Ayumi Hamasaki Sekai - View Single Post - THE GRATEST POP SONGS OF ALL TIME
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Old 29th October 2006, 11:09 PM
sxesven's Avatar
sxesven sxesven is offline
my name's WOMEN Initiate
 
Join Date: Jun 2003
Location: The Netherlands
Posts: 6,526
I've never liked the classification of 'pop' as popular, even if it's where the word comes from. Popularity is relative, and frankly, every genre is popular, except then with certain crowds.

My points is, you're wrong. I'd love to get technical, but more frankly I actually wouldn't

/edit/

What the heck. I'll just copy and paste the quick Wikipedia definition here (which is 100% correct) for starters:

Quote:
Pop music is a genre of popular music distinguished from classical or art music and from folk music.
Notice that pop music thus excludes 1/ classical music, 2/ folk music and 3/ art music. What art music denotes is debatable, but if you limit it to jazz and whatever falls under avant-garde (meaning everything from ambient to harsh noise and power electronics) you're pretty safe.

The definition of pop music as 'popular music', meaning music that is considerably popular, is frankly quite nondescriptive and immensily popular among those who have no notion of musical genres and their respective histories. Popular is a completely relative term, and though I understand what's meant by popular, ergo the fact that a considerable number of people appreciate x, it doesn't make for an obvious classification of what pop is. And pop can certainly be classified: as said before, it's everything but classical music, art music and folk. The immense popularity of, say, Miles Davis, or classical composers like Mozart, Bach or Beethoven, or whatever popular folk artist you can come up with, doesn't make them pop. I hope you see the pure absurdity of even considering this.

Of course, all this does not mean that pop is, in the end, a genre with clear boundaries. In fact, it certainly is not. There's plenty of cases imagineable where there's no clear division; plenty of pop artists borrow freely from aforementioned non-pop genres and in some cases it's just incredibly difficult to categorize something. Where does Bob Dylan fall? Pop or folk? Where does Billie Holiday go? Jazz or pop? Not to mention such dubious cases such as Il Divo.

Whatever the case, I hope this at least marginally improves your understanding of pop and non-pop. Thank your for reading.
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Last edited by sxesven; 29th October 2006 at 11:26 PM.
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