Although it's sometimes decried by highbrow music purists as a poor relation to art, every songwriter knows the true feat behind creating the perfect pop song. Attaining that irresistible aesthetic is as deceptively simple as is it mysterious. Why do tunes... [more]

Although it's sometimes decried by highbrow music purists as a poor relation to art, every songwriter knows the true feat behind creating the perfect pop song. Attaining that irresistible aesthetic is as deceptively simple as is it mysterious. Why do tunes get stuck in your head? Why do certain memories of our lives have built-in soundtracks: time measured by a chain of successive melodies? Since popular music is categorically ever changing, it resists absolute definition. Tin Pan Alley was the pop of one decade, the Beatles the pop of another. Intrinsic to pop is its crucial relationship to machines -- those used to record songs and those used to play them back. Whether scraped onto wax cylinders or streamed from Web to desktop; whether listened to on Victrola or Walkman, the aesthetics reflect the tools uniquely. Its zeitgeist dictates only that it mirror the cultural shift: pop doesn't need praise from musicologists when it has public adulation. But sometimes pop is graced with visionaries who launch its ephemera into eternity. Lennon and McCartney, Bacharach, Carole King -- all simultaneously inhabit the rarefied kingdom of art and the neighborhood of pop. Pop has now morphed so many times, its endless reinvention has become endemic to the form. As Jeremy Beadle points out in "Will Pop Eat Itself?," the postmodern technique of sampling, the self-referentiality and collaging of the past, actually mean that pop at the end of the twentieth century has more in common with high art than some would like to admit. [show less]