothing more broadly fashionable for a time.
Heavy metal grew to become the dominant genre of pop at the end of the 1980s. Recordings by Iron Maiden, Def Leppard, Motörhead and others at the beginning of the decade became known as the ‘New Wave of British Heavy Metal’, and the catchy songs and high production values of Def Leppard in particular set important precedents. Several factors contributed to the growth of the genre: the androgynous glam metal of Mötley Crüe, Ratt and Poison; the success of Black Sabbath’s singer, Ozzy Osbourne, as a solo artist; Bon Jovi’s balance of pop romance and rock rebellion. It began to receive significant radio exposure, and MTV’s ‘Headbangers’ Ball’, first aired at the end of 1986, quickly became that station’s most popular show. Throughout the decade, guitarists such as Randy Rhoads, Yngwie Malmsteen and Steve Vai followed Van Halen in developing ever more virtuosic techniques. The influence of classical models (especially Bach, Vivaldi and Paganini) on harmony, virtuosity, pedagogy and analysis became paramount. The ‘underground’ styles of Thrash metal, death metal and speed metal, with their faster tempos, heavier distortion, ensemble virtuosity and more complicated song forms, arose primarily in the San Francisco Bay area and quickly spread, led by Slayer, Testament, Megadeth and especially Metallica.
Rap, the aural component of a hip hop culture that included break dancing and graffiti writing, was perhaps the most innovative and influential musical development of the 1980s. During the previous decade, DJs at block parties and dances extended disco mixing techniques so that bits of one piece of music were superimposed on another, and this recontextualizing of musical fragments (Sampling) became basic to the style; manipulation of turntables as percussion instruments also provided rhythmically complicated patterns (Scratching). MCs (from ‘master of ceremonies’) who exhorted the crowd and advertised the group of musicians became rappers, whose intricately rhymed and phrased lyrics were rhythmically declaimed against the background of the DJs’ music. Rap musicians drew upon long traditions of black American signifying and Jamaican toasting even as they utilized the latest technology, often (as in scratching) in unintended ways. Recordings of these practices began to be issued in 1979 and, in the early 1980s, Kool Moe Dee, L.L. Cool J and others demonstrated the virtuosic potentials of the new style. Grandmaster Flash, with songs like The Message (1982), established a tradition of social critique through rap lyrics, which was extended later in the decade by the innovative and virtuosic music of Public Enemy. Female rappers such as Queen Latifah and Salt-n-Pepa positioned black women’s concerns and perspectives prominently within popular culture and used rap as a forum for debate about gender. Later in the decade, Run DMC brought rap and heavy metal together by covering Walk this way, a song by Aerosmith; fusions of these two styles were explored by many musicians in the following decade. Ice Cube, NWA and Ice-T led Gangsta rap, and provoked great controversy by addressing racism and ghetto life in violent terms. Complex generational and class connections made black American rappers popular with large white audiences even as they became more Afro-centric. Particularly skilled and imaginative production teams, such as the Bomb Squad, combined dozens of sampled bits of previous music into noisy urban collages, often polyrhythmic and sometimes polytonal. Extraordinarily virtuosic rappers, such as Public Enemy’s Chuck D and Queen Latifah, combined the rhetorical techniques of black-American preaching with bebop’s rhythmic flair as they delivered vivid and often critical lyrics.
Like heavy metal, rap was often deliberately noisy when compared to other styles, which often caused its particular forms of creativity and virtuosity to go unnoticed. Both genres were musically and lyrically diverse and differed greatly, but rap and metal fans and musicians often found themselves grouped together and demonized by politicians and the mainstream press. The Parents’ Music Resource Center, launched in 1985 by a group of politicians’ wives, instigated congressional hearings about ‘offensive’ music, mostly metal and rap, promoted censorship campaigns against particular artists and brokered a ‘voluntary’ programme whereby record companies put warning stickers on certain albums, so making them unavailable in some parts of the USA. As had happened in the early days of rock and roll, such controversies betrayed fears about the reproduction of values, miscegenation, and the power of popular music to challenge and critique dominant assumptions and to present and naturalize alternatives.
This period was marked less by technological developments than the 1980s had been. Sampling and sequencing remained important compositional techniques, although increased corporate control of popular music and related changes in copyright law made it more difficult to sample pre-existing recordings freely. CD sales surpassed those of cassettes, and the internet emerged as an important and contested site for the distribution and exchange of music. The popular MP3 compression format preserved much of the high fidelity of a CD source but reduced sound files to a tenth of their former size, making feasible the widespread transfer of music via personal computers. The music industry fought to regulate musical uploads and downloads, which they saw as a new frontier of piracy; in contrast, many fans and artists celebrated the new medium’s potential to subvert corporate control of musical life.
Media conglomerates pursued mergers that enabled greater profits through synergy, as when soundtrack albums and films promote each other. The major record labels prioritized the music of a few consistent megastars, such as Michael Jackson, Janet Jackson, the Rolling Stones, Madonna, Prince, Aerosmith and pop balladeers Mariah Carey and Whitney Houston, yet their dominance of the domestic market declined somewhat as smaller labels nearly tripled their share to one fifth. Despite the emergence of new styles linked to youth culture, audiences for popular music remained generationally diverse; in 1992, only 24% of records were bought by people in their teens and younger.
A number of factors combined to end the unusual prominence of heavy metal at the turn of the decade. The rise of ‘alternative’ music, especially as represented by the Seattle Grunge of Nirvana and other bands, blurred genre lines by retaining heavy metal’s energy and distorted guitars but eschewing its overt instrumental virtuosity and spectacular stage style. The introduction of electronic point-of-sale reporting in 1991 showed that rap and country were much more popular than had been indicated by previous Billboard charts and other measures of sales, which had overstated the dominance of heavy metal. Besides the decline of heavy metal, the biggest musical trends of the 1990s were the movement of ‘alternative’ to the mainstream, the growth of ‘world music’ as a marketing category, another period of crossover success for country music, the popularity of film soundtrack albums and the sudden expansion of Latin pop at the end of the decade, propelled by demographic changes that were making the USA ever more culturally diverse.
Growing out of the college radio and post-punk scenes of the 1980s, and building on the increasing popularity of REM during that decade, ‘alternative’ emerged as a successful marketing category in 1991 when Nirvana’s Nevermind unexpectedly sold over ten million copies, and led to national prominence a wave of grunge bands, including Soundgarden and Pearl Jam. All-female ‘riot grrrl’ bands such as Bikini Kill and Hole, and other punk-influenced bands such as Green Day, were also part of this alternative movement, which increasingly called its genre designation into question by outselling mainstream stars such as Michael Jackson. What united alternative musicians and fans was a generational identity characterized by disaffection and malaise: with an ongoing decline in real wages, ‘Generation X’ was the first cohort of Americans who could not expect to be better off than their parents. Thus, themes of downward mobility, loss of faith and an ironic, distrustful attitude towards modern life abound in alternative music. The more detached commentary of REM and Beck contrasted with the intense desire and frustration articulated by Nine Inch Nails, P J Harvey and Nirvana.
Few people anticipated the tremendous breakthrough of country music to mainstream popularity in the 1990s, with new artists such as Brooks and Dunn, Allan Jackson, and sexy, often overtly feminist female singers like Martina McBride and Shania Twain, all led by the agile voice and sincere stage presence of Garth Brooks. Along with successful performers of the previous decade like Reba McEntire, Alabama and George Strait, these country stars accounted for as many as 40% of the top-selling albums. Early in the decade, the popularity of country music seemed to owe something to the fact that it offered a less aggressive alternative to the noisy sounds of rap, heavy metal and grunge.
Gangsta rap was the decade’s most controversial musical genre, with widespread debate as to whether rappers such as Ice Cube, Ice-T, Dr Dre and Tupac Shakur accurately depicted lives marked by racism and violence; critics alleged that they glorified criminality and misogyny. Such music responded to factors including the greater incidence of child poverty, infant mortality and youth unemployment among black Americans, as well as disproportionate felony convictions and prison time for blacks and whites who committed the same crimes. The large white male audiences for gangsta rap were sometimes deliberately cultivated by rappers to interrupt the familial reproduction of white racism. Rapping spread around the world, as it served various cultural needs for working through local issues of identity and making connections with a global hip hop culture (see §V).
