How to Listen to Pop Music
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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