Pop


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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.


I. Introduction

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.)

Richard Middleton


II. Implications of technology

1. Introduction.

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.


2. The advent of rock.

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.


3. The progressive rock era and punk reaction.

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 Base 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.


4. CD, sampling and interactivity.

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.

David Buckley


III. North America

1. Introduction.

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 Tharpe, 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.


2. 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.


3. The 1960s.

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 33⅓ 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 Ronettes 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.


4. The 1970s.

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.


5. The 1980s.

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.


6. The 1990s.

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.

Robert Walser


IV. Europe

1. The British Isles.

(i) From rock and roll to rock.

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 (seePSYCHEDELIC, 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.


(ii) From rock to dance.

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.


(iii) Dance music and after.

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.

Richard Middleton


2. Continental Europe.

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.


(i) Effect of English-language music.

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).


(ii) Traditional music and European pop.

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.


(iii) Survival of older genres.

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.


(iv) Transnational developments.

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. Yet,
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.

Dave Laing


V. Non-Western cultures

1. Global dissemination.

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.


2. Local interpretations and identities.

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 interpretative 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.

Peter Manuel


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D. Marsh and others, eds.: The First Rock and Roll Confidential Report: Inside the Real World of
Rock & Roll (New York, 1985)

R.G. Pielke: You Say You Want a Revolution: Rock Music in American Culture (Chicago, 1986)

D.P. Szatmary: Rockin’ in Time: a Social History of Rock and Roll (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1987,
3/1996)

L. Martin and K. Segrave: Anti-Rock: the Opposition to Rock ’n’ Roll (Hamden, CT, 1988)

L.G. Roman: ‘Intimacy, Labor, and Class: Ideologies of Feminine Sexuality in the Punk Slam
Dance’, Becoming Feminine: the Politics of Popular Culture, ed. L.G. Roman and L.K. Christian-Smith
(London, 1988), 143–84

R. Sanjek: American Popular Music and its Business: the First Four Hundred Years, iii: From 1900 to
1984 (New York, 1988, rev. 2/1996 by D. Sanjek as Pennies from Heaven: the American Popular Music
Business in the Twentieth Century)

C. West: ‘On Afro-American Popular Music: From Bebop to Rap’, Prophetic Fragments (Grand Rapids,
MI, 1988), 77–87

D. Marsh: The Heart of Rock and Soul: the 1001 Greatest Singles ever Made (New York, 1989)

B. Tucker: ‘“Tell Tchaikovsky the News”: Postmodernism, Popular Culture, and the Emergence of Rock
’n’ Roll’, Black Music Research Journal, ix/2 (1989), 271–95

L.A. Lewis: Gender Politics and MTV: Voicing the Difference (Philadelphia, 1990)

G. Lipsitz: Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture (Minneapolis, 1990)

R. Pratt: Rhythm and Resistance: Explorations in the Political Uses of Popular Music (New
York, 1990)

S. McClary: Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, Sexuality (Minneapolis, 1991)

D. Toop: Rap Attack 2: African Rap to Global Hip Hop (New York, 1991)

D. Weinstein: Heavy Metal: a Cultural Sociology (New York, 1991)

J. Dawson and S. Propes: What Was the First Rock ’n’ Roll Record? (Boston, 1992)

G.G. Garr: She’s a Rebel: the History of Women in Rock and Roll (Seattle, 1992)

L.A. Lewis, ed.: The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media (London, 1992)

G. Tate: Flyboy in the Buttermilk: Essays on Contemporary America (New York, 1992)

B. Cross: It’s not about a Salary … : Rap, Race and Resistance in Los Angeles (London, 1993)

R. Garofalo: ‘Black Popular Music: Crossing Over or Going Under?’, Rock and Popular Music,
ed. T. Bennett and others (London, 1993), 231–48

J. Otis: Upside your Head! Rhythm and Blues on Central Avenue (Hanover, NH, 1993)

R. Walser: Running with the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music (Hanover,
NH, 1993)

R.D.G. Kelley: ‘Kickin’ Reality, Kickin’ Ballistics: “Gangsta rap” and Postindustrial Los
Angeles’, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York, 1994), 183–227

G. Lipsitz: ‘“Ain’t Nobody Here but us Chickens”: the Class Origins of Rock and Roll’, Rainbow at
Midnight: Labor and Culture in the 1940s (Urbana, IL, 1994), 303–33

T. Rose: Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (Hanover, NH, 1994)

B. Shank: Dissonant Identities: the Rock ’n’ Roll Scene in Austin, Texas (Hanover, N.H, 1994)

Britain Invades, America Fights Back, The History of Rock ’n’ Roll, iii, videotape, dir. A. Solt,
Warner Home Video (Burbank, CA, 1995)

Plugging In, The History of Rock ’n’ Roll , iv, videotape, dir. S. Steinberg, Warner Home Video
(Burbank, CA, 1995)

A. Sexton, ed.: Rap on Rap: Straight-Up Talk on Hip-Hop Culture (New York, 1995)

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)


D: Europe

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)

E: Non-western cultures

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), 327–46

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.