1980s styles of rap and pop ballads continued to be popular in the 90s, especially with hip hop touches introduced by such neo-doo-wop groups as Boyz II Men, En Vogue, a number of artists who worked with influential producer Kenneth ‘Babyface’ Edmonds, and the best-selling female group TLC. Dance music achieved great popularity with new styles, such as Jungle (soon renamed ‘drum ’n’ bass’), featuring virtuosic snare drum samples as a prominent part of the mix. It grew out of the 1980s progression through house and techno, and through new venues, such as all-night ‘raves’.
At the end of the millennium, the music of the 50-year rock and roll era was still widely perceived as comprising a reasonably coherent and living paradigm, despite accreted innovations in technology and musical style. New institutionalizations of the music, in college textbooks, musicology dissertations, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, treated this period inclusively and with growing seriousness. The future of the music industry, however, seemed uncertain. The growth of the internet as a medium of musical exchange, the increasingly widespread capacity for people to make their own CDs, the popularity of MP3 and other compression formats, and denunciations of and rebellions against major labels by such stars as Prince and George Michael, all raised questions about which forms and structures would shape the commercial distribution of music in the future. There is not likely to be any shortage of music; like recording itself, new technologies can help one style of music to spread throughout the world even as they stimulate creative interactions and fusions. Mass mediated popular music, even though it has depended upon exploitative commercial practices, has both registered the desires and inequities of a conflicted world and facilitated the exchange of experiences and insights among people who have been separated by geography, power and time.
(i) From rock and roll to rock.
Pop, §IV, 1: Europe: The British Isles
The larger historical context for the development of pop music in Britain and Ireland is constituted by the intricate and long-running relationship between popular musics there and in the USA. Transatlantic popular music traffic had been two-way since the 19th century. Each new American style was greeted by its British adherents as a symptom of modernity or exoticism, a route to liberation from entrenched cultural habits; critics, by contrast, attacked each one as a manifestation of barbarism, commercial excess or cultural levelling down. The reception of rock and roll was no different. For critic Steve Race (Melody Maker, 5 May 1956) this new style was ‘the antithesis of … good taste and musical integrity’, while its fans, according to the Monthly Musical Record (lxxxvi, 1956, p.203), were ‘essentially primitives, untouched by the West European culture of which they ought to be the heirs’. But Bill Haley had several hit records during 1955, culminating in the success of Rock around the Clock (heard also in the film The Blackboard Jungle), and Elvis Presley arrived in 1956 with six Top 20 hits. Rock around the Clock became the first single to sell a million copies in Britain, and, though most top-selling records were still in more conservative styles, the notorious if exaggerated ‘riots’ which accompanied screenings of Haley’s films, and the moral panic surrounding the association of the music with the flashy and aggressive working-class teddy boy subculture, signal the impact that rock and roll made on the popular imagination.
The foundations for rock and roll’s popularity had been laid during and immediately after the war, when the presence of American troops and their radio stations, imported American records and visiting musicians, fed a hunger for cultural change that was intensified by postwar austerity and the apparent rigidity of the British social structure. By the mid-1950s the beginnings of an increase in disposable income, especially significant for the working-class young, made the cultivation of a new leisure style possible. The BBC was slow and reluctant to broadcast rock and roll, but it could be heard easily enough on the commercial station, Radio Luxemburg. Some American stars visited, for example Bill Haley in 1957 and Jerry Lee Lewis in 1958. Over the same period revivalist jazz, built on a desire to recreate what was taken by purist enthusiasts to be the authentic jazz style of pre-1917 New Orleans, was gradually developing from the status of a cult into a substantial if short-lived commercial success. Its peak of commercial popularity, in the guise of ‘trad’ or Traditional jazz, came at the hands of Kenny Ball and Acker Bilk during the period 1960–62. A mid-1950s offshoot of revivalist jazz was Skiffle, a do-it-yourself, acoustic proto-folk style that drew its repertory from black and white American folk sources, including blues. This too enjoyed brief commercial success (1956–8), largely through the recordings of Lonnie Donegan. (After their moments of visibility, both traditional jazz and skiffle continued, as largely amateur performing traditions, skiffle feeding into the 1960s British folk revival.) The growing interest in black American music indicated by the success of the jazz revival, skiffle and rock and roll led to visits from several blues singers in the late 1950s and early 60s, including Muddy Waters, Sonny Boy Williamson ‘II’ and John Lee Hooker. Rhythm and blues clubs also formed, where local bands laid the foundations of the 1960s British blues revival. So, by 1960, the appeal of black music in Britain was probably more broadly based than it ever had been and, more important, it was producing not only listeners but also performers.
There is no doubt that to its young fans rock and roll represented some sort of revolt: freer use of the body and of the voice were central to its appeal. But, while the British record industry soon accommodated itself to the new trend, most of the singers whom they deliberately groomed to compete with the Americans (Tommy Steele, Marty Wilde, Terry Dene, Billy Fury and Cliff Richard) were imitative at best, lacking charisma, unrelaxed in the idiom, pale copies of their principal model, Elvis Presley; often they were accompanied by session musicians. Steele became a variety entertainer and Richard a middle-of-the-road ballad singer. Nevertheless, these performers figured strongly in the late 1950s to early 60s record charts, along with white Americans groomed by their industry to supply a blander, more respectable version of rock and roll (Pat Boone, Ricky Nelson and Bobby Darin) and singers in older styles, including Shirley Bassey, Perry Como and Frankie Vaughan. Historically more important were the instrumental recordings of Cliff Richards's backing group, the Shadows, such as Apache (1960), which not only popularized the all-electric guitar format for pop groups (previously, rock and roll groups generally used a string bass and often included piano and saxophones) but demonstrated that, through the use of tremolo, sustain and echo, for example, it could generate sounds that were quite new. Similarly, Joe Meek (one of the first independent producers to work in Britain) pioneered the creative use of studio effects in, for instance, the ‘echo-y’, other-worldly sound of the Tornadoes' Telstar (1962).
Not until the emergence of the Beatles in 1962, however, was there a stylistically substantive British response to rock and roll. The Beatles were one of many hundreds of groups, located in Merseyside and other provincial urban centres, who had learned by playing skiffle, imitating the Shadows and copying American records. The Beatles were special not so much because of their performing ability but because of their self-presentation – cool, self-mocking, witty – and because they composed much of their own material (still unusual, though shortly to be commonplace). They also added fresh musical qualities to rock and roll with a new sort of tunefulness, harmonic and subsequently structural sophistication and a native ‘folkiness’. Their success was quick and immense. After Love Me Do (1962), virtually every one of their single releases reached number one in the British charts; their first album, Please please me, was the British bestseller for six months in the year of its release (1963). With six number one hits in the USA during 1964, their records accounted for an estimated 60% of all record sales there in the first quarter of the year, and their first American tour (February 1964) was one of the most publicized events of the decade. ‘Beatlemania’, compounded of fanatical audience response and intense media publicity, spread from Britain to the rest of Europe, North America and beyond. Many other groups such as Gerry and the Pacemakers, Herman's Hermits, Freddy and the Dreamers, the Hollies, the Swinging Blue Jeans and the Dave Clark Five also achieved success at home and abroad (see Beat Music). The phenomenon was clearly linked to the ‘cultural revolution’ of the 1960s, involving political change with a Labour government elected in 1964, changes to the class structure brought on by new employment and education patterns, the full establishment of a youth cultural sphere and the enthronment of an ideology of ‘style’ and technological modernity. The new music was heard everywhere on transistor radios, at first on pirate radio stations as much as the BBC, though in 1967 the Corporation responded to this competition by creating Radio One, a dedicated pop channel. The Beatles were irrefutably the leaders: bringing together John Lennon’s taste for rock and roll simplicity on the one hand, aesthetic experiment on the other, and Paul McCartney’s melodic inventiveness and intuitive harmonic ear, their fusion of rock and roll rhythm, blues-style and modal harmonies, vocal harmonizing and Tin Pan Alley sectional song forms was both influential and hard to match.
A parallel tendency during the period 1962–4 was represented by an emerging group of rhythm and blues bands (the Rolling Stones, the Yardbirds, the Animals, the Kinks, Them and the Who, for example) who drew not only on rock and roll but also on the ‘dirtier’ city blues of such performers as Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker, transferring the aggression and macho sexuality typical of Chicago rhythm and blues to themes of adolescent alienation and desire (quintessentially in the Rolling Stones’ 1965 hit, Satisfaction). The Stones’ image was to remain defiantly iconoclastic, with lead singer Mick Jagger the first British singer to match Elvis Presley as a symbol of eroticism and revolt, but their own material developed an individual style; similarly, the Kinks absorbed elements of music hall, and the Who evolved a theatrically violent mode of expression epitomized by the classic My Generation (1965).
