Pop music is back in a big way, with artists like Dua Lipa, Little Mix and Ariana Grande topping the charts the world over. Then again, did pop ever go away?
While rock music, R&B, dance, rap and hip-hop have all had their moments over the last 30 years, popstars have still delivered the fun, joy and spectacle, whether that was the 90s heyday of boybands, or the newer class of popstars sweeping the Grammys .
Since 1991, we have had girl bands becoming phenomena, legends reinventing themselves, and people becoming superstars off the back of one viral hit. While there's too many iconic pop moments to count, we've taken a look at 30 of the moments from the past 30 years that defined pop music.
Pop music changed forever when 16-year-old Britney Spears dropped her debut single, "... Baby One More Time" in 1998.
From the opening "oh baby baby" to the iconic video, featuring Spears in a schoolgirl outfit and pigtails, the song has gone down in history as probably the best debut single ever and an all time pop great, and catapulted Spears into pop princess territory.
In 2002, American Idol debuted and changed pop music forever by giving aspiring singers a new path to stardom via auditioning for judges and appealing to the nation for votes.
Whatever you think about the concept and its effect on music, without Idol , we would not have Kelly Clarkson, Carrie Underwood, Adam Lambert or Jennifer Hudson.
Country rap wasn't really heard on the mainstream airwaves prior to 2019, but the release of Lil Nas X's "Old Town Road" changed that.
After becoming a success on TikTok, "Old Town Road" made it onto the Billboard country music charts, but was disqualified on the grounds it didn't fit the genre.
DMX's Posthumous All-Star Track, and 9 More New Songs - The New York Times
Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week's most notable new songs and videos. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter , a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage.
This song from "Exodus," the first posthumous DMX album , features a 1990s rap supergroup that could have been. DMX sounds limber and loose, and Jay-Z and Nas are having far more fun here than they did on the grown-and-grumpy "Sorry Not Sorry," from the latest DJ Khaled album. The union of the three titans is consequential, but they treat it like a friendly cipher, the mark of stars confident in their legacy. JON CARAMANICA
The nonprofit Red Hot Organization supports its efforts to fight AIDS with albums full of unexpected collaborators. The preview of its dance-oriented "Red Hot + Free" collection, due July 2, is "Mon Cheri," which brings together the Florida dance-pop duo Sofi Tukker with the Malian singers Amadou & Mariam . Sophie Hawley-Weld of Sofi Tukker coos the verses in Portuguese, philosophizing about time and rhythm over a twangy guitar line that hints at Malian modes; when Amadou & Mariam arrive for the choruses, calling for togetherness in love, a 4/4 thump kicks in, steering the song directly to the dance floor. Before it's over, a synthesizer starts cheerfully sputtering like a high-tech kazoo. JON PARELES
Dan Friel has been making noisy rock — frenetic guitar abetted by over-the-top electronics — since he founded the band Parts & Labor in the early 2000s. He's still at it in his current band, Upper Wilds, and "Love Song #5," from an album due in July titled "Venus," comes on as a whirlwind. As he sings about how love changes nothing and everything at once, a stereo blitz of distorted strumming, whizzing arpeggios and screaming sustained tones insists how much it matters. PARELES
Griff, an English pop singer, songwriter and producer who won this year's Brit award as rising new star, sounds optimistic despite herself with "One Foot in Front of the Other," which will be the title song of her mixtape due June 18. Sure, her first steps are tentative as she recovers from a breakup — "Things just take longer to heal these days" — but her perky keyboard tones and a chord progression that descends but soon bounces back all insist that she'll thrive, and soon. PARELES
Recently, the emo-rap-influenced country singer Kidd G announced a partnership with the Valory Music Co., a division of the country powerhouse Big Machine Label Group. It was a seeming acknowledgment that his most viable path forward would run through Nashville — or at least near it. And indeed, he is slowly homing in on a version of his hip-hop that's structured more like contemporary country music. On "Break Up Song," the guitars are fuller, and his rapping has less residue of Juice WRLD than his earlier songs. The laments are pure country, too: "I wiped your footprints off the window of my truck." CARAMANICA
A songwriter from Northern Ireland who's fond of vintage American soul music, Foy Vance has collaborated with Ed Sheeran, Alicia Keys and Kacey Musgraves. On his own, he harks back to Van Morrison's better days, grainy and impassioned. Many of his previous songs have been folky and rootsy, but "Sapling" deploys electronic illusions as well. He strives to draw benevolence out of his own imperfections and regrets — "Am I strong enough?" he wonders — as patient piano chords open into vast reverberations. PARELES
A union of one of hip-hop's most stoic rappers and one of its most excitable. In this partnership, OhGeesy (formerly of Shoreline Mafia) pulls DaBaby into his patient tempo, a surprise victory. CARAMANICA
"Morocco" is from the new album, "Bird Ambience," by Masayoshi Fujita, a Japanese vibraphonist and composer who constructs meditative pieces with a Minimalistic pulse — layers of vibraphone lines with fleeting apparitions of percussion and sustained brass tones. Every layer is melodic; follow any one closely, and it turns out to be far less repetitive than it seems at first. PARELES
BTS, Psy, And More: A Guide To K-Pop : Pop Culture Happy Hour : NPR
Last year, the South Korean pop group BTS topped the U.S. charts with a blockbuster earworm called "Dynamite." Now they've got a new hit called "Butter."
