The History of Pop Music: Part II

The Seventies

In the early seventies, pop started to get boring. There were not so many new and interesting sounds. Two of the more interesting kinds of pop were progressive rock and heavy metal. Progressive rock, played by groups like Pink Floyd and Genesis, came from the psychedelic music of the sixties. Led Zeppelin, started in 1968 with singer Jimmy Page and guitarist Robert Plant, was both a progressive group and the first hard rock or heavy metal group.

Things were different in the USA. In New York, bands like The Stooges and The New York Dolls were making a new, stronger kind of music. They wore strange new clothes: it was called the glam look. They wanted to wake people up. This was the start of punk – the music of the seventies.

In the US, punk was just another kind of music. But in Britain, when John Lydon changed his name to Johnny Rotten and joined The Sex Pistols in 1975, young people immediately knew that this was different, the most different thing since the Beatles. Their music was loud and unmusical. But that didn’t matter. Punk music was ugly because life was ugly. It was angry because there was a lot to be angry about: many young people were poor, many did not have jobs. Punk was very different from the love and peace of the sixties. For the punks, there was No Future.

And yet, as so often in pop, another completely different kind of music was also popular at the same time: disco. In 1977, a film called “Saturday Night Fever” about disco life and disco dancing, with music from the Bee Gees, made disco the most popular music of the time. While many young people were still listening to punk bands like The Glash, the new international sound was the music of groups like The Bee Gees and the Swedish group Abba.

The Eighties

The new pop of the early eighties was «new» mainly because it was not like punk. Some New Wave music had a punk sound, but it was not the angry sound of the Sex Pistols. New Romantics like Duran Duran and Culture Club were not angry either. But there were differences. There were new sounds made by computers and synthesizers. Pop was becoming more and more international.

The Nineties

The most important new music of the nineties was rap. Black music has always been important to the story of pop. The rock and roll of the fifties came from black music. In the sixties, American blacks made soul music and Motown. In the seventies, Bob Marley and the Wailers from Jamaica gave reggae to the world and became international stars. In the eighties, funk was the black bridge between rock and disco.

Rap was not new in the nineties: it started in New York twenty years before. But by the early nineties, one in five records bought in the US was rap. It was the most important kind of new music since punk. Rap is different because rappers talk more than they sing. They speak their words fast over music, which can come from live musicians or from a DJ (disc jockey) taking sounds from different records. Rap, like punk in the seventies, was the music of the city streets, and the words were about life on the city streets. Rap changed pop in the nineties as much as punk did in the seventies.

By the nineties, music was international big business. New styles of music were coming from all over the world – Salsa from Latin America, Highlife and Afrobeat from West Africa, Township Pop from South Africa and many more.

The feeling of danger which comes from the danger in the streets, and the danger of AIDS is not just in rap but in grunge as well.

Raves, which began in England in the early nineties, are like big parties where thousands of young people go to dance all night to different kinds of non-stop house music like techno and jungle. This music is made by computer, it is very fast – 180 beats a minute – and usually has no words.

Pop today – and tomorrow

Today, pop is everywhere. It is in the street, in the big shops, at the airport. You can get pop twenty-four hours a day on your radio, from the TV. You can get pop through your computer on the Internet. You can listen to music and you can change it: make it faster or slower, happier or sadder, use the sounds of different musical instruments.

Notes:

Stooge – марионетка

Glam look=glamorous look – шикарный вид

Saturday Night Fever – Лихорадка субботнего вечера

Answer the questions.