Between 1965 and 1967 many pop groups began to break the bounds of existing pop norms, stimulated by a booming popular music market, by new technological possibilities, by aspects of the emerging ‘counterculture’ and by the demands of an audience now extending further into middle-class grammar school and college students. The Beatles' albums Rubber Soul (1965), Revolver (1966) and the celebrated Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967; one of the first LPs designed to be a coherent whole) display new influences (Indian, folk and classical music), new instrumentations (strings, brass and keyboards of various types), unorthodox chord progressions, unpredictable phrase-lengths and sectional relationships, and innovative usages of studio techniques (overdubbing, collage and electronically treated sound). Sgt Pepper, in particular, was hugely influential, setting off a trend for concept albums, laying bare the need for a new musical category (rock), forcing listeners to question their preconceptions about the differences between popular and art musics, and hence rendering inevitable a growing fragmentation of pop and its audience.
Increasing stylistic breadth is clear even within the make-up of the burgeoning countercultural rock itself. American influences included the Beach Boys' intricate studio compositions, West Coast blues-, folk- and jazz-influenced acid rock (see Psychedelic, Bob Dylan and the folk-rock he inspired, blues-rock singers such as Janis Joplin, and singer-songwriters as varied as Joni Mitchell, Randy Newman and Simon and Garfunkel. British rhythm and blues reached new heights of virtuosity at the hands of Cream, whose ex-Yardbirds guitarist Eric Clapton extended the instrument’s potential for fast runs, expressive bending of pitch and vocalized effects and went on to become the most celebrated rock guitar player. Black American Jimi Hendrix, who settled in Britain, fused acid rock and blues and developed an equally startling electronically mediated guitar style through novel use of wah-wah, vibrato and feedback. Such developments in the rhythm and blues lineage fed into the highly amplified heavy rock of such late 1960s bands as Deep Purple and Led Zeppelin (featuring dramatic vocal styles and exhibitionistic guitar solos) which in turn was to evolve into Heavy metal. British rock at this time was less overtly political than its American counterpart, or rather its politics tended to be personal and hedonistic, and protest was less common than avant-garde experiment on the one hand and art-music influences on the other. Pink Floyd's extended collage forms fusing mainstream rock with electronic sound, elaborate tape effects and light shows, exemplify the first tendency. Proto-classical textures, sometimes using orchestral instruments, through-composed sectional forms, thematic integration techniques and unorthodox harmonies can all be found in the Progressive rock associated with Procol Harum, Genesis, Yes, the Electric Light Orchestra, Jethro Tull and Emerson, Lake and Palmer. A further influence in the case of some of this latter group was the 1960s British folk music revival, which at the same time was itself giving rise to a strand of Folk-rock, represented by, for example, Fairport Convention and, later, Steeleye Span. Irish folk, along with country, blues and jazz, was an influence on the notable ex-Them singer from Belfast, Van Morrison in, for example, Astral Weeks (1968).
These countercultural styles were not to the taste of all listeners. Throughout the decade many records by black American performers were popular in Britain, starting with Motown artists and then ‘heavier’ soul singers such as Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett and Otis Redding, and the funk of James Brown and others. Whatever the stylistic differences between these musicians, they tended to stay closer than progressive rock to dance rhythm, simple, repetitive formal schemes and direct vocal expression; even when not in the foreground of chart success, they furnished some of the principal repertories for dancing, especially for underground subcultures such as the ‘Northern soul’ clubs of Northern England. At the same time Ska, a fusion of West Indian traditional musics and American rhythm and blues, was developing in Jamaica and among British Afro-Caribbeans, and this provided a further dance-music style popular not only with black British youth but also some white groups. Moreover, simpler, mainstream white pop continued to compete against more progressive trends; indeed, the first signs of a deliberate attempt to target a pop as against a rock market can be seen in the success of ‘manufactured’ American group, the Monkees. Ballad singers had considerable success: for all its drug-driven ‘summer of love’, 1967’s bestselling solo artists were balladeers Tom Jones and Engelbert Humperdinck (for both singles and albums), and the bestselling groups were the Beach Boys (with a retrospective compilation) and the Monkees.
Pop, §IV, 1: Europe: The British Isles
The cultural situation favouring progressive and heavy rock shifted in the early 1970s with the decline of the counterculture as an active force and with the economic downturn that followed the oil-price rise of 1973. Nevertheless, many of the most successful bands of the late 1960s, such as the Rolling Stones, the Who, Genesis, Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin, continued to tour and sell records heavily. Their appeal was weighted towards the same listeners (now older) whom they had first attracted, and, as the music was absorbed into the accepted patterns of cultural life and of the music industry, losing much of its previous frisson of subversiveness, it could be seen as rather safe and self-interested. The scale of concerts tended to grow ever larger, with bigger audiences, more performance equipment and more elaborate stage presentation, and thus a new category sometimes called stadium rock emerged. Overblown and pretentious to its critics, this middle-of-the-road music could actually be seen as encompassing a wide range of styles, and in its essentials it continued up to the 1990s. At one extreme stands the experimentalism of Pink Floyd and the old-style progressive rock of the Moody Blues and Mike Oldfield (whose one-man studio album Tubular Bells was a major success in 1973), at the other the straightforward blues-and-boogie of Status Quo. In between are the mainstream rock of Ultravox and Simple Minds, the powerful but more eclectic approaches of the Irish group U2 and Queen (whose Bohemian Rhapsody, 1975, was the first record to make integral use of a video, setting a trend that would become increasingly important), the soft-rock of Fleetwood Mac, the ‘white soul’ of Simply Red and the more pared-down, 1960s-related style with blues and country resonances of Dire Straits. In addition, star solo singers drew on the same range of styles and appealed to similar audiences; in the 1970s the composer, singer and pianist Elton John and the grittier, rhythm-and-blues-styled Rod Stewart were the leading figures, while subsequently the rock and soul fusion of Phil Collins (previously in Genesis), the jazz-tinged ballads of Sting and the ‘white soul’ of George Michael stand out. Throughout the period, heavy metal bands (Black Sabbath, Thin Lizzy, Iron Maiden, Judas Priest and many more) also drew on late 1960s rock roots but developed them into a distinctive mix of thundering riffs, simple and repetitious harmonies, lengthy and virtuosic guitar solos, anthemic choruses and theatrical performance, and appealed to a distinct audience of their own.
By the 1980s, if not before, many of the musicians listed above are very difficult to categorize stylistically. This fluidity has a broader context, however, going back to attempts in the late 1960s and early 70s to produce a simpler ‘pop’ music which would compete with ‘over-complicated’ progressive rock and attract a younger teenage market. The Sweet, Slade, T. Rex and the Bay City Rollers all had success with straightforward dance records, dressing them up with the visual trappings of ‘glitter’ and Glam rock. The success of disco in the second half of the decade, mostly through imported records but also some British groups such as the Bee Gees (especially in their film Saturday Night Fever, 1977), continued the dance focus. In the early 1970s David Bowie embarked on a lengthy career which has coupled together a succession of relatively simple musical styles based on hard rock and soul influences and a sequence of theatrical personae, including Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane and the Thin White Duke. Startling hairstyles and clothing and camp performance modes queried the cultural and gender stereotypes of rock stardom, as, in such albums as The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972), Bowie placed himself in quotation marks, undermining the rock assumption that seriousness necessarily implied expressive realism. Roxy Music, featuring the studiously ‘romantic’ self-presentation of singer Bryan Ferry and partly electronic sounds produced by the avant-garde Brian Eno, used different means in pursuit of a somewhat similar aesthetic end.
In both his cultivation of ‘style’ (in the sense of deliberate artifice) and his back-to-basics musical approach, Bowie was an important source for Punk rock, along with the abrasive, stripped-down sounds and shock tactics of the New York avant garde (Velvet Underground, New York Dolls and Patti Smith), earlier British hard rock (the Who) and the raw, good-time American ‘garage band’, and British ‘pub-rock’ traditions surviving in the margins of the 1960s and early 70s. Nevertheless, punk's arrival on the British musical scene in 1976, orchestrated with carefully cultivated outrage by pioneering band the Sex Pistols and their manager Malcolm McLaren, drawing knowingly on French ‘situationism’, was dramatic. The Sex Pistols, the Clash and other leading bands deliberately insulted audiences, constructed bizarre visual styles and tackled provocative subjects (see, for example, the Sex Pistols’ Anarchy in the UK (1976), and White Riot (1977) by the Clash). Their short, high-speed and painfully loud songs, with shrieked vocals, feedback-laden ‘buzzsaw’ guitars, relentlessly thumped drums (with little syncopation) and calculated crassness, were meant to infringe not only mainstream social and cultural values but also progressive rock's pretensions. In this pure form, punk lasted only a couple of years, yet, internationally as well as at home, it was the most influential British popular music style since the Beatles. Punk rehabilitated simplicity and crudeness and suggested that they could be used for aesthetic purposes. Its rejection of studio trickery and music industry gigantism legitimized a return to do-it-yourself music-making; together with a fall in the cost of production technology, its innovations stimulated the formation of many small, independent record companies and a host of new performing groups.
