I don’t think there really is a ‘definition’ of pop, certainly not from a genre perspective. There are certain qualities that pop broadly adheres to- short, tonally up-beat, simple, catchy choruses and transitions. Not all pop songs exhibit every convention, but some mixture of those elements will be present in any given pop song. The name itself comes from the original explosion of top-40 radio in the 50’s, which was dominated by doo wop and early rock n’ roll, the first truly nationwide popular music trends, but I don’t think it’s been directly correlated with commercial viability since the 60’s, and plenty of pure pop gold has fallen by the wayside, like this-
The Ramones were pop AF. Their whole thing was in reaction to noodley over-jammed Led Zep et al. Doo-wop on speed was the result. Blondie explicitly aimed to be pop stars, and freely stole from any genre to get there- Chris Stein is a criminally overlooked guitar mutant, possessed of ridiculous flexibility, could play anything. More Songs About Buildings and Food and Fear of Music are perfect examples of anti-pop/art-pop, the intentionally difficult colliding with a familiar form.
Little Red Corvette, that’s about as perfect of a pop song as you get IMO.
Rivers Cuomo is a pop fetishist! Nerded out so hard he mathematically broke down his favorite songwriters so he could devise an equation for writing infinite pop songs.
And Bowie was all over the place, a product of his thoughts on evolution and progression.
I think what it boils down to for me is that pop is more about qualities of a song than necessarily a description of an artist. I dunno. It’s all subjective anyway, ain’t it?
Pop is definitely an ever changing thing with the times. As the name itself points out it’s about what’s currently popular, a few years ago it may have been dubstep influences, or hip hop inspired songs, or pop rock. In a few years time what we consider pop will inherently be different depending on what artists are hot at the time.
I agree to an extent. For one thing, anything that was ‘pop’ in the past is still pop, so any derivations or whatever from that would also be pop. Almost limitless possibilities, really. Also, to reiterate I don’t think sales directly correlates, for example Korn was huge and nothing about them was pop at all.
True but it does directly influence other musicians as to how they need to be sounding. When an artist is hitting it big you’ll see others try to emulate them and make it work within their styles. I don’t listen to enough radio to know what’s the sound of the moment, which is why i’m mostly lost on who the hell are these Chainsmoker guys.
If my partner didn’t work with children I would know almost nothing about what’s cool these days. I worked construction for a long time, so classic rock radio drove me nuts. Now I can only listen to npr/talk radio.
No doubt, but few compare to Prince and the industry was very different in the 1980s than it is now.[quote=“wait_really, post:66, topic:99112”]
Future Lung Cancer Patients
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Also, as someone who’s dad died of lung cancer… yeah.
Me too, FWIW. Last September. I’ll delete it if you’d like, I certainly don’t want to impede on you like that. I’m just still in the woods, sometimes i’m inappropriate about it.
It’s the worst. I’ve been through my share of friends dying, grandparents and the like… But that was the first time I truly felt the weight of eternity.
Heh I have one of those uncles too, tho I guess many of us do. My partner also happens to be a fan of the “My dad is dead” joke (her father passed right after we married) and as you can imagine, it really sets the mood at parties.
Oddly enough, I can bring this back(ish) to the thread- I played Heaven is a Place by Talking Heads at his memorial.
I’m not current enough on pop culture to be familiar with this band, so I assumed “how to write a chainsmoker’s song” would involve inserting sufficient vocal pauses for the singer to take a puff now and then.
Chainsmokers is garbage, but knocking songs because they have four chords (really, it’s three chords, since the last is the first) is like knocking books that have beginnings, middles, and ends.