1. What new kinds of pop were the 1970s characterized in Great Britain/ the USA?

2. Why was punk music angry?

3. When did musicians begin to use computers and synthesizers?

4. What are the roots of rock and roll of the fifties, soul, Motown and rap?

5. What is the peculiarity of rap as a musical genre?

6. What are raves?

Read the definitions of pop music genres. Which of them do you prefer? Why?

jazz – a genre of popular music that originated in New Orleans around 1900, characterized by a strong but flexible rhythmic understructure with solo and ensemble improvisations;

blues – a music genre that originated in African-American communities of the "Deep South" of the US around the end of the 19th century from spirituals, work songs, field shouts and chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads;

disco music, disco – popular dance music (especially in the late 1970s); melodic with a regular bass beat; intended mainly for dancing at discotheques;

rap music, hip-hop, rap – genre of African-American music of the 1980s and 1990s in which rhyming lyrics are chanted to a musical accompaniment;

R & B, rhythm and blues – a combination of blues and jazz that was developed in the US by black musicians;

rock 'n' roll, rock and roll, rock-and-roll – a genre of popular music originated in the 1950s; a blend of black rhythm-and-blues with white country-and-western;

jungle music – an electronic music genre which would later become primarily known as drum and bass; a type of popular dance music with an extremely fast rhythm and a low range of musical notes;

techno – a form of electronic dance music that emerged in Detroit, Michigan (USA) during the mid-to-late 1980s. Stylistically, techno is generally repetitive instrumental music, oftentimes produced for use in a continuous DJ set;

punk rock – a rock music genre that developed between 1974 and 1976 in the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia. Punk bands created fast, hard-edged music, typically with short songs, and often political, anti-establishment lyrics;

heavy metal, metal – a genre of rock music that developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s, largely in the UK and in the USA. Heavy metal developed a thick, massive sound, characterized by highly amplified distortion, extended guitar solos, emphatic beats, and overall loudness. The first heavy metal bands were Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple and Black Sabbath;

psychedelic rock – a musical style that emerged in the 1960s; rock music inspired by or related to drug-induced experience.

Read the main facts from the biography of Elvis Presley. Speak about the great singer on their basis.

1935 – was born in a poor white family in Tupelo, Mississippi;

1954 – made his first record;

1956 – had his first number one hit: Heartbreak Hotel.

1970s – sang in Las Vegas, had problems with drugs;

1977 – died.

Write about the career of a musician (singer) who interests you. Get some facts and dates about this person – his/her early life, how his/her career grew, what high points of his/her professional life were/have been.

Do you know?

* Pop music is made in many different ways but the musical instrument of pop is still the electric guitar. There have been many great guitar players since pop was born. Three of the best are Jimi Hendrix: the great guitarist of rocks; Eric Clapton: the great guitarist of the blues; Jerry Garcia: guitarist with the Grateful Dead, for thirty years the most popular live band in the US.

* Two of the biggest and the most important pop concerts were:

The Woodstock Festival in New York State in 1969, a three-day concert with more than 300,000 people and the best American bands of the time;

The Live Aid concert of 1985, which happened at the same time in London and Philadelphia, and was watched on TV by millions of people all over the world. They gave more than £40 million to help the poor of Africa.

Make up short dialogues using the given patterns and practice them with the partner.

Model: Do you like rock? – Of course. I listen to rock to get adrenalin going/ I absolutely adore…/

Prompts:

*jazz, blues, disco, R&B, hip-hop….

*disgusting, fabulous, incredible, beautiful, exciting, awful, fascinating, fantastic…

Model: What about going to the concert of …..?

• It is an excellent idea! It’s my favourite group. Its soloist has a fabulous voice.

• That’s wonderful! I haven’t been to the live concert for a long time.

• I think that’s a great idea. I enjoy listening to their compositions full of beautiful music and lyrics.

• I’m afraid it is not my cup of tea. Rock is really disgusting.

Model: What are your impressions of the concert? – I enjoyed every minute of it/ That was one of the best performances I’ve ever heard.

• I didn’t like it. The sound was awful.

• It was a complete flop.

• It’s an excellent performance.

• The concert was first-rate from beginning to end.

• Not that I liked the concert but …

• The voice of … is truly spectacular, really strong and powerful.

• It wasn’t just a successful musical, it was a smash hit.