Punk clearly presented itself as a subculture, connecting a music and a people. Yet it fell apart partly because of the tension between the ‘realist’ strategy of its ‘dole-queue politics’ and the ‘formalist’ implications of its constructed aesthetic; and the artifice with which its musical, visual and behavioural styles were pinned together suggested that any simple equation between a musical style and a social group would henceforth be problematical. Ironically, at the very same time, previous pop subcultures (working-class rockers, mods and skinheads, with tastes for the visceral thrills of rock and roll, rhythm and blues, soul and ska, ranged against middle-class hippies and their progressive rock) were being obsessively theorized by sociologists, as symptoms of active resistance to the workings of political hegemony. The feminist critique of subcultural theory pointed out that women's roles in music were ignored, and that both the subcultures and the theory were complicit with patriarchy. Successful female singers in the 1960s, such as Lulu, Cilla Black, Sandie Shaw and Dusty Springfield, drew on contemporary pop and soul and older ballad styles, but they tended to be stereotyped as either young and sexy (and therefore limited in career prospects) or ‘sophisticated’ (and hence musically conservative): in neither case did rock do anything to subvert older patterns of male chauvinism. Punk, however, opened the way both to female instrumentalists, non-stereotyped singing styles (Siouxsie of the Banshees, Poly Styrene) and all-female bands (the Slits, the Raincoats).
Punk's legacy was varied. The musical style itself remained available, as in the Thrash metal of such bands as Motörhead, the punk-folk fusion of Irish group the Pogues, the punk-dance hybrid developed in the 1990s by the Prodigy and the dedicated if relatively invisible bands of the hardcore scene. The avant-garde deconstructionist impulse was continued by post-punk bands such as Public Image Limited and Scritti Politti. There was greater visibility, however, for post-punk groups favouring styles influenced by blues, soul and British rhythm and blues (Squeeze, the Jam and the Style Council), as there was too for ska and reggae. Not only were these styles popular in themselves (for instance, reggae superstar Bob Marley's popularity in Britain peaked in the late 1970s) but their influence can be detected in some punk (notably the Clash) and in the work of many subsequent bands (Madness, the Police, UB40 and the Two-Tone groups of the English Midlands such as the Beat and the Specials).
In large part, the punk legacy was not directly stylistic but rather related to punk rock's effect in crystallizing a change in the pop aesthetic (so that the complex, large-scale and ‘deep’ were either rejected or became just one option) and in the structure of the music industry: the punk model of self-management, and the hundreds of new studios, production and distribution companies and shops that it inspired, facilitated an extension of stylistic possibilities. Even though the major companies retrieved the position by buying out or making deals with independents within a few years and re-conceptualizing stylistic variety as ‘niche marketing’, the basic network-like pattern of production remained. Diversification was furthered too by the spread of local radio (independent local radio began in 1973 and control of its programming was significantly relaxed during the 1980s; BBC local radio began in 1967 but had little impact until put under pressure by its commercial competitors), by the appearance of the CD (first marketed in 1983, and used, among other things, for a massive programme of back catalogue reissues), by the spread of audio cassettes, home taping and the personal stereo and by the increasing breadth of the pop audience age. In the 1980s, therefore, it is very difficult to find a sense of a centre to the pop field.
The so-called New Romantics of the early 1980s, such as Duran Duran, Spandau Ballet, ABC and Culture Club, which featured the cross-dressing singer, Boy George, were presented as a reaction against punk, their visual glitter and knowing commercialism epitomizing the metropolitan hedonism of the dawning Thatcher era. A strand of light dance-pop continued throughout the decade, often aimed at a very young age-group (‘teenyboppers’), representative examples being the work of female vocal group Bananarama and the singers managed by the production company Stock, Aitken and Waterman, including Kylie Minogue, Jason Donovan and Rick Astley. Starting around the same time, ‘synth-pop’ or ‘electro-pop’ drew on the innovatory use of synthesizers in the late 1970s by such bands as Kraftwerk, in Germany. The recordings of Gary Numan, Depeche Mode, Human League, Bronski Beat and Soft Cell (featuring the singer Marc Almond, who subsequently enjoyed a successful solo career) cover a variety of styles, from post-punk experimental to light soul, but all place emphasis on deploying new kinds of sound. Much of this music has a strong dance component, usually carried through disco influences, and its content commonly plays with gender stereotypes, often featuring camp or openly gay imagery and sensibility. This is true, as well, of two of the most successful 1980s groups, both employing a good deal of synthesized sound in their white pop-soul/disco styles, the Eurythmics and the Pet Shop Boys.
It would appear that the electric guitar had become closely connected with the expression of a masculinist sexuality, whereas both synthesized sound and disco (with its novel orchestrations, use of electronic and extravagant studio effects and associations with gay dance-clubs) allowed opportunities to subvert this. Nevertheless, guitar-rock comprises a third important 1980s pop strand. In the hands of several bands starting in or just after punk rock (Joy Division, later named New Order, the Cure, the Fall and the Smiths with their charismatic if agonisingly introspective singer, Morrissey) and such successors as the Jesus and Mary Chain and Primal Scream, this strand took on the status of a genre as indie (see Indie music), developing its own specialized record companies, sales charts, radio shows and audience (serious, student-based, preponderantly middle-class and, it would seem, male). Positioning itself against the ‘commercial’ pop promoted by the major companies, indie's poeticism and emotional extremism represented an exception to the prevalent 1980s sensibility: a hedonistic though often ironic consumption of the aural surface, grounded on a knowing use of past pop repertories.
Singer-songwriters offered a further alternative to this sensibility, but covered a variety of styles themselves. These ranged from the politicized folk-influenced songs of Billy Bragg to the jazz-tinged social comment of Joan Armatrading, from the theatrical mood-pieces, with often unorthodox arrangements and forms, of Kate Bush to the stylistically eclectic but emotionally incisive repertory of Elvis Costello. Older styles of rock were still popular, though mostly in the hands of already established musicians, as were the varied genres of black music, especially for dancing. The Soul II Soul production collective, founded in 1982 by DJ and producer Jazzie B, was associated with much of the best black British soul, funk and reggae of the 1980s. Dance rhythms were foregrounded too in the late 1980s music of ‘Madchester’ bands (in Manchester) the Stone Roses, Inspiral Carpets and Happy Mondays. But their success was linked to the rise of the British rave scene, which was the context for the development of a new sort of dance music.
Pop, §IV, 1: Europe: The British Isles
The musical background to this development was the continuing popularity of black American dance genres in British clubs, updated in the 1980s through the influence of electro-funk and Hip hop, and then House and Techno. The social context was the swelling of the dance scene from the middle of the decade through the impact of lengthy and often all-night ‘raves’, fuelled by recreational drugs; at first informal and sometimes illegal, these were subsequently largely absorbed into a commercial system. They were presided over by a new breed of DJ-producer, whose innovative use of new technology (through techniques of Sampling, Scratching and remixing, live and in studio work) transformed notions of dance music form and performance. Operating largely in a separate sphere with its own record companies, studios, venues, magazines and sales charts, the new practice generated a continually mutating chain of styles and hybrids and through the late 1980s and 90s was probably the most creatively energetic area of British popular music. Its musical norms include foregrounding rhythm, timbre and texture, downplaying harmony and singing (though the latter varies somewhat between styles), largely abandoning formal sectionalism and symmetry in favour of collage, slowly mutating textures built over repeated rhythm ‘loops’, and open-ended additive process. These can be seen both as carrying certain tendencies present in pop since its very beginnings in rock and roll to their furthest point of development and as moving as far away from the norms of mainstream Western musical traditions as popular music has gone.
