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I dunno. JF's above definition of "pop" music sounds to me like the old saw when a Canadian says "I'm an American because I live in North America. And so are Venezuelans because they live in South America!" True, but in terms of people saying "I'm an American," one does not immediately think "aha, he's from Chile."
I think most people's understanding of pop music, and in terms of Jeremiah's question, doesn't include Mozart or Strapping Young Lad. It's music that is created for mass consumption along a kind of "light bouncy rock" pattern. Or "blandly pleasant," if you want a harsher description.
"Pop" is, from an Eastern/Central Canadian former radio station manager's perspective, the default category for any music that isn't forcefully placing itself into another genre strongly enough to be that other genre.
Justin Timberlake and Britney Spears and Hillary Duff and Lindsay Lohan are all "pop," because they don't rock enough to be "rock" and aren't jazzy enough to be "jazz" and certainly not classical enough to be "classical." You could say that Metallica has recorded popular songs, but if you said "what kind of band is Metallica," I'd say "hard rock" or "light metal" rather than "pop." If you asked about the Pet Shop Boys, I'd say "electronic pop," because they're keen on the synthesizers and the keyboards but are essentially recording "pop" music. Shania Twain I'd call "country pop," because she's found in the "country" section of the music store and throws some steel guitar in there but is essentially not very "country" when you actually listen to the songs.
"Pop" also equals "inconsequential sell-outs" in the minds of avid fans of a particular genre. Being someone that used to be semi-Goth and listened to a lot of Industrial music, "oh, they've gone 'pop'" was a popular disparagement of a band that had gotten some sort of mainstream success and was therefore no longer cool. Skinny Puppy, Ministry and Nine Inch Nails were oft dismissed as having "gone pop."
As a kind of default "non-category," pop is also subject to sort of retro-reclassification. Stuff that is pop may not stay pop. A lot of music that was once created to fill that "blandly pleasant" niche... Bing Crosby springs to mind... is not "pop" any more and has been swallowed by a larger genre like jazz. So a contemporary "pop" group now, in twenty years, might slide into "rock" or a genre subtype that hasn't been created yet. New Order, f'r'instance, were generally considered straight "pop" when they were new, but have been retro-classified as "electronic," both because of the later direction the band took and how "pop" music keeps sliding around and getting re-mapped.
Whew. Sorry about the length there. This was the subject of much debate among programmers when I was the manager of a community radio station, so it's something I can go on about for ages. |
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