THOMPSON: But the story of K-pop extends well beyond BTS, and it goes back decades with a huge array of styles and sounds. I'm Stephen Thompson. And today, we are offering up a brief guide to K-pop on POP CULTURE HAPPY HOUR from NPR, so don't go away.
BTS: (Singing) And you know we don't stop. Hot like summer, ain't no bummer - you be like, oh, my God.
THOMPSON: Welcome back. Joining us today from Seoul, South Korea is Haeryun Kang. She is a journalist and the creative director of MediaOri, a media incubator based in Seoul. Hi, Haeryun.
THOMPSON: It's great to meet you, too. So one of the huge stories in pop music the last few years is the rise of K-pop around the world, most notably the boy band BTS, which has broken a lot of barriers in the U.S. But we wanted to go beyond BTS a little bit and talk about some of the other artists who've contributed to K-pop's legacy and commercial strength. Now, this is obviously not meant to be comprehensive. We're just scratching the surface here. So, Haeryun, one thing you've written that really struck me when we're contextualizing K-pop, you describe K-pop not as a musical genre, but as a geographic destination. What do you mean by that?
KANG: So there's not one musical genre that ties K-pop together first of all. If you listen to all these different songs from hundreds of different groups that are all classified as K-pop globally, it's a cacophony of sounds. Sometimes within a single song, you would have different influences from Latin America, United States, Europe, where have you. And so musically, to call something K-pop really doesn't say a lot about what it actually sounds like. But also, when we look at artists that come out of Korea and who make it globally, like Psy or BTS or Girls' Generation, we just tend to clump them together as popular music that comes from Korea - K-pop.
So K-pop as a word became popularly used in the late 1990s as the Korean music industry started exporting itself globally. Most commonly, when people say K-pop, it refers to idol music, which is studio-produced artists from big entertainment agencies. So K-pop doesn't refer to any one musical sound, it's what we generalize as music that comes out of Korea that becomes globally successful.
THOMPSON: Yeah. Now, you brought five songs to try to capture some of the kind of history of K-pop. And just listening to these songs, even within a single song, you're hearing so many genres at once. And I think your first pick really captures that. Let's hear it.
KANG: That was Seo Taiji and Boys' debut called "Nan Arayo." And this is most often seen as, like, the moment that Korean pop industry changed forever. But this was something that was unlike what most Korean people had heard before because the early '90s, late '80s was when Korea was changing very rapidly. The military dictatorship had just ended. Civil society was springing up and all sorts of activism and politics and arts and culture, even in music. So whereas before you had more reserved music, like, maybe slower ballads or a genre called Trot, which is a popular genre in the older generation. And then in the late '80s, you know, bands like Fire Truck or Kim Wan-sun start coming on with, like, much more visual and dynamic moves and dancing.
Musician Sarah Kinsley, CC '22, talks new music, TikTok, and self-expression - Columbia Spectator
Noise Pop announces return of 20th Street Block Party and 2022 festival | Datebook
Noise Pop, producer of both the 20th Street Block Party and its eponymous music and arts festival, announced dates for both events, signaling a return of its in-person pop music concerts to the Bay Area.
The 20th Street Block Party , which features food from local restaurants and two stages of indie bands, is scheduled to take place Oct. 16 between Harrison and Bryant Streets. Though the event is free, a fare tier known as the Headliner Experience Super Early Bird Ticket gets audiences access to an exclusive viewing area right in front of the main stage as well as a hosted beer and wine bar and complimentary appetizers. (Prices are $49 plus a $12.04 fee through June 3, increasing to $59, plus a $13.89 fee, thereafter.)
