Anyone who's exposure to pop music started with Sonic Youth, has EXPANDED to include Dylan and holds a soft spot for Oasis has absolutely no business opening their ignorantt trap on the subject of pop music.

For that matter, Dylan ain't pop.

Christ on a frozen stick, what has the world of punditry produced now? Back! Back into your musty collection of Dvorak vinyl! There is no place for you here!

Dylan, strictly speaking, is pop. He was pop by the definitions of pop music holding sway in the mid to late Sixties, when the word became associated with experimentation, the avant-gard. "Pop" and "Rock" were interchangeable terms. Peter Townsend was the one who coined the term "power pop" and used the phrase to describe the Who. Definitions of terms change,of course, and the re-emergence of commercial tunes in a post -punk era came a new pop music that was heavy on irony and purely obsessed with its hook value. Someone like Dylan from the Sixties wouldn't be considered pop at all.

Ted writes: "Dylan, strictly speaking, is pop."

Well, that's got to be a pretty tortured definition of pop. The Byrds playing Dylan? Now that was pop, by my lights.

Pop and rock drift along together, sometimes merging, sometimes informing each other, sometimes calling each other out. Each suffers at times from its own excesses. Sometimes you can't tell the difference -- was Fleetwood Mac c. 1976 rock or pop? How about Pink Floyd? Were the Beatles rock ("Helter Skelter," "Back in the U.S.S.R.," "I Saw Her Standing There") or were they pop ("Norwegian Wood," "Yesterday," "An Octopus' Garden")? How in the world did the Stones' nihilistic "Paint It Black" ever make #1 on the pop charts in the same year as the Beach Boys' "Good Vibrations," while the only Dylan song that year to make the top 40 at all was "Rainy Day Women No. 12 & 35" (it only reached #2)?

Yet in some cases it's really easy to tell which is which. The Osmonds (that Mitt Romney of bands) were always pop. Bubblegum was pop. Britney Spears was pop. Elvis Costello, The Clash, R.E.M., Radiohead -- always rock. U2? I think it's safe to say they're pop, though I didn't think so 20 years ago.

And whatever genre you think you can pin on Dylan -- rock, folk rock, country, jazz, folk -- he was never really pop. He was the anti-pop, though he proved more popular and enduring than any pop artist you could name.

The problem with this discussion is that Pop is not a genre. In the twenties the Dixieland Jazz Band was pop. In the forties Sinatra was pop. In the fifties it was Elvis, and in the sixties it was the Beatles, and yes, Dylan.

Pop means popular. By my lights anything that sells more than half a million copies has got to be considered pop, and Blowin' in the Wind did that.

Classical music clearly can be pop. Remember the Theme from Star Wars. Even ragtime entered the pop arena when the Entertainer theme from the movie 'The Sting' got so much airplay in the 70s.

It is best to leave the term Pop out of any discussion of genre. It does't mean much.

Wow. You personify the problems I highlighted in my earlier post "From a music educator's perspective."

"Back! Back into your musty collection of Dvorak vinyl! There is no place for you here!"

This quote says it all. You have gone out of your way to ensure that music is seen through it's prescribed stereotypes (this one being, "Classical music is stuffy/high brow music.") I hear many musical stereotypes in my profession, including things as stupid as "That's a boy's/girl's instrument."

As far as who has the right to say what, anyone that has an intelligent point of view that actually took thought and consideration can say whatever they want. I may not like rap, but I'll listen to an intelligent commentary on it. There are things that, even as an experienced musician, I simply don't understand. You have to understand that music is a huge topic, and no expert in the world can have full understanding of everything.

You need to understand that music is audible art, and we can't get caught up in the semantics of whether something is "pop" or "rock." While that can be an interesting topic to discuss, I don't think that's the point of this article. I think that we should all get out of our own little corner of the musical world and experience and appreciate all styles of music.

FordTruck5Speed:

It's easy to experience new styles of music. It's harder to appreciate, much less enjoy them. My tastes run towards the Beatles, R.E.M., Gary Numan, Cole Porter, Mozart, Chopin, Bach ("pop", if you will); but I've made myself go to the SF symphony to hear Michael Tilson Thomas's maverick series (as well as to clubs to hear artsy bands like Einsturzend Neubauten) and have found those experiences at best interesting, at worst excruciating.

So I guess my question for you is: are there any "classical" composers since, say, Aaron Copland, who have written music that I might appreciate at anything but a chilly intellectual level?

Considering Copland died in 1990, this is a toughie. For me, anyway. But my knowledge of such matter is limited.

You may want to head straight at the minimalists or lyricists: try Arvo Part (Fratres is a start, though Te Deum, Silhouans Song, Tabula Rasa, Berliner Messe, Kanon Pokajanen etc. all work as well, most of them recorded on ECM) or Samuel Barber (go for the Essays for Orchestra nos 1 & 2).

Thanks, claroche. I will give your suggestions a listen.

--jonas

All we needed was another person with a shallow background and a big vocabulary. Spare us your recitation from books written by people who also weren't there. Pop and rock have never been interchangeable. Pop was Ohio Express, the Carpenters, and several dozen other "bubble gum" bands. Rock was born of Buddy Holly and Elvis Presley, and continued by the Righteous Brothers and Van Morrison.

Dylan is not and has not ever been pop. At his best in the early to mid sixties (I was there, although completely sober) he was a folk artist. Think Peter, Paul, and Mary, and Marianne Faithful. Various songs that he wrote have been interpreted as pop or rock, but Dylan himself did not do that. He did not have the voice nor the stage presence for it.