Can You Perform a Pop Song as Performance Art

In that location's a brilliantly funny scene in Tom Stoppard's play The Real Thing, where the character of Henry, an intellectual playwright, is invited to select his favorite music for BBC Radio iv'southward Desert Island Discs programme. Henry's dilemma is over whether to choose the sort of music that he thinks his audition would respect him for, or whether to be honest and choose the pop music that he loves. "You can have a bit of Pinkish Floyd shoved in between your symphonies and your Dame Janet Baker," Henry muses, "that shows a refreshing breadth of taste, or at to the lowest degree a refreshing candor – just I like Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders doing 'Um, Um, Um, Um, Um, Um.'"

For an manufacture where image is central, pop music itself has got an image problem of its own. Many critics view it with disdain, while even fans of i sort of pop music consider other types of pop music to be below contempt – valueless and not worthy of being considered music, let alone art. But this is nothing new. In fact, this is a problem equally quondam every bit pop music itself. For as far back as y'all intendance to wait, poor old pop music has been bullied, belittled, and sneered at: "Information technology'south non art, information technology's just popular."

In order to determine whether pop music is fine art, it is first necessary to empathise what popular music actually is. And information technology's at this, the most central of steps, that virtually arguments begin. To some, pop music is considered dispensable. They run into information technology every bit commercially driven music designed past big business to be marketable to a teenage (or younger) audience who, in their eyes, know no better. They recall of popular equally being music that doesn't take the credibility to exist described as "stone," "folk," "jazz," "indie" – or whatever ane of a hundred other labels. To them, popular is the lowest-common-denominator stuff that no self-respecting music fan would exist caught dead listening to. Substantially, popular equally a genre of its own. To others, yet, popular might refer to any number of styles downwards the decades, from Frank Sinatra through Elvis Presley to The Beatles, Madonna, and endless other household (and surreptitious) names. Others withal might have an fifty-fifty wider definition, thinking of popular music but equally music that isn't classical: a catch-all for anything contemporary. So there are even those who don't consider anything "pop" to exist music at all. At which point, for fear of going round in circles, information technology'southward worth exploring the history of the very thought of "pop music."

What is pop music?

Humans have been making music for as long as they've been effectually – longer, fifty-fifty. A flute found in a cavern in northwestern Solvenia in 1995 has been dated to somewhere around 40,000 years ago. Whether information technology was made by Neanderthals or Cro-Magnons continues to be debated, but what information technology does show is quite how long we – or our ancestors – have been enjoying music. Over the ages, of course, the style of music has inverse unimaginably, with new instruments even so existence invented and developed today, along with new ways of playing them, varying ways of vocalizing, so on, as people accept go more sophisticated.

So at what betoken on the timeline of human existence does music become "popular"? Pop, after all, originated every bit shorthand for "pop music," the sounds that were existence dug past whatever generation in whichever club. The broadside ballads popular in Tudor and Stuart times are sometimes referred to by historians as "early pop music." These earthy, comical, and sentimental songs of the streets and taverns were pedaled on sheet music by street vendors, and proved popular with landed gentry as much every bit serfs in the fields. In Victorian times, audiences would enjoy concerts past the German-born composer Sir Julius Benedict, billed every bit the London Popular Concerts.

However, almost music historians would concur that pop music, as nosotros know it, began with the dawning of the recording manufacture. To assistance make customers' choices easier, record companies would color-code music of different genres. In the immediate mail service-war years, RCA Victor, for case, sold classical music on cerise vinyl, country and polka on greenish, children's on yellow, and so on, with black the reserve of ordinary pop, a genre that covered a multitude of things, but essentially meant "anything else."

Of course, many of the musical styles that came nether unlike headings – jazz, dejection, land, and so on – was simply the pop music of the time and place from which they originated. Today, it'south widely accepted that early jazz musicians such equally Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald were artists of the highest caliber – likewise bebop musicians such as John Coltrane or Sonny Rollins. But at the time, many critics frowned upon such upstarts, leaping around with their clarion horns, making things up on the spot rather than sitting and playing notes that had been carefully written onto the folio.

Similarly, dejection musicians such every bit Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters, and Sonny Boy Williamson were considered not only inferior musically, just weren't fifty-fifty treated equally as people in the racially divided Us. Today, their piece of work is enshrined in Smithsonian museums and the Library Of Congress.

The rock'due north'roll explosion

Information technology wasn't until the mid-50s that pop music began to actually mean something in its own right. With the explosion of rock'n'roll music, the pop concern built itself an empire. The songwriters in New York'due south legendary Brill Edifice crafted their art, with producers headed by Phil Spector delivering three-minute popular symphonies as rich and multi-timbred as Wagner at his height. (In the following decade, Brian Wilson's production and songwriting expanded on Spector's template; in 1966, Pet Sounds, marked a creative high point for both Wilson and The Beach Boys.)

