To call it "pop" may be OK, but doing so certainly does away with a bunch of subtleties, and a lot depends on what you mean by "pop" anyway. Rock 'n' roll challenged pop (also challenged country, r&b, and blues), cut down its sales, took the youth away from pop - if by pop one means the music represented by Jo Stafford and Rosemary Clooney and Frank Sinatra and Perry Como. The word "pop" tended to be used to mean the old stuff that rock 'n' roll was threatening and replacing (and assimilating and copying). Or another way of putting this is that rock 'n' roll divided the pop market into a kind of you're with us or against us.
And then ballads are a whole nother story, since there are black and country and pop ballads, but pop tends to stay strong there, even when the performer is a rock 'n' roller; so there's the feeling among '50s guys that Elvis sold out to the girls by recording all those ballads.
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timeasmymeasure
Re: all in all you're just another dime in the jukebox baby
Date: 2007-03-21 05:39 pm (UTC)And then ballads are a whole nother story, since there are black and country and pop ballads, but pop tends to stay strong there, even when the performer is a rock 'n' roller; so there's the feeling among '50s guys that Elvis sold out to the girls by recording all those ballads.