History of Popular Music from 1950

The history of pop music is tied up in the history of technology that delivers it. New technologies have allowed artists and songwriters to reach bigger and different audiences.

Rhythm & Blues, Rock’n’Roll
Modern popular music begins with rock’n’roll in the early 1950s. In the late 1940s musicians reduced the big band format to its minimum with just vocals, sting bass, drums, piano and brass. They then created a bouncy jazz syncopated version of the blues and they called it ‘Rhythm and Blues.’ This music was marketed and played by the African Americans population in a still segregated USA. The establishment did not approve of the dancing and sexuality that was created by the music, but it was OK for the black people in the poorer parts of Chicago and New York to dance to the music but was very much frowned upon to the white community. White teenagers had to listen to the tame singers their parents approved of, e.g Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin. 

Then Elvis Presley had an idea....a birthday present for his mother. 

Elvis was a young truck driver who walked in one say in his lunch break to record a song for his mothers birthday. When Elvis sang the first song Sam Phillips decided to make an extra copy to show her boss. She kept pushing him to use the singer. 
Eight months later in 1954 Sam called Elvis into the studio to sing a song called ‘Without You.’ 
The song sounded terrible so Elvis sang some gospel. Suddenly everything blew up for Elvis. He found a band, recorded some songs with them, the first one being ‘I Love You Because.’ 
Whilst Elvis was recording Sam realised what he had been looking for, a white singer who sounded black. ‘Thats All Right, Mama’ was the first single for Elvis.
Sam then took a record to Dewey Phillips, Sams former business partner and top DJ. Dewey played the song over and over again and it attracted enthusiastic reaction from the public. Many listeners thought Elvis was black but Dewey emphasised that he went to Humes High school-which was an all-white school. 


By pairing down’n’dirty rhythm and blues with a soulful, clean cut, god looking white boy, Sam Phillips created an irresistible pop culture combination. 

Pop Music and Television
Television was the next big technical innovation that had an impact on the way people consumed popular music. Bill Haley and the comets introduced American TV audiences to Rock’n’roll with Around the Clock on the Ed Sullivan show in 1955. A year later, 21 year old Elvis Presley preformed Hound Dog on the Milton Berle Show where the modern pop star swam into focus on TV screens. 


Reactions To Elvis
Although it wasn't his first TV appearance, his rendition of Hound Dog created a media storm that rocketed Elvis to nation and international attention. Critics slammed his singing and dancing. 

Parents, Teenage Girls and Cops
The older generation, the while establishment,feared Elvis because he was a white boy who sang music, his soulful voice turning teenagers on to the ‘tribal rhythms’ of R&B. 

Elvis made no secret of his love for gospel music and he attended services for the coloured and he tried to hide that many of his musical heroes were black. When he hit the big time, he was frequently photographed with black musicians. 

“ A lot of people seem to think I started this business. But rock’n’ roll was here a long time before I came a long...Nobody can sing that kind of music like coloured people...Lets face it: I can’t sing like Fats Domino can. I know that.” 
Elvis Presley. 

Music like everyone other aspect of culture was strictly segregated along colour lines. The thought of white teenagers dancing alongside their coloured counterparts sent many into fits of rage and campaigns were launched to stamp out the rock’n’roll menace. 

A Background to the Music Industry and some basic theory

Pop Music Genre

Genre- the classification of a text according to its style and content and possibly its form and manner of production. Pop music is very dependent on genre.  
Genres are continually being invented, crossed and revisited. 

Most music falls into one of these categories:

• Pop 
• Dance
• R&B
• Hip-hop/Rap
• Rock
• Punk
• Country & Western
• Folk 
• Jazz
• Blues
• Latin 
• Gospel
• Reggae
• New Age

Each of these categories have sub-genres, and there are plenty of hybrids and mash-ups. 

However each of these genres have a unique musical character (rhythm, instruments, lyric, and vocal style) which can connect with other factors of the artist such as clothing, hair and lifestyle. 

Genre and Artist Image

An artists image is key. They should have some kind of ‘look’ categorising them before they start singing or playing. They must be represented as doing so visually on record sleeves, publicity photos and in music videos. Their look can be as generic as their sound. If the look fits, wear it. 

Adele, whose music comes from classic pop styles of the 1960s and 1970s is often photographed wearing classic and retro clothing that links her with her role models such as Aretha Fraklin and Dusty Springfield. This look suggests a serious and soulful artist. 

Genre and Sales

Costumers often restrict themselves to a certain type of music and genre. In your local HMV you will see that the albums are organised in the different genre categories across the walls. Lots of artists resent being pigeonholed into a particular genre niche in this way, there is little doubt that retailers and customers rely heavily on genre to make their buying choices. Services like Spotify rely on the past genre choices in order to keep playing you new music that you may be interested in. 

What have I learnt from this article and what will I take away?

