Origins of Pop

Pop is short for ‘Popular’ music’ and it is usually commercial, aimed towards the youth. It is quite short and simple in its structure. It is often classed as a softer for, or alternative to rock n roll.

Its life began in the 1950’s in The UK and The USA. Pop has a mix of a lot of genres, taking bits from each of them to create its own genre, it gained its use of vocal harmonies from gospel and soul, instrumentation from Jazz, country and rock music, ochestration from classical music, tempo from dance music,, backing from electronic music, rhythmic elements from hip-hop music, and recently incorparated spoken passages from rap.

From 1967 it was used increrasingly as an opposition to rock music. Rock aspired to authenticity and an expansion of the possibilities of popular music, pop was more commercial, ephemeral and accessible. Though Pop was ‘Popular’ I still believe that rock and jazz a the talent, the courage to stand up against the main stream, and with it came many loyal followers that would follow them till they die, currently, pop changes from week to week, what was new one day, is suddenly old and rubbish a few months later, to me it seems these musicians only produce music that will last enough time to get them to the top for a while and then thats it, no legendary peices of music are produced, nothing that will make you just listen in awe. To me that is a big shame, it seems the level of music, generally, has dropped recently, and yes it may be what the public want, it may be what will get them the most money and fame, but the music is of poor quality and as a person who appreciates raw talent, it upsets me to see where this is taking us. As you can probably tell, I am not a big fan of pop, and most modern day music. But i have gone of on a tangent.

Source

List Pop artists

• The wanted
• The Saturdays
• Sugar babes
• S club 7
• Spice girls
• Boyzone
• Westlife

 

 

 

 

 

Origins of Metal

Metal, or heavy metal, is a Style of rock that came out in the late 1960’s, early 70’s mainly in the UK. If you delve deep enough you will see elements of Blues and phychedellic rock. Metal took rock, and created longer and more intense guitar solos, made thick, massive sounds with distortion, and also basic overall loudness. The lyrics often refer to masculinity.

When it first arrived, it was often described as hard rock, but over time was used to describge music with more volume, and power. Hard rock maintained its swing in the back beats and riffs, and bluesy character, whereas metal evolved to have riffs with stand alone melodies, and had no swing in them.

One of the first bands to start this style, or move towards it was Led Zeppelin, with Robert Plants Wails, and Jimmy Pages highly distorted guitar style. But probably the biggest player in early metal was Black Sabbath with their 1970 releases of Black Sabbath and Paranoid. Deep Purple also touched metal from time to time, but by 1969 Ian Gillan, and Ritchie Blackmore were leading the band to the heavy metal style. Judas Priest made metal what it is, made metal a complete genre of its own. For many it was the post-Black Sabbath heavy metal band, with its non-bluesy more cleanly metalic sound and featuring heavy rapid tempos.

Source

List of Metal Bands:

• Black Sabbath- 1968
• Led Zeppelin- 1968
• Deep Purple- 1968

These were considered to be the pioneers of metal, and modern day hard rock.

List of more current metal bands:

• Cradle of Filth- 1991
• Dimmu Borgir- 1993
• Slipknot-1995