Aspects of the new dance music percolated into the pop mainstream, however. Indeed, by the mid-1990s ‘dance beats’ were common on TV commercial and film soundtracks and in pubs and shops. As early as 1987 (Pump Up the Volume by M/A/R/R/S), hit records were drawing on similar techniques; Pop Will Eat Itself and KLF (the Kopyright Liberation Front) were other groups in this category. By the mid-90s such bands as Prodigy, the Chemical Brothers and Underground were taking dance music effects out of the clubs and into a wider market by grafting them on to established rock techniques; Goldie and Roni Size did the same for the Afro-Caribbean variant, Jungle (later named drum ’n’ bass). By this date too, quite mainstream pop records would routinely pay homage to dance music by copying a characteristic rhythm track or including snatches of rap, scratching or ‘looped’ effects.
Older lineages continued to be successful. The increasingly global reach of the music industry oligopoly dictated its obsession with the search for mega-stars and mega-hits. Large quantities of American music were still imported into Britain, and by now included rap as well as the leading pop stars such as Michael Jackson, Madonna and Whitney Houston. New home-grown solo singers also emerged: the soul-influenced Lisa Stansfield and the impassioned balladeer Sinead O'Connor, for example. More ‘alternative’ styles, such as guitar-based indie music, prospered too. Rock expressive traditions of anger and anguish were continued by the Welsh band, Manic Street Preachers; the strikingly intense P J Harvey brought a singer-songwriter's confessional sensitivity to the genre, while Suede pursued sexually ambiguous performance styles; Radiohead were musically more eclectic and experimental, The Verve more tuneful and romantic; and primal Scream married indie sensibilities with dance-music rhythms. Chart pop, aimed largely at younger audiences, generated its usual stream of mostly transient performers. The most striking phenomenon here, though, was the renewed popularity of vocal groups, in the form of ‘boy bands’ singing in a soft harmony style (Take That, East 17 and Boyzone), and ‘girl groups’ such as the Spice Girls, whose recordings of light, expertly crafted pop songs, allied to a message of ‘girl power’, brought them extraordinary worldwide success in 1996–7. Partly on the back of the new dance music's popularity, some bands with roots in older dance genres also enjoyed considerable success, the most notable examples being the jazz-funk of the Brand New Heavies, Jamiroquai and M People.
The most publicized development of the mid-1990s was Britpop, a movement unified less by musical style than discursively, through its positioning against American rock (notably grunge) and in favour of songs (as opposed to dance music). The recordings of Oasis, Pulp and Blur, in particular, brought a predominantly guitar-based music back into the pop mainstream and constructed sometimes quite explicit links with styles of the 1960s and 70s, including the Beatles and the Kinks. The mood of Britpop was generally celebratory, ‘English’ and often nostalgic and was duly called upon by the propagandists of the new Labour government of 1997. During much the same period, Trip hop, associated with black musicians based in Bristol, explored darker aspects of contemporary life. Massive Attack, Portishead and the strikingly original composer-producer Tricky brought together rap, reggae, soul, and electronic and studio effects typical of modern dance (especially Ambient house styles) and portrayed a very different Britain. While the new dance music was claimed by some as signalling the end of rock (that is, the end of a certain mode of self-authored personal expression in favour of collective gesture and ecstatic abandon), trip hop in its own way, as much as Britpop, suggested that popular music was not yet ready to give up its long tradition of song forms. Rather, the sheer range of styles making up the British pop field as the century came to an end indicated a healthy variety of creative activities.
The impact of American and British styles and the massive growth in music media caused the quantity of popular music created in continental Europe to grow exponentially in the second half of the 20th century. In a continent of over 30 nation states with differing political histories (particularly between the West and the countries with communist governments prior to 1989) and numerous ethnic or regional cultures, it is difficult to confidently discern pan-European trends, but several broad themes in the development of the music since 1955 can be outlined.
The response of European musicians to the ‘invasion’ of Anglo-American rock and pop music has involved its imitation and assimilation to local or national themes or genres. The music of Bill Haley and especially Elvis Presley inspired copies across Europe but the assimilation of rock and roll's stylistic innovations was limited to local language translation of song lyrics, a practice which continued into the 1960s when French language versions of Beatles and Bob Dylan songs were common. The best known of the European performers in the Presley mould is Johnny Hallyday who became the first French rock star and created an image of rebellion which has nourished a career of over 40 years. Other Elvis impersonators such as Per Granberg in Norway and the Sputnicks (Czechoslovakia) are now only a footnote in musical history. In the early 1960s the guitar instrumental music of the Ventures and the Shadows provoked numerous imitators particularly in Scandinavia, from the Boys (Finland) and the Vanguards (the Norwegian group where the country's most renowned guitarist Terje Rypdal began his career) to the Swedish group the Spotniks who had an international success with the Israeli song Hava Nagila (1963).
The choice of English-language names was widespread among the European groups inspired by the beat music emanating from Britain in the early 1960s. The Vienna Beatles from Austria were the most transparent in acknowledging the source of their style but elsewhere there were such groups as the Rattles (Germany), Butlers (GDR) and Blues Section (Finland). In a number of cases such beat groups were the training ground for musicians who later made significant contributions to European music. In Greece the leading groups the Beatkins and Formix included singer Demis Roussos and film music composer Vangelis respectively, while Sweden's Hep Cats included Benny Andersson, later of Abba.
The impact of punk and rap in Europe was significantly different. While European exponents of these genres imported the rhythms and instrumental modes of the Anglo-American genres, these were used as a springboard for national language lyrics expressing the concerns of disaffected youth in Naples or Helsinki rather than London and Los Angeles. The punk rock movement in Britain between 1977 and 1980 inspired such groups as Stinky Toys (France), Bad Semen (Denmark), Big Balls and the Great White Idiot (West Germany), Hanoi Rocks (Finland), Watercloset Band (Czechoslovakia) and Pershing (Poland). Despite their English names, these groups performed songs in their own languages.
Although its musical origins in black American youth music were very different from that of punk, rap music also acted as a catalyst for musical innovation in mainland Europe, most notably in France where M.C. Solaar (from an African emigrant background) became a major star and the groups Supreme NTM and Alliance Ethnik were popular. Elsewhere, rap performers were found throughout the continent. Some groups crossed ethnic divides, such as Cartel, a German-based group with members from Cuba, Turkey and Germany, Portugal's General D, formed by the younger generation of African emigrants, Sens Unik (Switzerland) and Mission Hispana (Spain).
Folksong and folkdance had been an important inspiration for many European art music composers in the early part of the 20th century but had made a lesser impact on popular music, which was more concerned with American influences. This impact increased significantly after 1950 on both sides of the Iron Curtain. In most communist-ruled states folk music enjoyed a new status as proletarian art and folk ensembles received political and financial support from public authorities, whereas pop and rock groups were either forbidden to perform or were regarded with disapproval. One notable beneficiary of this policy were the Bulgarian choirs whose recordings were issued in the West by Marcel Cellier as Le mystère des voix bulgares. Later (post-communist) flowerings of this trend included the work of Ivo Papasov in Bulgaria and the important partnership of the Transylvanian group Muzsicas and singer Marta Sebestyen (whose mother had been an assistant to Kodály).
In the West traditional music was taken up by new generations often with a similar radical political motivation. In Spain a nuevo flamenco movement appeared in the form of guitarist Cameron de la Isla, singer Rosario and rock group Ketama; in France the Celtic traditions of Brittany were revived by harpist Alan Stivell and others; in Portugal fado was ‘rediscovered’; and in Greece the despised rebétiko – the music of the underclass often compared with blues or tango – was rehabilitated by Opisthodromiki Kompania and others in the 1980s. The electric folk and folk trends pioneered in Britain by Fairport Convention and Steeleye Span had their continental counterparts in groups such as Flairck in the Netherlands and Basque group Oskorri in the 1980s and Värttinä in Finland, Celtas Cortes in Spain and Hedningarna in Sweden in the 1990s. At that period critics discerned a Mediterranean alternative genre whose exponents included Radio Tarifa (Spain) and French groups Mano Negra and Les Negresses Vertes who combined flamenco with Algerian rai and Latin brass with French chanson. In the 1990s groups such as Palatz from Belarus mixed traditional instruments and tunes with current dance beats.