I have learnt that i do restrict myself to some certain genres like Pop, Dance, R&B and randomly I love country and western music. I think that I need to branch out more and discover other types of music. I also think that for my product I will make sure that the image that I try to present to people is what I am trying to get across. Sometimes people get mixed up with an image they like and an image they are trying to put across to people and I think this is important to bare in mind for my project. 

Studying Pop Stars

In the 100 greatest singers of all time most of the artists on there you will never see again because they are dead and buried, but because they were such good artists their music carried on living and may have even become more successful. Unfortunately this is not the same for everyone and some artists die and their music dies with them. 
A good example of people dying but their music still living would be the ’27 Club’  who ‘lived fast and died young’. Their music has been adapted and continues to be bought by generations of fans. 

It is said that pop music is ‘of its time’ and it looses all meaning and value after a certain period has passed. While music remains rooted in the era of its creation it seems that some pop stars transform their context. 

While pop music constantly changes and is evolving into a variety of hybrid forms, pop stars keep common characteristics. Their songs may change but the singer/artist themselves stay the same.

They embody the same set of values:

• Youthfulness
• Rebellion
• Sexual Magnetism
• An anti-authoritarian attitude
• Originality
• Creativity/talent
• Aggression/anger
• A disregard for social values relation to drugs, sex and polite behaviour
• Conspicuous consumption, of sex, drugs and material goods
• Success against the odds 

“However the longer a star remains successful on the world stage, the more difficult it is  to continue to embody these values. Originality and creativity burn out.”

I think that this is going to be something very important to take away from the article when creating my own ideas while constructing my products this year. It is so important to be original and creative because at some point you wont be able to create the same stuff because it would have already ‘burnt out.’

“If you don’t quit, eventually popular culture moves on, and quits you.”

So I have learnt that no matter how famous you are or how good your music is, at some point the candle will have burnt at both ends and nothing will be left and the music industry will eventually quit you. I think that this also suggests that it is a very tough industry and business area to be in.

The Top 10 Of Dead Pop Heros 

(in rough order of demise)

1. Billie Holliday
2. Jimi Hendrix
3. Jim Morrison
4. Elvis Presley
5. Sid Vicious
6. Karen Carpenter
7. Kurt Cobain
8. TupacShakur
9. Michael Jackson
10. Amy Winehouse

These people all relate to James Deans “Live fast, die young, have a beautiful corpse” 

Dyers theory applied to pop stars

We read and understand song differently depending on who is singing the song. A song forms part of a pop stars ongoing narrative, eg with a break up album like 21 by Adele. When a pop star dies we start organising their life in to a three act narrative. Postmortem sales meann big business. A celebrity death creates headlines and often rekindles a fan interest. For example, Michael Jackson sold more songs in the week after his death then he had for years.





From reading this article I think that the best way for me to get a good reaction out of my own products is to focus on a song or an artist who may have died. I may get more interest because people may be sympathising with my ideas because of the death involved in it. 

‘Why Piracy is Perpetuating Plastic Pop’ By Helienne Lindvall

Artist have been weary about speaking out against piracy since the band Metallica experienced a 'massive public backlash’ for suing Napster. 

One of the few artists who dared to speak out and ‘voice their opinions’ was Lily Allen. She lashed out to a couple of older and successful artists after they declared their opposition to online copyright enforcement. She argued that it was easy for them to get on the freebie bandwagon as they’d already made money from the music industry, but most younger artists would never get the chance to even make a living from music. She then got targeted by thousands of people and she received abusive messages and even death threats which eventually caused her to shut down her website. 

Many artists who became famous before the ‘digital age’ have said that they find it frightening to see the amount of unlicensed downloading sites there are on the internet. 

“This is how I make my living. It can be 25,000 (per site). Multiply that by all the (unlicensed) sites in the world and that can be my whole profit gone.” 

This scared me when I read it. The internet is such a powerful thing that it has the ability to shut down companies and peoples careers with people input with just the click of a button ‘download’. 

Noel Gallagher spoke about the situation as well as Lily Allen although Noel was a lot more blunt about it. 

“The consumer says ‘Wheres my free music on the internet? Is this a free download?’ F**k Off! It cost me a quarter of a million pounds to make it, you’re not getting it for nothing. I want my quarter of a million back, thank you very much. Thats why we’re rock stars.” 

He also added that the reason why tours have become so long is because people need to have more shows to make up for the money they are loosing on the illegal downloading sites.

“Records dont get any cheaper to make, they get more expensive to make. I say this as an independent artist. I’m on my own record label. It isn’t backed by anybody else. I pay for it all. Everything.”

After reading Lilly Allen and Noel Gallagher’s side of the story i do think that it is really important that we do not illegal download anything of the internet. This is their job and how they make a living and people should not take that for granted just because they might have a lot of money. 

I think that when producing my own product I will think about the time and the effort that I have put into making it look good and sound good and then imagine people taking the Micky out of the work i have done and almost stealing it like they do when they download their music, then I will times this feeling by 10 and think about how the artists must feel.