Now That's What I Call 1980s Music!
Modern pop music can trace its origins back to the 1950s and 1960s. Before it became a catch-all to describe the most commercially popular sound on top 40 radio, pop music and rock and roll used to be synonymous. And then they weren’t.
In the 1970s, pop music artists began to experiment with and later standardize electronically produced sounds (despite the fact that the technology was there for a decade prior), eventually rejiggering disco, funk, and new wave for the MTV generation in the 1980s. In response to this, rock music artists and fans—who favored live performance showcasing performers’ virtuosic guitar-playing—staked the genre’s reputation in positioning itself in binary opposition to pop music.
In the years that followed, Americans have represented the 1980s with ill-fitting symbolism: the urban sprawl of malls is where pop music can be heard blaring through the speakers, while arenas are synonymous with rock music. Our present conception of the two genres is hitched to a frozen snapshot of the decade wherein pop is vaguely characterized by the use of synthesizers and other electronic sounds and rock music is mostly defined by the guitar, which doesn’t feel like a useful way to think about music. Personally, I’m of the belief that pop and rock—and everything else!—are formats, not genres.