The 29th annual Noise Pop Music & Arts Festival, spanning music, film and art, is slated for Feb. 21-27, 2022, in intimate venues throughout the Bay Area. In the past, headliners have included the Flaming Lips, Carley Rae Jepsen and Cuco, among others.
Festival badges, which grant access to all main stage concerts and other perks, range $99 to $399, plus fees, with the best deals expiring Friday, May 28. Some individual concerts are usually free.
COVID: SINGAPORE TURNS TO POP MUSIC TO POWER VACCINE DRIVE | CNN | wfmz.com
Stay up-to-date on breaking news, weather and entertainment with "Desktop Alert Notifications" WFMZ.com.
Was 1971 the Year 'Music Changed Everything'? - The New York Times
Everything changed with the music of 1971. No, wait. It was 1973. Check that — 1974 was the year, except it was music, film and television, but only in Los Angeles.
If you're writing a book, or adapting one for television, you could do worse than choosing a specific year as your organizing principle. That's especially true when you're dealing with the tumultuous early '70s, when pop culture seemed to go down in flames and then rise again on a regular basis.
The latest to take up the challenge are the makers of "1971: The Year That Music Changed Everything," based on the David Hepworth book "Never a Dull Moment: 1971 — The Year That Rock Exploded." Released in full last week on Apple TV+, the eight-part docu-series offers plenty of evidence that its human subjects are convinced of the premise, as they typically are. "Music said something," Chrissie Hynde says over the opening credits; "We were creating the 21st century in 1971," says David Bowie.
But however hard it may be to avoid some boomer bias — a sense of generational self-importance is, after all, baked into the premise — it's perhaps even harder to confine the scope of such endeavors to a single year: Did the music of 1971 really change things more than '72? What would 1969 have to say about it? How to begin even making the case?
"Sometimes you've got to make a bold statement," said Asif Kapadia, the series's overall director and one of its executive producers, in a video call from London. "From our research, there was something amazing about that particular moment, where it comes after the '60s, where it comes in terms of the '70s, as a turning point."
The series assembles so many captivating clips and strings together so much recent history that it's hard to deny the results, whether you buy the premise or not.
In 1971, Marvin Gaye was transforming the protest song with the sublime "What's Going On"; the Rolling Stones were hammering away on their raw classic "Exile on Main St." (and doing copious amounts of heroin) in a rented villa in the South of France; Aretha Franklin was showing her public solidarity with the incarcerated Black activist Angela Davis; and David Bowie was writing the book on rock 'n' roll androgyny.
It was also a remarkable coming-out year for female artists. Carole King, who split with her husband and songwriting partner, Gerry Goffin, in 1968, released "Tapestry" in 1971, and Joni Mitchell put out "Blue," after the end of her relationship with Graham Nash. These weren't just great albums; they were also personal statements of independence, resonant cries of defiance and vulnerability in what was still often a man's world.
Consider Bowie, who ends up with the last word in the series. "The Man Who Sold the World" was released in the United States in 1970, but in Bowie's native England in 1971. He recorded the bulk of "The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars," which provides the series's climax, in 1971, but the album was released in 1972. Similarly, the Stones recorded most of "Exile" in that villa in '71, but they finished it in '72, the year the album was released.
Techno pioneer Moby believes today's modern pop music is "too loud" - Buzz.ie
Dance legend Moby created some of the noisiest bangers in rave music — but he worries that modern pop music has become too loud.
Moby, who made early rave classic Go and the mega-selling album Play, reckons today's tunes aren't subtle enough.
The veteran techno pioneer said: "A lot of modern music doesn't really have dynamics. Most modern songs start off loud, stay loud and end loud.
"That isn't meant as a criticism, just a statement of fact. Even when a modern musician makes a ballad, it's the same: it starts loud, stays loud, ends loud."
Moby said that problem was one reason he wanted to show the variety music is capable of, in his new classical music album Reprise.
Reprise reworks his old favourites such as We Are All Made Of Stars and Why Does My Heart Feel So Bad with the Budapest Art Orchestra.
Moby explained: "I was reminded with this album how much I love the ability of acoustic instruments to communicate emotion.
He laughed: "I rarely work with other people, and I'm basically like a monk when I make my albums, usually.
Having got used to working with others, Moby admitted he got too used to being on his own again during lockdown at home in Los Angeles.
