PopMusic.com: What is a pop song?

What is a Pop Song?
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What is a pop song?

For some reason, when I was around 13, and read Brave New World, I memorised this bit...

It was only a hopeless fancy
It passed like an April Day
But a hope and a word
And a dream they stirred
They have stolen my heart away...

(more)

...
In the book, Aldous Huxley imagined a future in which songs were written by machines. He apparently felt a machine could do as good a job as a person writing what he disdainfully felt were merely pop songs. (This was before computers, so he imagined a kind of machine with spinning wheels with rhyming words on disks, and complicated gears, which would come up with...with....)

Well, here’s the thing. Growing up listening to hip-hop, and Britney Spears and all of that...half a century after even “I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together...”...which is still kind of a pop song...

Those lyrics, from Brave New World, deliberately written to be nonsensical, seem like they make sense.

Don't they?

But if you look at it carefully, it’s gibberish.

(continued...)

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...
Anyway, the modern idea of a pop song came with the invention of recorded music, around the end of the 1800s. There was a place called Tin Pan Alley, and a building called the Brill Building, where workers would go to offices, and write songs, every day, 9-5.

Even before recorded music, actually, there was the trade of written music for the middle classes, who were not culturally sophisticated enough to want exclusively to play more “serious” music - Chopin, or whatever. Or perhaps not technically skillful enough.

It’s hard for us, today, to understand, that before the modern age, people made their own entertainment. Women would collect in one another’s houses, and do readings from plays or poems. People would gather in their drawing rooms, and make their own music. Or at least play it - often, using sheet music, often consisting of songs from the nascent music business...

But with the invention of records, a strict format began to take shape. The earliest widely available commercial recordings were on wax disks - cylinders had not made much headway, were bulkier to transport, and had a lower sound quality. The first disks were breakable and only one-sided, and revolved at 78 RPM - how or why that number was arrived at, I’ve no idea! (I could Google it, I suppose, but I don’t really care!) The point being, they could only hold about three minutes of music, and so the modern idea of the three minute pop song was solidified.

(continued...)

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...
A classic pop song has verses, choruses, a bridge, all of which are usually eight measures, with maybe a few other brief sections or extra measures thrown in for variety.

I heard this song the other day for the first time. I’d never heard before, I Think I Love You, by David Cassidy, which I was surprised to learn was more popular than The Beatles Let it Be the year it came out. I think it’s a perfect pop song.

	David Cassidy - I Think I Love You .mp3

What I love about it is the bridge section - the harpsichord solo, and the low vocal part - is so different from the rest of the song. The minor verses, and mainly major choruses, give it a kind of dynamic - the single female voice going “I think I love you” adds a slightly sad tone to the happier pre-chorus section.

It also tells a story.

This was, I think, towards the very end of pop songs as they were originally created. Cole Porter was probably the apotheosis. With the invention of rock and roll, pop songs got simpler, with The Beatles they got stranger, and with the invention of samplers, they go so chopped up that the standard, classic, format of verse, chorus, bridge, was basically, or largely, lost.

Still, there’s something really cool about what Phil Spector called - again, from memory - “Tiny”... that’s not quite it - “Miniature”? - maybe?....something like “Miniature symphonies for kids.” Or operas. Okay, I don’t recall what he said!

But there is something cool about this song, which tells a story, has a resolution, has sadness and happiness, and is somehow catchy enough that it beat The Beatles...

Here’s a bit about how I Think I Love You, by David Cassidy, was made...

A.W!

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