As a matter of a single song this might mean very little; as culture, as a way of life, you can’t beat it."
Without a doubt, popular music is a primary, if not the primary, leisure resource in late modern society. The sound of pop permeates people’s lives in a variety of different ways.
From nightclubs and live gigs, through cinemas and TV commercials, to what Japanese music theorist Hosokawa (1984) refers to as the ‘autonomous and mobile’ form of listening facilitated through the invention of the personal stereo; for a great many people, popular music is an omnipresent aspect of their day-to-day existence (Hosokawa 1984: 166).
As Frith (1987: 139) observes: ‘We absorb songs into our own lives and rhythms into our own bodies; they have a looseness of reference that makes them immediately accessible’.
Equally significant about popular music is the way in which it functions at a collective level.
Every week in cities around the world people gather in clubs and venues to listen and dance to their favourite musics. The summer months bring festivals where music consumption is mixed with relaxation and socializing as people forge new friendships and associations based around common tastes in music, fashion and lifestyle.
Popular music has also been linked with political issues and social change. In 1969, 500,000 people gathered at a rural site near the town of Woodstock in upstate New York for the Woodstock Music and Art Fair, an event which, among other things, protested about the US’s continuing involvement in the Vietnam war. During the 1980s, popular music became the focus for a series of globally broadcast mega-events (Garofalo 1992a), beginning with Bob Geldof’s Live Aid concerts in Britain and the US in aid of the famine in Ethiopia. Geldof later described the Live Aid event as a ‘global joke box’ to raise awareness about the famine.
Although the political naiveté of Live Aid has been justi- fiably criticized (see, for example, Garofalo 1992b) the event’s principal success was that it was able to focus, however briefly, people’s attention on a world problem by utilizing a key element of their leisure and lifestyle.
Since the late 1960s, popular music has become a key focus in the related disciplines of cultural and media studies and sociology. Every era of post Second World War popular music, and the cultural scenes this music has inspired, has been the subject of study in one or each of these disciplines at some level.
"Leisure was no longer simply a moment of rest and recuperation from work, the particular zone of family concerns and private edification. It was widened into a potential life-style made possible by consumerism. To buy a particular record, to choose a jacket or skirt cut to a particular fashion, to mediate carefully on the colour of your shoes is to open a door onto an actively constructed style of living."
Central to the new marketed youth identities, then, were items such as fashion clothing, magazines and music. While all of these commodities played their part in articulating the collective identity of youth, the most significant aspect of post-war youth culture was the music which effectively became its signature tune.
During the nineteenth century, commercial music had taken the form of sheet music, most households across Europe and the US possessing a piano.
Thomas Edison’s invention of the phonograph during the 1880s in the US marked a fundamental change in the way in which music was marketed and heard by people.
The cylindrical shaped phonograph was the forerunner of the vinyl record and allowed for acoustic sounds to be recorded and reproduced electronically.
"It sounded different from anything previous generations had listened to. The whine of the electric guitar, the crisp drumming, the echo effects, and, later, more complex mixtures of electric and acoustic instruments, all made a new sound . . .
The generation that had lived through the hard times of the depression and the Second World War, preferred its music soft and romantic. Their children, growing up in safer, more affluent times, wanted to hear more dangerous music. They responded to simple chords, a jumping beat and loud electric guitars."
Elvis Presley, who Beadle (1993) describes as ‘the first pop star in the modern sense’, was working as a truck driver when he was discovered by Sam Phillips, head of a small independent record label, Sun Records, based in Memphis, Tennessee (Beadle 1993: 5). Presley first visited Sun Records to record a song as a present for his mother’s birthday. However, Sam Phillips was so impressed with Presley’s voice that he invited him back to record some more material.
In keeping with the rise and appeal of rock ’n’ roll generally, the importance of new technologies cannot be overlooked in attempting to chart the cultural impact of Elvis Presley on young audiences. Presley first reached a nationwide audience in the US through the medium of television. Indeed, in the case of young people outside the US, Presley remained an essentially ‘mediated’ star, television appearances and subsequent films rather than live performances being the way in which Presley was experienced on a global level (apart from several impromptu performances in Germany during his tour of duty there as a soldier in the US Army, Elvis never performed anywhere outside the US). Moreover, the spectacle of Elvis on TV created a moral panic among the parent culture which further endeared him to his young fans
"When the Beatles arrived in the United States, which was still ostensibly sobered by the assassination of President Kennedy two months before, the fans knew what to do. Television had spread the word from England: The approach of the Beatles is a licence to riot. At least 4,000 girls (some estimates run as high as 10,000) greeted them at Kennedy Airport, and hundreds laid siege to the Plaza Hotel, keeping the stars virtual prisoners."
If mediated images of Elvis and the Beatles were instrumental in securing loyal and enthusiastic audiences for these artists, they were also ensured the popularity of Elvis and the Beatles on a global scale. If rock ’n’ roll was the first musical form to exploit the potential of the global media, this in turn ensured it gained an audience which went far beyond the US and Britain. Similarly, the demand for rock ’n’ roll music resulted in the appearance of ‘home-grown’ rock ’n’ roll artists in many different countries throughout the world.
The history of popular music has long been debated by philosophers, sociologists, journalists, bloggers and pop stars.
While much has been written about the origin and evolution of pop, most claims about its history are anecdotal rather than scientific in nature. Popular genres, in fact, sometimes suffer a fate worse than death—becoming an anachronism and embarrassment, especially to young listeners eager to define themselves by allegiance to the latest style.
"The alluring, addictive sound of pop does still evolve, but what is sung about remains the more or less the same; the poses, controversies and costumes repetitive and derivative. It is machines that are now the new pop stars, the performers and singers like travelling sales workers whose ultimate job is to market phones, tablets, consoles, films, brands and safely maintain the illusion that the world is just as it was when there was vinyl and the constant, frantic turnover of talent, genre and style. There is today a tremendous amount of sentimentality in making it seem as though things are as they once were, a desperate future-fearing rearrangement of components that were hip 40 years ago.
But Pop belongs at the end of the 20th century, in a structured, ordered world that has now fallen apart."
1970
2015
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