Merely until the emergence of The Beatles, popular had remained largely ignored by critics on whatever intellectual level, with the music papers generally existing to depict new discs and inform the public and industry alike of goings-on. Simply in 1963, the renowned English music critic William Mann wrote almost the Fab Four in The Times, in a manner previously reserved for high fine art: "One gets the impression that they think simultaneously of harmony and melody, and so firmly are the major tonic sevenths and ninths built into their tunes, and the flat submediant fundamental switches, so natural is the Aeolian cadency at the end of 'Not A Second Time' (the chord progression which ends Mahler's 'Song Of The Earth')." He spoke of "lugubrious music" and "pandiationic clusters," and achieved dubious notoriety when he called Lennon and McCartney "the greatest songwriters since Schubert." People who would not have been pop music fans were starting to sit up and have it seriously – perhaps not yet going as far as to telephone call it art, only withal applying the aforementioned critical analysis that would be applied to the more traditional arts.

Only although The Beatles were certainly creating something new inside pop music, this wasn't so much a case of pop music finally elevating itself to the level of fine art, as it was the noise it was making became so deafening that it was no longer possible to ignore information technology. Pop, it seemed, was here to stay. And, if you tin't trounce them…

Art pop

Over the next two or 3 years, pop embraced art similar never before. Let'south not forget that so many of the greatest pop acts come from fine art-college roots, from The Beatles to The Rolling Stones, The Who, David Bowie, Queen, REM, Blur, Pulp, Lady Gaga, and as well many more to mention. And so the battle lines were being fatigued. For pop's elite in the mid-60s, you were either with them or against them. Fans of Bob Dylan, the darling of intellectual students who loved his political and protest songs, were shocked by what they saw as his "selling out" when he switched from acoustic to electric guitar. One disgruntled fan, Keith Butler, famously shouted "Judas" at him during a show at the Manchester Gratis Merchandise Hall in May 1966. Dylan replied contemptuously, "I don't believe you." When Butler was interviewed after the prove, he sneered: "Any bloody pop group can exercise this rubbish!" The implication was that fans had come to see something of creative merit – not popular music. But the times they were a-changin'.

The pop album itself was by now becoming a recognized art course, and groups were thinking about every aspect of their piece of work, with the album cover being elevated from mere pretty packaging to pop-art itself. Groups and singers would rent the all-time photographers and graphic designers to create their tape sleeves, and work aslope filmmakers to produce artful promo clips. Perhaps the almost obvious instance of this embracing of the art world is Sgt. Pepper'due south Alone Hearts Guild Band, for whose cover The Beatles recruited the respected pop creative person Peter Blake, but it'south worth noting that the idea for their "White Anthology" cover came out of conversations between McCartney and another respected pop artist, Richard Hamilton, who produced the poster inserted into the finished package.

Finally, pop had convinced the art world that the two camps were of a like mind – popular was one of them. And yet it was in this very acceptance that a strange thing happened. With the launch of Rolling Rock magazine in 1967 came the beginning of serious pop criticism. Except it wasn't called that; it was chosen rock criticism. Pop –short for "popular," permit's think – music was a catch-all term that became used to encompass whatever current styles were in vogue, be they the doo-wop of Frankie Lymon & The Teenagers, the rock'due north'curlicue of Elvis Presley and Little Richard, the Merseybeat of Billy J Kramer & The Dakotas or The Searchers, or heartthrobs such as Ritchie Valens or Dion DiMucci. Only now rock (without the roll) music was breaking away, distancing itself from pop every bit though in some manner suggesting itself to exist of a higher course. Past 1968, you lot were either rock (alongside The Rolling Stones, The Doors, Pink Floyd, and Jimi Hendrix) or pop (like Cliff Richard, Lulu or Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich). Stone had its music press, its critics and its intellectuals; pop was at present strictly for footling kids and squares. In the very instant that pop finally became accepted as the art that it was, a coup from within saw it banished to the bubblegum shelf.

Snobbery exists around any class of art, and popular would be no unlike in this respect. While the critics (not to mention many fans and fifty-fifty the artists themselves) sought to depict a line betwixt the artistically credible (rock) and the commercial (popular), other artists refused to be pigeonholed. The reality is, as with all art, that there is good and bad pop music. What proved difficult in the late 60s – and remains tough today – is to explain exactly what makes something adept and something else bad. Marc Bolan is a proficient case of an artist that crossed the divide between rock and pop. His original Tyrannosaurus Rex were an interesting group, certainly closer to the outsider edges of stone than commercial pop, with plenty to attract critics while as well appealing to hippies and art students. But when Bolan followed Dylan's lead and ditched his audio-visual guitar in favor of an electric one, shortened the band's name to T.Rex, and ended his partnership with Steve Peregrin Took, the effect was a run of popular singles that brought him greater popularity than any British artist had known since the days of Beatlemania. Indeed, a new term was coined to depict the mania: T.Rextacy. Information technology was conspicuously popular, very definitely fine art, and, crucially, extremely good.

Taking pop music to a new level

Sweden's Eurovision winners ABBA are some other interesting case report. Surely zilch in the popular world could be further from fine art than this almanac Europe-broad songwriting competition? Added to this, ABBA'southward records sold past the bucketload. That people who wouldn't normally pay any mind to the pop charts were falling in love with their well-crafted slices of pop should accept removed any adventure of brownie for the Swedish fab four. And, at the time, that may well have been true. But today, they are lauded for taking popular music to a new level.

