Nick Bollinger - How to Listen to Pop Music

THIS BOOK WAS going to be called How to Listen to Rock Music, but the title didnt feel right. Rock? Sure, the word covers much of the music youll 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 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. Youll hear a persons behaviour described as being very rock n roll but this may indicate nothing more than that he or she has thrown up on someones 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 Dont 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 isnt room. Madonna, Dire Straits, Destinys 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, Ill be very glad.