Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    How to Listen to Pop Music
    How to Listen to Pop Music
    How to Listen to Pop Music
    Ebook128 pages1 hour

    How to Listen to Pop Music

    By Nick Bollinger

    3.5/5

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    This comprehensive and illuminating guide explores the entire spectrum of pop music, from Beatlemania and the long-playing record to Eminem and the iPod.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAwa Press
    Release dateDec 1, 2004
    ISBN9781877551055
    How to Listen to Pop Music

    Read more from Nick Bollinger

    Related to How to Listen to Pop Music

    Related ebooks

    Music For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Grace Notes

      Aug 10, 2021

      Grace Notes
      3 min read

    • Article

      Solo Flight

      Nov 16, 2021

      IF YOU’RE LOOKING for musical inspiration, Guitar Player is always a great place to start, and this issue is especially stimulating. Inside these pages you’ll find writeups on more than 100 exhilarating guitar solos chosen by our readers and a host o

      2 min read

    • Article

      The Moment N.W.A Changed The Music World

      Dec 11, 2017

      Of the many big bangs that have transformed rap over the decades, N.W.A's "Straight Outta Compton" is one of the loudest. It was a sonic Molotov cocktail that ignited a firestorm when it debuted in the summer of 1988. Steered by Dr. Dre and DJ Yella'

      4 min read

    • Article

      Acoustic Prog

      Mar 9, 2021

      USING DIFFERENT A COUSTIC instruments in unique ways is a big part of what separates prog from the rest of rock music. Generally speaking, traditional American styles don’t mix into a progressive recipe as readily as they do in other classic genres.

      2 min read

    • Article

      Commentary: Don't Fall For The Myth That You 'Can't Sing'

      Mar 29, 2019

      "When I was in kindergarten or first grade, during a singing session, the teacher pointed to me and said, 'You there in the back, just mouth the words.' I never sang again until I was nearly 60. Not in front of other people, not in front of the dog,

      4 min read

    • Article

      Taking Notes

      May 18, 2021

      Taking Notes
      2 min read

    • Article

      Digital Dollars

      Oct 12, 2021

      Digital Dollars
      2 min read

    • Article

      Let's Borrow Chords

      Jan 4, 2022

      The concept of modal interchange is actually very simple: a song borrows chords from a parallel scale. By parallel we mean a different type of scale built on the same tonic, so for example we use chords from the key of C major, but then we may also u

      2 min read

    • Article

      THE RHYTHM ROOST New Jack Swing

      Feb 10, 2021

      Back in the late 80s, early 90s, Top 40 chart music was enthused with a vibrant US style called New Jack Swing. Amalgamating hip-hop, soul and funk, it was producer-songwriter Teddy Riley who led the movement’s forceful snare-driven swing rhythms and

      1 min read

    • Article

      Still Raging

      Nov 9, 2021

      Still Raging
      4 min read

    • Article

      Hubert Sumlin

      Apr 5, 2023

      Hubert Sumlin
      3 min read

    • Article

      Remembering The Rager

      Jul 19, 2022

      Remembering The Rager
      9 min read

    • Article

      Masters Of Groove

      Apr 6, 2021

      Masters Of Groove
      12 min read

    • Article

      The Lee Way

      May 24, 2022

      The Lee Way
      9 min read

    • Article

      The Importance of Musicality

      Aug 16, 2021

      THE importance of musical intelligence can sometimes be overlooked in the drive for technical accomplishment, and yet it is an essential component of a dancer’s toolkit. Musicality is a “sensitivity to, knowledge of, or talent for music” (according t

      5 min read

    • Article

      The Size Of It

      Sep 14, 2021

      The Size Of It
      7 min read

    • Article

      Tech House

      Mar 5, 2020

      Tech House
      2 min read

    • Article

      Bass Lessons

      Jul 13, 2021

      Bass Lessons
      2 min read

    • Article

      The BODY ELECTRIC

      Apr 6, 2021

      YOU CAN’T LOCK Neal Schon down. Sure, his band, Journey — one of the highest-grossing rock groups of all time — has put touring on pause as the world struggles with its first major pandemic in a century. But as you can tell from the epic solos and ba

      7 min read

    • Article

      John Taylor

      Dec 7, 2021

      With over 100 million albums sold over their 43-year career, Duran Duran could quite easily have retired to their own luxury island decades ago. Instead, they’re still creative, still touring, and—judging by their new album, Future Past—still as full

      4 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for How to Listen to Pop Music

    3.5/5

    2 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      How to Listen to Pop Music - Nick Bollinger

      how to listen to

      pop music

      nick bollinger

      To my mother Marei,

      and the memory of my father Con

      Pop music is an argument that anyone can join in.

      Greil Marcus

      What is pop?

      THIS BOOK WAS going to be called How to Listen to Rock Music, but the title didn’t feel right. Rock? Sure, the word covers much of the music you’ll read about in these pages. The column I began writing in the Listener in 1988 was for many years headed simply ‘Rock’. (A few years ago it was changed to the vaguer ‘Music’.) And rock journalism remains the common name for the kind of writing I do.

      This form of journalism, which makes the long-playing album its core business, was born around the same time as the term ‘rock’ itself. Actually rock, which replaced earlier names such as rock ’n’ roll or pop, was almost certainly coined by the journalists themselves – to give the music, and by association the people who wrote about it, more gravitas. Rock distinguished this newer, more serious and more self-conscious music from its frivolous predecessors, whose medium was the two-and-a-half-minute single and the teenage pin-up mag.

      Rock has subsequently spawned numerous sub-genres – folk rock, punk rock, garage rock, funk rock, jazz rock, acid rock, black rock, white rock, cock rock and so on – but it has generally retained its air of high significance.

