One of the identities that the 20th century will be remembered for will be music derived from primitive rock and roll with various names (pop, rock, underground) that toured the last half and continued into the first decades of the 21st century. Numerous books have been written about this phenomenon, from musical and artistic to political and sociological perspectives. A recent experiment Juan Carlos Fernandez Serrato, “Towards a pop theory” (Cátedra) tries to combine them to arrive at a series of conclusions about pop’s relations with social movements, avant-garde cultures, and the market. According to the author, pop music, seeking to be recognized as art, represents a certain lifestyle and a maladaptive attitude towards the world, thus being identified with protest and alternative political movements; anti-racism, protests against the Vietnam War, feminism…
Because the performers of new music are the same age as their listeners and represent their lifestyles, it was the youth who channeled this opposition to the dominant order and cultures that emerged in the post-war period from the very beginning: confronting what is forbidden by adults, manifested in terms of clothing, sexual freedom, fun and entertainment, new body expressions to the rhythm of the music and live concerts by artists previously promoted by record labels and the media. More and more awe-inspiring performances with sound and lighting effects confirming that pop is also music to be seen.
From the beginning to the present pop knows countless genres and formats that make classification increasingly difficult. They adapt to many factors, from generational shifts and their relationship to the lifestyles in which they were born, to their hybridization with cultural fields other than music, to commercial and market interests. Born in the United States, pop formed part of a mode of production and consumption that was integrated into mass culture and mediated by the communication industries. star system Hollywood and advertising strategies. Its production was inspired by the Fordist assembly line, where the musician was not always the most important element and technology played a fundamental role. Here, the importance of musicians (with examples ranging from Elvis Presley to Alice Cooper) but also of producers (George Martin, Phil Spector), directors (Brian Epstein, Colonel Parker), composers, arrangers, sound is analyzed. Technicians, promotional departments… are parts of the chain whose end product is a record.
A special area is reserved for The media that has played an important role in the spread of rock and roll since its inception in the 1950s. Radio, musical cinema, specialty magazines, television shows, video… even the available on-demand modalities (YouTube) and platforms (Spotify) that contribute to the spread and commodification of pop. Promote increasingly ephemeral music products.
Born, then, in an even more destructive encounter with the dominant order, the market has historically been preoccupied with channeling each of the pop proposals and turning them into consumer products. Each new surrender gave rise to a new form of protest with new thematic and aesthetic propositions. Rock and roll, underground, psychedelia, punk, glam, heavy metal, hard rock, progressive and symphonic rock, new wave, gangsta rap… successive forms of expressing this opposition to the system The dominant, assimilated by the market and transformed into mainstream materials, in turn transforms each alternative culture or counterculture into a new consumer industry.
The golden age of pop. a story
When Bill Haley and the Comets rocked the music scene with “24 Hours of Rock” in 1956, the closest thing to this music heard in Spain was the songs of Enrique Guzmán and Ten Tops. Antonio Machín and Lucho Gatica were the idols of those moments, along with Marifé de Triana and Antonio Molina. Mexican corridors and French and Italian songs were also among the popular tastes. That year TVE was born, The European Football Cup was held for the first time, Soviet tanks invaded Hungary and the first Seat 600 was introduced.
Rock and roll didn’t catch on so strongly back then in Spain, which preferred to channel new music into what would later be called pop, like “Diana”, a song sung by a 16-year-old singer the following year. old man. years searched for Paul Anka.
Since then, throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Spain has gradually updated itself to a point with international hits such as Los Bravos and Miguel Ríos, making it one of the countries with an active music market. A book by Ignacio Faulín, “Hello Mr. Pop!”Published by Silex Ediciones, it collects the history of this process in two volumes (more than a thousand pages). It is a monumental study of how music has evolved from year to year in Spain and on the international stage, with information covering all genres, lots of data, a wealth of anecdotes, and a deep, meticulous and knowledgeable knowledge of the subject. inclusive. Here are pop, but also rock, flamenco, musical cinema, festivals, the rhythms of those years, themes that appealed to a whole generation who grew up listening to both Spanish and international music. The reading was revealing and very satisfying to me, and it constitutes one of the most extraordinary works on popular music ever written. This will be one of the essential reference books for future research on the subject.