Through the 70s, accusations of snobbery were voiced by many young pop fans – notably towards the increasingly cerebral noodlings coming from the prog stone campsite. In 1976, these shouts became a roar, as punk rock exploded onto the scene. Punks were determined to reclaim pop music for the masses, refusing to see it disappear upwardly its ain rear stop in a flurry of intellectualized virtuosity. Popular was for anybody, regardless of talent. In a way that harked back to the skiffle groups that had sprung upwardly all over the country in the late 1950s, leading to a wave of bands from The Beatles and the Stones, to The Animals, Kinks, and endless more, punk was about a expect, an attitude, and expression, far more than it was virtually being able to play guitar. And both scenes took seed in Britain'due south art schools.

Image is the central to success

Key to pop'southward success has always been image. From Sinatra'south blue-eyed good looks through the dangerous sex appeal of Elvis to David Bowie'south androgynous attraction, how an artist presents him or herself is role of the bundle. While the music is conspicuously primal, the visual event is a huge part of pop – another tick in the Yes cavalcade in the old "is pop fine art?" debate. The art globe embraced this notion with the pop art movement, but these artists could never present the full popular package in a gallery, nonetheless adept their work was. Every bit Pete Townsend of The Who explained to the Tune Maker in 1965, pop fine art was: "I blindside my guitar on my speaker because of the visual effect. It is very artistic. One gets a tremendous sound, and the effect is great."

The post-punk pop globe embraced this same idea in the early 80s. Pop groups became more flamboyant than always before, with each act presenting itself in its own singled-out way. Whether this be Boy George's at-the-time shocking appearance in make-up and dresses, Adam Ant with his mini-movie pop videos and characters, or Martin Fry from ABC, wearing a gold lamé suit as he emerged from the dole in Sheffield. New romantics and new moving ridge acts such equally The Homo League, Soft Cell, and Duran Duran exploited the value of paradigm to enhance their music, creating a richly diverse pop scene that would sustain them for decades to come up.

Meanwhile, American stars were similarly decision-making every attribute of their presentation to ensure they were in control of their art. Michael Jackson'due south videos became big-budget epics, rivaling Hollywood for their extravagance, while Madonna'south sexually charged operation elevated her stage shows to grand theatre.

This was the blueprint followed by Lady Gaga, who became an international superstar following her 2008 debut anthology, The Fame . A onetime student at New York's Tisch School Of The Arts, Gaga fused her avant-garde electronic music with pop sensitivities, added a splash of Bowie/Bolan glam, and presented herself as a consummate packet of music backed upward past flamboyant and provocative visuals. As she explained, "I am a walking piece of art every twenty-four hours, with my dreams and my ambitions forwards at all times in an effort to inspire my fans to lead their life in that mode."

Whatever you telephone call information technology, the music remains the same

Over the decades, the definition of pop has inverse too many times to mention. In times of rude wellness, everyone wants to be associated with it, while in fallow times, artists have made keen efforts to distance themselves from it. As we know, pop only means "popular," but it can also mean a mode of popular music. The discussion is often used to describe music that has mass appeal, produced with a big budget, and intended to be commercially successful. And it's this commercial success that alienates many who experience this aspect of the music business sets itself aside from the purists who consider their music to be art for its own sake. Rock fans would altitude themselves from what they saw as dispensable pop in the 80s, and yet the groups they loved used many of the same tools equally their perceived enemies – image, flamboyance, and then on.

What exactly popular is volition be different from one person to the next. Many people retrieve of Motown as soul, but to the soul purist, Motown is pop, non soul. They view Motown as somehow inferior, due to the business-similar nature of caput-honcho Drupe Gordy, producing a conveyor chugalug of hits. However, by the early 70s, Motown artists such as Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye were firmly in accuse of their own output, with albums like Gaye'south What's Going On and Wonder's Music Of My Mind as soulful every bit anything coming out of Memphis or Muscle Shoals. Simply at the same time, they remain some of the greatest pop records ever fabricated.

When the great soul label Stax Records, home to Isaac Hayes, The Staple Singers and the late Otis Redding, invited the Reverend Jesse Jackson to open "the black Woodstock," as their Wattstax festival was dubbed, he preached inclusiveness: "This is a beautiful 24-hour interval, it is a new solar day. We are together, we are unified and all in accord, considering together nosotros got power." He connected, using music equally a metaphor: "Today on this program you volition hear gospel, and rhythm and blues, and jazz. All those are just labels. We know that music is music."

Whatever you call it, the music remains the same. The discussion is only most how we translate it – and what information technology says about the states. Do those who dismiss popular as having no value really but suffer from the snobbery of wanting others to think that they, like the playwright in Stoppard's play, are to a higher place such childish things equally popular music?

As Henry laments in The Real Thing, "I'm going to look a total prick, aren't I, announcing that while I was telling the French existentialists where they had got it wrong, I was spending the whole time listening to The Crystals singing 'Da Doo Ron Ron.'"

Heed to the Nonstop Pop! playlist on Spotify.

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Source: https://www.udiscovermusic.com/in-depth-features/pop-the-worlds-most-important-art-form/

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