      Rock ’n’ roll has, since its banishment, made a comeback, but more as an attitude than a style of music. You’ll hear a person’s behaviour described as being ‘very rock ’n’ roll’ but this may indicate nothing more than that he or she has thrown up on someone’s carpet.

      There have been other kinds of music, equally popular, that have resisted being pulled under the umbrella of rock. For a start, black American music – from which rock indisputably took its initial impulse – has over the years worn numerous labels, some by choice, others imposed from outside: race, rhythm and blues, soul, funk, disco, hip-hop. Black acts that have identified themselves as rock – Bad Brains, Living Colour, TV On The Radio – have been the exception rather than the rule.

      Then there are the popular sounds from other parts of the planet: reggae from Jamaica, wassoulou from Mali, MPB from Brazil, fado from Portugal, and so on. To equate pop with rock would be to exclude such immensely successful styles.

      ‘Pop’, on the other hand, encompasses it all. Short for ‘popular’, the term was coined in the nineteenth century when collections of sheet music were peddled for parlour piano sing-alongs. These drawing-room ballads fell somewhere between simplified arias and gussied-up folk songs, tailored by professionals to suit amateur performers.

      But pop really came into its own with the advent of recording. Records made professional music available for the first time to almost everyone. Broadly, then, you could define pop as any music made primarily for the purpose of being served on a platter.

      By my definition, that goes for the 1920s’ blues recordings by stars such as Leroy Carr, Lonnie Johnson and Bessie Smith. It includes the first great recordings of Louis Armstrong, a pop star as surely as he was a jazz genius, and Duke Ellington, whose body of work – arguably the greatest of any twentieth century American composer – included such unarguable pop tunes as ‘Satin Doll’, ‘Mood Indigo’ and ‘It Don’t Mean A Thing’. It incorporates such idiosyncratic interpreters of song as Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday. It embraces Elvis Presley, the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Black Sabbath, Nirvana, Eminem, Sam Cooke, the Coasters, Curtis Mayfield, Sly and the Family Stone, Public Enemy and Missy Elliott. It welcomes Max Merritt, the Datsuns, Sam Mataparae and Trinity Roots.

      Even classical music, while commissioned for churches, courts and concert halls rather than crafted for Top 20 charts, can become pop when used in a successful movie, television show or commercial. There is also a vast amount of other music that can legitimately be called pop but which I will ignore, because it neither inspires or offends me enough to write about it, or because there simply isn’t room. Madonna, Dire Straits, Destiny’s Child – this is the last time these names will appear in this book, all for different reasons.

      Mostly this is a book about some of the music I love and the ways in which I listen to it. It by no means covers all this music, or even tries to. But if there is anything in my methods, memories, musings and madness that you can find a use for in your own listening, I’ll be very glad.

      Wallpaper

      POP NEVER SLEEPS. It pushes its way into every silent space in our lives. We have little choice when and where to hear it. Radios rotate it 24 hours a day. Televisions transmit it in music videos, commercials, soap operas, dramas and news shows. It sings through telephone systems as we wait for our calls to be connected. Cellphones signal it – monophonically. At rugby matches it swells out of the same gigantic sound systems used for rock concerts. It hums continuously in cafes, restaurants, bars, malls, elevators, supermarkets, bookshops and art galleries.

      I go to a dentist for a root canal. As I recline, bracing myself for the drill, I notice a screen inescapably in my line of vision. With a sudden roar of over-amped guitars and shredded vocal chords, pop-rockers Poison – all permed and pouting – appear several metres above me. As if dental surgery weren’t painful enough, music videos continue to howl at me for the next twenty minutes. Flat in my chair with a numb mouth full of blood, I am unable to protest.

      In the 1960s, when as a schoolchild I began listening to pop, it was in few of these places. There was only one hour a day I could be certain of hearing the thrilling sounds of the Beatles, the Supremes, and Dinah Lee singing ‘Do The Bluebeat’. The rest of the time the radio played Frank Chacksfield and His Orchestra. At school we learned to sing ‘I Vow To Thee, My Country’. It was not yet assumed that everyone enjoyed a slamming dance beat while shopping, or jarring electric guitars during dentistry.

      Given that pop now pursues us through our waking life, How to Listen to Pop Music might seem tautologous. (A more useful book, a friend suggested, would be How Not to Listen to Pop Music.) Who needs instruction anyway? We are all, to some degree, pop critics. Of any song that comes on the radio or television, most of us will confidently give an opinion. We either like it or don’t, and can usually support our position with some kind of critique, even if it’s as basic as ‘I can’t stand rap’ or ‘I love that Robbie Williams’.

      How many of us would feel as confident about voicing our response to a Brahms symphony, or a John Coltrane saxophone solo? We take it for granted that appreciation of such things requires sophisticated understanding. The music sounds difficult. We have to go to special places – concert halls, arts festivals, classical music radio stations – to hear it, so it must be special. And we believe expert tuition will enhance our listening experience. Such knowledge may even make us better people. Library shelves groan with dignified volumes on how to appreciate classical music or jazz.

      Pop, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to require explanation. We’ve all been hooked by a pop tune. Before you’ve had time to think about it, you’re singing the chorus and miming the guitar riff. The gratification is instant. And if it has done its job really well, many of us will hurry out and buy the record.

      Trouble is, there’s so much pop you can drown in it. It has been estimated that there are one thousand new CDs released each week in the United States. Add in the independent productions sold through websites, home-studio remixes played only by club deejays, and promotional souvenirs touted at gigs, and the figure expands even further.

      ‘The same sound is a different sound / You never step in the same river twice,’ wrote my friend Bill Lake in his song ‘The Big

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1