So You Thought Pop Punk Was Dead? - Impact Magazine
In the early-to-mid 2010s, there was a resurgence of new pop-punk bands bursting onto the scene, including The Story So Far, State Champs, and Neck Deep. The latter of which, entirely self-aware that their pop-punk sound was nothing new or revolutionary, branded themselves with the slogan "generic pop-punk" which would appear on their early merchandise. A perfect gateway band to pop-punk also emerged at the forefront of the mainstream at around the same time, in the form of 5 Seconds of Summer. Sure, they make pop music with only a small tinge of punk influence, but their pop-punk aesthetic in 2013, complete with ripped black jeans, facial piercings, and extravagantly dyed hair, gave teenagers the potential to discover the alternative music scene for the very first time. Despite 5SOS not being enough to help pop-punk make a full resurgence back into the mainstream, they helped to maintain and expand the genre's fanbase behind the scenes.
Travis Barker has been a significant figure at the forefront of pop punk's vibrant resurgence, facilitating its second rise to the mainstream by collaborating with this new generation of alternative artists including Machine Gun Kelly, YUNGBLUD, and Trippie Redd. Another artist who has dabbled in the pop-punk genre with the help of Barker is LILHUDDY, who also starred in Machine Gun Kelly's directional debut, Downfalls High . After building up a widespread audience on TikTok, he is on a new mission to transform this social media popularity into a fully-fledged music career.
TikTok has played a crucial role in the resurgence of pop-punk, with songs from eras past sound-tracking viral trends that have circulated on the platform in recent years, including songs from bands like All Time Low, Simple Plan, and Paramore. These trends have led to over 658.3 million videos on TikTok being tagged with the hashtag #poppunk, and they have created the potential for the 16-24 age bracket to experience either fond nostalgia or new discovery of previously unheard music from the past.
Maybe pop-punk was never really dead at all. Maybe it never will die. Instead, it was existing in the background of the music industry all this time, resting dormant, and waiting to rear its head in the mainstream once again in the future. And in the year of 2020, when Gen-Z are expressing themselves more freely and openly than ever before in the online realm, it seems like the perfect time for it to do so.
In-article image courtesy of LILHUDDY via Facebook . Images granted to Impact by their owners. No changes made to this image.
Summer 2021 entertainment preview: Best movies, music and TV - TODAY
Summer 2020 was a real bummer: If you weren't actively facing COVID-19 head on, you were probably scared of it, staying at home, not seeing friends or loved ones and worried this was how it was going to be from now on.
Fortunately, summer 2021, which is just around the corner, looks to already be about a thousand times better and more exciting — and this year, we're gonna be able to go back to the theaters!
In theory, at least. "This summer is really going to tell us a lot about the future of people's entertainment habits, because now finally mask mandates are being lifted," Turner Classic Movies host Dave Karger tells TODAY. "I'm really curious to see how some of these big ticket movies do in theaters."
So with a summer of true open door season coming fast upon us, what movie, TV and music delights await? Karger spoke with TODAY recently to offer the highlights he thinks are going to keep things red-hot!
The Washington Heights, New York-based Tony-winning musical was a massive Broadway hit for Lin-Manuel Miranda in 2008, years before he became a household name with "Hamilton." It looks like more fun than ice cream on a hot day, too. "The reviews have just started coming out," says Karger, "and it's phenomenal. So energetic and fun and vibrant. They've made a couple of changes from the musical that make it relevant to today's issues, and could be an Oscar contender next year." (June 11, in theaters and HBO Max)
Two boys in Italy are hiding a secret: they're sea monsters! Pixar is at it again, clearly. "Whenever Pixar does a feature-length movie it's something you have to sit up and take notice of," said Karger. "This one doesn't seem as philosophical as 'Soul,' but it looks like a really fun European young friendship story with some mystical elements thrown in for good measure." (June 17, Disney+; not in theaters)
Stephen King's novel about a woman haunted by her late husband and his writing career stars Julianne Moore and has been adapted as an 8-episode limited series. "I don't think Julianne takes on many TV projects unless they're super-high quality," says Karger. "Any time she signs on to something, I'm curious." (June 4, Apple TV+)
A new documentary series on Netflix will be a "user-friendly look at what makes popular music so appealing and infectious," says Karger. "Musicians and experts will comment on the history of pop music and how it's evolved over the years." (June 22, Netflix)
Season two of the earnest, fish-out-of-water series ( Lasso is a football coach sent from Kansas to the U.K. to take over an ailing soccer team ) starring Jason Sudeikis has really gained traction in the months since the first season premiered. "It did so well at some of the awards shows that people decided to binge it, and it has all of the momentum going into this second season to be even more popular than the first," said Karger. (July 21, Apple TV+)
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