Several European countries had entered the postwar period with firmly established songwriting traditions often allied to national poetry modes. These included the French chanson, the German Schlager, the nova canco in Spain and the Italian canzone. In France the key figures as composers and performers included Georges Brassens, Leo Ferré, and the Belgian Jacques Brel. Chanson was associated with the left bank milieu of existentialism and modern art, and lyrics were provided by poets like Boris Vian and Jacques Prévert. In addition to the composers, the renowned performers of the chanson included Juliette Greco and Barbara. Charles Aznavour provided a bridge to the more mainstream French popular song associated with such legendary singers as Edith Piaf and Charles Trenet, while the compositions of the mercurial Serge Gainsbourg linked chanson with the teenage ‘ye ye’ stars like Françoise Hardy and Claude François. The Schlager of Germany is less defined, deriving from the mainstream German-language pop of the 1950s as performed by Drafi Deutscher, Conny Froboss and others. In later years the genre has become more conservative, moving closer to Volksmusik, the rurally-themed genre (like American country and Japanese enka) usually defined by musicologists as folklike music.
In Italy the worldwide success of Domenico Modugno's song Volare (1958) marked a moment when the tradition of Neapolitan ballads gave way to the canzone d'autore which came to be associated with the jazz-influenced singer Paolo Conte and the Florentine Lucio Battisti, who achieved what the critic Thad Wick called a ‘union of Anglo-Saxon rock vocal phrasing with distinctly Italian emotion and melody’. The repressive cultural regime of the Franco era gave the nova canco movement in Spain (which flourished between 1962 and 1975) a sharper political edge, especially in the work of those such as Juan Manuel Serrat who defied the ban on the use of the Catalan language. Other singer-composers associated with the movement are Joaquin Sabina and Ana Belen and Victor Manuel.
To the extent that these national lyric forms were created by singer-performers, they made a certain rapprochement in the 1960s with the emerging singer-songwriter genre of Anglo-American pop. The effect of the singer-songwriters, and in particular Bob Dylan, was most evident in the adoption by European performer-composers of rock music rhythms and in a shift in thematic emphasis, notably towards songs of social and political protest. Many countries produced singers described as the national Dylan, such as Boudewijn de Groot in the Netherlands and Vladimír Merta in pre- Velvet Revolution Prague.
The evolution of European traditions since that period has included a large industry of soft-rock ballads and also a more gritty and unpredictable singer-songwriter mode exemplified by Serge Gainsbourg and Conte and the Russian star Boris Grebenshikov. The most characteristic exponents of the soft-rock ballad – comparable to such Anglo-American performers as Elton John and Billy Joel – have included the Italian Eros Ramazzotti, the Frenchman Patrick Bruel and the German singer-songwriters Herbert Groenemeyer and Westernhagern.
Although the impact of anglophone music on continental Europe has been considerable, a significant amount of pop music from within Europe has found international audiences during the past half century. Some singers, notably Caterina Valente and the Greek-born Nana Mouskouri, specialized in performing in numerous European languages, while it was not unusual during the 1950s and 60s for British pop singers such as Petula Clark and Dusty Springfield to record their anglophone hits in French, German and Italian.
Additionally, Italian ballads were frequently heard in translation in Germany, France and Britain where Dusty Springfield's hit You Don't Have To Say You Love Me was originally Io che non vivo (senzate) (by Pallavicini and Donaggio). With the outstanding exceptions of Brel's repertory, which was taken up in particular by the American Rod McKuen and the European-based Americans Mort Shuman and Scott Walker, and of Jacques Prévert and Jacques Rigaud's Comme d'habitude (translated by Paul Anka as My Way), a smaller proportion of French song was translated.
By the late 1960s, this type of transnational transaction was supplanted by the widespread use of English as a lyric language, particularly in northern Europe. Progressive and heavy rock bands like Focus (Netherlands), Tasavallen Presidenti (Finland), Scorpions (Germany), Krokus (Switzerland) and Europe (Sweden) were able to compete on equal terms with the Anglo-American artists and also enjoyed international success. A bizarre offshoot of heavy metal is the Norwegian death metal genre whose exponents used their native language and were embroiled in satanic arson and violence. However, the most outstanding example of a continental European contribution to international pop music came from the German-based groups Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream and Can, whose work took inspiration not from rock but from the electronic experiments of Stockhausen. This ‘industrial music’ of the 1970s led directly to the techno dance music of Detroit which in turn inspired house music, a dominant trend in European pop during the 1990s.
The apogee of anglophone pop music from continental Europe was achieved in the late 1970s by the Swedish group Abba. Their recordings were equal in professional quality to any of their Anglo-American contemporaries as were those of subsequent pop groups from Scandinavia such as A-Ha, Roxette, the Cardigans and Aqua. Abba's success had coincided with the vogue for disco music which provided a further opportunity for European producers to craft hit records for international audiences. Following in the footsteps of such orchestra leaders as Bert Kaempfert and James Last from Germany and Paul Mauriat from France, the new generation was led by Frankfurt-based composer and producer Frank Farian who created a series of hits with the group Boney M. Farian's work provided a template for a much larger wave of dance music producers from all around Europe during the late 1980s and the 90s. Apart from the heavily accented dance rhythms performed on synthesizers, these later records were notable for their strong melodies, minimal lyric content and use of session singers or even samples for the vocal element. The leading exponents of this Euro-dance genre included the Italian production team Riva and Pignagnoli (responsible for hits by Whigfield), Sweden's Denniz Pop (Dr Alban), the Dutch partners Phil Wilde and Jean Paul de Coster (2 Unlimited) and the French duo Air.
The producers of Euro-dance and their more left-field contemporaries like the creators of Dutch ‘gabba’ house music were experts in the utilization of the cutting edge of computer and digital recording technology. But at the close of the 20th century probably the single most popular European recording artist was Andrea Bocelli, an Italian tenor singing popular classics, who was heir to a long tradition of classical singers as pop stars that stretched back through Luciano Pavarotti to Enrico Caruso at the dawn of the European recording industry a century earlier.
2. Local interpretations and identities.
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. In the process many syncretic hybrids have emerged which combine Western and indigenous features in various degrees and forms. Many such genres resist categorization either as Western or local. Often, however, Western-derived musics stand in sharp contrast to more indigenous idioms, whether modern or traditional, and are recognized as such in local discourse. Most scholarly research on popular music outside the West has concentrated on distinctively indigenous music genres (e.g. Manuel, E1988), but Western-derived styles play such significant roles in most cultures worldwide that they must be incorporated into any attempt at a holistic perspective. Such musics also merit attention in terms of their sheer quantity; for example, the output of the Japanese record industry, most of which is devoted to Western-style pop, for several years has surpassed in quantity that of every nation except the USA. Since the popular music genres in question themselves largely correspond to Western counterparts, more important than their technical and stylistic description is the study of their interaction with other indigenous and imported genres and their local and global significance.
Some of the most globally influential popular music styles have originated from the peripheries of mainstream Western music culture. Cuban-style dance music enjoyed extraordinary popularity throughout Francophone urban Africa and parts of Asia in the mid-20th century. Jamaican reggae came to attain similar appeal in the 1970s through its infectious rhythms and associated message of political and ideological liberation. Country and western music, as recorded by Jim Reeves and others, also became widely popular throughout much of Africa and elsewhere. Since the 1960s, however, greater international popularity has been attained by the more central genres of Euro-American popular music. Most conspicuous among these are the black American-influenced forms of Western popular music, especially mainstream rock and such related sub-genres as disco, heavy metal, punk and techno. These have been rearticulated in various forms throughout the world, often acquiring new labels, such as string in Thailand, ponchak rock in Korea and stereo in Myanmar (Burma). Since the late 1980s rap music, with its emphasis on texts, has also been a popular vehicle for adaptation in numerous societies worldwide.
The global popularity of rock music and rock-influenced pop, although prodigious, is at least equalled by that of another category of Western-derived music, comprising sentimental ballads and easy listening music. In this category falls much of Indonesian pop and lagu cengeng (‘weepy song’), Vietnamese ca Khuc (‘modern songs’), Thai sakon and luk Krung (‘child of the city’) and the vast majority of contemporary Chinese commercial popular music, especially Cantopop and other styles of light music emerging from Taiwan and Hong Kong. This genre, in its various regional manifestations, is distinguished by soft, non-percussive textures and sentimental love lyrics crooned in an intimate, sensual style; it corresponds to the Western genres least associated with dancing, youth, black American influence and explicitly countercultural or anti-commercial ideologies.
Western-derived pop styles occupy different places in regional soundscapes, in accordance with the socio-musical dynamics of each culture. Such relationships cannot be comprehended in terms of a reductionist ‘core-periphery’ model, but are better seen, in Slobin's terms (E1992), as a complex matrix of overlapping, intersecting and interacting ‘supercultures’ (of which Western pop would be one), regional ‘intercultures’ and local ‘micromusics’. Thus, for example, Indian film music and Egyptian urban music can be seen as constituting regional ‘cores’ or music supercultures whose popularity spreads well beyond national and even linguistic boundaries.
