Pop music  

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"Rockists believe that pop music should follow the 'authentic' rock and roll paradigm: the basic instrumentation of guitars, bass guitars and drums. The fundamental tenet of rockism is that some forms of popular music are more authentic than others. Rockism places value on the idea of the composer and performer as auteur; authentic music is composed as a sincere form of self-expression, and usually performed by those who composed it. This is as opposed to the notion of manufactured "pop" music, created in assembly line fashion by teams of hired producers and technicians and performed by pop stars who have little input into the creative process, designed to appeal to a mass market and make profits rather than express authentic sentiments."--Sholem Stein

"Pop culture - the folk culture of the modern market, the culture of the instant, at once subsuming past and future and refusing to acknowledge the reality of either - began about 1948, in the United States and Great Britain." --Lipstick Traces, Greil Marcus, p. 257.

"As old as the tension between art music and vulgar music is, it became radical only in high capitalism. In earlier epochs, art music was able to regenerate its material from time to time and enlarge its sphere by recourse to vulgar music. This is seen in medieval polyphony, which drew upon folk songs for its cantus firmi, and also in Mozart, when he combined peep-show cosmology with opera seria and Singspiel."--"On the Social Situation of Music" (1932) by Theodor Adorno

This page Pop music is part of the music series.Illustration: Sheet music to "Buffalo Gals" (c. 1840), a traditional song.
This page Pop music is part of the music series.

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Kunstformen der Natur (1904) by Ernst Haeckel
Kunstformen der Natur (1904) by Ernst Haeckel

Pop music is music intended for or accepted by a wide audience, usually with a commercial basis and distinguished from other genres such as classical music and art music.



Shortened form of popular music.

According to the website of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 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". The Oxford Dictionary of Music states that while pop's "earlier meaning meant concerts appealing to a wide audience [...] since the late 1950s, however, pop has had the special meaning of non-classical mus[ic], usually in the form of songs, performed by such artists as The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, ABBA, etc." Grove Music Online also states that "[...] in the early 1960s, [the term] 'pop music' competed terminologically with beat music [in England], while in the US its coverage overlapped (as it still does) with that of 'rock and roll'".


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Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Pop music" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

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