In cultures with strong indigenous popular music traditions, such as flourish in Africa, South Asia, the Arab world and Java, Western-style pop may be relatively marginal or may co-exist with thriving local commercial genres. At the same time, syncretic local genres in these regions may embody prominent Western-derived features. Thus, for example, in India, while rock music per se is enjoyed only by the most Westernized urbanites, disco influence has become increasingly marked in Bombay film music, and a disco-style ‘Hindi pop’ has become the favoured idiom of many urban bourgeois young people in the North. In Indonesia, pop Indonesia flourishes as a Western-style soft-rock genre sung in the national language; regional-language versions of this music – collectively called pop daerah – also thrive, a few of which (such as pop Sunda) introduce local instruments as iconic markers of regional identity. Meanwhile, these syncretic Indonesian styles co-exist with more indigenous forms of popular music, including Sundanese jaipongan and the rock- and Indian-influenced dangdut (Yampolsky, E1989).
In other countries, Western-derived styles enjoy virtually complete and unchallenged hegemony. In countries such as the Philippines, indigenous music traditions have been too socially marginal to syncretize into modern urban styles. In Japan, Taiwan and Korea, with their rich traditional music cultures, the dominance of Western-style pop clearly derives from other reasons which, although complex, would presumably involve the forms of cultural nationalism adopted since the early 20th century and the related desire to emulate the West in culture as well as technology. State policies have often played roles, in some cases unwitting, in promoting Western popular music. In Iran the fundamentalist Islamic government, which came to power in 1978, effectively silenced or exiled the extant local popular music scene, thereby contributing inadvertently to the popularity of recordings of Western rock among urban middle-class youth. In China the totalitarian policies of the Cultural Revolution (1966–76) created a musical vacuum which was filled by Western-style pop ballads sung by crooners from Taiwan and Hong Kong.
The international recording industry has generally been dominated by Western-based multinationals, for whom the global marketing of Western pop has been a primary source of profit. (The purchase of CBS Records in 1987 by Sony and of MCA in 1990 by Matsushita has not altered the prevailingly Western orientation of those companies' core output.) New technologies, by increasing the sheer amount of music recorded and disseminated, have intensified trends toward both greater Western penetration as well as regional individuation. Satellite technology distributes MTV around the world, exposing consumers to slick, capital-intensive American music videos, with which local products are hard-pressed to compete. While cassettes have stimulated the growth of regional pop musics throughout the developing world, they have also brought Western pop to the most remote areas.
Cassette piracy has also tended to promote Western pop music at the expense of local styles. In countries such as Tunisia, for example, rampant piracy bankrupted local music producers in the 1970s and 80s; Western multinationals, however, were able to absorb the losses caused by such piracy, such that their products came to dominate Tunisian recording sales (Wallis and Malm, E1984). In other countries, such as Indonesia, copyright enforcement has protected local producers while tolerating piracy of foreign musics. While such policies have allowed legitimate local producers to emerge, their products have had difficulty competing with cheaper pirate cassettes of Western pop. Thus, while Western artists and multinationals themselves are deprived of direct profits, pirated versions of their products nevertheless inundate local markets, often to the detriment of local musics.
The presence of Western pop music recordings constitutes only a first stage in the entrenchment of these musics in non-Western cultures. More significant are the local productions and reproductions of these genres. In many cases these begin with local ‘copycat’ bands, performing global hits like the Lambada tune or the songs of Abba, the Bee Gees, Led Zeppelin and the like. An initial form of local resignification occurs when bands indigenize cover versions of Western hits by substituting lyrics in a local language and whose topics may naturally address local concerns. Subsequently, bands may start composing original songs in their chosen style; rap, with its emphasis on lyrics, is particularly suitable for the expression of local values and themes. Although stylistically derivative of Western pop, such musics may be of fairly high quality, and their song texts may resonate with local issues and aesthetics. De Launey (E1995) and Regev (E1992) have outlined the successive stages of the development of Japanese and Israeli rock, respectively, in such terms, noting the eventual emergence of ‘credible’ local rock musics and their effective legitimization by local afficionados, journalists and other institutionalized critics.
In some cases a ‘saturation-maturation’ process may occur in which imitative rock musicians move on to synthesize innovatory and distinctively local musics, as did the Zimbabwean bandleader Thomas Mapfumo in the 1970s with his eventual adaptations of features of mbira music to dance-band format. However, in a country such as Japan, where indigenous traditional musics have become so marginal and irrelevant to popular youth culture, it may be too late for any such ‘return to the roots’. Since the imitation of foreign artists carries no particular stigma in that country, distinctive innovation is more likely in the form of self-consciously manneristic mimicry or the avant-garde postmodernities of groups like the Boredoms or the Japanese-American duo Cibo Matto.
The international spread of Western-style pop music has been interpreted variously as representing Americanization, homogenization, modernization, creative appropriation, cultural imperialism, and/or a more general process of globalization. Critics debate whether the Westernization process should be seen as an instance of neo-colonialist penetration of global markets or, alternatively, as reflecting the informed choices of discriminating and empowered consumers and performers. Much discussion has focussed on the values implicitly or explicitly associated with Western-style music when consumed or cultivated outside the West (e.g. Garofalo, A1992). On the whole, it has been natural for consumers to associate such musics with modernity, fashion and notions of personal freedom, whether articulated through the stentorian manifestos of rap and heavy metal or the sense of individual autonomy implicit in sentimental love songs. While such values may be perceived as liberating by many listeners in traditional societies, conservative moralists may find them threatening and may disparage Western-style music for its perceived shallowness and its links to commercialism, hedonism and Western imperialism. Hence, nationalist governments from China to Malaysia have sought, however ineffectually, to limit dissemination of Western-style music. Cultural policies and popular attitudes toward Western-style pop music have often served as focal articulations of broader debates regarding national identity, pitting advocates of cosmopolitanism and modernization against ethnic essentialists seeking to preserve local aesthetics.
Depending on the specific sub-genres and local socio-musical configurations, regional efflorescences of Western-derived musics are often linked to specific social sub-groups. In developing-world countries with strong local music traditions, Western-style music is most typically associated with urban bourgeois consumers, especially of the younger generations. Individual sub-genres may have more specific social affiliations. Singer-songwriter ballads and protest music, for instance, generally emerge from politically-conscious higher-education students. In Malaysia local heavy metal, with its more visceral and assertive style, is associated with lower-class urban migrants, dubbed kutu (‘lice’). Similarly, rap's association with the black American ‘underclass’ and its generally aggressive ethos has contributed to its adaptation by subaltern minorities like New Zealand Maoris and ethnic Koreans in Japan. Rock consumers tend to be urbanized youth who are to some extent Westernized and alienated from indigenous traditional music and culture. In many societies preference for Western-style pop music among young people is so universal that it cannot be linked to any particular sub-group.
A different dynamic of local-global music relationships obtains in geographically non-Western but otherwise predominantly European countries like Australia and New Zealand and among the substantial white populations of South Africa, Zimbabwe and other former colonies. In such societies Western idioms like rock music dominate popular music scenes. While there may be no significant stylistic differences between local and imported musics, issues of cultural nationalism and Western hegemony nevertheless provoke journalistic and academic debates.
Although the textures and associations of a genre such as rock may tend to predispose it toward values of modernity and sensuality, the inherently polysemic nature of music allows rock and related styles to serve a wide variety of agendas and to express markedly divergent values in different contexts. Thus, for example, while rock in Puerto Rico has generally been associated with upper-class, pro-American bourgeois youth, in Argentina rock nacional became a vehicle of progressive and often anti-imperialist protest in the 1970s. Similarly, the Chinese dictatorship has released disco versions of pro-regime songs, while Cui Jian's ‘Northwest Wind’ rock music idiosyncratically critiques both capitalism and the Chinese Communist Party. Contradictions may be inherent to genres such as Latin American Nueva cancion, some of which uses a North American singer-songwriter ballad style to criticize US imperialism and celebrate local cultures. During apartheid in South Africa, similar contradictions can be seen in the use of black American-derived styles as imported solutions to the problem of finding music that could be somehow modern and progressive without being ethnically exclusive. In recent decades, black youth in South Africa and Brazil have increasingly embraced black American soul and disco as vehicles for their own self-assertion, as more stylistically indigenous genres such as samba or mbaqanga come to be perceived as having been co-opted and commercialized. Noting the adoption of rap and reggae by young Maoris and Australian Aborigines, Lipsitz (A1994) argues that such musical borrowings represent less acquiescense to cultural imperialism than a practice by which alienated communities can effectively ‘become more themselves’ by identifying with Western underclass musics. In the process, local versions of rock music and related genres, while not enriching the global style pool, may come to constitute meaningful idioms that are experienced as both indigenous and cosmopolitan.
These rearticulations, like such seemingly oxymoronic American idioms as Hasidic rock and Christian heavy metal, illustrate the ability of listeners, performers and interpretive communities worldwide to resignify Western-derived styles in accordance with their own predispositions. Accordingly, genres such as rock, rap and the sentimental ballad can no longer be categorized as Western per se, but rather constitute international idioms which can form components or even bases of authentic music cultures throughout the world, even if their global cultivation may be at the expense of indigenous styles.
See also Popular music, §II. For more detailed discussion of specific styles see articles on individual countries.
A: General. B: Implications of technology. C: North America. D: Europe. E: Non-western cultures.
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R. Walser: ‘Rhythm, Rhyme, and Rhetoric in the Music of Public Enemy’, EthM, xxxix (1995), 193–217
E. Weisbard with C. Marks, eds.: Spin Alternative Record Guide (New York, 1995)
R. Garofalo: Rockin’ Out: Popular Music in the USA (Needham Heights, MA, 1997)
C. Small: Music of the Common Tongue: Survival and Celebration in Afro-American Music (Hanover, NH, 1998)
C. Werner: A Change is Gonna Come: Music, Race, and the Soul of America (New York, 1999)
B. Bird: Skiffle (London, 1958)
C. MacInnes: England, Half English (London, 1961)
G. Melly: Owning Up (London, 1965)
G. Melly: Revolt into Style: the Pop Arts in Britain (Harmondsworth, 1970)
W. Mellers: Twilight of the Gods: the Beatles in Retrospect (London, 1973)
D. Laing and others: The Electric Muse: the Story of Folk into Rock (London, 1975)
S. Hall and T. Jefferson, eds.: Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain (London, 1976)
British Phonographic Industry Yearbook (London, 1976–)
K. Humann and C.-L. Reichardt, eds.: EuroRock: Länder und Szenen (Hamburg, 1981)
D. Rimmer: Like Punk Never Happened: Culture Club and the New Pop (London, 1985)
D. Hill: Designer Boys and Material Girls: Manufacturing the ’80s Pop Dream (Poole, 1986)
S. Frith: ‘The Making of the British Record Industry’, Impacts and Influences: Essays on Media Power in the Twentieth Century, ed. J. Curran, A. Smith and P. Wingate (London, 1987), 278–90
S. Barnard: On the Radio: Music Radio in Britain (Milton Keynes, 1989)
B. Henson and C. Morgan: First Hits: the Book of Sheet Music Hits 1946–1959 (London, 1989)
A. Sinfield: Literature, Politics and Culture in Postwar Britain (Oxford, 1989/R)
P. Oliver, ed.: Black Music in Britain: Essays on the Afro-Asian Contribution to Popular Music (Buckingham, 1990)
S. Cohen: Rock Culture in Liverpool: Popular Music in the Making (Oxford, 1991)
A. Marwick: Culture in Britain since 1945 (Oxford, 1991)
J. Savage: England’s Dreaming: Sex Pistols and Punk Rock (London, 1991)
J. Toynbee: ‘Policing Bohemia, Pinning up Grunge: the Music Press and Generic Change in British Rock and Pop’, Popular Music, xii (1993), 289–300
I. Macdonald: Revolution in the Head: the Beatles’ Records and the Sixties (London, 1995)
R. Middleton: ‘Authorship, Gender and the Construction of Meaning in the Eurythmics’ Hit Recordings’, Cultural Studies, ix (1995), 465–85
R. Middleton: ‘The Rock Revolution’, Music in Britain: the Twentieth Century, ed. S. Banfield (Oxford, 1995), 79–106
S.P. Ramet, ed.: Rocking the State: Rock Music and Politics in Eastern Europe and Russia (Boulder, 1995)
D. Rees, B. Lazell and R. Osborne, eds.: The Complete NME Singles Charts (London, 1995)
J. Rice and others, eds: British Hit Singles (Enfield, 10/1995)
P. Gambaccini and T. and J. Rice, eds.: British Hit Albums (Enfield, 7/1996)
J. Savage: Time Travel: Pop, Media and Sexuality 1976–96 (London, 1996)
P. Delanoe: La vie en rose: the Singers and the Songs of 20th-Century Paris (London, 1997)
M. Andersson: Music in the Mix (Johannesburg, 1981)
R. Wallis and K. Malm: Big Sounds from Small Peoples: the Music Industry in Small Countries (New York, 1984)
C. Hamm: ‘Rock ’n’ Roll in a very Strange Society’, Popular Music, v (1985), 159–74
D. Stigberg: ‘Foreign Currents during the 60s and 70s in the Mexican Popular Music: Rock and Roll, the Romantic Ballad and the Cumbia’, Studies in Latin American Popular Culture, iv (1985), 170–83
P. Vila: ‘“Rock nacional” and Dictatorship in Argentina’, Popular Music, vi (1987), 129–48
S. Feld: ‘Notes on World Beat’, Public Culture, i (1988), 31–7
P. Manuel: Popular Musics of the Non-Western World: an Introductory Survey (New York, 1988)
L. Fujie: ‘Popular Music’, Handbook of Japanese Popular Culture, ed. R.G. Powers and H. Kato (New York, 1989), 198ff
P. Yampolsky: ‘Hati Yang Luka, an Indonesian Hit’, Indonesia, no.47 (1989), 1–18
U. Siriyuvasak: ‘Commercialising the Sound of the People: Pleng Luktoong and the Thai Pop Music Industry’, Popular Music, ix (1990), 61–78
T. Brace: ‘Popular Music in Contemporary Beijing: Modernism and Cultural Identity’, AsM, xxii/2 (1991), 43–66
C. Hamm: ‘Music and Radio in the People’s Republic of China’, AsM, xxii/2 (1991), 1–42
S. Kawabata: ‘The Japanese Record Industry’, Popular Music, x (1991), 317–26
A. Kimura: ‘Japanese Corporations and Popular Music’, Popular Music, x (1991), 317–26
J. Kitagawa: ‘Some Aspects of Japanese Popular Music’, Popular Music, x (1991), 305–15
Mao Yu Run: ‘Music under Mao, its Background and Aftermath’, AsM, xxii/2 (1991), 97–126
D.C. Robinson, E. Buck and M. Cuthbert: Music at the Margins: Popular Music and Global Cultural Diversity (London, 1991)
J. Tomlinson: Cultural Imperialism: a Critical Introduction (Baltimore, 1991)
A. Jones: Like a Knife: Ideology and Genre in Contemporary Chinese Popular Music (Ithaca, NY, 1992)
M. Regev: ‘Israeli Rock, or a Study in the Politics of ‘Local Authenticity’, Popular Music, x (1992), 1–14
M. Slobin: ‘Micromusics of the West: a Comparative Approach’, EthM, xxxvi (1992), 1–87; repr. as Subcultural Sounds: Micro-Musics of the West (Hanover, NH, 1993)
V. Erlmann: ‘The Politics and Aesthetics of Transnational Musics’, World of Music, xxxv/2 (1993), 3–15
P. Manuel: Cassette Culture: Popular Music and Technology in North India (Chicago, 1993)
S. Broughton and others, eds.: World Music: the Rough Guide (London, 1994)
R. Shuker and M. Pickering: ‘Kiwi Rock: Popular Music and Cultural Identity in New Zealand’, Popular Music, xiii (1994), 261–78
D. Wong: ‘“I Want the Microphone”: Mass Mediation and Agency in Asian-American Popular Music’, Drama Review, xxxviii/3 (1994), 152–67
G. De Launey: ‘Not-So-Big in Japan: Western Pop Music in the Japanese Market’, Popular Music, xiv (1995), 203–26
G. Lee: ‘“The East is Red” goes Pop: Commodification, Hybridity and Nationalism in Chinese Popular Song and its Televisual Performance’, Popular Music, xiv (1995), 95–110
See also bibliographies for individual genres and sub-genres, including Blues, Country music, Dance music, Disco, Funk, Rap, Reggae, Rhythm and blues, Rock, Singer-songwriter, Soul music.